Note: the above image is a flashback not an announcement
Earlier this month, my boy turned ten. He was relatively nonplussed by the event, having viewed himself as older than his years since he was roughly three months old. Always determined. Always pushing for the next thing. Always on the move. He was climbing desks before he could walk. He was climbing trees as soon as he could toddle around on his little legs. He was networking to put together playdates on his first day of school, and a lunchtime soccer tournament at the end of his first week.
But what he doesn’t realise is that he split time for me. There is before Henry, and there is after him. In the time he went from being two pink lines on a preggy stick to being a newborn in my arms, my entire world had changed. Almost nothing remained untouched.
I thought I’d bring him into a big, rambunctious supportive family. But I didn’t. And I’ve worried over him more nights than I can count. But that boy is doing fine. He’s a smart, socially savvy kid who excels at school. He's got his eyes set on soccer greatness, but a backup plan in exercise physiology. He and I regularly talk about politics, feminism, power and control, and what it means to be a good person. We drove through a protest the other day, on the way home from soccer practice. He asked me what it was about, then promptly rolled down the window and yelled “Free Palestine” with fists in the air, to the delight of the placard-wielding adults at the crossroads.
The scene amused me, and then quickly turned to a moment of pensivity.
In another version of us, he’d have been born into Zionism, patriarchy, and an insular, Christian nationalist view of the world. He’d be raised to oppose women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, or even the rights of his Muslim friends. Instead, we discuss whether Ronaldo’s character disqualifies him from being the soccer GOAT, and whether Messi’s poor sportsmanship casts a shadow over the rest of his career. And there’s no big deal in wishing his Muslim friends a blessed Eid when Ramadan finishes. In fact, we’ve spoken about how Ramadan and Lent bear so much resemblance to each other. He’s sensible. He’s a wonderful kid.
He’ll never know what life would have been like for him had we not found ourselves ousted. He is not wounded by that. I am. I am wounded by the loss of so much, by the trauma of so much. But the kids are fine. The kids are really fine. His ten years have been great. Two loving parents, a firm idea of family and of unconditional love, parents living on the same block for all but two months of the six years we have been separated, growing up with friends only a few doors down. The cruelty of screen time limits and sugar rations is really his only hardship.
I worry over him, but he is fine.
The looking glass that takes me back through time is a little more brutal.
I sometimes wish I could reach back through time to the girl I was before him. We are nothing alike. She was a caged bird. She sang when she was asked to. She parroted the talking points of the house. She believed them, too, for the most part. She was a devotee, a silent sceptic in moments but she squashed those questions because she knew what they might cost her. She ran between repressing symptoms of PTSD - the disallowed emotions of anger, fear, and distress - and hitting the boundaries of the acceptable woman in the system she lived in. She was too vivacious. Too opinionated. Too blunt. Too thinky-thinky. Not submitted enough. Too traumatised.
She desperately wanted someone to believe her. To see her pain and allow her to heal, rather than to push her to walk on hot coals as if it were the ideal way to heal from burns. She was waiting for permission to be herself. Waiting to be told, “It's your time now.” You can be who you are. You can sing with your full voice. Think with your full brain. Exist in your full personality. Be safe in this promise of “covenant,” of “unconditional love.” But that permission never came. Only more demands. Submit more. Don’t be too much. Wait. Sit back. Repress who you are. Be the person we want you to be. We will say “God” wants you that way. You will feel ashamed when you can’t be that.
The girl I used to be was overworked. Masking. Terrified of letting the mask fall and being punished for it. She married, but they were two people living inside scripts written for them. They loved the best they could. There were four miscarriages, then a fifth pregnancy revealed itself on a preggy stick the day their disfellowshipping began. A question was asked. The shutters came down. “You’re free to leave” was said over and over again.
She pleaded, but it was clear. She was “free” to leave but never free to stay. Linguistic control but the language of exile. Call it freedom all you like. It is anything but that.
That was before Henry.
While he grew in my belly, all was in upheaval. We moved house. Our friendships dissolved around us. Not because my husband asked a question. Not because I tried to broker a peace deal between my father and us. But because of imaginary reasons, concocted to maintain their narrative control, mostly at my expense. The things I heard about myself bore no resemblance to reality, but I was powerless to correct them. I’d been branded.
By the time he was born, the dust was settling. In the days after his birth, a pastor-friend of Dad’s forced a visit upon us, in which did the Christian version of cursing our next child. I was in a hypertensive crisis, desperately ill, trying to figure out how to breastfeed while only days postpartum, and he was lecturing us on the prophetic movement and claiming credit for having raised someone from the dead. (Tricky feat, given he didn’t even pray for the guy, who was on the tram at the time of his near-death-experience). Nothing quite shines the love of God like someone being told they are not welcome at your house, only to tell you they are coming anyway, and then on the way out the door, pausing to pronounce that our next child would be disabled - because we pointed out that he’d said we would have a girl, whereas Henry was all boy.
It was like a Disney villain scene. There I was, by Maleficent, shielding my Aurora from what I perceived to be the power of those words.
We had to call reinforcements to move them from the house that day, as non-confrontationally as possible. It came by way of inviting someone from our new church’s leadership over, and thankfully they left. I think that was a big moment in my life. In that moment, I’d realised what I just sat through. I realised it had nothing to do with the Jesus of the Bible, of love, truth, or good works, let alone righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost - the things Jesus used when he described the Kingdom of Heaven. I remember watching that pastor leave, bile and anger rising in my throat. Shaking from hunger (the visit had been hours long) and adrenaline. Looking at my sleeping baby and thinking “Thank God he’s out of there. Thank God we aren’t raising him in that.”
And I did mean God. I did thank GOD.
Soon, I learned to thank me. And Henry’s Dad. We had survived something that would take years to wrap words around. We had lived in a closed system of totalising control and domination. It consumed our social and romantic lives, our reading material, our worldview, our time, our money, our holidays, our everything. We were told over and over how free and happy we were. How we were the answer to the problems in the world, the pattern from heaven, sent to bring heaven to earth.
And yet the fruit was misery. No growth. And for me, no peace.
Ten years have passed, and I measure that passage of time in the years of Henry’s life.
This week I sat in the car with a friend who has survived a similar system to me. As we sat and chatted, doing a very important run to our favourite hardware and garden store (Bunnings!) and slugging back the best coffee inner North Melbourne has to offer, we talked about what it feels like to reclaim the forbidden emotions we women were not permitted to embody inside the broad scope of evangelical fundamentalism without transgressing upon is sacred definition of womanhood.
Anger. Grief. Sadness. Strength. Defiance.
I used to fear these things. I feared that anger would taste bitter in my mouth. I feared it would overtake me, or that sadness would define me. Or that I’d pine for the life I left behind.
Of that, one thing is true. I miss my family. And I wish I was wrong about so many things. But I also realise many of the things I miss were just carrots dangling from the end of a stick, constantly out of reach.
But the passing years have changed me. I’m not the girl I was. I’m a single mum (who is dating, but that’s my business for now). My two kids are thriving. I’ve been paying the rent, running a business and maintaining a social life, while also podcasting, running an anti-cult law reform advocacy body, and working with other incredible anti-cult advocates to bring the Australian Cult Survivors Network to life. I’ve managed a couple of little holidays, and plenty of memories with my babies. Their Dad and I get on well and co-parent well. We even wrote a world-leading policy framework for legislating against cults (group-based coercive control) that wouldn’t be hamstrung by freedom of religion claims. In certain fields, I am becoming a bona fide expert. Its a weird privilege that me from ten years ago could not even imagine.
I look back to the girl I was, and I see how far she has come. I see how the life I have now is one she dreamed of. She didn’t dream of divorce, of course. But neither did she think it would ever be possible to have a life she fully chose. At the age of 16, she would daydream about running off to start anew, in a place no one knew her, but she never did it in real life because she loved her siblings too much. But then when the choice was taken away and she was put out of fellowship, those relationships were redefined to the point of severance overnight. It was paralysing. Unthinkable. But eventually, I did move away to a place where no one knew me. I did start over.
Whenever I jump in my car to head into town, I turn out of my street and see the Melbourne city skyline clear in the middle distance. It’s a short tram ride. A nominal Uber fare. Some days I head in just to get lost in the famous laneways, or to sit on the banks of the Yarra and watch the world go by for a minute. This is my home now, far from the open plains of my childhood home. When the work I do gets too much, I go to those laneways, that riverbank, and remember I got out. I remember that reclamation of those ‘unacceptable’ emotions means I don’t feel consumed by anger or sadness. I hold them with an open hand. I turn them over and observe them. And then I choose whether to pop them back in my proverbial pocket for another day, or not. Usually I put them back in my pocket. I weigh the sadness in scales against the joy I find in my children, my relationships, my freedom and my work. The anger doesn’t feel consuming or even piping hot. It sits as a cold observation. A thing I think through and decide whether to act on.
To me, all these things are impossibilities to the girl of ten years ago. To be living happily as a single woman, holding it all down on her own. To being completely in charge of her money, schedule, social life and work. To be known for who I am and chosen as a friend by people who have nothing to gain by proximity to my family. Amazing. To be chosen as a friend by people who aren’t told “this is covenant. Be in covenant relationship. These are your friends.”
I was told that was the pinnacle of unconditional love. Turns out it wasn’t. It was the definition of conditional. What I have now is so much healthier. Sturdy.
I don’t expect to ever get to a point where the injustice of what happened to me, or the sting of what I lost will disappear completely. Maintaining my health and recovery costs me roughly $16000 per year in therapists, migraine prevention and other chronic health stuff. Thats the cost of long term stress in high-control sects, in cults.
But in the grand scheme of things - the ten years that have passed have revealed a version of me I never thought could exist.
Her path has been woven through jagged rocks and sharp fall-offs. But gosh, it’s been so lovely to meet her.