Posts Tagged: contradictions of fundamentalism

I had a few friends in Bellingham, Massachusetts, where my family lived until I was five years old. There was Jenny, my best friend who lived across the street, who was two years older than I. I vaguely remember learning to skip with her in the woods, and I remember begrudgingly playing with her barbie dolls with her, although I also remember I would try to get her to play with my transformers with me. I would be very sad to leave Jenny when we would have to leave Bellingham, and I tried to track her down years later on occasion. I remember Jenny’s father being referred to as a “crazy inventor” by my father, and that he was always apparently losing the family’s fortune on his crazy revelries.

I had a friend named John as well, but I remember John always trying to get me into fights, which I didn’t like as I was a natural pacifist. I remember that one day John’s mother had come over to be my mom’s company (which was acceptable to John’s mother since she preferred to only have other Christians as company) and I was under the kitchen table crawling around, saying “fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck” over and over again. I had heard my dad say this word, but not often, so it interested me.

I remember seeing John’s mother seeing and hearing me and being totally aghast, just horrified. She became outraged and never visited us again and I remember how my parents discussed how she had forbade John from ever playing with me again since I had such a dirty mouth and since my mother had not been a good enough Christian to teach me better. My mom scolded dad for putting the word in my mind and after that he stopped swearing so much, just in case my mom found another Christian friend, I guess. I found John’s mother’s ethic about words quite ironic since John was always trying to engage me in physical fights. This may have been my first cognizant encounter with the absurd, teeming contradictions of Christian fundamentalism.

I vaguely remember my father going after his MBA degree during this time, mostly from home and in addition to his long work hours as human resources manager at a manufacturing plant (I can’t remember what the factory made, but it was something industrial and quite boring). I remember there was an unfinished room in that house in Bellingham and he would sit at this desk that was sort of like a drawing board and do math homework with what seemed then to be a very high tech calculator, with its little red LED lines-as-numbers. I would try to interrupt and he might entertain me as I desired, or he might tell me he didn’t have time to play since he was busy working. I got such a strong work ethic even from those very earliest imprinted memories of his putting in all those hours of perseverance to try to get ahead and stay ahead in the world, with education as guiding light.