Tidy House

Jill Woolworth, 11/19/2018

When I was young I dreamed of a tidy house. I dreamed of it as I sat by the river on a wooden platform that never became my playhouse. I dreamed of it when I cleaned the dirty spice bottles in the kitchen. I dreamed of it as I watched piles of mending and books accumulate, as words became shrapnel. In the fall of 1975, when I was 20 and 3000 miles from home, I met Gretchen. She was 76 and had found faith at 68. I found her on a 3 x 5 card at The Student Union at Stanford University. She had a bedroom and a shared bath to rent. Gretchen exuded joy from the little table where she ate her breakfast. After twelve consecutive months of study at Dartmouth, I was in California to work near my boyfriend, Rick. I got a job at a gourmet food store, not the best place for a bulimic, but no one knew. From Gretchen’s house, I could bike to my job and my boyfriend. $50 a week for rent was half my salary. In the polished pearls and starched shirts church I rejected at 14, only uneducated or mentally challenged people got excited about faith. Someone’s household help perhaps, not Davidson and Vassar graduates. My family debated which denomination was better—Episcopalian or Presbyterian. Church attendance was required, a box to tic on the calendar of right things to do, useful the way a mirror is for touch-ups. I went to boarding school and didn’t look back, not on my grandfather who abused me and insisted that wearing blue eye shadow and not going to church would lead me to hell, not on my warring parents, not even on Jesus Himself floating above the altar on his pinky blue cloud. Goodbye hypocrisy. Hello eating disorder. Dad had stopped drinking by then. Mom came and went. My brother lived in a different world . Our friends and activities didn’t intersect. Books were my sacred spaces. I swore at Billy Graham on the TV in the corner of the living room beneath a depressing painting my mother had done in college. I feel bad about the Billy Graham part. Gretchen’s faith surprised me because she was educated. She had gone to Wellesley. Her best friends were Harriet and George Gilles, ages 80 and 81, who had seven boxes of Kleenex in their living room because tears and praying in tongues were standard fare. At their church, I heard about a different kind of relationship with God. This One wasn’t hurling weapons at me from the top of a tall obsidian cliff or sitting uselessly on a cloud. Within a month of my arrival, Gretchen, George and Harriet baptized me one cool October night in the Gilles’ pool into which they poured a small vial of Jordan River water. I wore a full-length white flannel nightgown with little red and blue flowers on it, the brand Rick called a form of birth control. I remember the green underwater lighting as three gray heads watched me from above. Dear God, I was saved by senior citizens. The church youth leader told me not to yoke myself to a non-believer. Faith was only for the broken and bleeding, a story Rick didn’t share, so I was pretty sure that we would have to break up or annoy God. “God, if this isn’t the right guy for me, you can stop it. Just make it really clear because I don’t want it to end.” I woke up peaceful, a novel feeling. Two months later, Rick told me that faith fit an empty space inside him. He was surprised, too; beer and Jesus didn’t hang out together at Sigma Nu. I transferred from Dartmouth to Stanford without telling my parents. That Christmas, we told my parents about my transfer, that we were getting married, and that we had become Christians. They were horrified. They greeted Rick with cool handshakes and a dark house. It was always dark . That night, after an awkward dinner with few words, by the light of fireplace embers, my father pronounced his judgment, “Rick, no one will ever be good enough for my daughter.” He left for his study on the third floor and did not return. “Well, what did you expect?” my mother responded to my tears that came half an hour later, delayed by shock. I am not sure what upset them most—my transfer to a college in the Wild West, my choosing a non-hippie to marry, or my defection into the arms of Jesus. In high school, I learned the Latin verb, “religio, religiare,” meant “to tie up, as in a bundle of sticks.” Not being a stick, I knew I had been right to eschew religion. In California, I heard a new definition of “religio, religiare”: “to provide structure.” God knows or knew I needed structure. It was a stiff structure at first. I clung to faith the way a drowning person clings to a life ring. The “I Found It” campaign, similar to praying in tongues, was what everybody did. I converted a woman in Baskin Robbins by walking her through a little yellow book called The Four Spiritual Laws. Her conversion lasted long enough for her to get out the door. Faith was my safe house, a refuge during a personal war. Please hurry up with the worship music. Give me words that will set me free from the bulimia monster pursuing me at home and in the dark alleys of my mind. A Stanford psychiatrist with a thick German accent recommended “eight years of analysis about my relationship with my mother.” Cute blond girls from Campus Crusade and Navigators met me in The Student Union. Their faith houses had white picket fences, red flowers in the window boxes, and something delicious in the oven. They were very tidy—no monsters, at least none they talked about. I couldn’t talk to them. The church minister was equally unhelpful. He gave me three minutes in his office concluding with “Trust Jesus and quit.” I was put in encounter groups with obese nurses and a suicidal man. I got A’s in school and stole food from stores. I was an imposter in the house of faith and pretty sure my days were numbered. After graduation, we moved to New York City to work. In the whirl of city life, distracted by my job, the inconvenience of taking the subway to church, and the 1000-pound shame blanket my monster used to confine me, I lost touch with George, Harriet and Gretchen. It never crossed my mind that I should stay in touch. I feel bad about that, too. Behind my attractive resume curtain, I was secretly “defiling the temple of the Holy Spirit,” sometimes twelve times a day. Long periods of white-knuckled abstinence alternated with periods of mind-numbing abuse. The New York medical doc recommended a diet of boiled meat and water for six months. It lasted two weeks. A shrink who looked like Mr. Rogers, including the vest, the voice, and the sneakers made me want to binge every time I left his neighborhood. I went to eating disorder retreats with pot-smoking leaders, and deliverance meetings, and got up at 6am every day for six months to jog around the lake in Central Park. In New York, age 24, I must have looked desperate as I waited near the dais after a panel of Christian speakers finished because a businessman came up to me after Rick left for the bathroom. He asked if I were upset because of that man. I shook my head, no. He asked me to take his hand. There was a quarter in his palm. He said whatever my problem was, “Jesus wanted to take it from me like the quarter in his hand. The problem was that I kept taking the quarter back.” My first words were, “but I throw up.” To his credit, he responded, “The next time you throw up, I want you to thank Jesus that he is there with you in the bathroom.” That was as shocking as the idea of a minister peeing on the communion wafers. It did, however, grant me a four-day reprieve. The separation of church and my state was apparently not as absolute as I thought it had been. I could live there with my monster. I wouldn’t be evicted. Bulimics welcome. Really? Jesus said it’s not healthy people who need doctors, only the sick ones. Check that box. I was 26. I am part of a long line of survivors of personal wars. We see it in each other’s eyes. Sometimes we hide from each other and from ourselves. Sometimes someone sees us and extends a hand. Sometimes the hand has a quarter in it. That quarter bought me eight years of hope that my eating disorder would ultimately end, more Bible study, three daughters, and hope for our marriage. I took the subway with my first baby down to Grace Church on Fourteenth Street to learn about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I read a lot. I inhaled books, often with my hand in a bag of M & M’s. The monster was tough on marriage. We moved to Connecticut. How could I be a healthy mother to Jocelyn, Virginia and Helen, ages six, four and two? I was the fourth generation of daughters not loved by their mothers. I was an off and on bulimic who smoked cigarettes on the kitchen steps, a habit left over from corporate days. I read parenting books and took classes. Lots. I taught classes on parenting, but feared my monster would hurt my girls no matter how hard I tried. What I couldn’t transform, I would transmit. I wanted Jesus with a magic wand. Instead I got a Mid-western therapist and a mentor named Bob from Texas. My therapist, Jean, asked what my girls would say if she asked them, “Does your mommy love you? “I cocked my head (therapists take that as a good sign) and paused before I whispered, “Yes.” In the car as I drove home, I asked God, “But what about all the cracks in my life?” “That’s why I came—to fill in the cracks,” I heard as I sensed his presence in the passenger seat. I cried so hard I had to pull off the road. Crack Filler. Bob from Texas was Rick’s mentor, too. He listened to Rick the January night I relapsed in 1990. He talked to Rick about St. Paul’s affliction that never got removed. I cringed as I heard this familiar story the next morning through the shower curtain. Rick was shaving and I was washing off shame for the thousandth time. St. Paul had an eye problem or something congenital; I had a self-inflicted, disgusting secret. No connection, but somehow there was. As Rick continued talking, I heard from somewhere else, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” Call it a delusion. Call it whatever you want. No one was more surprised than I. St. Paul, the greatest saint in Christian history, and me, the biggest loser. Bob and Rick tied us together. It was my first day of recovery. I went to meetings five or six days a week for two years often with a daughter on my lap. Bulimia had a name by then. It was mid-May before I noticed a green leaf. I hadn’t noticed when depression turned the color off. I was too busy excusing myself from every activity that didn’t involve mothering, recovery or crying. The problem with giving up my drug of choice after eighteen years was that I could no longer shut off the demons playing ice hockey in my head. They scored when my mother called, hip checked when I yelled at the kids, and roared when I drank too much. They took slap shots when I got on the bathroom scale. Whistle. Penalty. Guilty. Hundreds of journal pages and hundreds of dollars of therapy shut down some of their daytime practice, but their middle of the night games were rough. Jesus wore overalls when he dragged the minivan-size black garbage bag of my kicking and screaming demons out the kitchen door and away into the woods. He carried it to hell. At least that is what I dreamed. Garbage man and crack filler. He didn’t seem to mind. He made a lot of trips. I got angry at the whole faith thing, too. I fired or erased god many times for long periods. What kind of god would let someone grow up the way I did? I didn’t question the miracles. It was all about me. I got depressed again when our youngest daughter was very sick for a year and a half. My faith went out with the trash, but came back via the words of thoughtful writers and teachers. The Hound of Heaven was a faithful dog even when I kicked him. Virginia, age 15, asked me, “Would I be accepted in this family if I weren’t a Christian?” It killed me she had to ask. I turned from the dishes to look at her. “Sweetheart, you’re welcome here no matter what you believe. If God is who He says He is, He will reveal Himself to You in His own way in His own time.” She smiled. I built my tidy house. I still live in it. We rattle around now that the kids are grown. It is a sanctuary, a place of beauty and safety, color and light. Every window and blue, green or cream paint color beckons outside. It has many porches for reflection and welcoming friends. There is a path around the pond, a tree swing, skating in winter, and flowers in summer. I love my tidy house, but I could leave it now. It has served its purpose, just as the structure of my faith has. Both are precious, but I hold them more loosely. Instead, my faith holds me the way that soil, air and sunlight sustain a tree that doesn’t know how it grows. From time to time It gives me strength to shelter others in their own untidy lives. My branches grow outward and upward in ways that surprise me. In graduate school to become a family therapist in my 40’s, I prayed that I would not have to work with weird sexual stuff and very angry couples. I knew I wasn’t equipped. So God sent me transsexuals, cross-dressers, swingers, and three threats on my life from irate spouses. Their stories weren’t that different from mine–anxious and depressed members of Triple A: abortionists, addicts and adulterers. Their pain was often worse than anything I had experienced or studied, especially the ones who had been repeatedly incested or gone through sex changes. No one would choose that kind of suffering. No one chooses to be an addict. No one wants to be in a therapist’s office opening the doors to the untidy cellars of our psychic houses. And yet, if the simplest prayer is “me, too,” we save each other. Survivors become each other’s steppingstones. These are my people, my tribe. I still want to come home to a small tidy house, but on the day’s journey, I want to travel with my tribe, the other bozos on the bus, whether we smell like wine or roses. Mine is a religion of bus-riders, gathered up, like a bundle of sticks. We don’t know where we’re headed. Maybe Jesus is the bus driver. All I know for sure is that I’m glad to have a seat.

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