When people ask, I joke that I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist church, then married a Southern Baptist who had gotten off into all the charismatic stuff, then married a Lutheran, then a Mormon, then a golfer, and I liked his religion the best. For the record, after the death of my One True Love, I had a four-year relationship with a man who was Jewish, then a 10+ year relationship with a man who was a lapsed Roman Catholic. Just to round out the story.
In June of 1950, I was given away for adoption by my thirty-seven-year-old, never-married birthmother. I was her second child to be given up for adoption. The first had been in 1935. I found my half-sister on Ancestry in 2016, when we were 80 and 65.
So there was the initial abandonment.
Then I was adopted by a couple who, in their mid 30s, already had two sons, ages seven and five.
These two mothers sewed up the baggage I've carried around for 71 years.
My adoptive father was, I'm convinced, the driving force behind the adoption. He wanted a daughter. He was a general practitioner and general surgeon, and let all his obstetrician friends know that he and his wife would like to adopt an infant girl. When my mother went into the hospital in labor with no plans for me, her OB called my daddy and said, "If it's a girl, it's yours."
And so, six days after my birth, I was removed from the hospital and driven to my new home in my second mother's arms. My daddy didn't go along to pick me up. They were afraid he would be recognized and that, at anytime later, my birthmother would change her mind and want me back. Only thirty-three years later did I learn that she might recognize him because she knew him! She had come to Orlando to stay with her brother from their native Gloucester, Massachusetts, during her pregnancy. Her brother had heart problems and, as coincidence would have it, my daddy was his doctor and she went with her brother to all his doctor's appointments.
I say I think Daddy was the driving force in the adoption based upon the years of unequivocal love and emotional support I received from him, in contrast with the emotional abuse I received from Mother. The spankings and slaps when words I spoke to Mother were deemed by her to be "sassy." The harsh and denigrating things she said to me. Years of criticism of me from a very narcissistic woman, whom I've said through the years had no business mothering a daughter, much less adopting a daughter.
But she was not the only person who was critical and judgmental toward me. Because of three of my husbands' devotion to their respective churches, there were many more people looking for an opportunity to take me down a notch
-There was an Adventist woman on a Saturday night at my elementary school, where many of the Adventist kids congregated after the end of the Sabbath at sundown, with or without their parents, to watch church-approved movies (usually true stories or documentaries about wildlife) or play kickball and tetherball and so on. I don't think I even knew who she was at that time. She had a child with her, a little girl probably three years old. I loved being around children. I bent down to say hello to the little girl and waved at her. The mother yanked her away from me and said to me, very sternly, "Were you thumbing your nose at her?" I not only didn't know what thumbing one's nose meant, I wouldn't have even thought to do it had I known. That was totally not my style. We didn't have a television; we didn't go to movies; where would I have ever seen the gesture called "thumbing your nose." That event occurred about 63 years ago, and if you gave me a map of my elementary school at that time, I could take you right back to the exact location the interchange occurred.
-About 57 years ago, at the railroad crossing on Virginia Drive approaching North Orange Avenue in Orlando, Mother asked me something. I don't know what she asked; I don't know what I answered. But she clearly didn't like what I said. She hauled off and slapped me as hard as she could. The location where this act occurred is indelibly burned in my memory. This woman who lived and died for her church thought nothing of taking her open hand or a flyswatter to my skin when my actions didn't meet her requirements. Her actions must have scared her that day, as she never slapped me again. But that was only the last of many such occurrences.
-When my first husband and I divorced after ten years of emotional abuse on his part, he said horrible things about me to acquaintances. At a women's Bible study a few weeks before our ultimate separation and the following divorce, the woman sitting next to me told me I should be nicer to my sons. (I remember very few people from that speaking-in-tongues and dancing-in-the-aisles church, but I'm pretty sure this woman's name was Cookie.) WTF? Judgmental much? All in the name of Christ. And because we had moved to that location for my husband to attend graduate school in a Southern Baptist seminary, and our only non-school activities were with the church he had chosen for us to attend, when we divorced, I lost every friend I had made in that town so distant from my friends of many years.
-In my 40s, I began dating an Adventist man whom I met at work. I should have known better, but I was driven by the need to be accepted and loved. I became very close friends with his sister, who was also very active in her Adventist church. She was one of the worship leaders in that church, and once she learned how well I played, she asked me to start being the church pianist. We spoke by phone almost daily and had frequent family gatherings with her extended family. Until one day when she didn't like something I said or did, and told me I wasn't a good enough Christian and she didn't want to be friends with me anymore. "Good enough Christian?" I didn't know there was such a scale.
Again, all in the name of Christ.
When presented with the "religion" category in various online profiles, I respond "Kindness." I try to be nice to everyone. I try not to criticize. I don't want to hear negative things that other people say about people I know. I want to like people. I feel I wasn't liked. My mother drummed that into me: I had no value, no worth, no redeeming graces.
People shouldn't have to be raised with a lack of self-respect, with a feeling of not mattering. And if your words that make another human feel worthless are driven by your religion, then you're losing the game of life. In my opinion.
When someone asks for prayers, I make sure that person knows I'm thinking of them. I'm thinking of their well-being. I'm wishing them a swift recovery from whatever kind of problem they're having. But praying for them? Not in the traditional religious sense. I don't think it's anything more than words and thoughts.
Your religion is important to you? Good. Good for you. But, for your and everyone else's particular god's sake, don't go around with a sense of superiority. Don't say your religion is the only religion, the only true religion. It just ain't so. Believe what works for you But don't go trying to force everyone else to believe as you do. It doesn't become you!
My greatest desire is that, at my memorial service when I'm gone, someone--or many someones--will stand and say, "She was kind." Not "she was kind for God's sake" or "she was kind in the name of Jesus." Or Buddha. Or Allah. Or Mother Earth. Or the universe. Just, "she was kind."
I wish for you the same thing.
The photo is of Kress Memorial Seventh-day Adventist Church in Winter Park, Florida, the church in which I grew up.
