“Your mommy is doing great.  She’s trying so hard,” the well-dressed “sister” told my newborn son as she held him in front of me.

I think that might have been the exact moment a deep ache in my soul, held at bay for so long by food, drugs, alcohol and sex, began to work its way to the surface. My eyes began to be pried open and a bright light was beginning to shine on the insufficiency of all of these rules and checklists.  Even though I was doing all the “right” things, I felt as though I was merely a shell moving down an assembly line watching life all around me, but never truly experiencing life myself.  The hypocrisy of this woman talking to me through my two-week-old was like a sucker-punch felt low and deep.

Its said that time can heal all wounds.  I believe, in some cases, time has a way of slowly picking off the scab instead.  Eventually, I was “reinstated” to the congregation.  The hugs and kind words felt genuine, but as anyone with a festering disease eating away at their body knows, all the platitudes in the world won’t restore your health.

Now that I had a sweet little boy depending on me, I couldn’t return to my self-destructive coping mechanisms (…well, other than the trichotillomania, I suppose), so I decided to try a little geographic therapy.  My Father had recovered, somewhat, from his accident and had been stationed at the Pentagon.  I calculated that I stood a better chance of finding a well-paying job in Washington D.C. than I did in the economically depressed rural Lowcountry of South Carolina, so I gave him a call.  He agreed, albeit reluctantly, to offer a temporary home to me and his grandson.

I’m sure this move broke my mother’s heart.  I understand this even more now that I have a grandson I never get to see. Not only did I take her grandchild away, but I moved in with the man with whom she had gone through an ugly divorce; a man who was not a Jehovah’s Witness, who was, in fact, part of “christendom,” those poor lost souls who didn’t know “the truth.”

Every Sunday my father would invite me to join his family at church.  I simply said, “I don’t believe what you believe.” In all honesty, I had no clue what I believed, but I didn’t want to tempt God to punish me by leaving what I had been persuaded to accept as absolute truth.  One day, my father, turned to me in response to that statement and calmly replied, “You have no idea what I believe.  Until you take the time to study and explore it, I will no longer accept that statement.”  I asked him to please, tell me, what are your beliefs.  “No.  If you really want to know, you’ll find out on your own, ” and he walked out the door.

So I made up my mind to prove, once and for all, that I did NOT share the same views of the Bible as my Dad.