Normal?

            I often wonder what it would have been like to have a normal life. 

When I was eight, two major things happened in my life, my parents became Christians and I asked God to make me a boy.  My parents’ religious conversion and being summarily ignored by their loving God paved a very interesting road for the person I was to become.

            God brought many changes into our household…no more beer, no more cigarettes, different music, less TV…but being eight things don’t appear the same as they do twenty years later.  The major changes didn’t occur for a couple of years, at least not until my parents attended a “Basic Seminar”.

            I think I was eleven when my parents attended the week long seminar in “Basic Youth Conflicts”. I was too young to attend, but I experienced the results…for fifteen years. 

When that seminar was over my life experienced another dramatic turn. I was no longer able to wear pants!  For a daughter who wanted desperately to be a son, this was unthinkable, but I also wanted desperately to please my parents and have them be proud of me. I tried to adapt to the role I was expected to play. I dutifully learned to sew, and even to enjoy it, but I was only willing to learn embroidery after I found out that a famous football player enjoyed cross-stitch.

The next year I attended my first Basic Youth Conflicts seminar, where I learned that God created me just the way He wanted me. I was taught that any disfigurement was simply something God used to develop character in his children, and should not be surgically corrected unless it was life threatening.  I was taught that the father is the head of the house, and that to disobey him was to disobey God.  I was taught that it is wrong for women to wear men’s clothing and that just because women’s pants are designed for females bodies did not mean that they are not men’s clothing.  I was taught that it is wrong for women to wear pants because they draw attention away from the face to the butt, and that it is unnatural for a man to have long hair because it causes other men to look at them with lust.  I was taught that rock music and music in minor keys was not godly music, that back beats gave ground to the devil, and contemporary Christian music was just as sinful as other rock music…

I found out why my parents loving God ignored my plea. He wanted me this way. But I didn’t understand it. Why did he make me feel like a boy, if I was supposed to be a girl? Why did he give me a girls body, if he made me feel like a boy? It didn’t make sense, but the only option I was given was “be the girl god created.”


All of this was reiterated when I attended the next conference in the series…Reiterated and reinforced with rules. Illogical, irrational, and irresponsible rules. And the worst of it is by this time I ate it up. I wanted to be that person, because then I didn’t have to look at the real me. I wanted to be better than everyone else, to have higher standard, to be more godly, to be a light in the darkness. But more than anything I wanted the approval of my parents. They were my measuring stick... but I never measured up.

Shortly after my first “Advanced Seminar” my parents joined ATI, the homeschool program that sprang forth out of the seminars.

…more tomorrow