Sunday Morning

It was a typical Sunday morning before church.  It was bright and sunny out.  I was already dressed and laying on the floor of the living room.  It was furnished with burnt orange carpet.  I would lay in front of the television where the sunlight would hit that orange carpet and when you laid your face against it had a warm sensation.  I can’t honestly say how old I was at the time.   I was probably right around ten or eleven.  I would watch standard Sunday morning shows from Shining Time Station to Dragon Ball Z, but never Thomas the Train because of it’s association to Ringo Starr.  Ringo was apart of the Beatles, a sex charged rock and roll band, and that’s just not fitting for a young christian boy.  Some logic can just never be explained.

While I had achieved a state of carpet zen, there had been an energy in my house of lately that would go foul for no apparent reason.  A tension between my sister and my parents.  The relationship between my sister and my parents was like a dead tree, dried out and shriveled up.  It was always just a spark away from going up in flames.

I of course never could never stand the arguments they get into.  My mother always took a stern tone and my sister would be a shrieking mess.  My father, well he could of just as well not have been there, the slumping mass of a man never had an opinion that wasn’t my mothers.  My mother would tell me that these sort of things happen when you become a teenager.  “It’s because when you become a teen your body gets all of these hormones.”  she’d say.  “More like horror moans” I would reply as a kid not knowing how accurate I might be.

More often than not arguments between my sister and my mother had to do with how she didn’t get all of her chores done before church.  We’d get up at seven o’clock and have to be ready to go by nine.  The argument would always start the same.  My mother would say “There is no reason for your chores to not be done.”  And she was right.  We’d get up at seven o’clock and have to be ready to go by nine.   That’s two hours.  It usually took me a little under an hour to shower and get dressed and finish cleaning my room and make my bed.  Nothing we were asked to do was hard, but of course I was motivated to be able to watch TV.  My sister of lately didn’t seem motivated to do much of anything.

I would try to subvert the arguments by finishing up my chores early and then finishing up my sisters while she was in the shower and her room was free.  She always seemed to appreciate the help but even while clearing her plate of some responsibility she still couldn’t manage to be ready on time.  This was also the case on this particular morning.

“I don’t understand Kari!  You have had plenty of time to get ready.  Hurry up! Do your hair right now!”  My mothers rage was a possession of demons she could never really see herself.  Her body was in motion, mouth snarling, but there is a switch somewhere deep in the brain that gets set to off.  No more input, no more thinking, only demands  and anger.  I turned my head to my father slumped on the couch half conscious with his eyes closed.  The phrase “hear no evil, see no evil” comes to mind.  Oddly enough no one looked to Christ for salvation in this house, it was naivety instead of Calvary.

My mother would storm down the stairs and shout up behind her  “I want you ready to go in five minutes!  Come on, let’s go!”.  She looks down at me on the floor, “Kevin shut off the TV, it’s time to go.”, she’d say as she made her way to the kitchen.  With mild protest I would state the obvious “but Kari’s not even ready to go.”  This is quickly shutdown with the retort from her “Don’t worry about her. I’m telling you to turn off the television.  Now obey right away.”  You might think I’m a chump, but I hate conflict, so I jumped up right away and turned off the TV.  Then I sat down on the Lay-z-boy and began to wait.

After a few minutes later my mother emerged from the kitchen and walked to the front door shouting up the stairs “Kari, if you’re not down here in one minute we’re leaving without you.”   I guess my sister saw through this typical scare tactic.  “Then I guess I’m not going” she would shout back down the stairs.

No way this would stand.  My mother now on the landing gripping the railing as if she’s ready to leap up the flight of stairs at a moments notice.  “You get out here right now!”  My sister would step out to the top of the stairs and shout down from where I can’t see her “What mom?”  My mom would make this low tone roar “ewwww, you know what!  Why aren’t you ready?  Your hair isn’t even done!  This is ridiculous!”  Then she would look over at me with a face that says “you know I’m right”, but I’m a fucking boy what the hell do I know about how long it should take a girl to do her hair.

“I’m not going!” cracked my sisters voice down the stairwell.  I never knew where she got the nerve to pull these stunts.  Why does this have to be so hard?  It’s always some unsolvable conflict that is formed in the ether and given life through a shouting match.

“You’re going and I don’t care what you look like.  Now come down stairs!  Rick start the car!” No one was spoken to.  There is this weird thing that happens when you start to yell at one person, suddenly you’re yelling at everyone you interact with.  The fix to this is NOT yelling back.

“I’m not going!” There is a special tone and volume a teenage girl can yell at that will pull the paint right off the wall.  This was that frequency.  It was pretty unbearable.  You both had to look at the source in disbelief and cover your ears in overwhelming affirmation.  “You said if I wasn’t ready you were going to go without me. So just go!”  Bluff called.

You can’t be a happy family at church if you’re short a kid, even a kid who directly opposes you.  I guess it’s a better image to have all your children no matter how emotionally dejected and wonky haired they look then to be completely short a child.  Even a dirty dollar is worth one hundred pennies, but seventy five cents just ain’t no buck.

“Kari you get down here right now or you’re grounded for two weeks!”

“Fine! Whatever! Let me get my purse.”

I remember the purse vividly.  I couldn’t tell you what she was wearing or what percentage of her hair was crimped, but I remember that purse.  It was an acid wash denim.  It had three pockets.  One main pocket that the strap connects to.  The main pocket was the size of a small notebook.  Maybe eight inches high and six inches wide.  It had two smaller pockets on the outside on the front.   It looked like it was going to burst and it sounded like metal.

“Kari what do you have in your purse?!”.  My mom couldn’t let anything slide.  Nothing could be easy.  She could never look the other way.  A teenager has weird secrets, let it go.  “Kari, what’s in your purse?”

“It’s change. I need it for offering.”  It was change.  Once she said it out loud I realized why it sounded like metal, but why did she need so goddamn much of it?

“Kari why do you need change?  You’re not even in church today you’re doing nursery. Go put it back.” My mother nailed saying her name at the beginning of every statement.  I suppose this is a tactic to let the person know you’re claiming authority.  She was already beyond pissed and everything in her voice reached the saturation point when she shouted.

This is where my sister broke down.  Full on shrieking.  Tea kettles don’t sound this shrill.  In fact I’d prefer that someone hold a hot boiling tea kettle whistle up to my ear instead of listening to the pain embodied in her voice.  She went from angry teen to sounding like a tortured animal.  You would think it would be impossible to not have an empathetic reaction to the sound, it just absolutely pierced your soul.  Crying! Screaming! “Then I’m not going if I can’t bring my purse!  I’m not going! I don’t want to go mom!”  And so my mom and my sister are now in a full on fit of rage yelling at each other.

Nuclear war is always right there and people are itching to push the button.  You might think of nuclear war as some sort of post apocalyptic landscape fought with the latest technology in weapons and that’s true.  But nuclear war is also any fight that results in a scenario where everyone loses and the subject of the argument, whatever it is, is totally and utterly destroyed in combat to the point that it is unrecoverable.

This is decades before the #metoo.  Far before it was acceptable for full grown women to speak up much less a teenage girl.  Long before I even understood the concept of sexual assault.  Even if someone had explained what was really going on at the time, I don’t know that I would be able to process the situation.  It wasn’t until almost a decade later, or in my sisters case, two children later that I would learn what was going on.  My sister was being molested at church.  Corned by the boy who ran nursery with her.  Alone in a detached section of the church with no one around but the toddlers that they were responsible for watching.

So what is it that really happened that day.  Was my sister a delinquent when it came to simple house hold chores?  Was she suffering from hormonal teenage angst?  No.  She was just trying to survive.  She was just trying not to be attacked yet again in a temple removed of hope.  So she avoided the situation by being late.  When that didn’t work she grabbed a purse filled to the brim with change, as a weapon.  She had constructed a device to allow her to stand up for herself and level the playing field so she could beat the living shit out of this guy who couldn’t keep his hands to himself.  And the consequences of her behavior is that her means of defense were stripped from her and she was pushed back into the same abusive situation.  The lions den. Where not even the prayers of Daniel could save her.

As a ten year old in this story I have the privilege of being exempt of responsibility for how the situation turned out.  I could just proclaim that it was unfortunate and I wished it hadn’t happened, but the reality is something was wrong.  Something was really really wrong.  We all knew it.  You can’t muster up the type of energy needed to put a fight like that simply because you don’t like church or your unable to get your chores done.  You put up  that type of fight because you can see yourself being delivered to harm.  It might be because of shame of her involvement or fear of my mom interpreting it as her fault or just complete repression, but my sister was unable to say anything to directly address the situation.

My parents would later say they had no idea what was going on.  I know I certainly didn’t, but again I was ten.  As adults I feel like they failed completely by choosing to be naive to the situation.  Here is a person who is screaming bloody murder to avoid going to church.  Isn’t that enough of a flag that something is wrong.  Did you really interpret it only within the context of being upset about a Sunday ritual.  Could you not look past your invisible friend for two seconds to see the flesh and blood person right in front of you?

The moral of this story is that sometimes people are hurt.  And sometimes those people are so hurt that they are no longer able to find the words to describe the type of suffering they are going through.  But even traumatized people are still able to communicate how they feel even if they can’t articulate it.  Sometimes these people are seemingly crazy or delinquents.  That awfulness you feel in their presence, that might be an awfulness they are stuck feeling on their own in your absence.  In the end you are better off trusting that empathetic reaction you feel in someones presence more than you are trusting their words.  Because they’ll always be “fine” even if they’re dying inside.