Home Life?

1 Peter 2:13-17, the Message Bible;

Make the Master proud of you by being good citizens. Respect the authorities, whatever their level; they are God’s emissaries for keeping order. It is God’s will that by doing good, you might cure the ignorance of the fools who think you’re a danger to society. Exercise your freedom by serving God, not by breaking the rules. Treat everyone you meet with dignity. Love your spiritual family. Revere God. Respect the government.

The picture shared here is a photo of a painting I did for my father for Christmas in 2007. It depicts the garage and woodshed of the home I grew up in. Pops has passed on to his reward, so this painting hangs in my home now.

Life at home was never easy. On good days there was a tenuous calm that exuded our house. On bad days mom was yelling at all of us, smacking us when she was within reach, shouting her usual refrain; “Wait till you father gets home, he’ll take care of you!” You see she tried to leave most of the discipline to him.

When I was growing up dad was not the “ideal” disciplinarian. He, like my mom, came from a broken home. Neither of them grew up learning how to parent. They had never seen any good examples of how to be parents in their own or in any of their relatives. So dad, like his father before him, would hit first and find out what happened after we had been beaten down – until he learned to overcome his anger issues.

My oldest brother took many beatings for me and the rest of our siblings … he didn’t like to see us getting knocked around, especially if it was for something we hadn’t done. But I took plenty of beatings, some deserved and some not.

I wasn’t a Christian; though I tried to live a godly life, just without God. Mom would make us attend church every time the church doors opened and I lived like I believed it. I could talk the talk and look like I was walking the walk. Thus I attended without complaint, was a faithful choir member and sang specials whenever asked, but it was all different ways to run away from reality.

When days were rough around the house I would run, sometimes quite literally, running to the local swimming hole to swim and fish with my oldest brother and his friends. Or I would hike up the hill behind our home to our hilltop hideout where I would play among the wildflowers, or build imaginary buildings, roads, etc. with pine cones, branches and pine needles. Sometimes my running would be running away to my fantasy world while hiding in my room, out in the local park or sitting under the trees, among the headstones in our town cemetery. Another way I ran was by participating in afterschool activities; sports – I played basketball and volleyball in 8^th grade, continued playing volleyball throughout high school and I also ran track, Future Homemakers of America, 4-H, band, and choir. I also stayed many weekends with my girlfriends.

I felt an outcast in my own home, my own family. Oh, I know that I was loved by my family; at least in the small ways that they each understood love and family. But our parents were not from families that had a proper understanding of real family love. Both of their families’ were survivors of abuse and divorce.

In my father’s family, my uncles were men who ran from the anger of their father and the lack of a mother at home, to attend Seminary and become the Pastors of churches in different denominations: one was a Baptist, another was Presbyterian, but I don’t know what denomination the third was.  They learned to love from the pages of God’s word instead of the lives of their parents. In what little time I spent with them, I thought them stoic and their families quite withdrawn.

His sisters, my aunts, became wives and mothers. Their homes and families were quite different from the uncles … there, fun and laughter abounded. I enjoyed the times that we spent in their homes. I felt that they knew what being “family” was all about!

My mother’s family was quite different, though her parents divorced when she was 12, her father was gone a lot of the time before he left their family home. He was a driver for the family trucking business and they drove all over the eastern states – New York to Chicago, etc. Family rumors said that Papa had a girl in each of the cities that they made regular trips to. Years after he and Gram divorced he married a lady named Phyllis. She was very different from my Grandma Jady, but I loved her, too.

Grandma Jady was a Christian whom my Papa Dick thought too religious. This was one of the reasons that he didn’t want to stay with her. But he loved his children – Nancy and Jerry – as well as he knew how. Mom and Uncle Jerry lived with Grandma Jady most of the time, but there was the time that they lived with Papa and Grandma Phyl.

When Papa left Grandma Jady, she became sickly and, at times, suicidal. So my Great Grandma Clark, Papa’s mother, took care of her and her children. She was like a mother to my Gram, though she was her mother-in-law. With Great Gran’s help, Gram was once again able to care for herself and her children.

My mother’s family was full of incest, pedophilia, child sexual abuse and molestation. Every female child was molested by Great Grandfather James Clark and his son, my Papa Dick. Great Grandpa raped his daughter and granddaughter; Cora and Jeanne, and possibly my mother too, didn’t even know their own virginity as he took it from them at such a young age. But this type of activity didn’t stop with the patriarchs; it continued through every generation, to the point that we molested each other. We girls went so far as to have sex with each other in our preteen and early teen years and also with Rick and Dave at times. All of this I have repented of in great tears, years ago. Is it any wonder that we are a family full of runners?

Death of a Child

I Corinthians 13:11-12:
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.

We all know that our childhood should fade away into our adult existence as we gradually grow into maturity, but no childhood should end in the manner that mine did. So, I share with you here how my childhood abruptly came to an end.

 My childhood is a blur of memories, both happy and sad. But the most vivid of these recollections is locked in sadness, hidden deep within a small, dark closet … quite literally. When I was 10 or 11 years old, mom and dad were both working. On this warm summer day, my mom was without a sitter to watch over us while she worked. So she arranged for her cousin Dan and his girlfriend to stay with us until she got home. 

My brothers were out back playing in the yard. I don’t really remember where Dan’s girlfriend was – maybe she was out back with the boys, I don’t know. My sister and I were in the bedroom playing. Dan came into the bedroom and began touching us very inappropriately; much like Great-grandpa Clark used to do when we sat on his lap. He also made us touch him. When he tried to force us into doing oral sex on him I rebelled.  This is when Dan put me into the closet and left me there until just before mom arrived home from work.

My sister and I tried to tell mom and Aunt Cora, Dan’s mother, what had happened but the shock of it all cloaked our young minds. All that we were able to tell them was, “Uncle Dan touched us.”

Though I know that both of those women had been similarly abused as young girls, they refused to believe – or even to acknowledge – that this tragedy had happened to my sister and me. When they ignored our pleas, in my young heart and mind there began to live many new fears; fear of men, fear of darkness, fear of being attractive and being touched in this manner once again, and the fear of small, locked spaces … and so the running begins. And I began to live deep in the recesses of my mind, hidden in my thoughts … telling stories, living mental lies – fantasies of my own creation – a private world of plush palaces and secret rooms where only the safe could come and dwell with me … ever running away from the reality that was my life.

Runner

Hebrews 12:1-3, The Message Bible;

Do you see what this means—all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we’d better get on with it. Strip down, start running—and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in. Study how he did it. Because he never lost sight of where he was headed—that exhilarating finish in and with God—he could put up with anything along the way: Cross, shame, whatever. And now he’s there, in the place of honor, right alongside God. When you find yourselves flagging in your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of hostility he plowed through. That will shoot adrenaline into your souls!

Hi, my name is Leigh. I am a runner. Born into and of a family of runners. Though I am not one who runs for exercise, nor for the sheer joy of running or the music of the soul found therein. No, I am one who runs away from life; from my fears and my problems … and never toward any goal, either positive or negative! I am always seeking, but never really finding true peace of heart, mind, spirit or soul. At least that is who I used to be.

 These are the stories of why I run …

I was born on the 21^st day of April in 1959; my great grandmother Clark’s birthday. I was small and underweight with pink hair. The second daughter of a family that would grow to five have children that survived birth and lived to adulthood. And yet I had been rejected before I was even born.

My mother, also a runner, was a very immature woman of 20 at my birth. To this day, though she is growing, she still has a lot of growing up to do. When she learned that she was pregnant with me, she already had a small daughter under the age of a year old. Now she was about to have another one, and she was very afraid … afraid that my father would leave again when he found out. Afraid that he didn’t love her … never had loved her or their young daughter. Afraid of raising two small children all by herself, as her mother had done. And she was afraid of being all alone in the world – and un-loveable – for the rest of her life … So she contemplated putting an end to her life.

Many days the thoughts of ending her life invaded her mind. Often she allowed them to stay and entertained them for a while … until one day she actually stood upon a bridge, toying with the idea of jumping. In essence, running away from life altogether.

I don’t know what force – other than God, Himself – held her back from the edge of the bridge that day. Or why she never gave in to her fears and suicidal impulses in this sad and lonely time of her life. I can only give thanks to God that she didn’t and that I am here today.