Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy
This guest post is taken from Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy by Cait West and is shared here with the author’s generous permission.
Please join us for a free online event with Cait on January 19, 2025.
If I were to tell a story about how an innocent girl grew up in an idyllic family, only to be blindsided by cruelty when she got older, I would start here: a little girl searching for buttercups in the grass.
I would begin with how the girl liked to fold printer paper together and write nature books about the creatures and flowers and trees she played among.
How she dreamed of becoming a ballerina or someone who owned a horse. How she rode bikes and roller-skated and drew with sidewalk chalk and tried really hard to be good at origami. I would begin with an image of a perfect childhood, just to show the contrast of what came after.
But the truth is trauma doesn’t always happen like a car accident, suddenly, out of nowhere. Often suffering sets in like the fading of day in high summer, like the slow disappearance of buttercups as autumn creeps up on you.
And even though all these things happened, from the roller-skates to the origami, they weren’t all that happened. And maybe I wasn’t all that innocent.
Sometimes when I look back at that girl, I see the parts of me I hate. The tattletale. The people pleaser. I see a mean big sister, an obnoxious little sister, a friend who is quick to judge. I see my sanctimonious insecurities.
I was told I was set apart, holy. A child of the covenant, I belonged in the family of God. This was taught to me from infancy, in the words of the baptism, in the water that signified and sealed me into the hands of the everlasting. In my mind, I was blessed. I had conservative Presbyterian parents who understood covenant theology and who faithfully catechized me in Reformed doctrine. I memorized the hymns of the church; I could sign the books of the Bible without missing a beat. I was destined for heaven. Nothing fills the need for belonging more than a promise that you God’s child and will live forever in paradise. Belief in this promise is a foundation that does not easily crack.
I assumed this belonging was provided without any payment on my part. I was born into it, so I didn’t have anything to worry about. It wasn’t until later that I discovered the rules I had been abiding by all along to keep my place.
There’s a photograph of me when I was around four years old, out at the summer cottage we used on rent on Star Lake in Upstate New York. I’m wearing a pastel two-piece swimsuit. I have blunt bangs that curtain past my eyebrows, and I’m holding a fishing rod with a small fish dangling from the end. I’m squinting into the sun and smiling.
I don’t remember this moment, but I do remember the rough planks of the dock under my feet, the sun on the cold water, and that bathing suit.
I also remember another moment, perhaps the following year, finding the swimsuit in my dresser and coming down to the lake ready to swim or fish or jump in the canoe.
“Tell her to go upstairs and change. She can’t wear that,” my father said. His hair was darker then, absent gray hairs. He wore a mustache and the short shorts popular in the early nineties.
I don’t know if he was angry with me then, not in a loud way, not in the way he would be as I grew older and less compliant. I felt only his disappointment with me, with how I looked.
My mother told me to change into the other swimsuit I had--the one-piece. “Go on, honey,” she said softly, her oversized glasses and tight perm shielding her deep-brown eyes.
I didn’t know what modesty meant then. I only knew I had done something wrong, that something must be wrong with the small band of skin showing at my middle. Most of all, I remember feeling ashamed. I remember trying to put the guilt into the swimsuit, as if it were evil somehow, as if it had tainted me, those filmy pieces of stretchy fabric.
Cover up. This was one of the first rules I learned.
Cait West is a writer and editor based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As an advocate and a survivor of the Christian patriarchy movement, she serves on the editorial board for Tears of Eden, a nonprofit providing resources for survivors of spiritual abuse.
