"Unpacking the Backpack"

I went again today to the Unitarian church that I visited last week. Instead of just merely going to the 11:00 morning service like I did the last time, I got on the road early (the town it's in is about 10 miles/20-25 minutes from me), and went to their early morning classes, which they refer to as "religious education" instead of Sunday School, I had to repeatedly keep myself from calling it Sunday School out of old habit.

At least now, I can find the church easily, and I made it up there in record time. The town it's in is an old river bluff town on the Mississippi River, and the church is in a historic district there, the area has been settled since the time of the Civil War.

Supposedly the limestone that makes up the exterior of the church came from a prison for Confederate POW's. The church is only 4 blocks (and a highway) away from the Mississippi, yet it's probably about 60-70 feet above the rive.

I've been told there's a street level entrance somewhere coming in, but I haven't found it yet, and because the area is so hilly (it reminds me of the topography of San Franscisco), I end up walking up a 2 sets of a long series of steps leading into the front door


When I started at this church, I thought it would attend just for the sense of community, and to have somewhere to go on Sunday mornings, since it seemed so strange not to have somewhere to attend on Sunday after nearly 25 years of going to church.

It seems like I'm getting more than I planned from it. The minister today had a sermon on "unpacking the backpack". He did a demonstration in front of the church of a full backpack, stuffed with supplies for a trip. He said he had made it his custom when traveling to only bring a backpack, no other luggage, he can't stand hauling around a lot of luggage (and taking the risk of the airlines losing it).

He will start with a backpack, prepare a month or more in advance, and then about a week before the trip, he'll try it on. After he tries it on, he usually decides to get rid of a few non-essential items to lighten the pack, because otherwise, it would be about 50 pounds.

 He then tossed a few items to the side, "don't need a third pair of shoes", etc, and zipped up the backpack, and strapped it on. A few non-essential items taken out, and it's down to a bearable size and weight again, maybe 35 pounds or so, which is better. Simple is best.

He said we often need to do this in our personal lives as well. He used this somewhat corny illustration to get into his next phase of the sermon. He had volunteers pass around markers and pieces of paper, write down what's weighing you down in your life emotionally, and pass it forward. If you want the note read, don't fold it or only fold it once. If you don't want it read before the congregation, fold it more than once or crumple it up.

I Don't Think I Should Trust the Chameleon , Even Though It's Acting Friendly.

I have noticed in recent months, ever since I moved into my house, that my mom hasn't quite been herself lately. Her old domineering personality seems to have faded away, and she's actually in some ways acting like, well, a mother.....

It's bizarre, she kept her normal personality all through the rebuilding of the house, but now, she seems to be somewhat not only treating me like an adult human being (which is something she was incapable of before, I always felt like I was more of property than a son to her), but she's acting like I'm her equal, it's bizarre, and I can't help but question her motives. She's gone out of her way to help, even helping to take care of "Happy Horse" even though she used to be scared of large dogs, and is in fact mildly allergic to them.

I distrust her motives in all this, and I wonder what's with her chameleon act, because she has always been a master manipulator, and haven't trusted her since I was a child, and for good reason.

 This is the same woman who slapped me around as a child, barricaded the door when I tried to move out several years ago (and threatened violence against me, and said I would deserve it if she did), forced me to go to a college she probably knew was a scam, just so I wouldn't have the time to work and earn enough money to leave, and was so psychologically abusive and controlling when I was living with her that it damn near drove me to the point of suicide.

Not only all that, but remember my recent (and still ongoing) series on my father's mental health issues when I was a teen? One detail I left out, (and don't know why), is that she was actually going to divorce him at first during this time, the only thing that kept her from doing so was the fact that I made it clear that if she left him, I would do everything I could possible to convince the judge to let me stay with my dad. Though it's an understatement to say that US courts have a heavy bias toward mothers in divorce cases, I was about 13 at the time, and the court would take notice that I was heavily campaigning to go with my father and wonder why (and I would have told them).

So if you want to call me bitter, unforgiving, and mistrusting, then fine, because you're right, and I feel like I have good reason to. She only truly cares about herself, and what she wants, she's a sociopath, to put it bluntly. I have no clue what's behind this campaign of trying to act all nice.

My Family and Mental Illness (Part 1): The Phone Call that Would Change My Life Forever

Sheldon's note: This will be a long story, and one that is very difficult for me to write, so I will be splitting it into a series. I have alluded before to my father's struggles with mental illness in past posts, but I have never gone into detail as to what his health conditions are, or how it profoundly changed my life as a teen. This series will change all that. 

This series will probably be as hard for me to write, so please, bear with me as write this. It's been over 10 years now since my father had to quit his job due to his health conditions, but beginning to write this is dredging it all up again, and my emotions feel almost as raw as when it happened.

I was 14 years old when one day, there was a call from the owner of my dad's company. I was busy working on my ACE coursework, as a hard working home school kid, the same ACE coursework that I had in the fundamentalist private school I was in until the 4th grade.

My dad worked as an industrial mechanic for a small family owned company in St. Louis for 25 years, but I still had never spoken to the owner of his company before, he refused to say why he was calling, since he knew I was only a teen at the time, and the fact that he would make this kind of call, and refuse to say what it was about meant that something wasn't right.

I was full of dread of finding out what this call was about, but I didn't know if my mom would be happy with me leaving my coursework for a moment, (she was at the house of an elderly neighbor of ours, and this neighbor could tend to talk for quite a while). After my father's boss called several times, about once every 30 minutes, to see if he could talk to my mom, I knew it couldn't wait. I walked down to the neighbor's house, and as I thought she would react, she wasn't happy at first, and was demanding to know why I had stepped out of the house.

I had told her about my father's boss repeatedly calling, and that it apparently was important, because he refused to tell me what was going on, and was insisting to talk to her only. She tried to hide her fear, and pull herself together, because just like me, she knew something wasn't right.

You see, there had been a lot of strange occurrences and patterns in his behavior leading up to this time. For about a year before this day, his normally good memory had been failing him at times, and he wasn't able to understand some things that he had been very good at figuring out. All his life, he was the problem solver, his mind could think through any problem, large or small, and he could react with ease, figuring out the best course of action, whether it was a major decision in life, or how to put something back together that had come apart.

It was a life skill that had served him well over the years, especially in his professional life, in his days as a young man in the construction industry, or at the job he had at the time as a mechanic, working on parts for buses, construction equipment, larger trucks, and even large generators (his company had even worked on generators for the massive Midwestern utility company, Ameren).

Those skills were failing, however, and his personality was rapidly changing. He was growing increasingly more frustrated with himself, and with everyone around him, when normally, he was a happy, easy going man (other then when my mother would be constantly trying to pick fights with him for no good reason, she loved drama). He would get very confused sometimes, and then several hours later, be back to his normal self again.

Undercover Agnostic: (Update 13) Post-Father's Day Thoughts

Of course, yesterday was Father's Day in the US, and churches often take part in ceremonies honoring fathers. The church I am undercover in (hopefully only for a few more months), is no exception to the tradition.

The singing was done by the male members of the choir, and one of them, who recently become a father himself, and is an avid comic book fan, went up onto the podium with both him and his infant son in Superman capes. (I suppose he was saying he was "superdad"). It was rather amusing to watch.

Father's Day is a much easier holiday for me to celebrate than Mother's Day, my feelings about Mother's Day are worse than my feelings about Christmas. To me, it's even more hollow, and joyless, and I don't like the expectations that are upon people to celebrate it joyfully like everyone else does.

Father's Day makes me grateful for my father, especially after I just finished a guest post I wrote for the blog Confessions of a Heretic Husband. The post isn't up yet, and the time of the writing of this post, I'm still awaiting word on when it will be published. It was one of the hardest posts I have ever forced myself to write.

I'm not going to give away much of what is in it, but it talks about my last 5 years, the time since my infamous nervous breakdown. I spill it all, and what I have had to deal with from my mother. Let's just say that emotional abuse doesn't stop when you turn 18. There's details of my life which I have felt too humiliated to talk about until now.

That post made me grateful for my father. As bad as my life has been with my family, it could have been worse without him. You see, on the surface, my family seemed like the typical fundamentalist family when it came to gender roles. My father worked full time as a mechanic (until he had to go on disability when I was 14), and my mother was the stay at home mom, homeschooling me. What people didn't often see was that the roles were truly reversed.