A Story I Don’t Know How to Tell
A South Carolina mother wrestles with the legacy she’ll leave her four children. Because the real truth about faith, politics and shifting values is complicated.
The evening Trump’s victory was announced — or, I think, by that time it had slid into morning — my boss texted me. I lunged toward my vibrating phone, which I’d hurled in rage across the sofa an hour (or three?) before, alone in the dark after my husband had stood and stretched and called it a night.
“Crazy,” he’d said, shaking his head, surprised but already somehow resigned to a reordered universe. “Wild.”
I crawled back under my blanket to read the text from my boss. We are going to Washington for the inauguration. In protest. Getting a bus. You in?
I didn’t pause to consider logistics. I texted back. YES.
Now we are only a few sentences in, and you believe you know several things about me: I am a female, a liberal, and all else that implies. Furthermore, you have determined, by virtue of my being those things, all the other things I am not.
And you either like this — you approve — or you do not.
So perhaps that was the wrong place to begin. Perhaps I should have begun in rural south Georgia, where I was short and skinny and my sun-bleached bangs were cowlicked, and my second home was the giant, brick building at the intersection of North Main Street and Woodrow Avenue: First Baptist Church.
I loved that place. They took Jesus seriously, and boy so did I. I memorized all the Bible verses, all the hymns, and all the categories of prayer. I wrote to Jesus in my diary. I went to Sunday school and Girls in Action and Mission Friends and Impact Team and youth group, and I even made my mama drive me to night church, which is like bonus church for the extra-faithful.
One Sunday morning, when I was about 12, I stood with friends in the First Baptist balcony while the congregation sang a hymn called “Spirit of the Living God.” Two things happened to me when I heard this song. The holy terror of those lyrics — Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me / break me, melt me, mold me, use me — almost stopped my heart. Never mind the dulcet tones, forget the lulling cadence of that melody — that song was terrifying. From the balcony I could see the whole congregation, faces forward in their ties and frocks and singing like it was just another song, just another Sunday.
I resolved inside my preteen heart that, if I was going to sing that song, I was going to mean it. If brokenness was what God required, broken is what I would be.
Break me?
Use me?
Does no one else hear this? Does no one else register these churchwide pleas for the descent of a mighty, divine violence? And if these folks are paying attention, how can they cock their hymnals and hit those notes without cowering in fear?
The second thing that happened is this: I resolved inside my preteen heart that, if I was going to sing that song, I was going to mean it. If brokenness was what God required, broken is what I would be. Because if any of this God-business was real, we had better act like it.
When I whispered to the Almighty, I had the gritted teeth and clenched fists of a child steeling for a shot in the arm. Okay, I whispered, sucking in a breath and readying myself for the pain. Break me.
Eight years later, when I was 20 years old, I married a man who also loved Jesus. When we’d been married five years, my husband and I were ready to have a baby. I had never wanted anything in my life as much as I wanted a baby (except maybe Jesus).
We tried for a year before we sought treatment options. We tried for another year as all of those failed. After 26 months, my eggs were sucked from my uterus by a 16-gauge needle, then combined in a dish with the DNA of my husband. While our reproductive materials wiggled toward one another in a lab, I vomited blue Powerade on our bedsheets back at home, debilitated by the drugs.
Five lucky days later, after an embryo had formed, I was sedated again so it could be inserted into my womb, where it would hopefully implant itself and grow, just like any regular baby. I was sick, swollen, and traumatized by the blunt force of my own naïveté. Nothing had gone the way I had planned.
Or had it? We were pregnant. And I was broken.
Five years later, when I attended what would become known as the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, I left behind not one but four children, including barely weaned 6-month-old twins. Three daughters and a son.
I had not told my parents I was going. Or my friends. Or my church. I worried no one would approve, and for the first time in my life, I needed not to make excuses for myself.
By January the election results had settled into cultural consciousness, though for many the shock was slow to wear off. In preparation for the trip I’d take with a hundred strangers, I bought a backup phone charger, earmuffs, and bananas. And in the parking lot of a South Carolina Whole Foods, I boarded a bus for the 16-hour round trip drive to Washington, D.C. I had not told my parents I was going. Or my friends. Or my church. I worried no one would approve, and for the first time in my life, I needed not to make excuses for myself.
One woman on the bus had knitted a hundred hats from bubblegum-pink yarn — what were being called pussy hats in the pre-march hysteria — and distributed them, along with a printed map of the city, to every person in our group. Since my late-night text exchange with my boss, the visit to Washington had been folded into a nationwide, organized movement, one with directors and scheduled celebrity appearances. Between 3 and 5 million people would attend, more than 1 percent of the American population.
I may have been no longer the pride of First Baptist Church, but the pussy hat was a step too far, even for me. On the bus I talked policy and did yoga, but when we marched, the beanie of loose pink yarn stayed balled up in my coat pocket.
By this time I was living inside two seemingly incompatible stories: that straight-A, fly-right church girl and that hell-hath-no-fury woman. Being two people is possible only for so long, especially when you have four children you’d better figure out how to bring up. Which story was I going to tell them, the one about the submissive female Christian who believes everything happens for a reason, or the one about the raging woman determined to reassemble pieces of a broken nation?
I understood things were not right with the world. Doctors had treated me like a lab rat; church had treated me like a threat; politics were failing. I grew up in a faith tradition that insisted on the profound brokenness of every person (and, by extension, every institution), while equally and oppositely covering up any real effects of that supposed brokenness. Brokenness, men said from pulpits, was our inheritance, so fundamental to Christians’ understanding of existence we had a name for it (original sin). But we were white knuckling against our inborn transgression harder than anybody who didn’t believe it was real. We sinned only in the abstract (that damned Eve) and always less than Those Other Guys.
I used to spend my energy turning people’s faces toward a brokenness in society — in all of us — they didn’t believe was there to see. I used to feel like the whole world was gaslighting me.
We see it now, most of us. And not necessarily because the world has changed (it was that Biblical king who told us “there is nothing new under the sun”) but because brokenness in all its shapes and sizes has, in 2023, made itself unignorable. Flannery O’Connor said, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” We were an almost-blind nation, and I wanted to draw big enough for people to see it.
I knew standing in that throng, listening to the real-live Alicia Keys sing “That Girl Is on Fire,” that I didn’t belong there, not really. Politics were broken, yes, but so were we all. And this idea made me, among that crowd, not angry enough.
So I drew a poster. When our family had been just us and our two oldest daughters, my husband and I had coined a family phrase: Jones girls are kind and tough. We said it to our girls in the morning, and at bedtime, and after skinned knees and broken baby dolls. Kind to encourage generosity; tough to encourage bravery. Kind to encourage softness; tough to protect it. I wrote it in magic marker on a poster that I rolled up and carried on a bus to our nation’s capital: JONES GIRLS ARE KIND AND TOUGH.
I didn’t just want my daughters to be kind and tough; I wanted to be kind and tough. I wanted to be brave enough to see the world the way it really was, but I wanted to be kind enough to make it better anyway. Kind enough to try.
Marching, I learned, was not really marching. At least on that day, it was standing arm-to-arm-to-arm against the sweaty, bundled bodies of hundreds of thousands of women and men and even children, shivering en masse. It was standing in sight of a port-a-potty and being too crowd-locked to get to it. It was confusion and miscommunication and no cell signal. The crowd was larger than any I’d ever been in, and we’d been warned violence could break out, and I was very afraid though I didn’t show it.
I knew standing in that throng, listening to the real-live Alicia Keys sing “That Girl Is on Fire,” that I didn’t belong there, not really. Politics were broken, yes, but so were we all. And this idea made me, among that crowd, not angry enough.
Perhaps by now, you are sufficiently confused about whether we are on the same side. I wish I could tell you.
When I transitioned from spunky kid with a penchant for memorizing Bible verses to an adult full of book-learning and bursting with opinions, my kinship faded in church, too. I didn’t belong in that congregation, not really. I wasn’t quiet enough.
Years before the Women’s March, when I’d voted Democrat only once in my life for a candidate whose slogan was “hope,” I gave birth to a baby girl after more than two years of thinking it was impossible. At 10, she is taller and smarter and better than I ever was as a kid. She is unencumbered by the weight of striving, by the heft of endless attempts at an impossible perfection.
After the march, I understood something. Politics weren’t going to save us, and neither was standing in church every Sunday morning in my best shoes. If something was going to save us, it was going to be bigger and harder and more illogical than all that.
Marching taught me something. Politics weren’t going to save us, and neither was standing in church every Sunday morning in my best shoes. If something was going to save us, it was going to be bigger and harder and more illogical than all that.
The story I was going to tell my children was this one: hope.
The thing about hope is, it doesn’t care whether you approve of it. It doesn’t care if you like it, beat it down, or flat-out ignore it.
“Hope,” wrote journalist Chris Hedges, “is a sturdy weed.”
I am 38 years old, wife and mother of four. Lifelong Southerner. Those things are true about me.
But whether I am more the Christian or the feminist, the mother or the marcher, I do not know. I am many characters in a story I’m still revising. Maybe I’m broken; maybe I don’t have to be. Maybe I’m getting it all wrong; maybe I’m getting something right. The best I can do is to tell the truest story I know how.
Because sometimes hope looks like a march on Washington. It looks like a pink pussy hat, a poster, and hand warmers stuffed in mittens against bony, blue fingers.
And sometimes hope looks like a little girl in a church pew, asking God to break her.
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Great reflection. Thanks for sharing it.