I’ve never been good at journaling.

Several therapists have told me that I should journal, but I hate it. I prefer writing things that other people can read. I could not begin to tell you if this is an overreaction to my mother telling me several times in childhood that I was the least important person in the room, or if it’s a pathetic plea for attention, or if it’s just that there are SO MANY WORDS IN MY HEAD that they are going to fall out if I don’t write them down and I cannot bear to keep them all to myself.

Whatever the reason, I am writing again. I’m glad you’re reading these words, whoever you are. Buckle the fuck up. I have a lot to say.

My dad came over for lunch a few weeks ago. I did not talk about politics, for which I am very proud of myself as several times I literally had to press my lips together and it took a great deal of effort to not yell at one of my four favorite people on the planet because he is happy that Trump bombed Iran. (I am Radical Leftist Scum. Are you mad? You should stop reading now. Have the day you voted for.)

Still here? Ok.

**deep breath**

This is gonna be a long one. I have tried to keep it short, but…it’s just not possible. Not this time.

So my dad goes to church and he sings in the choir. He loves it, and I love it for him. He said they were singing a certain song, and I said “Ooohh…I love that one, is it the version that starts like this?” (The specifics are not important.) But it turns out I had the title wrong. I found the song I was actually thinking about on another blog post I had written several years ago. (I absolutely know that one reason I write things down is so that I don’t have to remember them. My brain is very, very full of lots of things, most of which are movie quotes or historical facts that don’t matter right now.)

But then, after Dad left, I went back and read that whole blog post. And it kinda knocked my feet out from under me. Because I was reminded of the Laura that I was. And I marveled at how very dfferent she is from the Laura that is today. And I knew i needed to write about it.

**BACKSTORY TIME** 

I had what I like to call “An Excessively Baptist Upbringing.” My parents went to a Southern Baptist church, they had Southern Baptist friends, I had Baptist friends at school (I went to public schools so I had other kinds of friends too but in central Texas? It’s almost hard to find someone who isn’t Baptist to some degree or another.) My parents were ALL IN for church. Sunday School. Sunday morning church. Church Training or Bible Drill on Sunday night and GA’s/Acteens on Wednesday night (most churches don’t do these anymore; they have Awana instead). Church choir was an alternative Wednesday night activity. I even played on a church softball team one year! 

When I got into high school? Still church. Sunday morning was Sunday school and church. Sunday night was choir practice and Sunday night church.  Wednesday night? Straight from school to church for supper and then Wednesday night youth Bible study. 

Most of the time I was ok with all this church stuff. I was a kid; I really didn’t have much say in the matter. Also, my mother had started singing Jesus songs to me BEFORE I WAS BORN. I grew up drenched in “Jesus Loves The Little Children” (and I’m pretty sure I knew that song before I knew about any itsy bitsy spiders). As a girl though…I struggled. As a girl who wasn’t pretty? Who wasn’t interested in hair and makeup? Who loved working on the car with my dad and going on bike rides and “having adventures” more than…whatever girl stuff my mom wanted me to do? Well. It has never been easy being me. 

**Side quest** 

My mother was constantly frustrated by my hair and its refusal to…do anything. (My hair is thin, fine, straight, and mousy brown. I hate it. The reason I haven’t just chopped it all off and started wearing wigs is that wigs are expensive and require actual upkeep and I really just cannot bring myself to give a damn.) It does not help that my sisters have long thick blonde Barbie/Disney Princess hair and I, the eldest daughter, am stuck with whatever the fuck nonsense is growing out of my head. My stupid hair remained point of contention between me and my mother until she died. 

**End of Side Quest**

Outside of church? My family took our faith even further. Every morning we had Bible readings and prayed for the Baptist missionaries who had birthdays that day. We got a Baptist magazine with the names and birthdays and where the missionaries were stationed. Dad always put our names in the list on our birthday, too, because “Every Christian is a missionary and everywhere you go is the mission field.” But alongside this was the constant insidious message that the only way to be a good Christian woman was to get married and have kids. (I grew up before the Quiverfull movement, but just barely.) Still, many of those Wednesday night youth Bible studies reminded my friends and I that the three most important decisions we would ever make were “your master, your mate, and your mission.” Get married. Have kids. No other options.

This is the way.

All of my parent’s friends were couples their age who **usually** had kids the same ages as me and my sisters. It was generally assumed that we would all be friends.

Well.

As you can probably guess, this did not go well for me. In addition to the “I just don’t care about makeup, mom!”and the “UGH, your hair!!” there was the knowledge part. I loved knowing things and I loved reading and studying. I especially loved studying the Bible. I saw mom and dad do private daily Bible readings and I read and learned and studied and understood and took notes and…fuck…I was a girl so no one cared. If you’re Baptist? Especially Southern Baptist? Women can only study the Bible as a job if they’re gonna work with kids. Even my church friends thought I was weird because I knew the Bible so well.

Awesome. (#Sarcasm)

I was fortunate enough to be able to go to college. (My parents were both college graduates, and education was very important to them. I did luck out there, I admit.) Funny enough, I attended not one but TWO Baptist universities (Short version: I started as a piano/music education major, but I got carpal tunnel my first semester, changed my major to regular education, and switched schools.) I got married on campus to a religion major, fully prepared to be a preacher’s wife/elementary school teacher/church pianist. Had a kid and everything. I was convinced I was doing things the right way. If you had asked? I would have even told you I was happy.

Excessively. Baptist. Upbringing. 

I started what would be a very short career teaching elementary school. Two different times I had a principal who WAS ALSO BAPTIST. Living in Texas? Baptists are almost fucking inescapable.

Eventually, my first husband joined the Army and we moved with our daughter to Italy. My parents were thrilled! I was really going to be a foreign missionary! I would use all those wife and mother cooking and cleaning skills (that I completely I despised, and was terrible at, by the way) to witness…somehow…over there. I wasn’t sure how welcome Baptist efforts would have been in Excessively Catholic Italy (Didn’t matter, it turned out, because the Military Chapel is a thing that exists) but I was thrilled at the prospect nonetheless.

It’s so strange looking back at Laura 2005, getting on that plane to Italy with her little girl. I was excited! God would do great things with us there! If you had asked? I would have told you that my faith was as solid as a rock—but it was really only as solid as a Jenga game that had never come out of its box. Brick by brick I had built my faith, each block snug up against its fellows in neat stacked layers. Unshakeable. Immovable.

But also. Unchallenged. Untested. For all that I loved learning and education, I would have told you that god made the world 6,000 years ago. Without blinking, I would have then stated that I knew for a fact that the dinosaurs were killed 65 million years ago. And no one had ever sat me down and said “Laura. Both of those things cannot be true. Pick a lane.”

Like I said…being me? Has ALWAYS been hard.

In Europe, I had my first opportunity to take my faith out of the box. It didn’t involve science or dinosaurs though. Not at first. We attended chapel for a few months until we realized there was not going to be an altar call and we wanted our daughter to make a profession of faith and be baptized. So we found a very tiny Baptist church (where yes, I did in fact become the church pianist) and we attended there for a few years. Our son was born while we were in Italy, and I remember on several occasions while I was pregnant and playing piano, he would often kick in time to the music. (He doesn’t do anything with music now, and I like to annoy him about this every once in a while.)

But also. Chapel.

Chapel would become an ENORMOUS part of my life in Europe.

I wasn’t working while overseas and desperately needed something to do with my time and my brain so I joined an organization called Protestant Women of the Chapel. For the first time in my life, I was studying the Bible and worshiping with Not Baptists. I made friends with Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans…Protestant Women of every stripe joined together every Tuesday for worship, prayer, and Bible study. There was sometimes even a random Catholic or two thrown in for good measure. My knowledge of the scriptures expanded and my faith grew and I learned so much more about God and the Bible and church traditions that I had not experienced as a Texas Baptist. I was allowed freedoms I had never known as a woman. To lead. To speak. To teach. To ASK QUESTIONS. To be TAKEN SERIOUSLY. To ask the chaplains about this word in Hebrew or that word in Greek and not be told to go mind the children. I met WOMEN who KNEW THE BIBLE, who challenged me to grow as a student and a teacher. Yes, yes, wife and mother, that’s a thing. But there were OTHER ACCEPTABLE OPTIONS TOO. Even for Christians.

It was thrilling.

And even though I didn’t know it, I started moving the Jenga blocks of my faith.

I learned about when and why the banners in the chapel changed colors according to the church calendar.

I learned about different interpretations of scriptures that I had been reading one way my whole life.

I learned about the Documentary Hypothesis and how most scholars think that Moses didn’t write the Torah.

I learned that the chief end of mankind is to love, honor, and serve god. (I added “while being as ridiculous as possible” and bam! I had a Life Mission.)

I wrote a Bible Study about the book of Job after my first husband almost died from MRSA (which is a longer story for another time). This study and the time it took transformed me as a human and a Christian. I learned empathy and kindness in new ways (and I became deeply ashamed of many Excessively Baptist things I had done and said in my youth.)

During those seven years my faith grew and changed and expanded. My mind opened to other ways of thinking, other ways of prayer and worship. Other ways of believing. Other flavors of Christian.

On the Thursday before Easter in 2011, my grandmother died. I flew home alone for complicated Army reasons. This is important, I promise.

I made deep abiding friendships with many of these women. Some of them are still friends today, even after…well…I’m getting ahead of myself.

The long and short of it is that I left Europe very very Christian, but a Very Bad Baptist indeed.

In 2012 the Army dragged me out of Italy kicking and screaming and we returned to the States. We found a Very Southern Baptist Church in Tennessee. And within the first month I went to a woman’s missionary conference where there were only Baptist women. I came away feeling adrift, off-kilter, and even despondent as there weren’t any Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, or Presbyterians at the conference.

The Baptist shoes had definitely grown too small.

The pastor in Tennessee? Did not welcome my Bible questions. The Sunday school teacher did not want to do a deep dive into the five points of TULIP Calvinism but rather did a series on the Lord’s Prayer. For six weeks. For adults. I was withering.

I did find the military chapel and joined up with the PWOC there. But depression and a deployment and the fact that I was new put a lot of restraints on how much I could do. This…probably deserves a whole chapter, but I’m trying to keep this short. (Too late. I know.)

On Easter Sunday of 2013 my husband’s grandmother died. We had just been down to visit the family in Texas and so we did not get to go to the funeral at all. I was growing to despise Easter. This will be important later. Honest.

In the fall of that year we left the Army altogether and retreated to Texas to lick our wounds and recover. Again we found a Baptist church but once again, as an outspoken, intelligent, very-well-educated-in-the-Word-of-God-thank-you-very-much…WOMAN? I did not fit in very well at all. I had grown used to my leadership roles in the chapel, and I could not comfortably fit myself back into the Excessively Baptist Box I had grown up in.

We moved to another church (ironically, the last church where we had been members before we left for Europe) and began to settle in. Because of circumstances, I started working again (the first in a long line of call center jobs. School districts did not appreciate the gap in my resume or my chapel experience) However, I did join the choir and there was a woman’s Bible study I could attend without causing too much trouble. My faith had grown too big for the Baptist box, and there were some big holes in that faith (like “Be nice to gay people” and “Abortion is health care”). But on the whole? Everything seemed to be going well.

**END OF BACKSTORY**

On Wednesday, March 29, 2017, I was minding my own business at my job and when I went to my second break I checked Facebook because, well, what else do you do on your break? And I saw a report that there had been an accident. A bus full of senior citizens, on its way home from a church retreat, had been hit in a head-on collision. My throat tightened. My heart raced. My mind whirled. “Please don’t be us, please don’t be us, please don’t be us,” I prayed as I shakily called the church. The secretary answered the phone. 

“Yes.” It was us.

And the world…just…stopped…turning.

Wednesday was my early day (I worked second shift but I had one day a week where I got to leave at 5 like normal people). I called my husband. He knew already. I got home, dropped my work stuff, grabbed my church bag and some extra boxes of tissues, and the two of us headed to church. The kids…they didn’t need to be a part of this. All evening events were cancelled anyway. 

We arrived to find the church parking lot  full of news crews (“Vultures,” I remember thinking.) Signs were posted that basically said NEWS CREWS KEEP OUT but they still managed to catch some congregation members to interview on their way in. There was limited information available. How many injured? How many dead? Who was on the bus?

I don’t want to dwell on that night. It was a terrible night of sorrows. Of tears. Of cries of grief you don’t expect—don’t WANT—to hear in church. But it was also a night with an outpouring of love from the community. Our church was literally across the street from two other churches and these congregations had gathered to care for (and mourn with) us. There were huge tureens of tea, coffee, water…food donated…tissue boxes everywhere.

Names of the dead were read out. My special friend who I sat next to every Wednesday night was gone. My son’s Sunday school teacher had been driving the bus and had been killed on impact. Thirteen beloved senior adults stolen from our church family.

Something…shifted in me that night. I remember hearing the paramedics talk about how “peaceful” the victims looked. I remember thinking, “Liars. They were in shock and you know it. They weren’t at peace. They were just in too much pain to know it.”

I remember being mad. Not at god, but rather at The Doctor. For surely the Time Lords did not INTEND for all this tragedy to befall this church on this evening. This dark ugly swath of 13 empty seats in the choir loft? Surely the Good Doctor could go back and fix this. Surely he could fly out to that road and intercept the truck with his TARDIS and tomorrow we would wake up and find it was Wednesday again and everything would be ok.

But then I remembered a quote…not from the Bible, but again from the Doctor. “Certain points are fixed.” Some things HAVE to happen. And that thought, above everything else I heard that night, brought me comfort. Yes. This was a terrible thing. No need to say otherwise. But there was a REASON. God had said that stuff about “higher ways” and “all things working together for good” and all. Certain points were, indeed, absolutely fixed.

Again I will honestly tell you that I did not realize that I had begun my deconstruction journey at this time. I knew that I was a Very Bad Baptist Indeed, and I didn’t tell my kids until much later that it was Doctor Who and not god who had helped me breathe on that night. I would have said that my faith became STRONGER after this, even. Two weeks after the bus crash? EASTER FUCKING SUNDAY. LIKE THIS WASNT HARD ENOUGH FOR ME ALREADY. DAMMIT. But on that wretched Easter Sunday? I sang praises to the god who had let my friends die. Through it all, I was more determined than ever to believe and trust and love and honor and serve the god that my Protestant friends had helped me come to know and love in Europe. He was better than Baptist god anyway, because he let women teach. (Fight me on this. Jesus thought women were amazing. Paul was an asshole. I have studied this and I can bring receipts.)

I wrote about it, of course. I couldn’t help it. I wrote what would be the first of FIVE blog posts about it less than a week later. My faith! Oh! My faith in the god that had let this enormous fucking tragedy happen to a group of senior citizens on their way home from a church retreat…my faith was still incredibly strong. I remained thoroughly convinced that god was even then shepherding our church family through too many damn funerals too damn close together, and that this was all part of his glorious unknowable ineffable fucking plan.

It fucking hurt, though. And I wasn’t quiet about my pain. I blogged for the second time and yelled on Facebook over and over again, screaming to the world about how angry I was at the situation but that the angrier I was? The more I clung to god to see me through.

My cousin told me repeatedly that she appreciated watching me “mourning out loud,” because it was much more healthy than the Excessively Baptist Way of keeping it all stuffed down inside.

But just as certain points are fixed? Some cracks cannot be repaired. Three more tragedies followed in the year and a half that followed the bus crash (a church shooting, the death of a young man in our church, and the death of my uncle). Our marriage could not withstand the onslaught.

With the divorce? I stopped being Baptist entirely.

I found a new church, one of those non-denominational congregations that thinks it’s progressive because they have a woman on staff. I started dating again, and the man that would become my new husband came to this church with me. This was non-negotiable, of course. I was not Baptist, but I was still Christian. I had standards (LOL).

I left call center work after much prayer and support from my home group and returned to teaching in the fall of 2019.

My new husband and I got married on March 13, 2020, the day before the world shut down. Suddenly, after being constantly surrounded by seventh graders, I found myself at home all day every day, waiting for students who didn’t have internet in their homes to not show up for Zoom classes. Many long and lonely hours while my new husband was still working in his office left me with lots of time to watch YouTube videos. (Yes, this is important.)

I was looking for another teaching job at the time as well. I had been notified by Zoom (ON GOOD FUCKING FRIDAY? FUCK!!!) that my middle school teaching contract was not going to be renewed. I had not gone lightly back to teaching. I knew god wanted me in the classroom, though. I knew he would provide a teaching position. But there was also a deadline. I needed to provide health insurance for my kids. Coverage from the teaching job would last until my contract ran out, but not one day longer.

I found myself in a perfect storm of negative circumstances. My bubbly outgoing self was not doing well at home alone all day. I was very stressed about the search for a new teaching job. One hundred applications led to only 10 interviews, none of which included a call-back. I prayed and begged god in desperation for a new job with one eye on that ticking clock. And also…YouTube.

I love movie review channels. But a random video on one channel led me down a rabbit trail of woo and the debunking thereof. I discovered some Christian channels that I found ridiculous (they were the “be a good wife and mother” crap I had always hated) and I discovered other YouTubers who made fun of them.

Meanwhile, the first day of school came and went. No teaching job. I was devastated. I had joked for years about how god had consistently answered prayers at the last possible moment. But god always came through. Well, not always. He didn’t heal cancer. He didn’t stop school shootings. He didn’t go back in time and stop the bus crash. But he mostly always came through. Until there was no teaching job. And no health insurance. 

Around this same time I found Aron Ra on YouTube. His channel focuses on science, evolution, and debunking religious nonsense. He has a multi-part video series which completely debunks Noah’s flood. It not only DIDN’T happen, but it COULDN’T happen…and there is science to prove it.

And when I watched that series, something astoundingly unexpected happened. That Jenga tower of faith? My faith which I thoroughly sure was strong and certain and unmoving? The whole entire tower came crashing to the ground.

My belief. My faith. My very foundation. My LIFE MISSION. It was on the floor of my mind palace in a thousand little pieces. 

I don’t know exactly the date when this happened. I’ve managed to pin it down (through Facebook memories, of course) to late September of 2020.

It’s still so strange to think about. I didn’t even know I was poking at it until the whole thing came crashing down.

But here I was, newly married to a good Christian man…what to do? How to bring this up? His faith was solid too but not as deep as mine had been (and let’s be honest, there’s not a whole hell of a lot of women with faith like mine) but HOLY HELL. What to do?

And again, YouTube had the answer. This time it was Matt Dillahunty’s video “Why Don’t You Love Me?”, a monologue from God’s perspective about the relationship between the Old Testament god and the nation of Israel. I was watching it in our bedroom, and the video was playing louder than I thought, because my husband came in and said “Holy crap, he’s right!” So before we even had a chance to have our first Christmas, we ended up tossing our faith together.

Now, a lot of things about me have not changed. I’m still a smartass. I still talk too much. I’m still very much a nerd.

I’m still kind and compassionate and caring. I still want to help people. My Life Mission? I did alter it. Now it is: To live by the Girl Scout Law (while being, of course, as ridiculous as possible.)

I still love to learn. I still love to read. I still, on occasion, read the Bible (but only when I’m looking something up for friends online.)

I’m still growing. I learned the phrase “bodily autonomy” during the summer of 2020 (I was 45 years old. How horrifying is that, not knowing about the concept of bodily autonomy until I was married for the SECOND TIME) and had given birth twice?)

My mom died in the summer of 2023, and later that summer I finally told my dad about my deconstruction. Mom? Would never have understood. But Dad? Listened to what I had to say. Just like he always has. Asked questions. Listened to the answers. Kept listening for years as, over the course of many short conversations, I told him about Excessively Baptist beliefs that had done me damage. He said he wanted what’s best for us. It was what he knew. He didn’t mean to harm, and I know that. He’s still one of my three favorite guys.

So why am I writing about this now?

Because I’ve been trying to write this for six years. 

Because I haven’t told my sisters yet.

Because I’ve discovered that there are THOUSANDS of GenX oldest daughters that grew up Excessively Baptist and we’ve all collectively chucked our faith. And it feels so good to know I’m not alone.

Because someone reading this needs to hear it. To know that they’re not alone either.

Because this needs to be a book and I needed to start somewhere.

Because it’s been 9 years since the bus crash and that’s almost a decade. 

Because the bus crash didn’t start it, but it certainly didn’t help.

Because I needed to finally get all the words out.

But mostly because I never was very good at journaling.