Memoir: The Remembering

I’ve decided to write today about what it’s like to remember what happened back in 1991-2001 (the years my family and I were involved in a Protestant patriarchal Quiverfull cult, called the Advanced Training Institute, or ATI). I’m sure you know I’d rather not think about it at all. I’d rather just move on, forget those ten years of my life, think of happier things, work toward future goals, but you know what they say: those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

I am NOT going back, so I will remember now. I’ll remember intense details like what it felt like to be living in a former hotel (the Indianapolis Training Center) with juvenile delinquents climbing up and down the fire escapes peering into your windows all night long, when muscle men showed up to escort an out of control and screaming juvenile (naked and jumping from desk to counter) to a lock down facility (I was still answering the phone and asking people from the Oak Brook, Illinois-based headquarters to call back later.) What it was like to be gone from home for six months at a time, without earning a pay check, my parents scraping together twenty bucks every two weeks and sending it to me so that I could buy granola bars and shampoo. What it felt like when they locked us out of the kitchen all day on Sundays (thus why I needed granola bars) because everyone was required to fast until dinner.

What it felt like when there were so many calls coming in to the switchboard that you had to use “phone triage” to decide who to transfer first. What it was like sorting and organizing cartons and cartons of mail while answering that same phone, fetching orange juice for anyone who needed it, tracking two walkie channels, and still having a smile on your face. What it was like being chained to a switchboard for fifteen hours a day (there were two of us and we took turns, although sometimes it took both of us to keep up). What it was like to be in charge of a fifteen-year-old at age twenty, what it was like when the leadership locked her and other juveniles in prayer closets as punishment. What it was like trying to rest in a building that knew no rest . . . ever. What it was like trying to show love in a place that preferred to enforce rigid rules and no forgiveness, and was led by a man who “cut the tail off” of every hard situation he faced. The same person that forbid me to cry in his presence, no matter what. He was only one of many tough leadership examples who enforced, ruled, pushed, prodded, and never showed any mercy. They were not our parents after all. They stuffed too many of us in vans to drive across the country with no notice (a Little Rock, Arkansas seminar needed help and within twelve hours we were on the road), offered us as volunteers to every inner-city clean-up, street team, VBS, and charity effort they could find. We were there to be used up. When they were done with us, they sent us home or left us to collapse wherever we could. When someone wanted to give us all one hundred dollar bills for Christmas, this leadership protested. (We got our Christmas one hundred dollar bills in spite of them.) When I asked for one weekend off that entire year, I got grudging permission to go and then got in trouble when I got back from my four-day Memorial Day weekend at a friend’s house because “I hadn’t been available to them when they really needed my help.” For not being available, I was assigned a six-foot-tall female juvenile delinquent to monitor 24-7 during the annual homeschooling conference in Knoxville (they told me let her go if she ran away).

And then the good stuff: what it was like the day I walked out of that building for the last time. What it was like telling them “no” when they kept calling asking me to come back.

And that’s just a small piece of the memoir, probably one chapter or two at the most because I don’t want to focus on it. But that piece hurts the most. I gave everything I had and then some while I stayed at the Indianapolis Training Center. I get criticized from others who NEVER had to stay there unless they were visiting. They say stuff to me like “I didn’t have a tough time during my ATI years,” “I loved working with the Institute,” or even this one “What are you complaining about? It was fun.”

Yeah sure. Most of them worked at Oak Brook, where they got pay checks, where they weren’t living in a former hotel, where they had cars and could drive to eat breakfast if no one was serving it at home. Those people served in a different capacity. Oak Brook was fun compared to the training center. And the Indianapolis Training Center wasn’t even as bad as other places. To others, “I” had it easy.

That’s what I’m remembering now. I know it only lasts for a bit and it will be for good and I’ll get to move on to those heady days when I found truth and freedom, but lemme tell ya, it’s really hard to remember where you once were.

Tagged as: brilliant, memoir, overcoming resistance, writing