Dear younger fundamentalist trad wife me,

A love letter of escaping religious abuse and domestic violence.

I was thinking about you today.

I was scrubbing a kitchen sink to make it shine. You taught us this, remember? The Flylady? She was a judge or something with a fly-fishing hobby. She devised a housecleaning system and sent out lessons in an email group. Egroups, I think it was called, before she had the website. You were one of her first one hundred followers.

It would’ve been around 2000 or so, just after the colossal deflation of Y2k pressure. Disaster hadn’t manifested. World apocalypse wasn’t going to rescue you from your problems and you were beginning to wonder if the rapture was even a real thing, but you knew better than to say such a thing out loud.

Sink shining was a basic tenet of the Flylady’s system. Other top-tier essentials included getting fully dressed each morning down to the lace-up shoes, making your bed, swishing your toilet (was there a special term for this?), pulling the shower curtain closed to dry, decluttering “hot spots,” and dividing the house into zones to focus on each week.

But if nothing else happened, the hill to die on was a shining sink, and the reason for this was that if you shined your sink, the rest of the routine was contagious. One thing would lead to another and pretty soon the whole house would be clean. This is how you’d “bless your family.”

The motto that still rings in your mind as you spray the sink with stainless steel cleaner: “Housework done imperfectly still blesses your family.”

Today I wondered why this woman, who was probably a pretty interesting gal with her legal career and fly-fishing hobby, is known only as a housework coach in my mind, two decades later. But I also remembered how much you clung to her routines for hope.

Imperfection was dangerous back then. One thing needed to lead to another, or else. It did bless my family to make an effort, not only because it’s nice to have a clean and orderly house, but because that clean order is a requirement of fundamentalist wives. We heard it from Proverbs 31 to Fascinating Womanhood to The Excellent Wife to Created to be His Helpmeet. We knew better than to argue, yet it was a hard thing to figure out when the babies came so fast and we felt outnumbered. The consequences for failure were so high. The kids were getting old enough to hear the bumps in the night.

I think you found Flylady on a homeschooling forum. Sonlight Curriculum, probably. All the moms in co-op were excited about it. We knew the ideal we had to reach. What we needed was the “how.”

The trick to having a shiny sink is to make sure it’s dry. A wet sink doesn’t shine, so the dishes need to be already done or hidden away when you shine it up. One of the Flylady’s tricks is to use the dishwasher as a hidey-hole for dirty dishes that you can’t get to. Sometimes they stack up because the babies are crying or because you’re crying. Flylady understood depression was a key reason why many women can’t clean their kitchens. So her recommendation was to hide what was overwhelming and shine up what you could. Lacing up tennis shoes helped energize your attitude too.

I remember how hard it was for you to figure out how to wear a dress and lace up tennis shoes together. It sounded so ugly. So homeschool matron. You were 24. You’d just had your fourth baby, the bright blue-eyed sunshine baby after Clara died. You wanted work out clothes that year. To start running again. To try yoga.

But the women said yoga summoned demons and yoga pants tempted men. Exercise clothes were full of eye traps. Jeans tempted little boys to sexualize their mothers. Money was too tight for new clothes. Best stick to versatile dresses and jumpers that could accommodate breast feeding, pregnancy, housework and church. Men liked you better in dresses anyway, they said.

I remember how you felt when you wondered why what men wanted you to wear mattered more than what you wanted on your own body. That airless stab in your lungs. That flutter of your eyelids. But that thought was as dangerous as the rapture one and I understand why you bit down. Your brain had lots of hidey-holes for thoughts you weren’t supposed to have. For some reason this made you want to cut your hair.

A refresh? Years later you’ll laugh when someone says, “A woman who changes her hair is getting ready to change her life.” I think that day you were trying. You were for sure crying, which is why you decided to try something new. The thing about trying is that sometimes it takes a few times to get it right.

There wasn’t money for a salon so you’d taken a scissors to your hair in the bathroom, barely stopping with the choppy bob. What would happen if you cut it all the way up to your scalp? What would happen if the scissors missed and stabbed your neck? Your eye? You can just see the blood dripping into the sink, making it wet.

From the nursery, the baby cried. So instead, you did your best to even up the haircut. You swept the hair and took it outside for the birds to use for their nests. You’d gone back inside and shined up the bathroom sink and pulled the shower curtain closed. You’d unbuttoned your dress and sat and nursed the baby, hair no longer on your shoulder.

At least you had the babies, right? I thought about this over the sink today too, because that oldest baby has a baby now that looks just like him, and this beautiful boy won’t be raised in fundamentalism. He won’t lay in his bed and hear his father knocking his mother bump in the night, holding her accountable for imperfection. You were right to cling to the kids as your reason for staying alive. Honey, you were right.

What I wish you knew that day in 2000 is that one thought led to another. Sure, with housework but more importantly, with the bigger things. Each try brought you a little more ahead. You did change your life and theirs too. You stopped waiting for disaster and the day even came when you stopped waiting for rescue. Everything you’re learning becomes useful to you, even the time in the forums that led you to Flylady.

So hang in there, little mama. Hold on. Your wonder matters and your effort does too. We’re here now because of you.

We’re here.

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