But even with her, I won’t talk about the Family.
Who am I without the Family? What are my desires when no one is telling me what I’m supposed to be and want? What career do I want to have?
These are very difficult questions for me. Unlike most of the people around me, I never had dreams of becoming a firefighter or an astronaut or any profession. I never had the luxury of thinking about what I would be when I grew up. My path was irrevocably set. I would be a missionary until I was martyred in the Tribulation or went up in the Rapture. There was no future to plan for. There were no skills to learn except for the limited things we needed to be able to do in the Family.
I have no idea what I might be interested in or good at. The choices are overwhelming, and I’m scared to make the wrong one and be miserable forever. I know I want to do something to help make the world better, and I need skills to do that. I think I might like to do humanitarian aid work on a much larger scale than what we did in Kazakhstan; it’s the only “career” I know other than missionary. I take a career aptitude test, hoping for some guidance, but it’s useless. Suggestions range from paralegal (what’s that?), to accountant (snooze), teacher (no thanks), and flight attendant (seriously?). I hope I can figure this out in college.
I start classes at Monterey Peninsula College. The Pell Grant is enough to cover a lot of my tuition, but I still need to support myself and pay for insurance, books, and gas. Grandma has given me a little money to buy a cheap car, and while it’s a real clunker, it gets me to school and back.
College is one written assignment after another. I loathe writing, remembering the dreadful teen Open-Heart Reports, and these research papers have minimum page counts and unfamiliar rules about content, grammar, and structure. In my homeschool curriculum, I had a few essay assignments, but my mother read them, and she wasn’t that critical.
I must force myself to sit down and write each paper. The blank page, the research, creating order out of the confusion of thoughts, and, worst of all, editing. There are so many typos because I’m not trained to hunt them down.
I discover our community college has a writing center in the small library, where a couple of people are willing to help students with their papers before they submit them. I take every paper I write there, get their comments, and revise. Slowly, I improve.
The classes are not as hard as I expect; they just take hours of dedicated effort to learn the material and do assignments. I have the most fun in geology class, studying different rocks: sedimentary, metamorphic, volcanic. I keep bringing new stones to my teacher to identify, but I’m skeptical when he starts talking about the hundreds of millions of years it took to form a rock bed we see on a field trip. I’ve studied all the Christian arguments debunking evolutionary theory, and I’m not willing to suck down his “facts” like a sap.
“So, you’re saying that this sedimentary rock would have taken many millions of years to form based on the current rate of deposition that we see in the river. Is it possible that these many meters of sediment could have been deposited quickly, say, in a massive flash flood?”
“Well, yes—I guess that’s possible.”
“So how can you be sure it took millions of years?”
“Hmm, well . . .”
While I’m not certain of the seven-day creation theory anymore, I don’t want to accept a new theory without investigating it. Why should I just accept another teacher’s beliefs as facts, when they can’t prove it to me? Are those my only two options? Why can’t teachers just say, “We don’t really know. This is our best working model so far, but we can see some holes, some places where the observable evidence doesn’t quite fit; so, we are keeping our minds open to discover more”?
I need to learn more to figure out what to believe.
I interrogate everything and everyone, and it’s a new and liberating experience. It’s a freedom: the freedom to disagree. Fortunately, my professor enjoys our debates. I suspect he’s happy to have a student visibly engaged and not just taking the course to fulfill a requirement.
I’m starting to see that I was trained to not question, so I believed what the Family said, not what they did. While we were taught that men and women were equal in the Family, we were not treated the same. Why were women expected to sacrifice and sleep with men they didn’t want to, and it wasn’t the same for men? Why did we have to serve and service the men, all the while being told we were equal?
I’m seeing the unfairness of the expectations and messages I was raised with, that to be a good woman meant being feminine, motherly, a servant to others, and that any woman desiring a career, a different role than mother, cook, teacher, singer, or secretary, was uppity or unfeminine.
I don’t know what to do with these questions or where to find answers. I don’t know how to act around people my age; I have no example of healthy boundaries.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to navigate this new culture. It’s different from when I was here at twelve, where, without friends, I was fairly isolated. I am an adult now, on my own, and trying to make sense of all that is being thrown my way.
I make a new friend at the bar, who introduces me to his buddies, four guys in their twenties who become like substitute brothers. As we drive around in their pickup truck, they teach me Californian slang—“phat” and “gnarly”—and we listen to their favorite American bands, including Pink Floyd, Dave Matthews, the Eagles, and I dance to the staccato beat of their hand drums around the fire as they smoke pot.
I mess up often, misreading social cues. Every time I see non-Asians, there is the cultural conditioning to lean in for a kiss on both cheeks like the Portuguese do, but most Americans just shake hands, so I try to catch myself and not to go in for a kiss.
But I’m still used to the Family’s culture of affection, and I give exuberant hugs to all my friends, with unintended consequences. I don’t understand why one of the guys thinks I like him just because I give him a hug, then when I hug the next, he gets confused, and so on. I try to make it clear that I’m an equal-opportunity hugger.
But some of my sarcastic cracks about men get a response of “Wow, how did you get so cynical?” Resentment I didn’t know I had is starting to leak out.
Am I cynical about men? I don’t want to be. With five brothers and Patrick as my best friend growing up, I’ve always felt I understood guys, even got on with them better than I did with women. But I can’t shake the conviction that men are just out to take what they can from me.