Good Kids Die Young

We are being louder, messier, bright-coloured humans while the traditional and evangelical world clutches its pearls.

It was a scene out of a cheating boyfriend’s rom-com. My sister, getting booted from our childhood home at sixteen. I was fourteen, watching the chaos unfold. She was flailing - skipping cult services, stirring up drama, making our family dysfunction even messier.

So, with a casual shrug and a couple of garbage bags, my sister - now a stranger -was launched onto a one-way flight to Ontario, tossed into the loving arms of our equally cult-crazy aunt and uncle. Bon voyage! Your messy teenage mistakes? How dare you think for yourself! God hates that, (even though he knows your every thought) and if we don’t exile you, we join the sinner squad.

Ah yes, Christian “love”- perfected cruelty wrapped in Sunday best.

She didn’t darken our doorstep again for five years.

Unconditional love is a foreign concept in evangelical homes. God comes first, always. He reigns supreme, and with his “presence” - that hovering, judgmental dove - every raised voice, unregulated tone, or minor slip meant he would flee, and he wouldn’t come back until we straightened our act, cleaned up our mess, performed the right rituals, and swallowed the guilt he left behind.

We were loved based on action, submission, and good-girl kinks.

Love was measured in skirt length, neckline shapes, heel height, untouched hair - natural state. It was tucked into clean baseboards, spotless vocabularies, teen pregnancies avoided or punished, missionary sex, and church service attendance logged like a ledger.

It was acknowledging the colour white as “punk” and avoiding it like it had skin-eating bacteria crawling all over it. It was showing off your domestic skills at your first mixed birthday party at sixteen, hoping to catch the eye of one of the male teen prospects for a proposal. It was pretending you didn’t have sexual urges as teenagers, and praying the gay away - like that would solve anything. It was reading the Bible nightly and taking your turn saying “God is great, God is good,” over dinner. It was hating your worldly neighbour and spanking your children into submission. It was putting your cult leader on a pedestal and going out on limbs of faith … just to die.

Everything was performative. Everything was under surveillance. Every thought, every whisper, every sideways glance could betray you. Your worth wasn’t yours. It belonged to compliance, to allegiance, to how well you reflected the rigid fantasy the prophet, leader and elders had written for you.

Here’s the joke no one warned you about: you spend your life being trained to worship absence. To worship fear. To worship subservience like it’s a virtue when really it’s a leash. You spend your life pretending gratitude for scraps of conditional love, pretending God’s presence is worth the anxiety, pretending that death-by-limb-of-faith is noble instead of insane. You grow up waiting for the shoe to drop, for the rug to be ripped out from under you at any given moment. You were taught to trust the chaos. To surrender to the uncertainty - bending your whole life around the unknowing, and calling it faith.

Love was transactional.

Now how the fuck do you undo it?

As a mom whose entire parenting portfolio was stacked with toxic operatives, every undoing felt like a bullet through my skull. A re-birth. A demolition. A full-scale gutting of everything I thought I knew about love, safety, and self.

Undoing is messy. It is soul-crushing. It is being shredded, piece by piece, by a thousand invisible cuts that never stop oozing. It is bleeding out all the lessons you were forced to learn and trying to stitch new ones onto a skeleton of fear. Every reflex - shrinking, silencing, performing, apologizing for existing - has to be ripped out by the roots.

Every boundary you ever ignored in the name of “obedience is holy” must be carved out with blood, sweat, and an unflinching refusal to kneel to that fear again.

You watch yourself unlearn the scripts that made you small: the guilt, the terror, the constant performance of perfection. You scream at the ceiling when you catch yourself shrinking under someone else’s voice. You weep when your own child cries in a way that would have been punished in your house. You rage at the world that made you think love had to be earned, that acceptance was conditional, and that mistakes were final.

You hear yourself begging anything and anyone for a do-over because, shocker, you didn’t sign up for this religious bullshit. You writhe over the endless, “what the fuck could have beens,” each one a dagger to the heart you were never allowed to have.

But then you do the impossible, the unfathomable. You let yourself fuck up. You let your kids fuck up. You watch chaos unfold in real time and, for the first time, you trust it. Not the hollow chaos of fear you were raised on, but the messy, human chaos of living without invisible punishments, and in that trust, holy shit - you begin to breathe, really breathe. You are terrifying and tender and alive all at once. You are no one’s good girl anymore, no one’s project. You are not the sum of a system designed to break you.

Your voice has a sound now, and you’re loud. Your children are loud. They are living room children, not creatures of the basement - not shadows that only emerge when the company leaves. They take up space, and they sure as hell don’t waddle behind you in some Stepford duck parade. They barrel forward, dripping confidence, and every unapologetic step snaps another one of your obedient little cult bones in half.

You talk to your children, and not just in discipline - imagine that. You listen and you ask. You actually answer without twisting your words into a ten-minute moral sermon they didn’t sign up for. You are the soil that lets them grow wild, messy, and true; not some fucking checklist they have to tick off before they hit sixteen and graduate to “acceptable.”

There’s no skirt-length quota here, no service attendance log to keep Sky-Daddy’s ego intact, no silent treatment from the leadership because someone dared to have a bad day. They test boundaries without fearing exile. They fail without fear, and in the middle of it, you realize you’re building the home you needed. You’re dismantling the machine in real time - bolt by bolt, lie by lie, dirty baseboard by dirty baseboard.

You’re raising humans, not projects. Authentic people, not performances, and if that makes the Bible crowd clutch their pearls - well, good. May they choke on them.

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My 11- year-old son asked for pink shoes for back-to-school. In evangelical circles, pink is basically a gateway drug to hell. My own cult teenage wedding was hot pink, black, and crystal, but the groom, the groomsmen, hell, any man within a 50-foot radius was forbidden by the cult leader to wear it. Too feminine, they said. It attracts “homosexuality spirits,” they screamed because apparently, fabric dye is out here recruiting.

Now, if we were still living in the Evangelical Hall of Fame for “Proper” Families, I’d be stuffing my son’s clothes into garbage bags and flinging them onto the grass; a one-way ticket to his strict relatives taped on like a hall pass - just like my sixteen year old biological stranger had been.

But… teehee… love is totally unconditional here. After wrestling my generational-cursed demons the first few years post-cult and monetizing a few dollars from my rage here on Substack, I bought my son hot pink shoes. That’s right, religious freaks - he’s strutting in sin-coloured glory.

And that’s it. That’s the victory: living rooms full of loud kids, messy hair, untested patience, and yes, pink shoes. Take your skirts, your patriarchal regime, your ledgered prayers, and your holiness police because none of it touches us anymore. We’re raising humans, not your little god-bots, and we’re laughing in the face of every rule we survived.