Everything Lies
Part 4:
With the money I have spent on apparatuses that determine HCG levels, I could take a trip to Europe, decorate my home, buy a new vehicle, or perhaps buy a house. Well, maybe not that far, but close enough.
My purpose in cult life was to be a godly wife and mother. Every day of my childhood that passed was a day that Jesus hadn’t returned, and I was one step closer to my predestined future.
Doomsday fucks with your brain. There is scientific evidence that high-stakes religion causes irreversible brain damage. People often ask, “How are you as kind and empathetic as you are after living through all of it?” There is only one answer: I saw firsthand the other side of the kind and empathetic coin. Controlled by hate and apathy, I would have given my firstborn child to experience the stillness and homeliness that emanates from the opposite. Thus, how could I continue the pouring of the same that left me in continuous begging to end onto others?
I ought to be the villain, you know? To spend the remainder of my life with a hard-on of abhor.
I am many things, but a hypocrite should never find its final resting place within.
Sitting on the black faux leather couch in the living room of the rented duplex, I sobbed as he walked out the door to head to a Tuesday night’s prayer meeting. “ But what if I can’t have a baby? What if the rapture (doomsday) happens before I become a mother?” Who is laughing now as I am the mother to 5 children…. But the helplessness and hopelessness brought me to my knees at that moment. We had been married for three months.
“ What an honour it is to give life to a child of god.” He meant ‘crotch goblins,’ I am sure of it.
We were nineteen. I am three days older than he is. Our moms grew up on the same street in Newfoundland and were next-door neighbours in the hospital on those -30 degrees Celsius days in 1992. His dad was a groomsman at my parents' wedding in 1988. We would have made a cute story for TikTok. Remember, the Grimms Brothers authored this life story.
One menstrual cycle later, impregnated, my womb was now occupied.
It was our first summer as Mr. and Mrs., and the cult shut down for two weeks plus a weekend. The cult leadership announced the summer shutdown 8+ months in advance, and you and your family were to adjust your holiday schedule accordingly. We booked a cabin at a lake with our best friends.
*One must be married to be in mixed company and sleep under the same roof. Not the same room. (This reminds me of a Christmas Eve story while I was engaged.)
Up until that moment in time, the last time I had woken up in the middle of the night to pee was when I was three, but here, in the middle of Saskatchewan, in a tiny ass cabin, my bladder took a detour off the regularly scheduled programming. The cabin had no toilet. The fog-stained star-filled abyss and a locked outhouse door stood between me and relief. The campground was on black bear watch, and what should have taken me just a few moments was an extended forty-five minutes.
I did not wake my husband. With others sharing the cabin, even though they were in REM, I had to dress myself in cult attire. I tip-toed out of the cabin, slipping past the sleeping bodies on the living room floor. Once the door closed, I stood on the cabin porch, convincing myself of the courage to run across the road to the outhouse.
There was no requirement to witness two pink lines appear. I knew.
I kept my midnight bathroom run to myself; nobody needed to know. On the drive home, sitting in the cab of a truck with my husband and friend (who went on to become my brother-in-law), I began to have stabbing pains in my pelvic area. What felt like every fifteen minutes, we would pull over to let me out so I could relieve myself. I rocked back and forth in the truck, moaning in pain with the symptoms of an intense stomach bug; our friend yelled out, “ She’s got a little shrimp!”
The drive home dragged with my mind preoccupied with the realization of pregnancy with a real baby—one of my very own—a child of God.
Elder Eric once said, “ What an honour it is to give life to a child of god.” He meant ‘crotch goblins,’ I am sure of it.
Desperate to be a mother, I sat on the shelf of my bathroom vanity, a Clearblue box, for weeks.
If I read the box once, I would read it 8345 times: “For best results, use first-morning urine.”
I didn’t sleep that Sunday night. I held my stomach and repeatedly whispered, “ Mommy loves you. “
I drank copious amounts of water. A full bladder would give a higher rate of accuracy. Taking the pregnancy test out of the box and wrapper, I sat it on the counter, one step less to tackle when the morning urge to urinate hit. Oh, the chokehold of motherhood delusion when it’s all you must ascend to.
Monday’s alarm was the sound of my morning piss stream. As I watched the hourglass spin on the pregnancy test, I flipped it face down onto the back of the toilet. I paced the bathroom tiles for a torturous 180 seconds.
Thoughts of, “Doomsday may happen tomorrow, but if two lines appear, I’ll be a mom for a minimum of 24 hours” circled. This moment was nineteen years of conditioning, discipline and self-worth in the making. It all boiled down to this.
Shaking with sweaty hands and without taking a breath, I picked up the pregnancy test, flipped it around and, staring in bold black letters, read:
PREGNANT 1-2 WEEKS
The only movement my body made was that of a smile. Still I stood, frozen in the bathroom.
As my husband walked past the bathroom, on his way to work, I was standing in the bathroom doorway. I pulled the test out from behind my back, excitedly shouting,
“LOOK, IT IS OFFICIAL, I AM PREGNANT!! WE’RE GOING TO BE PARENTS!!
He took a seat on the top stairs, with his back turned to me and uttered,
“Those things lie.”
Nothing devastated me as those three words did. I have never forgotten them to this day, and while the sting isn’t painful, the itch of the scar remains.
Five years later, on New Years Eve 2016, I flipped the pregnancy test over revealing PREGNANT 2-3 WEEKS, with who would become baby #4.
As I stared at the apparatus, I uttered,
“And so the lie begins.” - Protecting him, regardless of cost, was my priority.
Creating a timeline narrative, where baby #4 was due two and a half weeks later than she was, kept us out of the cult office and our lifeline alive. It brought my husband back to the cult, our family unit together and for ten months, we found our stride.
Until the bank called his Dad.
Bank Fraud.
But, “ Those things lie, too.”