As a child, I hated going to church. I hated getting up early on a weekend, wearing stuffy clothes, listening to a boring old man read from a boring old book, pretending to like all the smelly old people, and listening to my dad pretend he could sing hymns. I thought it was the biggest, most boring waste of time ever invented by man - and worse, if I didn’t go and pretend to like it, then Jesus would get mad at me and send me to hell. Ugh. Lucky me, after this incident we didn’t go to church all that often anymore. This happened when I was very young; it was well before I was in school, but I don’t remember my precise age at the time.
It should come as no surprise, then, that while I was at church I would try to find anything - anything - to keep myself amused. I figured if I was physically inside the church and keeping myself entertained then I could trick Jesus into thinking I was actually entertained by church itself, thereby saving my soul.
That sounds crazy until you consider the fact that the church had two large clocks just over the pulpit - one with the correct time, and one that was set totally incorrectly. That way, it was once explained to me, the devil wouldn’t know what time it was inside the church and would never be able to show up on time to one of our services to steal all of our souls. After hearing this explanation, I concluded that it must not be too hard to fool all of these Bible people, so if I sat under the pew during the service tearing the program into tiny bits and then pretending the tiny bits were movie tickets and now I could pick out any movie in the whole world I wanted to watch, Jesus would think that I was actually being entertained by hearing about Abraham instead of being amused by internally debating the merits of Fern Gully vs. The Little Mermaid.
That was all well and good until one day I ran out of programs to tear up and got bored again. From my seat underneath the pew, I started tugging on my mother’s skirt, asking if church was almost done yet or maybe how about now or maybe how about now??
In order to better control me, she pulled me up onto her lap to listen to the choir sing. That was my least favorite part of the service, because the outfits the choir wore combined with the strange way they were lit caused all of the choir members to have this weird purple glow around them. My tiny child brain interpreted this as their souls being pulled up to Jesus by the glory of their singing, but I liked my soul and didn’t want it sucked out so this completely terrified me. Later, we would discover that I badly needed glasses.
Since I didn’t want to watch the choir’s souls floating away, I turned around and buried my face in the shoulder pads of my mother’s blouse (it was the late 80’s, and that was the height of fashion). Then I realized that her blouse had these delightful buttons down the front that would be perfect for playing spaceship. I began trying to remove them.
My mother didn’t notice what I was doing until it was too late. I completely unbuttoned her blouse and, in an attempt to remove the topmost button, flung it wide open. She pushed me back in horror as she realized what I had done, which only served to expose herself more completely.
The choir stopped mid-hymn and gasped, then started laughing. Turns out my mother wasn’t wearing a bra.
Furious, my mother buttoned up her blouse, flung me over her shoulder, and stormed out of the church. She pushed open the massive double doors at the entrance to take me outside and administer The Spanking to End All Spankings. Unfortunately for her, the doors didn’t have a mechanism to automatically shut, so everyone inside was privy to what happened next. My mother dropped me forcefully onto the grass just outside the church and calmly explained what I had done wrong.
“WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!?! YOU JUST FLASHED MY BREASTS TO THE WHOLE DAMN CONGREGATION!! GOD HAVE MERCY, I AM GOING TO BEAT THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF YOU!!”
To which I replied:
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE GOING TO BEAT ME IN FRONT OF JESUS’S HOUSE!”
The church service had completely stopped by this point, and I could hear the congregation inside laughing hysterically. I didn’t find anything funny about the situation, though - from the look in my mother’s eyes, the devil had cracked the two-clock mystery and was about to use her to end my life. She bent down to grab me for a spanking, but I was too quick for her and ran into a bush to hide. I knew I was small and nimble, and could therefore easily dash underneath the low branches. She, on the other hand, was tall and slow and would have great trouble pursuing me there.
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF THAT FUCKING BUSH!!” I feel it’s necessary to note here that my mother actually wasn’t a completely batshit insane child abuser and was actually a relatively nice person, but I had just totally pushed her over the edge here.
She got down on her hands and knees to get under the bush and to me, completely ruining her expensive linen pantsuit. She couldn’t reach, however - I had been too clever.
Or so I thought. As I looked around to scout a path should I need to run further, I saw it: a bee.
“OH GOD BEEEEEEEEEEES!” I screamed as I ran full speed out of the bush and into my mother, knocking her over and sending both of us rolling down to the sidewalk where she made good on her promise to “beat the living shit out of me.”
We looked like hell. My mother’s hair was going in every direction, her clothes were ruined, her makeup was streaked, and most of the people at that morning’s service had seen her ta-ta’s. I didn’t look much better, but at least nobody had seen me half naked that day. Still, I was indignant that I had been spanked when all I had wanted to do was play spaceship and didn’t she understand how bored I was?
She carried me back into the church. You could tell that everyone was trying their hardest not to break up into laughter again, but a few snickers here and there were escaping. The preacher had tears running down his face from laughing so hard, and the poor guy still had another half hour of services left.
Our pew was fairly close to the front, so we got to make a long and very embarrassing walk back up. As we did, a very nice lady pulled a coloring book and crayons out of her purse and offered them to me to keep myself entertained for the rest of the service. I was so furious at the situation that I did the only thing I could think of: I growled at her and bared my teeth like a rabid dog. The preacher saw this and burst into laughter again, followed shortly by the rest of the crowd.
Sufficiently humiliated, my mother quickly went back to her seat with her head down. I did not join her. Instead, I stood right where I was with my arms crossed and continued growling at this nice lady who, I would later discover, was actually my mother’s boss. After a few minutes of this, the laughter died down and the congregation seemed to go from thinking “this is uproariously hilarious” to “that child is weird and should maybe be in some kind of muzzle.” When it became obvious that I had no intention of moving, the preacher just chuckled to himself and started up the sermon again.
And so I stood there, arms crossed, snarling like a tiny angry beast for half an hour while the preacher told us all about how much God loves us. Traditionally, when the sermon ended the preacher would leave the pulpit and go to the back of the church (where the large double-doors from earlier were) and give one last prayer. That week, he gave his final prayer from the middle of the aisle because I refused to allow him to pass.
The next week, I got to sleep in on Sunday.
