More on: growing up

It is a fact that no one worries in the Bible. —Adam Phillips i. She worried. & she knew. Good enough makes a faint halo. Still she was good enough. She let the infant dream his unbroken body at her nipple. She suckled him & waited as lightning struck. Often. His eyes clouded— ultramarine, gray…

I MET THE MAN we chose to call Satan in Myrtle Beach in the spring of 1986, and my only direct dealings with him took place over a period of less than twenty-four hours. The last time I saw his face by light of day he was clutching a can of warm Meister Brau on…

Huge hunks of the silver maple we’d just cut down killing the grass, trunk pieces split into quarters a good hundred pounds each, and my father’s start with the trouble in my head again as I loaded the biggest ones into the wheelbarrow, metal scrape and sawdust, tightrope balance to the woods’ edge, then back…

I RECALL THE FACE OF A BOY wearing a blue sweatshirt, and I want to tell him that I’ve fallen in love and that I saw a fox midday like a flare, that I saw a black bear in the laurel just this evening and that the roar of life is in me. And I…

An expert from First Baptist Church in coat and tie came with our class to the Natural History Museum to lead the second grade past the error-filled placards on the walls of the Prehistoric Hall, so we could in innocence admire the skeletons of God’s magnificent extinct creation. I hung back as the class clambered…

  This essay will appear in Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, an anthology from Cascade Books, edited by Hannah Faith Notess. ON THE DAY of my baptism, my father stood at the back of the church—hung-over, or quite possibly drunk even at that early hour—and shouted, “Hooray for Sara!” as…

The Possibilities of Sainthood by Donna Freitas (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2008) Dark Sons by Nikki Grimes (Hyperion, 2005) Trouble by Gary Schmidt (Clarion Books, 2008) Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown, 2009) AS A TEENAGER, I was given several novels in a series of inspirational young-adult (YA) books. On their pastel covers, modestly sweatshirted girls with big hair and…

Eight, mouthy, and proud, you didn’t want his help, so while you watched the stairs revolve below your feet with every gust, your father watched you climb the last three flights dizzy, on your hands and knees, before your brother, crouched by the door, jumped out to scare you, and you missed the step. Which…

S HE WAS A BEAUTIFUL child and then a beautiful girl who seemed protected by an aura of goodness so that lascivious men kept their thoughts to themselves and didn’t lay a hand on her. But one afternoon her luck ran out during a hurricane which brushed New England in September of 1948. Her mother’s…

THAT YEAR IN INDIANA, June landed like a fire arrow. It was surprising, and—for the immediate avenue it opened with those strangers who demanded interaction with Jan in the grocery line or at the gas pump—a relief. She knew she could sigh a little, wag her head as if asked to bear a great and…