Writing In the Liminal Space

My history as a female promoter of patriarchy

Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

~Maya Angelou

What am I doing?

I wish I knew. For over a year I’ve had the idea to write a book about my experiences as one of the female promoters of “biblical patriarchy” in the day. Sometimes it seems pointless…it was another life. I have publicly repudiated my own part in it many times, apologizing over and over for anything I said or wrote or did then that may have harmed anyone else, including my own children.

I have moved on.

But as the old saying goes, what goes around, comes around. In 1905, George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Pick your favorite adage. Patriarchy did not fizzle out as I had hoped, but it’s back, bigger and badder than ever.

Vision Forum was the cult with which I was involved

So even though I have, in a sense, moved on, this is part of my story, my personal history, and I do believe the choices we make impact other people. I doubt I can apologize enough to make the impact of my own choices disappear. In some ways, you can never move on. You are formed by your story and as you inevitably interact with others, the ripples of your actions, despite your best intentions, will inevitably be formative for them, too. We are interdependent that way, which can be a good thing but a hard thing in this broken world.

I’ve been listening to and reading others’ stories in books, podcasts, and Substack posts, about the effect the “biblical patriarchy” (I cannot write that term without scare quotes) had on them, mostly women. Most of them I do not know personally, and they have probably never heard of me. But I feel a twinge of guilt and regret when I hear them mention familiar names from my own past and I remember the part I played in some of those circles. Sometimes it’s emotionally difficult for me to revisit this.

One of the most difficult parts for me now is grappling with being a participant in this movement but also being a victim of it. It was and is an ideology that promotes “father rule” and male domination (they would say “leadership”), after all. Being an articulate older woman who could write and had a platform (blogging, in the day) to promote their agenda was a boon to them and a boondoggle for me.

I’m afraid I drank the Kool-Aid.

Until it started tasting funny, that is. I had many wake-up calls, and began to move away from the patriarchy movement, until I was eventually booted out of it, thank God.

But the tendrils of it still cling to me, memories and guilt and the reality of my own complex PTSD then and now. I can’t just brush it all away, but I have to do the work I tell my clients to do: Explore with curiosity what is still bothering you. Like many women who bought and read all the books, got the catalogs with shiny, happy people on the cover, went to the conferences, and hoped to not only protect their precious children but to build a legacy of faith that would last for generations, my life didn’t turn out like I expected. I’m divorced and remarried, some of my children are going through struggles and some are–as they should be–exploring how they want to write their own stories.

I live in a liminal space of owning my participation in a system that now disgusts me, also being very angry at how I was used–manipulated to promote it, my own vulnerabilities exploited. And I am not alone in this space. As a therapist, I have walked with women down these confusing paths, and I have met women online who have had similar experiences. Some of them are women I knew at the time we were all involved in the patriarchy/quiverfull/homeschooling extremism together. So. Much. Pain.

Women’s work. Yes, I have churned butter. This is Country Life by Jan Brueghel the Elder.

Writing has become very difficult for me. Reading, too. My concentration is shot due to hypervigilance and betrayal trauma. I recently went to a lovely writing retreat where I got to sit with Mitali Perkins for some encouragement and coaching. She is a beautiful soul and beautiful writer. She listened to me express my difficulty sharing my story due to fear that I might once again veer into the weeds with my words. I’m deathly afraid of causing harm by what I say. I also don’t want to excuse myself from blame I deserve. Mitali reminded me that once upon a time my words were used to promote the agendas of evil men. That is not the case now.

This morning, I realized I don’t want to write a book. That feels intimidating. I feel pressure in my chest and churning in my stomach when I think about it. I sometimes wonder if I am allowed to speak up, too. But I do want to write. I want to continue to write on Substack, hoping it will perhaps be a corrective emotional experience for the blogging I once did. You are welcome to go peek at some of the crap I wrote at my old blog, Buried Treasure Books, when I was Carmon Friedrich. You can look it up using The Wayback Machine. I thought I was right about so many things I was really wrong about.

I want to write for myself, to process what I experienced and why, as well as to add to the record of what happened then. But I also want to write for the women whom I know still suffer from many regrets, who aren’t sure if they have the right to speak about their sorrow, whose families are broken when all they longed for was to see their families flourish, who don’t know how to mend the brokenness. These women, like me, wonder: What about the mothers?

I have stories to tell, as I am able, about those days, from my perspective. Others have a perspective, too. My hope is to keep working on my own healing but also to give hope to women who may be stuck in hopelessness, replaying old tapes and unable to see a future for themselves. Perhaps some younger women will pull back from the edge of the same chasm. I don’t know. I am so tentative these days.

That’s all for now. I have something to post in a couple of days. We will see, after that.