There's a blog that I keep up with because the content of said blog is pertinent to me and my interests.  This same blog usually sends out an email once a week with the "highlights of the week:" aka, blog posts that were most read.  One of the posts from this week was something relating to "why teens leave the Christian faith."

Intrigued, I decided to click on the link to read what it had to say.

Two main points were made as to why teens might decide to "leave."  The first being seeing a lack of compassion in the church, or within their home life.  The second, is because of hypocrisy.


This made me think about my life growing up; especially my teen years.  They were a turbulent time, to say the least.  And to be perfectly honest, there's still a lot I personally have to process and heal from, regarding my home life, the way I was raised, and the environment in which I grew up.


I wasn't an easy child for my parents to deal with.  In fact, they have occasionally said that if I were their first child, they probably wouldn't have had any others.  (Though, joke's on them, they didn't do very well in the birth control department, which is why there are so many of us, so I doubt they would have stopped after me, despite what they say.)

I remember the years between junior high and a couple years past high school being super rough.  I don't have good memories of home.  In fact, the more the years pass, the more difficult I find it to really recall any memories from my childhood (and I have a fucking good memory). 

My parents were desperate to "fix" me.  Or control me.  To make me behave.  They read books on the subject matter.  [In my opinion] stupid, idiotic books written by ignorant "Christian" authors who were lumping all "trouble" children into the same category.  Forgetting that we're people too, not just objects to be fixed and controlled.

To be perfectly honest, to the very depth of my being, I hated those books my parents bought.  I would occasionally find them laying around the house, and try to hide them, so my parents wouldn't get any stupid-ass ideas that were clearly inapplicable to me.  (They usually found them, so my hiding wasn't very good...)  Those books were a way of saying that my parents thought I was a project, that something was (or multiple things were) wrong with me. 

I don't know why my parents reading those books bothered me so much.  Thinking about it now, I can conjecture that it could have been because they were reaching to outside sources, things that had no concept of who I was, instead of talking directly to me.  Trying to understand me and what was going on.

(Though to be practical, if they had tried to reach out to me and talk with me, I wouldn't have told them what was going on.  Even if I myself knew...which I didn't.  But any trust I had in my parents was long gone, which is why to this day I don't talk to them about anything too personal.)


Back to this blog post that I read, though.  It mentioned that in the home life, hardness of heart, lack of grace, and being bigger on doctrine and "doing what's right," rather that being a living example of Jesus, were reasons given as to why a teen might leave the faith.  And having done a lot of processing in the past couple years of my life - thanks to therapy, and even thinking on things on my own - those were definitely things I dealt with growing up.  Which is why, even now, I still feel like I'm never good enough.  For anything.  Like I have to be good all the time, I have to be perfect, I can't make mistakes, because if I do, I've blown it forever.  This is most likely why I have never (and who knows if I ever will be) been sure of my salvation.  I feel like I have to earn it.

What?  Grace is given freely?  You can fuck up and people will still love you?

Sounds fake, but okay.


Anyway, there is a point to all this.

Reading that blog post, and reading about the reasons why teens might "leave the faith," made me start thinking about how I was raised and the way my parents went about trying to "fix" me.  And I realised something: all those books were talking about what was supposedly wrong with me.  And how to fix me.  I doubt ANY of them ever addressed the fact that, just perhaps, my parents may have been fucking up, and for them to look at their own selves and how they were behaving as parents, and to see if there were things they could change and address about how they were raising/treating me.


I still have a lot I have to process from my childhood.
I have a lot of healing that needs to take place.
And if anything, I want to take all the mistakes that were made in how I was raised, and be sure to not act that way should I ever have children.  I mean, God knows I'll probably fuck up a lot, as all parents do, but I certainly don't want a hostile environment in my home.  I want it to be known as a safe space.  For my kids to be able to come and talk to us about anything and everything; knowing without a doubt that even if they mess up big time, that we still love them and still support them.  That wasn't something I had, and I don't want my children to grow up and have to recover from a lack of love and grace.


...still a lot to think about.