Making amends with my former self
Iam getting a divorce. My kids asked me the other day if I was going to keep my name or drop the Faulkenberry, and I said I am keeping it because I don’t want to have a different last name than theirs. They are my babies and it would just be weird, I think, for them and for me, so I don’t see myself dropping it. This was a matterof-fact answer and the truth, my impulse.
But since then I have thought more about it, and as with most things, there is stuff there to unpack.
I have been Gwen Faulkenberry for 30 years. That is more than half my life—longer than I was Gwen Ford. Joan Didion said, “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a dark night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
Gwen Ford doesn’t hammer on the door of my head. She is not what I would call demanding. But she does have questions. And I have questions for her.
Thirty-plus years ago Gwen Ford was a student at the University of Central Arkansas, majoring in premed biology. She looked like Barbie and met up with a guy who looked like Ken, and they pursued a relationship according to the code of honor dictated by the evangelical Christian organization they were both a part of on campus.
They had big dreams and high standards. Tried to do everything right. This meant, among other things, that they “built a friendship” instead of dating for the first several months. When they started going on actual dates, they held hands occasionally but never kissed. Kissing—and everything else—was saved for their wedding night, per the advice of Elisabeth Eliot’s “Passion and Purity,” echoed soon after by Joshua Harris in “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.”
When Evangelical Ken and Barbie got engaged, they went through engagement counseling with a lovely couple who served on staff with Fellowship Bible Church. It was instilled in them that divorce was not an option, and Gwen Ford took this to heart, as she did so many things in those days. Over the next 30 years it became a mantra.
The idea that divorce was not an option meshed for Gwen Ford with the ideals she’d formulated her whole life as a good Southern Baptist girl. She was intellectual and creative, but her primary goal always was to be a wife and mother. And regardless of the divorce, mothering my four children remains the most important thing in my life, my greatest joy.
One of the questions I have for my former self is how much of who she was—who I was then—was my personality, and how much was a product of my upbringing in a conservative evangelical community? And a third factor, I suppose, is how much of it was influenced by cultural norms—meaning the role and expectations of women in American society, particularly in the South?
The purpose of these questions is not to assign blame to anyone who participated in my upbringing. Aside from a few easily identifiable villains—we all have those in any story—my childhood was populated by extraordinarily good human beings who meant well, and I would argue in the case of my parents, especially, but other important figures like teachers, Bible study leaders, etc., they did well.
I am grateful for most of the values I gleaned from my background, and they are still very much a part of who I am today: honesty, empathy, hard work, a sense of right and wrong, loyalty, generosity, and above all, love. I’ve been singing it all my life. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. They will know we are Christians by our love. This is the firm foundation of my personhood still today and I have no intention of ever abandoning it.
The thing I must confront at this crossroads, however, is that some of the aspects of the Christian life, and particularly Christian marriage, appeared to me through a glass darkly, and now I see them in a different light. I believe that Gwen Ford had a distorted view of what love and loyalty looked like. I believe she took some things, such as a wife’s submission, “Love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things” and “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life” far too literally.
And I wonder if she did that because she was explicitly taught to do so in her church. Most of her friends and family in that same environment, who were taught the same things, did not take it so deeply and specifically to heart. They wore WWJD bracelets too, but were wiser. Street-smarter. Something. What was it about me that latched on to some of this stuff as the actual way, truth, and life, when from my current vantage point I see clearly that it led me to some unhealthy, extreme, and I would now argue, anti-Christian behavior? I say anti-Christian because I no longer believe those behaviors are requirements of married love or loyalty. They are not what Jesus would have me do. This is the truth that sets me free today.
I may spend the rest of my life asking questions and trying to understand the factors that led my former self to become Gwen Faulkenberry. The person who still goes by that name is still becoming. Perhaps that is how I will make amends with the girl who was Gwen Ford.