The Match Girl

And the quest continues.

(The quest, for those of you who may be wondering, is to drag out a happy ending, kicking and screaming if necessary, from every story Hans Christian Andersen ever wrote.)

(Well, maybe not every story. But a lot of them.)

I believe Andersen is what I’m going to call a Religious Optimist. Basically what that means is that for a lot of his work, you have to shift your perspective for a thorough understanding, because his definition of a happy ending is based on a strong faith and a crappy life.  Which means death=heaven=happily ever after, as opposed to the general misery of daily life.

If the idea of returning to school didn’t fill me with horror and dread, my big thesis paper would totally be on this topic. “Happily Ever After: The Religious Optimism of Hans Christian Andersen.”

The facts: Andersen was a deeply religious, deeply depressed gay man in the nineteenth century. We have documentation on this from the most reputable of sources, i.e. Andersen himself.

Just try to comprehend what it would mean, the level of love and joy in Heaven, to a man who was so sad and alone on earth.

And my man Hans, he’s a realist. Does a homeless child alone on the streets in winter get whisked away by her fairy godmother and become a princess? Of course not. Life doesn’t work that way. But can a girl with no chance of a happy, healthy life on earth be happy and healthy in Heaven?

Absolutely. That’s, like, a given.

Here’s the deal. You’re an orphan living on the streets in the dead of winter. You survive on selling matches. Shockingly, not a hugely profitable career.

You die. Of course you die. You hallucinate and you die and you welcome it, because life is hell and now you get to be where the hallucinations are. What is there to live for, anyway? You’re tired, and you’re hungry, and you’re cold. Everyone you love is dead already, and everything always hurts.

Why would you want to be alive?

There are days when every thought you have, every step you take, every sight you see, brings only sadness and pain. We don’t all get to be princesses. The world doesn’t work like that. Sometimes you’re lucky just to survive. Sometimes it’s not surviving that’s really lucky.

If I ever get my hands on a time machine, the first thing I’m doing is getting Hans on some antidepressants; poor dude needs them almost as much as I do.

The Conservative Christian's Guide to Not Sucking: Love

My first memory is of a little boy in a red shirt. My second and third and fourth memories are of church.

A lot of people are leaving the church these days, especially people my age. And honestly, I’m more likely to sleep in most Sundays.

It’s not about God. It has nothing to do with my faith.

I think it’s worse if your parents are pastors. I think it’s worse if you’re from a small church.

See, my early memories aren’t of sitting in a pew while adults drone on. I remember being in basements for Bible study, playing with dolls on the floor. When I get bored they set aside their Bibles to hold me. A prayer meeting turns into a birthday party, with a Barbie princess themed cake. The people at church often babysit me. I love them. They’re my friends. They’re my family.

And then they’re not.

That’s the problem with being the pastor’s family. You’re born into it, and you don’t realize what it means. Not until it’s much too late.

There will always come a time when you are set apart. Something in the church goes wrong. Your family has to move on. You have to leave. And they never call, and on the streets when you see them they don’t smile, and everything is over. Everything is gone.

You grow up, and you move far away, and you go to a church where you’ve never been what you always are—the pastor’s daughter.

And you stay there for months, and no one even learns your name, and you realize things will never be the same.

These people don’t love you. These people are not your family.

And even if they were, what then? What’s the use in loving, when the people who love you always leave?

I have plenty of good church memories, but they always end when people ditch me, and everything is tainted by the sting of abandonment and betrayal. And it’s been eight years but I still don’t quite know how to forgive. And I’m so afraid to let a church be my home again, because it hurt so much when I ended up alone.

So. A word of advice for those concerned about young people leaving the church: if you remembered how to love us every day, maybe we wouldn’t have to leave.

You cast us aside so easily.

The second church family I lost, it was because some people were mad at my dad. It was nothing even to do with me. But they vanished from my life like I was nothing.

I wasn’t allowed to go to a movie theater until I was eleven, because someone at church disapproved, which is unimportant in the long run, but it’s always troubled me.

I thought you loved me. You thought the big screen was sinful.

I never expected any of you to be perfect, but eight years later I’m still stumbling beneath the weight of the pressure that was the unspoken center of my childhood. Be good. Be better. Be perfect. Be the kid that all the other kids can look up to like their parents look up to your dad, and the moment either of you fails to be flawless enough all bets are off.

Here is the thing you have to understand: you drive us away.

Your response to mistakes and disagreements is rejection. Every time.

Here is what the church becomes to me, on a Sunday morning as I think of getting up and dressed and going. Church is about being turned away at the door because your skirt is too short. It is walking in with tattoos and shoddy clothes, walking right out again to escape the disapproving, judgmental, even frightened stares. It is your baby left undedicated because you are an unwed teenage mother. It is a pastor refusing to perform a marriage because it will never last. (Forty years later they prove him wrong.)

What we learn from our mistakes in church is mostly that Christians cannot be trusted. It has little to do with God.

How can you honestly say you want to reach new people when you actively drive away the young and confused ones you already have? We were born in the church. You never even had to reach us. You only had to keep us. And you failed.

I used to take unconditional love for granted. Now, it mostly makes me laugh, since it’s either that or cry.

I would love to be in church on Sunday. Give me a reason. Give me love. Give me trust. Make me feel safe, and maybe I’ll come back.

*#@% You, Mary

This story is actually called “Mary’s Child,” or “Our Lady’s Child,” usually, and it shows up in the Brothers Grimm. And it will be a miracle if I can get through this essay without using some seriously bad language (but I’ll try, because my grandparents read this blog), because I am bursting with anger today, and the Virgin Mary deserves all I have and more.

Not the real Mary. Just to clarify. Fairy tale Mary. Fairy tale Mary deserves more anger than I have to give. I'm cool with the real life mother of God. No issues there.

Okay. So first of all, you got this baby. This baby’s dad is all broke, like everyone in fairy tales,  so one day when he’s out chopping wood, the Virgin Mary just appears all out of nowhere, like, hey man, you can’t afford to raise a kid. I’ll take her.

And this broke wood chopper dude, he’s like, yeah, okay. So the baby goes off with Mary to grow up in Heaven.

All good, yeah? Sounds fun.

Well, the crap is coming.

So the girl is like fourteen now, right? And Mary’s  gotta go on a trip. She decides—hello, Bluebeard—to leave all the keys to Heaven with this kid. Except of course one of the keys opens a door the kid’s not allowed to open.

Now this raises a lot of questions. Like, why would you leave these incredibly important keys in the charge of not only a child, but a living, human child—i.e. the only person in Heaven likely to make big with the sin and all? Or, like, where on earth does Mary have to be? Dude, you’re dead. Take a load off. Jesus came, Jesus went, your work is done. Naptime. Or, like, where exactly is God in all this? Or why are there locked doors in Heaven? Why are actual physical locks even a thing? Like, can’t the power of the Lord keep the special doors closed? And, most importantly, why is God putting up with all the crap that Mary is about to pull over the next several years of this child’s life?

So. Kid has the keys. Kid is hanging out with her little angel pals, and they’re all curious. There some arguing about how that would be wrong, we shouldn’t do that, it’s a sin, but you’re dealing with a high school freshman who grew up surrounded by the Sinless, and she is way past due for some rebellion.

Newsflash, Mary: Kids mess up. They can’t all be like your first one. Jesus was a special case, Mary. This kid is normal, Mary. She may be fully human, Mary, but she sure ain’t fully God.

Door opens. Mary returns, and it becomes obvious that the door opened—kid’s finger turns gold or something. Kid tries to lie about it, so that doesn’t help. Golden fingers don’t lie, kid.

So Mary dumps this child back down on earth, and she takes her voice while she’s at it. Recap: Girl, fourteen years old. Experience with other flawed human beings, zero. Experience with the trials of real life, particularly the wilderness, zero. Voice, none.

And here she is, smack dab in the middle of a forest, a child, and her clothes are all ripped and she’s tired and she’s hungry and she’s scared. And suddenly, a king.

I mean, you know where it’s going from here, right?  It’s not the first time. Big grown up king man marries the little girl with literally nothing, not even a voice to say no. And before you know it, she’s all knocked up.

And along comes Mary, in the middle of the night right after the baby is born, and she’s all like, hey, kid. You got a confession to make? Maybe one concerning a door you totally didn’t open?

And the kid says, “Nope.” (Her voice magically comes back so she can answer Mary's question.)

Okay. So, not the brightest. Not the most honest. She’s a stubborn girl. But, okay. She’s what, fifteen, now? And she can’t talk, and aside from the whole statutory rape thing, you really can’t say no to a king, especially when you have no voice. So I don’t think it’s all that much of a leap to assume this relationship was less than entirely consensual. And she’s a little girl, and she’s all alone in the world, and now she’s a mother. And she got kicked out of freaking Heaven. She has literally nothing left, and it’s all Mary’s fault.

And just thinking about it, I’m already all like screw you, Mary. So imagine how she’s feeling. I wouldn’t be about to admit defeat in the face of this crap either.

So Mary gets all pissed and takes away the newborn baby, and the next morning everyone’s saying that our girl ate her offspring.

But the king, he’s really into this whole child bride situation, so he decides to let the cannibalism slide just this once.

A year later, along comes baby number two. Mary shows up in the middle of the night, and she asks if the kid opened the door. And the kid is down a baby and the respect and trust of her people, on top of everything else. So she’s just like, “Screw you, Mary, I didn’t open your stupid door.”

Bye bye baby number two, hello continued rumors of cannibalistic infanticide.

Fortunately, the novelty of doing it with a little girl who can’t talk back has yet to wear off, so the king lets it go. Who needs babies for kids when you already got one for a wife?

Another year passes. Deceit and childbirth, take three. Mary asks, girl lies, baby goes away to Heaven to live with Grandma. And maybe a mute seventeen year old wife isn’t quite as fun as a sixteen year old, or fifteen, or fourteen, because finally, the king is like, “Okay, enough with the baby-eating. We gotta burn this chick at the stake.”

So apparently, the fire from the stake-burning melts the “hard ice of pride” around our girl, and she’s just thinking, like “Crap, I really wish I’d told Mary the truth.”

And BAM! The voice comes back, and she admits to God and everyone that she opened that stupid door when she was fourteen stupid years old.

The fire goes out, Mary descends from the heavens, returns the babies, and FORGIVES her. Girl makes one mistake when she’s young and stupid, and Mary torments her in every way imaginable for the next three years, and then MARY forgives HER.

It’s a problem.

So, in conclusion $#%@ you, Mary.

Screw That

Sometimes love hurts. Maybe most times. Maybe all times. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be, the way it has to be. Because love means change, and change is never easy. It’s even harder when you have to change from a monster into a man, and I guess that’s what I was planning to write tonight, but screw that. We’re tangenting. We’re tangenting hard.

Because it isn’t fair. Why should he have to learn to be a man? He never asked to be a man, or a monster. He’s just some poor little boy who got used, and it isn’t fair. And the little mermaid? Screw that prince, girl. You should have stuck that knife in his chest when you had the chance. Girl, you should have lived. He didn’t care about you. He didn’t care about anything. Girl, he killed you long before he said yes to another woman. You fought hard for your humanity, girl. You sacrificed everything you had for it, and he still consigned you to the stupid doggy bed in the stupid hallway. You deserved better, girl. You deserved to live.

So forget about love and all its pain. Screw that. You fight, and you live, and you don’t put everything you have into someone who will never give anything back. That beauty will never see that you were never a beast, boy. She’ll never understand how that fairy hurt you, and no matter what you, she’ll always believe that everything you are is only your fault. So rip her throat out while you have the chance. Those fangs are all you have left, boy. You better fight to keep them.

And stick that knife in him now, girl, now before it’s too late. You loved him, and you gave him your life. And your sisters loved you, and they gave you the chance to take it back. Screw him, girl. All he ever gave you was a pillow outside his door.

You deserve more. You deserve so much more. Don’t let them hurt you. You have to live. You have to fight for what’s yours.