I know there are a million stories out there about people losing family members to the Trump cult. This is mine. It doesn’t matter if you read it. I just need to get it out. Maybe it’s cathartic. I don’t know. But my 55th birthday is in a few days and my mother has been on my mind.
I was born in the late 1960’s to a suburban family in the rust belt of western New York State. We were in an extremely conservative region, possibly one of the most conservative in the nation. There were lots of chances to join a cult or get crazy religious. My parents were not in any way liberal but let’s say they were for the area. We were Christian. I was baptized Methodist in a tiny colonial style church on the corner. My dad read to my brother and I from the huge, gorgeous Bible he later kept on the edge of the electronic organ we always had where he played both religious and secular music. He worked at a machine shop in a big company. My mother did the mother thing back then. She raised us kids. She kept the house clean. She did laundry. She had dinner on the table by the time my dad got home. Some years later when we were teens, she took a job as a secretary.
In spite of all the religious stuff, my parents were in love with learning and taking the rational side of things. When Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was on, we all gathered in front of the TV to watch it every Sunday night. If Christianity was not in question, my parents believed in asking questions and objective thinking. Growing up, I thought the house was haunted, my dad told me to stop hiding and investigate it and get him real proof. My mom, while quiet about it, was the same way.
This is going to be kind of sequential and it isn’t going to be pretty. I was in no way the picture perfect kid. My dad was more religious than my mom. He literally blamed each and every woman for all the sin in the world. It made me an angry child, furious at everything to do with the devil and Biblical evil. My mother would just shake her head at that, looking up at the library book she was reading, and telling me that the whole thing was written by men so of course they blamed women. But it hurt and angered and barbed nonetheless. Because the household was so male dominated with my dad at the head and my brother getting privileges I didn’t, all of this was said in whispers. We used to laugh at my mom, calling her soft when she didn’t like to see any person or any creature hurt. I felt it was the only thing that made me a worthwhile human being in that environment. Be a man, no matter that I was a girl, and by being a man, be cruel.
I was eight years old when I went to my friend’s house. We were free range kids and mom would give me a time to come home and I had to keep track of it. Going to her house involved walking out into overgrown fields that were not yet yards and going to the dirt road out back past the golf course until I got to the side road where she lived. That day we had a cruel activity planned. We were going to pick up garter snakes from the creek and toss them into the road for people to run over. My angry eight-year-old self was okay with that. Didn’t the devil take the form of a serpent to tempt Eve after all? I felt I was striking at the devil. I got home later that afternoon. I proudly told my mother what I did then didn’t understand when she went into a towering rage at me for harming innocent creatures. She sent me to my room to think on what I did. I stood stunned, alone in the room. Weren’t serpents of the devil? After that day, I remember my mother was especially kind to snakes. In the summer, she sat on the back step and a garter snake would coil up, sunning next to her in the garden. She told me how peaceful it was to sit next to the snake.
After that day, I always had a soft spot for snakes. I feel that I owe them to at least be kind to them.
I was thirteen. It was the early 1980’s. I was still Christian. I still felt that God hated me for being a woman. It wasn’t just my dad. It was the region. Like I said that area is very conservative and very religious to this day. Deep inside, I understood it was all wrong, but the indoctrination was strong. I wanted to punish myself, not snakes, me, because maybe if I did, God would love me again and I wouldn’t be headed to Hell for doubting, and for being feminist. At the time, my dad was getting angrier at me and at women in general. There was a feminist movement nationally and it was even happening in this small region in New York. He was up in arms about it. My mother mostly just rolled her eyes at it but kept her mouth shut. He would scream and holler at the dinner table about the do-gooders in California while my mother did her best to keep the embarrassment and annoyance from her face. All I wanted to do was shovel food down my throat quickly so I could get far away from that.
I had a close friend during that time, Pam, who lived down the street in a poorer neighborhood. She was one of those people who loved to try new things whether they were good for her or not. She let me know of a Bible study group further down the road. I really didn’t want to go but I let her talk me into it. It was this family with about six adopted kids. The father, a dour, unapproachable guy, put on the presentation while the kids, all in very conservative clothing, girls in dresses and boys in slacks, sat respectfully. He announced during the service that they were Southern Baptists. I remember that Bible study, sitting in on a horror story about how the Rapture was coming and all of the horrible things that would happen to people who were left behind. The only way to avoid it was to be saved. So, to get on the good side of God, I elected to be saved. I followed Tona, their eldest daughter, to her ultra-feminine bedroom. We sat side by side on her knitted bedspread. She told me to pray with her, ask Jesus Christ to come into my heart and save me, and to forgive me all my sins. Then I need to act a good Christian woman and obey certain chapters in the Bible about keeping the home and being modest. She told me I would feel the Holy Spirit come into me.
I felt...nothing.
I spent the next few days trying my hardest to be a good Christian and get good with God. Finally, I talked to my mom about it.
“Mom? Are you saved?”
She sighed and said, “Yes. Someone came to the house a few years ago and we prayed together, and I was saved.” She didn’t sound like she took the whole thing seriously.
“I just got saved so I’m going to be all right.” I told her all about it. She got stern with me then. She didn’t say the word “Cult”. She danced around it but it still hung in the air. I trusted her implicitly at that moment. I never returned for another Bible study.
One night after school, I heard her talking to my dad. It was about a dinner event they went to at a local barbecue place for his work. She was complaining about his coworker’s wife who noted when most of the people showing up at the restaurant were African American that “It’s getting kind of dark in here.” My mother was telling my dad how disgusted she was at that comment and the racism presented by this woman.
I started to go to college for IT in 1989. I went to a local community college, so I commuted from home. My dad had discovered Rush Limbaugh around that time. He convinced me to listen to it because he said it was funny. I listened to a few episodes to and from class. He wasn’t funny. He was gross. He was making fun of people like me, calling us “feminazis”. I also was extremely interested in the environmental movement, which he picked on. My mother never listened to Rush. I am pretty sure she thought he was gross too.
On my last year of college, I fell under the spell of another cultish personality, a fellow college student named Cassandra who was born again. I was having a problem at the time with nightmares and spiritual malaise of sorts. Whether you believe in it or not, I was experiencing a level of supernatural distress, poltergeist activity maybe, maybe something worse. She promised she was imbued with the power of God and she and God were the only ones there to help me. She told me the cure for what was happening was for me to get more religious and to give up my dream of being a writer forever. That author dream, according to her, was saturated by the devil and demons.
A few days of trying this, I finally told my mom. She told me the woman was a con artist and putting me on. I, again, trusted my mother. I broke off friendship with Cassandra.
A couple years later, I read a book, Merlin Stone’s “When God Was a Woman”. It resonated strongly with me, and I was able to let go of Christianity and embrace a holy Mother figure who loved me without judgment. Oddly, when I told my mother, she took in in stride. I got the impression she didn’t understand any of it, but she wanted to support it because it was starting to heal me. She was seeing that. I don’t think she ever told my father. I am pretty sure he thinks I’m still Christian. Today, I am largely agnostic.
I don’t know when there was a sea change. My brother and I have long since moved out. He stayed close by while I moved halfway across the country. I know my dad is addicted to video games and conservative talk radio, Rush Limbaugh being his entry drug. But they don’t leave the house much so it could be that. My mom is exposed constantly to that echo chamber.
I visited them for Thanksgiving 2015. My dad was working on some project in the basement, and my mom and I were in the living room. I asked her conversationally, “So who are you going to vote for?” My mom is a lifelong registered Republican. My dad is not registered to a party but pretty much votes Republican down the line. Mom rolled her eyes and said in an annoyed voice, “Trump!” She followed up with how much dad likes him, but she thinks Trump’s crazy. And, when I asked my dad, he got about three inches from my face and started to scream at me about the glories of Trump and how much he hates how this country is. “Trump’s gonna take his foot and shove it straight up this country’s ass!” My dad’s body language was clear that I am part of the ass he wants Trump to stick his foot up, that I am part of what’s wrong with this country. I backed the hell away and didn’t ask again.
Later during that trip, mom and I went to the store. She told me she didn’t think black people and white people should marry each other because the kids are going to get picked on. That level of racism floored me. She had a problem with racism before and now she’s embracing it. I didn’t respond. It left me stunned. I wish I had responded. I wish I had said that black people and white people have been marrying each other since there were black people and white people, and the problem people have with that has nothing to do with protecting the kids.
She voted for Trump. She called me when he won. She thought she did the right thing and wanted to talk about it. I didn’t. I told her that his winning had bad consequences for my generation and every subsequent generation. She was okay with that. That was when I started to realize that the rational, loving, and gentle woman that was my mother was starting to get subsumed by this thing. I mean, she never got into the Q Anon stuff so there’s that. But, if we talk about politics at all now, she says stuff that is, at best, untrue and, at worst, horrifying to any good hearted and healthy human being. People like to say that Democrats are being propagandized about the Trump movement. Meanwhile, my mother told me during a phone call in 2017 that Mexican kids are abominations and told me just this year that drag queens, instead of having fun, are grooming our kids, that gender is assigned by nature and we should keep to that gender. When we talk on the phone, we keep it to family and the weather because I don’t know what will set her off into hysterics over something that some hate radio/TV commentator told her she should be mad about. Meanwhile, I’m getting sadder and sadder and talking to her is putting a pall on my day. If I try to bring scientific facts into the argument, she digs in and there’s a chance she’ll get hysterical. This is the woman who taught me to think rationally when I was a kid. My heart is breaking. I can do nothing.
My mother kept me safe from cults when I was growing up. She is now in the Trump Cult. I don’t know how to help her. I don’t think I can. I don’t recognize this woman anymore.
