I fell to the floor. Then my girls walked in.

I had thirty seconds to become their mother again. So I did.

Little Church in the Wood ( what’s missing? )

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The Old Bruise

I was having a perfectly good day until the Christian rock band started playing across the street.

Not softly. Not in the distance. Not in a sweet little neighborhood-barbecue kind of way.

Blasting.

So loud I could hear it over my television. So loud it felt less like music and more like an occupation.

At first I thought I was just irritable.

I wandered around the apartment aggravated at everything. Didn’t want to shower. Didn’t want to film. Didn’t want to work. Didn’t want to think. I could feel myself getting darker by the minute, asking myself the same question on a loop:

What the hell is wrong with me today?

And then it hit me.

It wasn’t the music.

It was the memory attached to the music.

Because the truth is, Christian environments were some of the places where I felt the least safe to be myself. Especially when I was married to a preacher.

Lord have mercy.

People have this fantasy about being a minister’s wife. They picture some soft-spoken woman carrying a casserole through a fellowship hall while smiling serenely and discussing Vacation Bible School.

I was not that woman.

And they knew it.

I was emotional. Creative. Questioning. Strong-minded. Alive in ways that did not fit neatly into the little invisible box they had prepared for “acceptable womanhood.” Which, in certain church cultures, feels less like community and more like a performance review with hymns.

At one point, a committee of three people literally met for months to discuss me. Not world hunger. Not poverty. Not suffering. ME - The minister’s wife.

Eventually, they handed me a report.

Thirty-two pages about me.

I remember sitting with it in my hands, trying to make sense of what I was holding. Thirty-two pages of documentation about what was wrong with Monica. How Monica should be handled.

Handled.

I called the regional minister. Surely someone in authority would see how wrong this was. He was kind enough about it. He explained that his role was to minister to the region’s ministers — not their families.

I hung up the phone and I fell to the floor.

Not gracefully. Not spiritually. Just — down. In a puddle, crying the way you cry when there is absolutely no one coming.

I don’t know how long I stayed there. Long enough.

What pulled me up wasn’t resolve. It wasn’t faith. It wasn’t even anger.

It was the sound of the front door.

My two girls, home from piano and dance lessons.

I had maybe thirty seconds to become their mother again.

So I did.

And that night, quietly, without ceremony, I made a vow: I would never return to that church. Or any church. And I never have.

The part that hurt the most — the part I’ve carried the longest — was that nobody defended me. Not one person in that room or outside it stood up and said: maybe there’s nothing wrong with her.

Not even my husband. That’s when I filed for divorce.

I sat with that silence for years before I understood what it cost me.

So today, sitting in my apartment while a Christian band blasted music through my windows, my nervous system didn’t hear joyful praise.

It heard scrutiny.

It heard judgment.

It heard years of being quietly informed that who I naturally was needed editing.

That’s what people don’t understand about emotional memory. Sometimes what looks like an overreaction is actually an old bruise getting bumped in broad daylight.

So I did what I’ve learned to do when an old bruise gets bumped. I made a pot of homemade chicken soup. I showered. I put on my jammies. I watched my favorite programs. And every hour, on the hour, I sat with my breath for one quiet minute and let my nervous system remember it was safe.

Nobody handed me that prescription. I built it myself. One hard day at a time.

I consider myself deeply spiritual. But my spirituality no longer lives inside systems that require women to shrink in order to belong. I no longer believe soulfulness should require performance, obedience, or pretending. I no longer believe God sounds like committees.

And maybe that’s why the music upset me so deeply today. Not because I hate Christianity. But because somewhere inside me still lives the woman who sat in those rooms trying to figure out why being herself made everyone so uncomfortable.

These days I don’t want to be managed. I don’t want to be shaped into acceptability. I don’t want to perform goodness for approval.

I want peace. I want truth. I want soul. I want the freedom to sit in my own living room without feeling like somebody else’s religion is climbing through the windows uninvited.

And the music reminded me — suddenly, loudly, completely against my will on an otherwise perfectly good day — how far I’ve come from the woman who used to let it in without question.

The body remembers what the mind worked very hard to forget.

Sometimes that’s a gift. Not a pleasant gift. Not one tied up with ribbon and handed over politely. More like a brick through the window.

But still, a gift.

Because once I understood what had happened, I stopped asking, What is wrong with me?

That question has stolen enough of my life.

The better question was: What old part of me just got touched?

And there she was.

Not as a wound this time.

As proof.

The woman who sat on that floor long enough to understand that nobody was coming to rescue her. The woman who finally stopped waiting for one decent person to stand up and say, This is wrong. The woman who got up anyway — not because she was ready, but because two little girls walked through the door carrying piano books and dance bags, and she had maybe thirty seconds to become their mother again.

She walked out of that church without a committee’s blessing. Without a husband’s defense. Without a map. With her head up, her stomach in knots, her whole life cracking open behind her, and one stubborn little ember of herself still burning hot enough to follow.

That is the part of me I want to honor now.

Her.

The woman who had no plan, but still had herself.

The woman who did not yet know she was becoming free.

Because she got me here.

Maybe you know exactly what I'm talking about. Maybe it wasn't a Christian rock band for you. Maybe it was a song on the radio, or the way someone said your name, or walking past a building you swore you were over. And suddenly there you were — not in your present life, but back on your own floor. Your own thirty seconds. Your own silence that nobody broke. If that's you, I want you to know something: that's not weakness showing up uninvited. That's evidence. Evidence that you survived something that was designed to make you disappear. And you didn't.

---

If any part of this landed for you, I want you to know there’s a place where women like us talk about exactly this. Not a support group. Not a self-help program. Just a gathering of women over 60 who are done pretending retirement is a rocking chair — and are asking, out loud, what they actually want next.

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