My Year of Living Spiritually by Anne Bokma

Author:Anne Bokma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: memoir, Canadiana, spirituality, religion, self-realization
ISBN: 9781771622349
Publisher: Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
Published: 2019-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

August

At the Women’s March on Washington.

Finding My Tribe

“People must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obligated by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here.”—E.O. Wilson

It was 1974. I was part of something, something bigger than me. There were five of us girls. We liked the Carpenters and the Bee Gees, wore flared corduroys and striped turtlenecks. Eileen was the queen bee in Grade 7, Jackie her aide-de-camp. As the new girl at John Calvin Christian School in Smithville, Ontario, I was initially granted access to this popular pack that roamed and owned the schoolyard. But a couple of weeks later, my social status plummeted when I approached them before the morning bell. Simultaneously, they turned their backs on me, effectively shunning me from the circle. I watched it all as if in slow motion. Standing at the edge of the clique, I wanted back in so badly I would have done anything to gain re-entry. They ignored my pathetic entreaties about what I had done wrong. Their backs remained cold and stayed that way. I was frozen out, friendless. Sick with shame, I spent an agonizing lunch hour sitting on the toilet in a cubicle in the girls’ washroom, trying hard to swallow the cheese sandwich my mother had packed for me.

I’d lost my tribe, and I felt desperate. It was a carefully planned and executed form of girlhood torture. Psychologists call it indirect or social aggression. I called it hell. Some part of my twelve-year-old self still hasn’t fully recovered.

Back then I was haunted by the question of why these girls had singled me out. Now I understand I was a target simply because I was different. Not just the new kid in school, but the only kid in this insular and rural Christian community whose parents had been divorced. The only one whose father had deserted his family. The only one who had scandalously worn pants on the first day of school. (Unbeknownst to me or my mother, the school had a “no pants policy” for girls, who were expected to dress in modest feminine attire. When I showed up in a pair of blue slacks, the teacher mocked me in front of the class: “What? You want to be a boy?”)

Fifteen years later, when Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye came out, I was struck by how accurately she depicted the menacing aspects of girlhood. In her story, ten-year-old Elaine Ridsley is the object of torment and manipulation by her group of friends, and yet she still desperately tries to please them. She despairs: “I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me.

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