Why I find "eating the pudding" more accurate than "drinking the kool aid"

[infiniteandsmall]

I was thinking about f-locking this, but I decided not to. I'm still BFF's with the friend that I talk about in here and I don't want anyone I know IRL to find this, especially because it's very specific and very personal and all that stuff. I wouldn't post it on tumblr, that's for sure.
                But only one person IRL knows about this journal and she's never met the people in this, with the exception of my sister. I don't use my face or my name on here. And yes, I know internet anonymity isn't always as anonymous as I'd like, but f-locking this still feels pointless. Basically if you know me IRL and I haven't invited you to friend me on here please back away slowly, and if you start to read and go HOLY CRAP I KNOW THIS CHICK please don't comment or tell any one or anything just. Shh. I am adding this warning because even though this scenariois unlikely I would face really big real life consequences if most IRL people I know find out about this journal. Trigger warning under the cut for talks of cults and suicide.

     When I was little, we’d go up to lake to stay for a week each summer.

     It wasn’t fancy, the cottage we’d stay at, but you could hear the waves from the front porch, which we sat on every night despite the huge spiders that lurked behind all the chairs.

     The bedrooms were small and stuffy and I shared with my grandmother. We’d stay up and read, and every summer, there was a book on the nightstand. The cover story was something about Princess Diana, it was an old book, published in the seventies, more like a magazine even if it was a sturdy hardcover.

     I read that story a few times, it contained pretty much all the grisly details of her death, but my pragmatic young self was already familiar with death, especially in the context of not wearing car seatbelts. It was something I thought about often, and it held little interest.

     What interested me was another story, shorter and tucked in between two others, with only a few photographs. It fascinated me, and I would read it every night we were there. It was about a cult, one that committed mass suicide by eating pudding laced with some kind of poison—I don’t remember which one it was now, but I do remember that the book specifically stated that it was tasteless and odorless. Mothers fed it to babies, even, though I’m not sure if everyone in the cult committed suicide. A few photographs of bearded men with piercing eyes stared up at me, they were dead now, in their strange heaven. Good for them.

     I’m not even sure if the story is true, now. I’ve googled everything I can think of, but I haven’t found anything about them, their name, their mission. I would be wary of eating pudding for several months after we’d get home.

     While I’m sure the suicide and dose of voyeuristic creepiness appealed to me, while I’m pretty sure I remember being slightly weirdly turned on by it before I really knew that suicide, voyeurism, or sexuality was, what primarily appealed to me was the parts about the inner workings of the cult, of people so brainwashed that they’d believe anything their leader said, mothers so sure of this good news that they would feed their toddlers poisoned desserts. If you’d asked me, that would be what I said a cult would be. The police finding people lying dead in their beds and outlandish theories, the bearded men.

     Now, it’s different.

     When I was little (though now that I think of it I must've been the same age), my best friend’s house had about ten huge blue plastic water barrels in their basement. Sometimes we’d be allowed to touch them. We’d sit on them like they were horses, or one of us would try to stay on while someone else would push and kick at the barrel, and then we’d lean against them and insult our younger sisters while they leaned against another and insulted us back. Sometimes we wouldn’t be allowed to touch them, or they’d be filled with water and too heavy for us to move.

     “They’re for the end of the world,” my friend would say nonchalantly. “My mom’s trying to get your mom to have your house blessed. If you have your house blessed than God will know to keep it safe.”

     It wasn’t any kind of blessing. It was a special one, one that you couldn’t get from any old parish priest. They’d had people come from the Shrine and do it. To this day I don’t think we’ve had our house blessed by them.


     I remember going to the Shrine a few times. It was a far drive. I’d sit in the far back of my friend’s big van, and we’d listen to CD’s she’d find in her brother’s rooms after they’d left for college on her portable CD player. Eminem and Bon Jovi and other songs I don’t remember, an earbud in one ear and the other listening to hush of our moms talking in the front seat and “the younger kids” talking in the second row.

     It was far out in the country. We’d walk carrying picnic baskets and blankets and folding chairs and rosaries out into a big field, and at the far end there would be tents set up. That was where the Blessed Mother or Jesus Christ Himself would appear to Maureen, my friend’s mom would say.

     We were giggly with excitement, out late and the stars big and far and bright overhead. The fact that Jesus might be appearing was one more reason to be excited. Before the apparitions started, our parents let us run up to the statues of Jesus and Mary on the hill. There were rose garlands around their neck, blessed roses, my friend said. We took some petals. One is still sitting in a box on my dresser. A family was clustered around the statues, crying and speaking in Spanish and holding candles. Unnerved, we decided to run up and down the hill and few times and then head back to our parents.

     The rest of the night is a blur of rosaries. We only had to participate in the first one, and after that we sprawled out on the blankets and compared our issues of National Geographic with a flashlight. My friend was curious because her mom had ripped a few pages out of hers, in mine, which was completely unscreened by any parents, those pages contained pictures of girls in a bathhouse somewhere in Asia. We then shrugged and turned to the article about a frozen baby mammoth, which contained some stuff about evolution but was otherwise very cool.

     At one point, a cloud started to float across the otherwise completely clear sky. At one point, it slid across the moon. People around us stared up at it, temporarily interrupting their rosaries, and started to murmur.

     “It might be a miracle,” my friend’s mom said. Soon after, lightening began to flash in the distance.
My mom, who leans more towards the “God helps those who help themselves” side of things, started to get nervous and suggested that we head back home before it started to storm.
“See? It passed us over. We’re protected here,” my friend’s mom said.

     My mom settled back down to her rosary. The distant cracks and jags of lightening remained distant.

Comments

[out_there]

That's very interesting to read (and well described, I have to say).

You know, I started a sentence of "If I think of my childhood and religion, I think one of the main themes was fluidity..." and then realised I don't think I can describe that. I am who I am, and I don't mind that, but it's built on a bedrock of knowing that so little in life is stable, that mum was the one solid, unchanging thing in my childhood and homes, schools, church, family and relatives were either occasional blips over the year or subject to change with very little notice.

(Mind you, that probably explains why I'm so risk-avoidant as an adult. I can move and cope with those changes, but when it comes to personal relationships or changing jobs I'm very wary and stolidly set in my ways.)

[infiniteandsmall]

Thank you. :) My memories are weird and spotty and come out weird but when they do come out they're very vivid. It's strange to piece it together and see how much hasn't really changed and what has. And while I might have a person in there who overshares everything, I think I like putting them on the internet because it makes them real.

*nods* It's hard to explain the things that underlie everything, because they always have been and so to explain them to someone who has had something completely different underlying their life is hard to put into words. I guess that's what I'm trying to do, because to me religion and family has always been the opposite: looming and inescapable and consequential. Yet situations and dynamics within the family are constantly shifting before backsliding, and so I am basically the queen of conflict avoidance.
There was a really fascinating article on autostraddle comparing the concept of gender and home as constructs. http://www.autostraddle.com/a-prairie-homo-does-new-york-homeward-trouble-182636/