Lorinda Boyer
The Order of Things
I’m four years old, brushing my doll’s hair with the baby brush Mom once used on my soft newborn scalp. I sing Jesus Loves the Little Children while tugging my dolly’s stiff yellow strands into a crooked ponytail. One day I’ll have a real baby, Mom tells me. But first I must grow up to be a righteous woman and marry a godly man. Then I will have children. This is the order of things.
I’m sixteen when I meet the boy of my mother’s dreams. He is strong, athletic, broad shouldered. He speaks easily about Jesus and salvation and God’s plan. My mother glows beneath his attention. He wins her over long before he wins me. We marry ten days after I graduate high school. I am eighteen. He is nineteen. Everyone says we are blessed.
Robin is twenty-seven when I meet her. I am twenty-two. We work together. She smells like coffee, dried lavender, and freedom. “Howdy, darlin’,” she drawls whenever she passes my desk, and my pulse stumbles strangely inside my chest. Not fear exactly. Not understanding either. Just heat. Recognition. Hunger with no name attached to it.
By then I already know how to be a wife. I know how to grocery shop and smile politely at church. I know how to keep a tidy home and swallow disappointment before it hardens into visible anger. I know how to fold myself smaller whenever my needs threaten to take up too much room.
My first baby arrives seven months before my twenty-fourth birthday. Which is how it works. Marriage first. Then babies. Then anniversaries and mortgages and casseroles carried into fellowship halls beneath fluorescent church lights.
Then Robin.
She is not part of the plan. She isn’t even a thought until suddenly she is everywhere. In the steam rising from my coffee cup. In the lingering brush of fingers passing paperwork across a desk. In the dangerous thrill of being fully seen.
At twenty-eight, my husband walks in on us having sex.
The veins in his neck bulge purple as he screams, “Is this what you want?” But he isn’t asking. He is accusing. Condemning. Pronouncing judgment from the doorway while my entire future splinters open at my feet.
I throw myself naked onto the hardwood floor, apologizing before I can even think. My knees press against the cold boards. Shame burns hotter than humiliation. I beg for forgiveness with the desperation of a woman trying to crawl backward into the only life she has ever been taught to want.
Robin disappears from my life after that. Banished with ultimatums and scripture and shame. I become my husband’s obedient wife again. Or at least I try to.
But something has already ruptured.
Once you have tasted freedom, even briefly, it becomes impossible to mistake captivity for peace.
At twenty-eight, the buried colors finally breach the surface. Desire collides with decades of swallowed rage. The good Christian wife I spent years constructing begins to crack apart at the seams.
Robin is gone, but she is not forgotten.
By thirty-eight, I have two children, a collapsing marriage, and a life that no longer fits no matter how forcefully I try to squeeze myself back inside it. And I do try.
Revision therapy becomes my final desperate gasp for air. Three years of prayer circles, confession, self-denial, and pleading with God to fix me, hollow me out from the inside. I recite scripture like medicine. I starve myself of truth. I become so skilled at disappearing that even I can barely find myself anymore.
Still, it isn’t enough.
Eventually even my husband gives up on saving our marriage. By then, our life together has become little more than shared grief and exhausted pretending. The church women who once praised my devotion now avoid my eyes in grocery store aisles. Word spreads quickly. Quietly. The way shame always does.
In the wreckage of my unraveling, I meet a woman named Sandy who looks at me as though I am someone worth saving.
Banished from conversion therapy, outed by my husband, stripped of nearly every identity I had built my life upon, I have nothing left to stand on except the terrible possibility that I was never broken to begin with.
And then, standing at the edge of a cliff with the Pacific Ocean raging beneath me, I finally understand the cost of spending an entire lifetime trying to survive “the order of things.”
Behind me, Sandy’s voice cuts through the wind. Calm. Certain.
“This is not how your story ends.”
She pulls me against her as the waves crash violently below us. Her hand smooths the hair from my face, and suddenly I am four years old again, a little girl being handed a future before she is ever taught how to belong to herself.
The order of things was never meant to keep me alive.
Only quiet.
I’m sixteen when I meet the boy of my mother’s dreams. He is strong, athletic, broad shouldered. He speaks easily about Jesus and salvation and God’s plan. My mother glows beneath his attention. He wins her over long before he wins me. We marry ten days after I graduate high school. I am eighteen. He is nineteen. Everyone says we are blessed.
Robin is twenty-seven when I meet her. I am twenty-two. We work together. She smells like coffee, dried lavender, and freedom. “Howdy, darlin’,” she drawls whenever she passes my desk, and my pulse stumbles strangely inside my chest. Not fear exactly. Not understanding either. Just heat. Recognition. Hunger with no name attached to it.
By then I already know how to be a wife. I know how to grocery shop and smile politely at church. I know how to keep a tidy home and swallow disappointment before it hardens into visible anger. I know how to fold myself smaller whenever my needs threaten to take up too much room.
My first baby arrives seven months before my twenty-fourth birthday. Which is how it works. Marriage first. Then babies. Then anniversaries and mortgages and casseroles carried into fellowship halls beneath fluorescent church lights.
Then Robin.
She is not part of the plan. She isn’t even a thought until suddenly she is everywhere. In the steam rising from my coffee cup. In the lingering brush of fingers passing paperwork across a desk. In the dangerous thrill of being fully seen.
At twenty-eight, my husband walks in on us having sex.
The veins in his neck bulge purple as he screams, “Is this what you want?” But he isn’t asking. He is accusing. Condemning. Pronouncing judgment from the doorway while my entire future splinters open at my feet.
I throw myself naked onto the hardwood floor, apologizing before I can even think. My knees press against the cold boards. Shame burns hotter than humiliation. I beg for forgiveness with the desperation of a woman trying to crawl backward into the only life she has ever been taught to want.
Robin disappears from my life after that. Banished with ultimatums and scripture and shame. I become my husband’s obedient wife again. Or at least I try to.
But something has already ruptured.
Once you have tasted freedom, even briefly, it becomes impossible to mistake captivity for peace.
At twenty-eight, the buried colors finally breach the surface. Desire collides with decades of swallowed rage. The good Christian wife I spent years constructing begins to crack apart at the seams.
Robin is gone, but she is not forgotten.
By thirty-eight, I have two children, a collapsing marriage, and a life that no longer fits no matter how forcefully I try to squeeze myself back inside it. And I do try.
Revision therapy becomes my final desperate gasp for air. Three years of prayer circles, confession, self-denial, and pleading with God to fix me, hollow me out from the inside. I recite scripture like medicine. I starve myself of truth. I become so skilled at disappearing that even I can barely find myself anymore.
Still, it isn’t enough.
Eventually even my husband gives up on saving our marriage. By then, our life together has become little more than shared grief and exhausted pretending. The church women who once praised my devotion now avoid my eyes in grocery store aisles. Word spreads quickly. Quietly. The way shame always does.
In the wreckage of my unraveling, I meet a woman named Sandy who looks at me as though I am someone worth saving.
Banished from conversion therapy, outed by my husband, stripped of nearly every identity I had built my life upon, I have nothing left to stand on except the terrible possibility that I was never broken to begin with.
And then, standing at the edge of a cliff with the Pacific Ocean raging beneath me, I finally understand the cost of spending an entire lifetime trying to survive “the order of things.”
Behind me, Sandy’s voice cuts through the wind. Calm. Certain.
“This is not how your story ends.”
She pulls me against her as the waves crash violently below us. Her hand smooths the hair from my face, and suddenly I am four years old again, a little girl being handed a future before she is ever taught how to belong to herself.
The order of things was never meant to keep me alive.
Only quiet.
Lorinda Boyer is a writer, memoirist, and fitness instructor living in Bellingham, Washington. She is the author of the memoir Straight Enough and is currently at work on a second memoir exploring faith, identity, family, and survival after leaving fundamentalist Christianity. Her work has appeared in anthologies, literary journals, and online publications focused on memoir, culture, and personal narrative.
https://lorindaboyer.com/
https://imhealingoutloud.substack.com/
Instagram: @lorindalboyer
Facebook: Writer Rinda
https://lorindaboyer.com/
https://imhealingoutloud.substack.com/
Instagram: @lorindalboyer
Facebook: Writer Rinda
