A Memoir
“I was not sad. I was not broken. I was so free I could barely breathe.”
A memoir about growing up inside a closed Anabaptist brotherhood in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and walking out at twenty-three with nothing but a crockpot, a can of beans, and the entire rest of a life to build. The table they didn’t set for me, I set myself. Pull up a chair.
I grew up inside a closed Anabaptist Mennonite brotherhood in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The church controlled our tithe, our housing, our cars, our health insurance. There was no internet. No outside books. No outside anything, because outside was where the devil waited.
I left at twenty-three. Ran, more accurately. The world outside turned out to be extraordinary and completely disorienting — when you leave a place that controlled every second of your existence, the silence that follows is not peaceful. It is enormous. My family was gone. My community was gone. Every structure I had ever known was gone, and I was standing in a barn in the middle of nowhere, more alone than I had words for, and freer than I had ever been.
This book moves chapter by chapter through the story: the childhood, the accident that put my father in the church’s debt, the move to the more radical group, the years inside, the men in the network, the leaving, and the long careful work of building a life on the other side.
The first meal I made as a free man was a dollar store soup packet and a can of Great Northern beans, cooked in a mini crockpot, eaten alone in a barn. It was the best thing I had ever eaten in my life. Not because it was good — it was powdered sodium, beans, and hot water — but because I was twenty-three, completely alone, with nothing to my name, and I was so free I could barely breathe. That soup was the beginning of everything.
— What they fed us, what they had —
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan. A town of about four hundred that doubled in snowmobile season. Our church had eighteen to twenty-five members — small enough that you knew every face, every voice, every secret. My dad worked for the minister in his butcher shop. My mom homeschooled us. We had a big garden and butchered deer from September through January. Cream cheese was a once-a-year purchase. I was six when my parents were approved for a building loan, and the trailer slid off the blocks with my father underneath it.
— The body, the blood, and the rules —
March, 2003. I was eleven, the youngest of four. My father had been working at the hospital every other Sunday, and the church was uneasy with him. My mother wanted us in the more radical group her sister had joined in Lower Michigan — the one that was ‘more godly.’ In the dead of the night I heard the door slam. It was 3 a.m. I looked out the window and saw my dad pulling out of the drive. That was the night the house started belonging to the Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood had a particular set of arrangements with the United States: no health insurance, no house insurance, no independent cars, no radios, no books that hadn’t been approved. If your house burned down the church built you a new one, and you were indebted for the rest of your life. Everyone watched everyone. Everyone reported. Pull up your chair. The next chapter is heavy.
There are things a child is told are their fault that are not their fault. There are secrets a mother keeps because she believes she is protecting you. There are men in a network who move between families and towns and church districts, and a Brotherhood that decides in a back room which of them will testify and which will be shielded. This chapter is about what afflicts a body when it belongs to other people first, and about the long, careful work of taking it back.
One email when the manuscript goes to print. One when the cover is finished. One when it's on shelves. That's the whole list.