A lot of the people that I've met here on the internets have a pretty sad or frustrating past. Many grew up with crazy fundamentalist churches and it absolutely amazes me to see how they have come out of that with so much humor and grace.

Photo by o palsson

Just the other day I was tweeting with my friend in the Virtual Village, Elizabeth Esther and we were giggling about the distinction someone had made between "regular people" and "Christians." (Well, I was giggling. She might not be so much a giggler. I'm not sure.) We both obviously have young kids, because "regular" quickly turned into a discussion about our bathroom habits. I tweeted, "I never knew I could just a person's salvation by the regularity of their bowel movements" to which Elizabeth responded, "regular bowel movements are SO TOTALLY indicators of your spiritual health. how did you not know this?!" At which point I realized that this was clearly a deficit of my non-fundie upbringing.


So here are some of the things I missed by not growing up fundie:

1. The joy of sneaking Christian rock music. My parents were early adopters of Christian rock. We went to every Mylon LeFever concert that came anywhere near Pittsburgh. 
2. My first swear. My first swear was in first or second grade when I accidentally left the "r" out of shirt when I was reading it. I'm sure I'd heard that word once or twice at that point, so I didn't realize it was something I shouldn't say.
3. Knowing how to sew. Okay, I actually do regret this. I would love to know how to sew and if I grew up in a fundie house, I would definitely know how to do this. I'm just glad I had a grandmother who taught me to crochet. 
4. The agony of deciding if it was okay to let my kids read Harry Potter. A good internal agony can really liven up your day. None of that here. I liked the books. They were well written and entertaining. So letting my kids read the books just seemed natural.
5. The heady first sip of wine. The Oktoberfest sold an all-you-can-drink mug of beer for like $5. I don't remember drunken people stumbling around, but there was definitely no taboo surrounding alcohol. 
6. A highly fine-tuned ability to apologize. Because I didn't think that everything was wrong to do, I didn't grow up feeling the need to apologize for everything.