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HEAVEN'S HARLOTS:  MY FIFTEEN YEARS AS A SACRED PROSTITUTE IN THE CHILDREN OF GOD CULT

11.  Like a Rolling Stone:

Globs of blood were coming out of me as I sat in pain on the toilet seat. There was a blood trail from the bedroom to the bathroom. I felt sick as I looked at my pieces of fetus floating in the pink toilet bowl water. The girls were in the yard playing. Michelangelo was crying in his highchair, waiting for more food. I leaned over, squatted, and pushed hard. There was no use trying to save this now. Maybe God was punishing me for leaving the Family.

"No," I thought, as I grew dizzy from losing so much blood, "this  will be a blessing, not a punishment."

When Paolo arrived back at the trailer, after going out to look for work, I asked him to take me to the hospital. One of the advantages of living in Italy, married to an Italian, was their socialized health care system. I knew I should see a doctor after what had just happened.

"Why?" he asked. "The blood probably washed it all away. These things are natural, you know."

"I just feel I should go to the doctor, that's all."

Paolo went down the street and asked his mother to watch the kids while he took me to the hospital.

I was advised to stay overnight and get a D and C, which is a uterus cleansing, the next day. The doctor suggested that I have my tubes tied after he heard I'd had five children and this miscarriage, but Paolo was insistent that I should not do it. He promised to let me use birth control, and I inserted an IUD, which made my menstruation longer and, for the first time in my life, painful. But it was worth it.

With our trailer parked in the garden plot of land that belonged to Paolo's uncle, we were mainly concerned about bringing in daily income. Paolo spent a few months selling our leftover Family tapes, while I took the girls out singing. Although Paolo was not happy to be working in the system again, I was thrilled at the limitless possibilities open before me. However, after a few years, I realized that in Italy married women with children already had their place established for them. It was in the home, serving her husband and children.

Since we now were living in Taggia again, and Jerry was living with his family in Nice, Thor was less than an hour from me. A tall, lanky boy at the difficult age of fifteen, Thor often had serious arguments with his father, and he was now free to come to my house whenever he wanted to. Although the Family always preached that God would punish those who left, I instead felt blessed. With Thor close by, I could see him every weekend, and he soon became an integral part of our little family show group. An agent signed us on to perform at small theaters, but because of the travel involved, and the little financial recompense, I created my own music business. Under the name of "Happy Songs," I developed a program introducing English to children in elementary school through singing and games. We performed at most of the local schools, and the local paper ran an article on the girls singing in a school, comparing us with the Sound of Music family.

When Athena, our star, enrolled in school, I began taking her on a public bus in the morning to another town, and picking her up in the afternoon. I still could not drive, and Paolo now had a job as a salesman, which kept him out most of the day. We had to stop performing, and our singing was limited to hospitals and nursing homes. In the summer, I made use of the tourist beach towns, taking all the children to sing on the large pedestrian streets. The money that the sweet Italians, who absolutely love other people's children, threw in our guitar cases helped to pay for children's clothes and other necessities.

My good friend Charles, who had always helped us financially,  giving at least one thousand dollars as a gift every time I had a baby, invited us to spend vacations in his St. Tropez home. I went out singing in the St. Tropez restaurants, and brought back quite a bundle. It's not that I was a good singer or musician; I was neither. But, by now, I had a tough skin. Once, when singing in Ville franche, an American man at the first cafe/restaurant gave me the equivalent of one dollar and said, "Here, go get some singing lessons." Since we needed lunch money, I had to keep singing. At the next cafe, a young Arab gentleman sitting with a beautiful woman asked me to sing a special love song for her, and he slipped me a hundred dollars under the table.

Whenever Thor came with me, we made twice as much. He now kept half the collections, but he was worth more musically. Having studied for seven years at the Conservatoire in Nice, he was a virtuoso on many instruments. At fifteen, he was tall, sported bright red hair, and was shy about his hormonal changes. Sometimes it was painful for me to watch as he struggled through the complexities of being a teenager. Like most fifteen-year-old boys, he was less mature than girls his age, and as far as I knew, not very interested in them. Perhaps I was in denial that my darling little boy had grown up. I was only now addressing the reality of adulthood myself, having lived in never never land for fifteen years. I never talked to Thor about sex, or the sexual experiences of the Family, but I gathered that his father had told him a lot. One evening, after we had just finished singing at our best restaurants in Diano Marina, a hip beach resort, we bought some delicious Italian ice cream and sat on a bench to wait for our train home.

"Why did you leave Dad?" Thor asked me out of the blue, licking at his cone hungrily and pretending not to be very interested.

"There were many reasons, honey, but you were not one of them.  You were the reason I stayed with your dad, and why I am still friends with him. I will always love him as your father."

I could see tears welling up in Thor's green-blue eyes. His face was becoming bright red.

"Why did you do that to him?" He started crying. "How could you do it?"

"What? What did I do?" I asked frantically. I knew he wasn't talking about divorce.

"You know. Dad told me everything. How you went with other men -- lots of them."

Thor was slobbering now. His ice cream had dripped down around his hands, and as he tried to lick it, the sticky melted stuff was spreading down his chin and neck. I tried to wipe his face with my napkin, but he pushed me away.

"You must be a bad person," he continued. "I know how it must feel to have the girl you love go with someone else. You cheated on him! Poor Daddy! Why did you do that, Mommy?"

I was beginning to understand that Thor must have had his first pangs of puppy love. He also had been told too much by his father, at too tender an age, and without a balanced view. But how was I to explain all this to a sexually budding fifteen-year-old boy? Despite his protests, I drew him to me and held him tightly. He melted into my arms, as the cone he held in his hand fell to the stony ground under our bench. His favorite flavors of ice cream spread across the sharp rocks, covering them with sweetness. I wished my love could do as much to the rocks that had been thrown in my little boy's heart.

I listened to him sob uncontrollably, as the last big cry of his childhood opened a door into maturity. I prayed he would not be afraid. I prayed he would eventually hear my side of the story, because I knew it was too early to tell him right now. All I could do was hold him and hope that he felt my tremendous love.

"There is more to the story than what your father told you, sweetheart," I whispered when he finally calmed down. I wanted to tell him everything from my point of view, but I believed that it would confuse and upset him even more.

"Whatever you think about me, I hope you know I love you very much. I always have and always will."

"As big as to the sky and back," said Thor with a smile, using an expression we shared when he was a child.

"As big as to the end of the universe and back," I answered, wiping away my own tears. "Come on, we have to make the last train."

We were all living in a small one-bedroom trailer. Our garden was beautiful, but in the winter, with four small children running around, the cramped space seemed unbearable. Then one day I noticed an article in the paper that gave me an idea.

There were dozens of tiny villages in the mountains around our area. With populations under three hundred in the winter, swelling in the summer with tourists and foreigners, the villages' schools were constantly under threat of closing down. I read of one town near us that was lamenting the fact that their one-room elementary school house would no longer have enough children to be eligible for public support. I called the mayor of the town and told her I had three school-age children, and one more on the way. If she could find us a decent house at an affordable price, we would move to her town. Within days, not only had she found us a house, but she also offered me a job running the after-school program. I talked to Paolo, and we accepted. We lived in this village, located over six hundred meters above sea level and still with a view of the ocean, for a few months. Then the mayor of Apricale, a neighboring town, called Paolo and offered him a huge house for a ridiculously low rent. Since Apricale was closer to the main roads and the beach area, we moved our family into an elegant old stone house, with four bedrooms, living room, den, kitchen, and terra-cotta floors. This was the beauty of old Italy.

I spent the first two months cleaning the three-story home, which had belonged to the mayor's family but been unoccupied for over a dozen years. After whitewashing all the walls, scrubbing the broken terra cotta, and covering the cracks with linseed oil polished to a shine, hand-sewing lace curtains for the windows, and designing handmade high beds for the children to keep them off the cold and drafty floor space, I finally had time on my hands to think about life. Paolo worked in the tourist towns along the coast selling publicity for the newspaper, and without a car or even a driver's license, I was forced to live a village wife's life.

I walked the girls to school every morning through the stony pathways that turned and twisted around the medieval town set on a hill. The Italian children wore little grembulas, which are a type of apron, over their school clothes, and I had made the girls grembulas of faded jeans and lace. Athena was eight years old, with brown inquisitive eyes that questioned everything. Genvieve, at six, had retained a baby-face expression of naivete and innocence. Her long blond hair was worn in two braids, and her expressive mouth was either smiling or round with wonder. Jordan, my cute little doll daughter, who scowled when everything was not exactly how she wanted, was only five, but she attended the same classes as her older sister in the two-room schoolhouse. Together, they made up a third of the school, and as the only half-Americans, in a town whose inhabitants spoke a dialect not even the Italians understood, they were always the outsiders. Their friends were the children of other marginal dropouts, the recently arrived Italian and German hippies who were buying up small, deserted farms around Apricale in order to "live off the land." The mayor of the town had learned to recognize these new residents as his only hope for the town's survival. Most of the natives' own children had moved to the bigger cities to start their families. Still, there was a deepening gap between "us" (the locals) and "them" (the newcomers). I watched this real-life drama from the sidelines, and ironically, I was included as "us" since my husband had been born and raised in Liguria, and included as "them" because I was a foreigner. Due to this precarious access, I was often asked to serve as a liaison between the two camps when disagreements arose over town politics.

Thor, who was now an independent teenager, came to visit whenever he could. He had not only become an accomplished musician but also excelled in math, and had been selected for the difficult math track in the French schools. That guaranteed him a college education in the prestigious colleges specializing in math and science. I was so proud of him. Through our talks together, I knew he had a deeply inquisitive approach to life, and would find answers to questions that I didn't even know to ask.

I usually brought Michelangelo, my youngest son, to the preschool, which Apricale provided for all the under-school-age children. He attended unwillingly, and often I let him stay with me in the piazza, playing in the morning sun while I took a cappuccino at the only cafe and read or wrote. However, on those winter days when it was too cold to play outside, and it took the house, with only one woodburning stove in the kitchen, all day to heat up, I thought Michelangelo would be more comfortable in school, where he could also learn Italian. We still spoke English at home, and I continued to teach my children to read and write in English. During those winter months, I took a heater into the tiny, windowless room we used as an office, and with an old portable typewriter I had bought secondhand, I wrote stories to keep my troubled thoughts from clogging up my mind.

It was the fall of 1990. I had been out of the COG for almost two years, and I was ready to write another children's story. I had never heard of the symbolism of a labyrinth before, and I started this story without knowing where it would go. It led me through a labyrinth ritual. The story line told of a little girl who discovers that she can jump into a tall calla lily growing in her garden and slide down into the underground world below. The lily's roots open into a labyrinth through which the girl must discover the answers to many of life's basic questions, such as why is there; evil, where does it come from, and what can one do about it? I read the story to my children as it unfolded, and they remained enthralled, so I sent it off to one editor in the States. When I received a rejection letter, I switched to writing adult stories.

I wrote intensely, listening to 1960s music as I worked, and with the Bible and Mo letters cluttered around my desk. Writing was the only way I knew to clean out my guilty conscience and express the cry of one truth-seeker who failed to find truth. I was thirty-seven years old, had been in college for only a semester over twenty years ago, and had not been allowed to pursue any type of academic research during the fifteen years I spent in the Family. But due to a natural inclination to include eclectic knowledge, my writing was interspersed with quotes from a range of sources: Bob Dylan, Francis Schaeffer, Leo Tolstoy, B. F. Skinner, Moses David, and the Bible. I sent in a twenty-four-page thesis to Rolling; Stone, which rejected my article. I decided I must be too religious for the radicals, and I resigned myself to try to learn the system.

This period of writing proved to be therapy for my questioning soul. I felt I had to empty myself of a polluted perspective before I was free to file new material. Writing was an emptying process, but it was only a small beginning. There seemed to be a bottomless pit to empty. After winter passed, and the cherry trees began to blossom on the lovely hillsides, I put the typewriter away, left my windowless room, and joined the children while they played on the sun-warmed stones of the town piazza.

During this time, Paolo was constantly changing jobs. He was unhappy with his working prospects, and when he met a member of a religious commune from America who had started a community in Sus, a small village in western France, he asked for their address. He took us to visit the community, which looked much like the COG, in the early days before sexual liberation. Everyone in the hundred-odd-member commune shared food, housing, clothing, and work responsibilities, as they ran an American-style coffeehouse and built futons, and other hippie furniture, to sell. Marriages were sanctioned by the leaders, and children were taught, disciplined, and cared for by everyone. The most notable difference between this commune and COG was that the women wore head scarves and were even more subservient to their husbands than the Family women had been. Their marriage ritual included the wife kneeling on the floor before her husband, while he placed the scarf on her head. The symbolic scarf, which the wife would forever after wear in public, was a constant reminder that the wife is under the man's rule, as the Bible supposedly commands. I was liberated enough at this time to think to myself that even the system has a better symbolic act, with the man kneeling to the woman as he asks for her hand in love and devotion, but, alas, Paolo thought communal life offered the ultimate set of rules. The leaders of the group convinced Paolo that until I bowed my head to him and wore the head scarf, our marriage would always be bad. Paolo told me on our third evening that he was joining.

"Fine," I said. "I'm taking the kids and leaving." My first reaction, although it did not last long, was relief that Paolo wanted to stay, followed by an urge to take my children and run!

"How are you going to do that?" he asked with assurance. "I have the car, and you don't have any money."

I knew I was stuck without resources. We stayed another few days, and either through subconscious manipulation on my part, or because I was truly desperate, I felt that maybe I should think over the possibility of joining. I somehow convinced Paolo that I would join, but that we should first go back home and get our belongings. Once back home in Apricale, I called the only Christian friends I knew, Baptist missionaries who worked, of all places, in Monte Carlo. I went to visit them and told the story of the commune through tears and weeping.

"I only want my children to be happy and healthy," I cried. "Maybe I should join this commune with Paolo. They aren't doing anything bad. I don't think they abuse the children. But I just can't  see myself submitting to Paolo, and I don't want to raise my girls to do that. But maybe that is the answer. Maybe I have never found the answer because I have not submitted to a man."

"You have submitted to many men, from what I understand," said the missionary wife, who was somewhat liberal and very pragmatic.

"Oh, that was only in the flesh. I have never submitted my will, my spirit" -- I was searching for the right word -- "I have never given up my soul to a man -- that's what they are asking me to do."

The husband of this woman was a very open, sensitive man. At one point he put his arm around me while I cried, but he had nothing to say that could comfort me. After all, even in their Protestant religion, the wife was ultimately obedient to the husband. However, they did meet with Paolo and convince him not to join that group, but to attend their church instead. Their support seemed to be enough for Paolo.

After the episode, I took a walk with my children along the beautiful mountainside trails, with all sorts of wildflowers blooming in the spring breeze. Sitting under the cherry blossoms, with a view of the Mediterranean Sea below us, and the blue sky that reached across Europe like a secure blanket covering a divided bed, I felt more lonely and lost than ever before in my life. Here I was living in the most charming place on earth, with the most adorable children I could ever hope for, with a husband who said he loved me and wanted to work on our marriage, and I felt utterly hopeless, as if my soul was desperately struggling to keep from dying. Why did I feel this way? Tears rolled down my cheeks as I clenched my teeth and tried to keep the sobs noiseless.

I walked back to where my children were playing joyfully under the trees. They couldn't wait till the cherries would be ripe and they could pick them, but then I would have to explain to them that these cherries belonged to someone else. We could only pick and eat the cherries that belonged in our family, or to some nice person who would allow us to pick their cherries. This is life. This is not the Garden of Eden that I read about to you at bedtime. From some memory storage in my mind came the words, "There is no truth outside the gates of Eden." Fine, I thought. I'll ponder that. But what if there is no Garden of Eden either?

The next few months passed as if I were stuck in glue. The days went by, the calendar pages were flipped over, but I did not feel that I was getting anywhere. I thought I had already emptied myself with the writing. What else was there to empty? Where did one find answers? Why did some look, while others did not? Was I doomed to eternal seekership? How could I be a good mother and a truth seeker at the same time? Truth seekers are always rejected and criticized by the contemporary majority who don't want to rock the boat. They have had the truth for two thousand years, and if! couldn't recognize it, then there was something wrong with me. Just be a good mother, I told myself. But how could I be a good mother when I felt like a hypocrite and a fake; when I felt like I was teaching my children to live a life that did not make me happy or fulfilled; when I really thought the purpose of life is to seek truth, love, and happiness, but I had given up? The paradox of my two most urgent, emotional needs -- the search for brotherhood and the pull of motherhood -- was tearing me apart.

Paolo was unconcerned with my dilemma. Either he could not understand it, or he did not want to be bothered by it. When I annoyed him with existential questions, he suggested I might be crazy. My only intellectual support, Charles, who had remained a friend to us throughout the years, offered me hope that I was not crazy but instead, just beginning to explore another level of understanding. Through conversations with him, I was able to recognize a ray of light inside myself. Perhaps I was not without resources, but during that dark time I felt utterly helpless. Against my will, I cried out for empathy to the person who was supposed to be closest to me. Maybe I was a hopeless romantic after all, but I believed that my husband was the one to whom I gave my body, but who also wanted my soul would, should, could understand me!

Instead, Paolo avoided my questions about why I was so unhappy. We began to argue over every decision involved in living together, from the big ones to the small ones.

"Help me! Help me! For God's sake, help me!" I screamed one evening, as I lay completely prostrate on the cold floor at Paolo's feet.

As I listened to Dylan's song "Like a Rolling Stone," I realized how I used to make fun of the "systemites" and the people who "hung out" at churches. Now I was scrounging for a spiritual meal, and I was on my own. I didn't even know where home was anymore. How did it feel? Enough to drive one crazy.

A few weeks later, I woke up in the early morning hours hearing a child cry. It was still dark outside, but because we left a light on in the hallway, I could see out through our open door. Our bedroom was situated next to the children's room, which was right at the top of the steep stone steps. There, on the platform at the top of the steps, I saw a little girl, covered from head to foot in dripping blood. She was about the age of my youngest daughter, who was five. I couldn't tell who it was because the blood hid her facial features. It could have been my middle daughter, who was seven. She just stood there in the hallway, crying. 

In that split second of realization, I imagined that my daughter had fallen down the stone steps, crawled back up while blood from a head wound splattered her body, and was now at my door crying. I screamed out in terror and pain. I could not move or make an intelligible word.

Paolo rose quickly from a deep sleep.

"What? What is wrong?" he asked, looking at me as if I were a madwoman.

I pointed to the little girl, still standing in the hallway. I could do nothing but scream. He looked to where I pointed and then back at me.

"What is it? What are you pointing at? What do you see?"

With a chill of fear running down my spine, I realized that Paolo did not see what I saw. I looked at him for an instant, my eyes wide with disbelief. When I looked back to the hallway, the little girl was gone.

"Go look at the girls," I cried, as I found my voice again. Maybe Paolo had not seen her since he just woke up and had not focused his eyes yet. Maybe my bloody daughter had gone back into her bedroom, frightened by my screaming. But I could not move to go look for myself.

Paolo went into the next room. All the girls were now sitting up in their beds, awakened by my screams.

"They are fine," said Paolo when he came back. "What is the matter with you?"

I got out of bed now, and ran into the next room, followed by Paolo. There were my three girls, all sitting up in their beds, and all without a drop of blood on them.

"What's happening, Mommy?"

I gave them all a hug, as I touched each one to make sure they were fine.

"What was it?" asked Paolo.

"I must have had a nightmare," I said with fear still in my eyes. "I'm going to stay in here and sleep with the girls. I don't want to let them alone now," I said, lying down and trying to act rational. "Please, tuck the girls in. It's still night. We need to sleep."

As I lay in bed, with my eyes open or closed, I saw demon faces. We had acknowledged the presence of demons in the Family, and although I had never seen one, I prayed and rebuked them while in the COG, like I was told to do. Now, as I lay awake in bed, I had little to go on but what I had learned in the Family.

"I rebuke you in Jesus' name," I said silently.

I had no tools to fight with but religion. I repeated the name of Jesus over and over, and quoted all the Bible verses I could remember. That helped me to make it through the night, but the days were worse.

When Paolo woke me to get the children ready for school in the morning, I knew my experiences of the previous night were not over. My whole consciousness had been altered. I felt as if I were walking in a world that was not real to me. I did all the rituals that were required: washed, dressed, fed the kids, took them to school, came home, cleaned the house, prepared lunch, etc., but all the time, the real me was in another place, looking on at my dissociated self. At night, demons came back and tried to convince me I was crazy. In the day, I walked around as if I were a zombie. Paolo finally grew concerned.

He took me to a doctor who was a homeopath and used natural cures. He diagnosed me as having had a nervous breakdown induced by stress and poor eating habits. Natural doctors seemed to attribute everything to eating meat and processed, chemically enhanced foods. I was put on a strict diet of brown rice and vegetables, and given natural vitamins and other homeopathic remedies.

However, after three nights of demonic visions, as I lay in my children's bed, desiring to be close to them since they were the purest form of love I knew, I looked the demon in the face and laughed. 

"You have no power over me, so why don't you just go away. I am protected by angels," I said, using the only references I knew. "I have Jesus in my heart. I have light, and you are darkness. You cannot exist inside me. You can only bother me from the outside. I am not crazy. If I were, you would be inside me, and you're not. You are out there!"

The demon faded away. Others came, but they all faded away. I never saw them again after that night. Sometimes, years later, whenever I started to lose faith in myself, this fear of demons would come again. But it only took remembrance of the light within me to make  it vanish.

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