Sunday Morning Hangovers
I am maybe quitting my pastor wife role altogether?
Sunday mornings have always felt fraught for me.
It started in the early years after my parents’ divorce, when we had to leave one parent’s house to go to the other’s so he could take us to church. My sensory memory of those days and years was always feeling cold and wearing uncomfy dress pants or dresses that left my legs chilly and exposed in the brisk Colorado morning air. We would always go for two services, never ever one. The church was rich, white, and stereotypically suburban, and I could smell the fakeness on the women’s perfectly coifed hair and makeup-laden faces and the men’s suave, confident smiles. I knew I didn’t belong but I also knew I had to be here for the good of my eternal salvation.
It got better for a minute in college, when I found what I thought was a progressive church, but was actually a progressive evangelical / Baptist church, which meant it was “hip” but had most of the same old theology I’d been fed since forever. Plus some non-system-disturbing care for the poor thrown in.
Then in my mid-twenties, I started playing with the concept of not going to church on a Sunday morning for the first time, ever. My then-fiance would notice my struggles and what a bad mood I would be in on Sunday mornings, and while I’m sure he wished I wouldn’t take it out on him, he also understood it wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about him even though he was studying to be a pastor, even though he was preaching at his own churches on Sunday mornings. It was entirely about what Sunday mornings represented to me.
The stress would start on Saturday evening, as I tried to figure out what I wanted to do in the morning. My partner was busy at his own church, so whatever I did, it would be alone or in his shadow at his church. Would I go to Quaker meeting? The liberal Disciples congregation? Or would I stay home, grappling with my own vague sense of guilt, but still having a compulsion to do some kind of self-growth activity on a Sunday morning? Did it count as spiritual if I went to the coffee shop and journaled? What if I went to the park and hiked, but what if I listened to a non-edifying podcast instead of meditating with my own thoughts? Did it still count?
I’ve never completely stopped going to church, even though I no longer identify as Christian. Some compulsions never fade, or at least don’t fade quickly. And it’s hard to find an intimate sense of community outside of religious settings, as my religious trauma support group was noting in our last meeting.
Ten years later, I still haven’t entirely lost what I call my “Sunday morning hangover.” It’s not a hangover from partying the night before, though — it’s my hangover from years of forced church attendance, of imbibing theology from the tap that ended up poisoning my insides, of thinking I was doing the right thing when maybe it was killing my soul.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about hoping my kids don’t think of themselves as pastor’s kids (which is still true). Since then, I had a realization.
I wrote that I still take the kids about once a month, for “posterity’s sake.” [Side note, this phrase is used colloquially but when I looked it up, I discovered it means “for [the sake of] future generations.” Which is sort of true in the way I used it?] I also mean for the sake of keeping up a good appearance.
Thing is, I don’t operate my life to keep up good appearances with others. The glorious thing about getting deeper into your 30s and soon enough 40s is that you have fewer and fewer fucks to give about what other people think1. I operate in a way that I find personally ethical, but I don’t generally try to shape my behavior so that other people leave with a particular well-crafted impression I want them to leave with. In the words of a client, “I want to be good, not nice.” Nice girls are silenced. Nice girls are held up as a model for behavior and then walked all over. Nice girls lose themselves in other people’s wishes and standards.
So if that’s the case, why am I ignoring my personal rule for the sake of… playing a certain role at church?
To be fair (to me), it’s pretty minimal, and as I’ve mentioned, I’m the last thing from a stereotypical “pastor’s wife.” But my daughter asked to go to “daddy’s church” last Sunday and I find it hard to tell her no about this topic. (To be clear, I tell her no about plenty of other stuff 🤣).
While sitting there, I could sense in my body that all I wanted was to not be there. My two-year-old was amping up his volume, and while I could typically handle that behavior in another setting, I was flooded in this situation. I pressed my hands to my eyeballs, tried not to cry, wished to be somewhere else, and just breathed. I didn’t really care what I looked like; I just wanted an escape.
My mood was sour the rest of the afternoon, and I could recognize in some way I seemed to just be in recovery mode from the morning. I was unpleasant with my darling children and a grump in general.
This is when I was hit with the realization: Why are you doing this to yourself?
My body has been giving me VERY clear signals all along about what she needs. She doesn’t want to go to that church, at least not most of the time. She doesn’t need to explain herself; she just knows.
I began to imagine what we might do instead. Plenty of Sundays we stay home and do nothing. This is often because I have no energy to do something and I’m trying as best I can to manage my own emotions and irritability. But interestingly, when Monday morning rolls around — which is another day I’m full-time with the kids, just like Sunday mornings — my energy and better mood returns. What if the subconscious pressure to “do church” is what has been draining me so much and creating my irritability?
Maybe we will go visit the one local hiking place now that the weather is getting better. Maybe we’ll go to the coffee shop and eat muffins and read the dinosaur book. Maybe I will read them a Matthew Paul Turner book at home and we’ll call it a day. Maybe we’ll go to Jubilee, the church my body doesn’t have such a strong reaction about.
An ease is noticeable in my chest when I think about these other options. It’ll be okay to tell my daughter no — because I want to show up for her in a way that’s good for all of us, and that means I have to take care of myself. A little bit of hopefulness arrives on the scene.
So there it is. I am maybe quitting my pastor’s wife role, to the degree I still held it? I don’t need to operate out of guilt or duty that doesn’t actually benefit anyone else. And we’ll try this little experiment out and see how it turns out. I’ll keep you posted. ;)
Do you also experience what I’m calling the “Sunday morning hangover”? Have you ever felt obsessed by the decision about what to do regarding going (or not) to church? What signals has your body maybe been sending you that you need to heed?
Could this also be a vague allusion to Taylor Swift’s new album?? Yes, yes it could, both because her album contains a generous amount of fucks (literally) and because she wrote it without caring to market to mass audiences — she was just processing her feelings and letting the chips fall where they may.
My growing up and leaving the church sounds a lot like yours... Except, somehow I became a minister! My spouse, who grew up Catholic, never comes to my church, and it's been great for me vocationally. People kind of just forget that I'm married, and so the judgment about my family is off the table. In what other profession do people's spouses regularly come to their workplace anyway? In what other profession are people judged for how healthy/pretty/successful/faithful their family is? It's actually weird.
So relatable. For years, I'd have some kind of meltdown or existential crisis every Sunday after church. I'm not currently attending, and I feel so much relief. Whenever I want to go to a service, there's a large mainline Protestant congregation that I can go to. But my health is so much better when it's not a weekly thing. Cheers to listening to our bodies!