Chapter 5 ~DISORDER & DARKNESS~

I already know that this is going to be the hardest part of my story to tell. I have no idea how to put my teenage years into word form, but we’ll see how it goes. In case you can’t tell, I’m totally winging all of this, all the time. Sometimes I think maybe I should outline where I want to go, but I think it’s better to just be raw and go with the flow.
My teenage years (like sooooo many others’) were rough, especially towards the end of them. When I turned 13, alot of things started to take shape in my life. I explained in previous chapters that my mom started the music ministry at this home for troubled teens. It started as a choir, but years later, she formed a small touring group of 8-12 singers that would go on 5 day tours up and down the East Coast, mainly. This group was somewhat “elite” in the sense that you had to audition to be in it, and you had to be doing well in the program…mostly “E” Levelers, or higher. (Refer to my last chapter before reading on if you haven’t read that yet…I explained the level system of the program there.) Teens who were considered for being in this group had also made the salvation decision and were spiritually strong. (Refer to Chapter 3 for explanation on that!) A large part of the purpose of the group was telling their stories of where they’d come from and how God had turned their lives around. They toured alot of the U.S. and Canada to public and Christian schools, nursing homes, detention centers, jails and prisons, churches, festivals, town parades…pretty much wherever anyone would have them.
 By the time I was 13, the music ministry that my mom founded had grown enormously. There were now two full-time groups, one still headed by my mom, and the other was directed by another staff lady. Let me just pause here and say that I was super blessed to be born into an insanely musical family. My mom and dad regularly sang in church together, with my dad accompanying her on the guitar. They even put out a few tapes (tapes, ha!) of their music and many nights my dad would put our cassette player at the bottom of our stairs with their tape in it and we would fall asleep to the sound of my mom singing.My dad was a gifted musician and my mom had a smooth, beautiful and soothing low alto voice. None of us kids ever played sports, everything we got involved in revolved around music. I sang a solo in church for the first time when I was 12. My older sister is 7 years older than me and is an incredible singer. I grew up watching her as the lead singer in my mom’s travel group and listening to her as she sang CONSTANTLY, wherever she was. She trained at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY with a prestigious voice teacher. Almost every night of my life from ages 9-13 consisted of hearing her practicing scales in her room and belting out all kinds of strange vocal warms ups. She was also blessed with probably the strongest and most powerful voice I have ever heard, so there was no hiding from her booming voice going up and down music scales in our home. My brother, who is 2 years older than me, was also a great singer who was also very musically inclined. He began playing the guitar as a teenager and had a natural talent for it. As I “came of age” in this very musical family, I felt I had big expectations to meet. My first time singing in church, as a 12 year old, I nearly threw up from nerves. I felt like everyone expected so much from me, since I was a Siegfried. (Maiden name.) I didn’t have the confidence of my older siblings, and was totally unsure of myself. I don’t actually remember singing that first time, but I had what was dubbed “a sweet voice”…not as strong and bold as my older sister, but I could hold my own.
When  I was 13, news broke out that they were adding another travel group to the touring music ministry, and this was to be headed up and directed by my older sister. I not only got in, but I found myself as the lead singer of the group. This was both exciting and extremely terrifying for me. Being the lead singer for this group meant that I was essentially the front man for the group. I had every lead, every solo, and usually had to introduce the group wherever we went. I don’t mean it to sound cocky, but when the group was performing, I felt like all eyes were on me. Some songs were essentially a long solo, with the other group members singing “ooh’s and ahh’s” around me. It was alot of pressure. I was also the youngest by FAR in this group. Our little ensemble was made up of 12 people, 6 boys and 6 girls…3 sopranos, 3 altos, 3 tenors, and 3 basses…all teenagers, and all program kids. Except for me. I was the only staff kid in the group.
I can honestly say touring with that group in the early years were some of the absolute best times of my life. I had no idea at the time what an incredible opportunity that was! Every couple of weeks I would pile into a 12 passenger van with all of my best friends and tour for 5-6 days, singing at least one show per day. Sometimes we would travel for a whole day, maybe to North Carolina, and sing a show that night in a church. The next day we would haul our equipment to a school in the morning, set up, perform, tear down, load up and travel to a detention center that afternoon, and do it all over again. We got to stay in hotels, eat at all kinds of restaurants, perform for hundreds of kids in schools, sing at church revivals…..IT WAS SO FUN. Of course, we were all just kids, and we became extremely close to each other. Anyone spending that much time packed into a van would! The faces of the group were always changing, and once again, I had many, many close friends come and go. I had occasional crushes on boys in my group, but would be brokenhearted when they left the program, again, usually on bad terms, and I wouldn’t be allowed to keep in contact with any of my friends when they had left. I found myself being the one and only constant of the group, in the middle of an endless sea of changing faces. It was during these experiences that I began to experience something that would grow and grow and become part of the fabric of me…anxiety. I have always had horrible anxiety over performing. Looking back now, it was alot of responsibility. I had to carry the group in a sense. I was the front man, the lead singer, and I was only 13. To my terror, I began having to “share my testimony” in venues. This absolutely shook me. As a group, we were really more of a touring poster for this place my family worked in. The venues we performed in would introduce us like, “Come and see teenagers who have overcome their past and found radical transformation through the power of Jesus! Former drug addicts, prostitutes, abused kids…all telling their stories”….and random Mary Siegfried plopped in the middle of everyone with her very ordinary (so I thought) church kid’s life. I felt almost embarrassed that my story was so plain and that I didn’t have a huge Come to Jesus moment. Every show we did was different, and my sister would give us our “set list” about an hour before each performance. That’s when we would find out which songs we were singing for that show, and who would be sharing their story. If I was on the paper to share mine, I would have horrible nerves. I felt like I didn’t bring anything to the table as far as sensational stories went. I would struggle the entire show, sweating, shaking hands, and when it got to my turn to share, I would want to crawl under a rock. I got through it though, always reminding myself that it was not all about ME, but rather sharing what God had done for me so far in life. Little did I know that I would tour with this group for 11 years.
Another thing that grabbed my attention and love around the age of 13, was ballet. My mom opened her own ballet school before I was even born, and I started dancing at the age of 4. I was trained in our little small-town school primarily by my mom my whole life. You know this already from my slightly-cringy salvation story in Chapter 3. Until I was 12, I danced but I didn’t really take it seriously. My turning point was that year when our school was doing a production of “Cinderella” and I desperately wanted the roll of the Fairy Godmother. I thought I would get the part easily, despite literally being the worst behaved kid in my ballet class. My poor mom! She had to be my teacher and cringe as I came to class late all the time, with my hair down, big rips in my tights, and I never paid attention in class. I am still unable to be completely serious in ballet class. I was always trying to make everyone else laugh, and my mom had had enough of me. Needless to say, she didn’t give me the roll of Fairy Godmother, not even close. I remember the day that castings went up in our studio, showing who got which parts. To my surprise, my name was not listed beside The Fairy Godmother, but rather it was my best friend’s name…who had started ballet much later than me, but had a passion for ballet and a work ethic that put me to shame. I frantically searched the cast list for my own name…found it. Mary Siegfried—Winter Season Fairy. That felt extremely lame. I ran across the studio and threw myself into a chair in the waiting room and cried my eyes out. Even writing that now, I’m laughing hysterically at how ridiculous and dramatic I was. But thanks to my mom, I wasn’t just handed everything I wanted without having to work for it. My friend totally deserved the part. I decided then and there that I was going to take ballet seriously, and I did. I started to live and breathe ballet. I took extra classes, stretched every day at home and spent my summers going to Ballet Intensives, which are basically summer camps for kids, without the fun parts. It’s like going to a mini college where you take rigorous classes all day, surrounded by kids just like you who want to improve their dancing. The first big Intensive I went to was Ballet Magnificat, in Jackson, Mississippi. I flew there all by myself when I was 13 and stayed in a dormitory on campus for a four week program. It was incredible and I loved every minute of it. Ballet Magnificat is the world’s largest professional Christian ballet company and dancers from all over the globe attend their Summer Intensives. That first summer, when I was 13, was the first thing I had ever done that was outside of my little “bubble” of life in the ministry my parents worked at. I remember going shopping for clothes for that first summer away, and I bought all kinds of outfits I thought were super cool. Little did I know that most kids in the world could wear actual shorts, tight clothes and tank tops if they wanted. The dress standards in our ministry were extremely strict, as I’ve mentioned before, and despite not being in the program of this place we lived in, we were all held to the same standards. So even though I was going to another part of the country alone, where no one even had heard of this place my family lived, I had to keep to that standard. I arrived in Mississippi in my long shorts that were an inch above my knee, and my overly-modest shirts, only to see other teenagers in cute short shorts, with camisole tops. I felt extremely weird and out of place, while at the same time judging everyone else for being “immodest.”
Looking back now, I wonder how my pastor allowed my mom to have a ballet studio and how I was allowed to dance. Everyone who has ever seen a ballet dancer knows that what you wear while dancing is not exactly modest. It was a strange double standard indeed that I had to wear abnormally modest clothes, but dance all day in a studio wearing nothing but a leotard and tights. It seemed normal to me though. I do know that it was not smiled upon by our pastor that my mom owned her own studio. There was definitely no dancing allowed in church, and more than a few times, he preached over the pulpit about what a waste it was for my mom to teach and for me to dance ballet. He didn’t say that overtly…I guess you just have to have been there to know how everyone knew exactly who he was talking about when he preached about people. I don’t know why he saw fit to allow my family to have the ballet school, because I know without a doubt that if he had ordered my mom and dad to close it down, we would have. That ballet school, and ballet in general was really my one thing that gave me any perspective of life outside the walls of the ministry we lived in.
My teenage years were steeped in singing and dancing, as you can imagine. All throughout high school, I kept touring and performing with the singing group, and taking as many ballet classes as I could. I went back to Jackson, MS every summer to Ballet Magnificat, from ages 13-18. All the while, life was getting harder and more confusing in my little bubble-world at home. I believe now that the kiss of death on the staff families who worked there, including all of my fellow staff-kid friends, was that as we all got older, the rules of the program began to bleed into the staff kids. It’s as if the pastor wasn’t satisfied with being in charge of the program kids’ lives, so he tried to reach in and control the kids of his staff members.
I feel the need to pause here and remind everyone that I am telling MY story. Not my parents’ stories, or my siblings’ stories. I can’t tell you why my family stayed there for 31 years. I do want to make clear that when my dad begged for his job back after being fired, (as told in the previous chapter) I believe he did so out of fear of being out of “God’s will”, but also and almost more because of the love my parents had for the kids in the program, and their hearts to serve and make a difference in those kids’ lives. Every staff couple that left did so with extremely heavy hearts, I know. That is mainly because they so very much wanted and felt called to stay and work with these troubled youth, but could not abide any longer being controlled by our pastor. My parents had hearts that wanted to help kids, and that was the primary thing that held most staff there, weathering the constant and relentless abuse from the man in charge of everyone.
But since this is MY story, I have to tell it all from MY perspective. And I was not a staff member there. I was a staff KID. I was born into it, and I grew up with a fear of leaving the place, not out of my desire to stay and help kids, but out of terror of losing God’s blessing on my life. That is my perspective, but not the perspective of alot of the adults who were working there. But I hope you can see through my eyes, that as I grew older, my reasons for staying were all fear-based, not love for the program kids-based. It was that fear, and a growing understanding of the paranoid atmosphere I was living my life in that began to tear me apart as I got older. I always felt like the program kids resented me for my so called “perfect life” and once I turned 15, I would start to be integrated into the program more and more. When I refer to the “program,” I’m talking about the boarding school and all of the rules and regulations those teenagers were supposed to live by…because they had voluntarily checked themselves into this place. I firmly hold to the belief that I, and many of my friends should not have had to abide by all of the same rules as the program kids, because…well it’s simple. We weren’t IN the program. We had our own families and no one should have been able to tell us what to do except our own parents.
When I was 13, our pastor started giving staff kids the punishment of woodpile. Again, please refer to my last chapter for what that is all about. In short, it was a punishment for program kids that consisted of carrying a log in circles for an hour. This was absolutely HUMILIATING for any staff kid it happened to, and even more confusing because it was a punishment handed to us by our pastor. The parents’ hands were tied. Many parents did push back against him and refused to allow him to dictate punishments for their kids. As you can imagine, those families were fired, or left of their own will. I remember being 15, and at that age, I had been wearing makeup for years. Anyone who knows me knows I am a big fan of eyeliner, and I’ve been wearing it the way I do since I was around 13 years old. One day, when I was in school (we went to a separate school on campus that was just for staff kids)we all got the news that our pastor had made a new rule that staff kids couldn’t wear any makeup until they turned 16. I was completely mortified. I was a teenager like any other teenager, and I loved makeup! The thought of not wearing any until I turned 16 seemed like the end of the world, but we all did as we were told. I used to put on mascara before bed and then wake up and not wash my face so I could still say I hadn’t put any makeup on that day. One day my sister and I were walking out of an office building together and the pastor happened to be coming in as we were going out. He looked at me and as usual, I shrank into myself. We all did that. One look from him, and I would shrink my shoulders instantly because I was afraid my shirt would look too tight, and maybe if I avoided eye contact with him, he would leave me alone. By this age, I think I had given up on being the kind of person who always tried to make him like me, and I just wanted him to forget I existed. No such luck that day. He saw me and said something like, “Mary, you look like you have some makeup on, there.” Before I could say anything, my sister, trying to come to my rescue, grabbed my head and wiped her fingers across my eyes…hard. “Nope!” she said. “No makeup here!!”
I just awkwardly laughed and got out of there as quickly as possible. I share that experience to further help show just how fearful and afraid of his authority we all were. It lead to me developing an irrational and paralyzing fear of people being mad at me. And if I ever did get in trouble, I couldn’t hardly breathe. I wanted so badly to make everyone around me happy, but there was no making this man, who controlled my entire life, happy. He could be your biggest fan one day, and send you out to the woodpile to haul wood the next. And there was no telling if rumors would be spread around about you. While there were many good people that worked there, there were also people who had nothing better to do than make up lies or gossip to the pastor about other staff people…just to be on his good side. If I confided in anyone other than my parents, that information would ultimately make its way to the pastor.
 My earliest memory of DISORDERED behavior was after a program boy I had had a crush on, left. He apparently spread rumors around the boys’ dorm that we had kissed or something, which wasn’t true at all. Somehow that rumor made it to me. I was 14 years old. I was so fearful of what would happen to me, and how humiliating whatever punishment I would receive would be, that I wanted to end my life. I cried and cried in my room and thought of any and all possible ways to kill myself. This was out of fear….not of my parents, but of how I would be dealt with by my pastor and the ministry he ran. Every staff kids’ worst fear, and we often joked about it, was to be put in the program. That would have been the ultimate control for him.
Things continued to go downhill. At the age of 16, we were told that staff kids would be going to school with the program kids. One more way for our lives to be dictated and controlled. Since I had been kept relatively separate from the program kids up until then, all they knew of kids like me was that we had perfect little lives, perfect families, never made any mistakes, and were sickeningly pure. As you can imagine, being plopped into a classroom with 60+ program girls in my Junior year of high school….it was a bit of a hostile environment. I went with maybe 4-5 of my staff kid friends, and I remember the program girls laughing at us as we walked in the room on our first day.
Over the next couple of years, so many factors would combine to take a toll on me. I was still dancing, and getting very serious about it. I was still touring with the singing group, and had found my footing of sharing my little “church kid” story. All the while, I was trying really hard to live up to that church kid persona. I was literally told by all of my new classmates that I had the perfect life, more times than I can count. But, I didn’t have the perfect life…no one does. Everyone, especially teenagers, go through hard things, and I was not prepared for it. When I did start to encounter those issues, I kept them hidden from everyone. I was afraid if I told anyone about those suicidal thoughts, I would shatter that perfect image. I would be put into the program, or taken out of my beloved singing group. And those weren’t just silly thoughts that were far-fetched. I watched program kids go from “Junior Staff” to No-Level, because they struggled with something. I couldn’t let that be me.
One of my worst fears did come true when I was 16 and I got accused of cheating in school. Mind you, this was not long after I switched classrooms and was put in with the program kids.
 This is how things worked at this place. No one ever came to me with suspicions of cheating. My principal went directly to our pastor without approaching me or my own parents first. This type of backstabbing was literally rewarded by our pastor. I was then approached by my principal, and he told me I was to serve 2 weeks of No Level. This meant that I would have to haul wood with the program girls on campus from 5:00-6:00 AM and 6:00-8:00 PM every day for two weeks. Did I mention that I hadn’t even cheated? My side of the story was never asked for. My parents had no say. The first night I hauled wood, I sobbed to my mom after dinner and told her I couldn’t do it. I knew the program girls who were also on No Level would laugh at me. I would be monitored by someone who was in the program, like I was some kind of bad kid. My mom cried with me and told me she would walk the woodpile circle with me. I can’t even imagine what my parents felt like. And this is again where you just have to have been there to know why we didn’t leave. It never felt like an option. So, I did my No Level. I hauled wood for two weeks, and I became very, very, very depressed.
Around this time, I had gotten really serious about dancing. Just like every other area in my life, I just wanted to make everyone happy. I wanted to be perfect. I felt like I couldn’t go to anyone with any problems I was having because I felt like I had no reason to be feeling this way….I had the perfect life…so why did I hate myself? I’m not sure why I have so many super distinct memories in my life, but here is another one. I was 16 and I was in ballet class, as usual. I caught my reflection in the mirror and for the first time thought to myself, “You look really fat.” Now, at this time I was 5’4” and probably about 115 lbs. I decided to skip breakfast the next day, and the control felt wonderful. No one would know, and finally something in my life would be a secret. For weeks, I restricted more and more. Sometimes, I wouldn’t be strong enough to not eat, and I would binge and eat everything I could find. Then, overcome with guilt and disgust, I would throw it back up.  NO ONE knew any of this. My spiritual life and relationship with God became weak, because I felt so ashamed of what I was doing, I avoided God. I needed to have it all together before I approached God. I began to lose weight quickly, and those closest to me started to take notice. At that time I was almost down to 100 lbs. To please everyone around me, and to avoid my problems being put out in the open, I evened out my eating, but became even more depressed. Around that time , I was taken to the doctor because I was sleeping all the time for no reason. He diagnosed me as clinically depressed. I never got prescribed medication and we stormed out even angry at him, because we were taught a Christian should never take medication for depression.
I have always loved writing. I kept journals growing up and wrote alot of poetry. Around this time of my life, I started keeping a different kind of journal. Again, I needed ways to get my emotions out without anyone finding out. So I started writing EVERYTHING in my journal. I would sit in my room and write for hours about all the things I hated about myself. I felt like a fraud. The lead singer of a Christian singing group, touring and sharing her testimony, praying with kids all over the place…and I was a mess. That journal was filled with so much sadness, anger, confusion, and disorder. I had several pages covered in the words, “I hate myself” over and over again. When before I had written poems about Jesus and His unfailing love, I now wrote endless poems about ending my life, about what a disappointment I was to everyone, and what a fake I was.
I ended up on No Level again…this time because my friends and I had played a completely innocent game of “Truth or Dare”, one of my friends told a program girl about it, and she promptly told our pastor about it. Because it had been girls and guys together playing the game (all staff kids) our pastor apparently felt like we had all done something horrible. Two of my friends got 10 weeks of No Level, my brother and his friend had their drivers licenses taken away and were given 5 weeks No Level, and somehow I got off with 2 weeks No Level. It was insane. I felt so angry. I hated everyone. Everything seemed to be falling apart…my singing was ruined because I felt like a phony out there travelling and singing, while I had all of this self hatred. My dancing was suffering because I never ate enough to have energy.
My parents’ marriage was starting to fall apart. Again, so much of this was caused in every single staff family because of the giving up of control to our pastor. Kids hated their parents for not standing up to him. They hated their parents for getting fired FOR standing up to him. Families were falling apart, and so was mine. When I was around 17, I began hearing my parents fight. My sister was long gone by then, living in her own apartment. having graduated high school and staying on staff in the ministry as nearly every other staff kid did. My brother was the exception to that and had left and moved as far away from all of us as he could. He resented this ministry and was treated worse by our pastor than any other staff kid I can think of that has been there….but that’s his story to tell. So I was the only kid left at home, and things were falling apart for all of us. One day, I got called out of school to our pastor’s office, which was terrifying for anyone who that happened to. When I got there I saw that my sister was there as well. The pastor got right to the point and told us that our parents were having some problems and it was looking like they may be splitting up. My stomach sank. I will forever remember his next words to us. “You guys can call me dad if you want.”
After he said that, it was almost like in the movies where all you hear is that wringing noise in your ears and you see the person keep talking, but you have no idea what they’re saying. I left the office like I was in a haze. Of course, neither of my parents had any idea he called this meeting with us. And they had no intentions of splitting up.
At this point, I was in complete darkness. I felt like I was out of control. I felt like I could talk to no one, because I didn’t know who I could trust among the staff there. And I clearly couldn’t talk to my parents, because they had their own issues. One night in my room, I had had enough. I had been crying and journalling. I felt SO overwhelmed with so, so many emotions that suddenly and without even thinking about what I was doing, I dug my fingernails into my arm and pulled up my forearm, pressing in as hard as I could. All of a sudden I grew extremely calm. I watched my arm as little prickles of blood started to appear and I realized I felt better. I felt completely in control, and now I found something that I could hide. I continued to cut myself for the next two years. Everything in my messy, out of control life eventually came to a head when I came home one night and my mom was waiting for me with my journal in her hand. She had suspected something was very wrong with me, and had searched my room. I was horrified. It took DAYS of her sitting with me, needing to know everything. But I couldn’t speak. I had been so conditioned by fear, so convinced that people would discard me for wasting my so-called perfect life. I wouldn’t talk. I was ashamed and embarrassed about what I had been doing. The day it did all come falling out of my mouth, though was some months after that “intervention” from my mom and the people who loved me. I was at a Christian school, singing with our travel group, and I was slated to share my story, as I’d done a million times before. I was in such a raw state of my life at that point, and when it came time to share my story, I didn’t do what I had done in every show before that…which was to put on my best church kid face and talk about how good everything was. I broke down. I told a room of 300 or so fellow church kids that I was a complete mess. That I hated myself and I was drowning in a sea of disorder that I hadn’t even climbed out of yet. I still knew God was real, I knew he had begun the slow process of healing, and that I was through pretending I had it all together. To my utter surprise, the altar flooded with kids. I had a line of 15-20 kids afterwards waiting to talk to me, and they all said, “me too.”
That day, I didn’t share about my eating disorders, or self harm…I was still extremely ashamed about it, and even embarrassed. But I did learn that day that the power of darkness is broken when people step out of the shadows and share what they’re going through. And not only that, but you will find you’re not alone.
When I decided to write these chapters, I wasn’t going to share about those things. They’re so deeply personal, and I still feel really ashamed sometimes. It’s easy to pass it off as just “one of those teenage things”…but that’s not what it was. It was me being completely broken. It’s a place I’ve been, and through me talking about it, (yes, I know it’s easier to be brave behind a computer keyboard.) I can let someone else out there going through it see that they’re not alone. And what’s so brave anyway about someone talking about their past? You can’t find anyone who is over the age of 30 who hasn’t gone through some part of life where they were lost and made terrible mistakes. Why do we hide it, and choose to keep it in the dark tucked away, and then applaud people as being “brave” when they talk about their own crap? We all have crap. Maybe airing all of my own dirty laundry will help it smell better and eventually I won’t feel any shame over it because I know it’s over and God completely healed and restored me. For that part of the story, (the BEST part!) you’ll have to stick around. But until then, please know that YOUR story is worth sharing. Don’t shut out the darkest parts of your life and pretend they never happened. Share it, and let someone else know that they aren’t alone and they can be brought out of darkness as well. And with that, I am finally out of words for the moment.
Until next time. 🙂