Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

After his father converted, he went to Bible school and became a missionary in Southeast Asia. That meant Jason was born in Thailand, among the splash of flowers, clear water and caressing air, the rainbow all fallen out of its stripes. It was like living at the firm center of a fruit. He loved it there. He ran around wearing a diaper and no shirt, much to the curiosity of the Thai babies, who wore shirts and no diapers. He had the same birthday as the king, and every year there was a parade of elephants, and every year his parents said it was for him. When he found out the truth, he turned his back on kings forever. He clenched his small fist, bellowed his rage to the heavens, and resolved to never again recognize the authority of any man on earth.

We were composed of conversation, so it didn’t matter where our hands and lips and heads were. The legs we walked on were the long and shifting lists of what we loved, what we had discovered, what we could not live without.

A cliff had presented itself as we were walking along together, and it called for a leap.

A beautiful backdrop is an aesthetic luxury, same as shelves of books and music lessons and trips to museums on weekends. It is green, green money to roll in.

When my first poem was published in The New Yorker—plucked out of the slush pile somehow, a miracle—I brought a copy to work and watched him puzzling over it throughout my shift, with the expression of someone trying to decode a magic trick.

All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape. You have belonged to many of them. So have I. The church was one of mine—it was my family. The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?

Does God exist was never a question for me then; do I exist took up the whole of my mind.