Why I Hate Easter

Alright, don’t get your panties in a bunch. I am not going to go on a religious tirade, or even an anti-religious tirade. I am not going to ask anyone to justify their religious beliefs or even type on and on about mine or lack thereof. However, it IS the fault of religion and not bunnies  that I dislike the Easter season, and here is why.

As a mother, I have now twice experienced the Easter “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again” story as understood by a three-year-old. It’s HORRIFYING to a toddler to tell them that this really great guy in sandals, who was but a tiny baby born in a barn only three months ago, was put on a cross where he bled to  death. Then he comes alive again (Does that mean Murry-dog will come alive again?) and goes to heaven…where dead people go (So is he dead or not?)  I have been answering questions about death and heaven all week because my child’s preschool teacher has decided to read Religious Easter stories (not fluffy bunny egg stories) to a room full of toddlers and preschoolers. Not only has she read these stories, she has fielded their questions about Jesus, death and heaven. Here is what I have learned:

1) There are no boo boos in heaven because when you fall, the grass is fluffy.
2) In heaven there are a lot of toys.
3) In heaven you get to play with Jesus
4) You don’t go to heaven until you are 100.

Sounds GREAT except, my daughter is now having nightmares about dying.

This also happened when my son was younger and I was forced to take him to an Easter service at my in-law’s church. The children’s sermon was absolutely terrifying. The pastor spared no detail in his retelling of the Christ-story.  When I was younger, I think we just sang Jesus Loves Me or something.  I mean, I know that there is no nice way to say it, the story itself is the stuff of R-rated movies. If I lived in a bubble, I wouldn’t even be dealing with it until my child was at least 13.  But here we are surrounded by Christians, at the time of year that is basically the reason for Christianity.  So I am trying to explain an abstract concept that I don’t believe to a three-year-old who can not and will not understand when I instead would like to only be discussing jellybeans vs. Reese’s eggs.  (Eggs all the way!)

That is why I hate Easter.

Sadness Seeping

I’m very sad, and every day, I am getting a little sadder. When the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School happened, I didn’t even KNOW about it until that evening. Then it took a day for me to process it all. Now as the days have turned into a week, my sadness has strengthened, and I hate to be idol or alone. On my drive to work, swimming laps, in a quiet moment at home or in a particularly annoying kid moment at home, and just about whenever I sit for five seconds, I get sadder. All I can think about is how horrible it must be to have to go through such a tragedy. I look at my beautiful, spoiled, funny, annoying, smart, and loud children, and I start to feel like I am hovering over my body, looking down upon the whole scene and I get a sense of melancholy. I am angry at all the media noise. I am angry that the people on Good Morning America are back to smiles and mindless banter. I am angry at anyone who claims that GOD is anywhere in this equation. Angry…and sad. The Christmas tree with its twinkling lights, a week ago, was the most beautiful tree we had ever had. Now, it just makes me cry when no one is looking.

I know no one in Connecticut.  But I am forever connected to Sandy Hook. Somehow I feel their loss. Which sounds stupid when I type it, but this incident has dug a hole in my very being that I don’t ever want to be repaired.

Coexist…by scraping off the stickers

I used to love bumper stickers, and although I never would dare put one on my vehicle (I can hear my dad screaming in my ear, “You just knocked $1000 off of the value of your car!) I always enjoyed finding a good, clever bumper sticker to agree with while sitting at a red light. I felt that the person in that car was a friend, even if I never saw them again or would never speak to them in my life.  We had similar opinions, and that, in my book, was good enough. Living in a bigger city like Cleveland, and especially in my little liberal corner of it, it was not difficult to find liberal, tolerant or witty bumper stickers that made me smile.  In fact, when we were deciding about whether or not to move to Wyoming, I said to my husband, “If you find 5 liberalish bumper stickers, we can move there.  That is your mission.”

To my dismay, bumper stickers are scarce here, so my husband didn’t find 5 left-leaning bumper stickers. In fact, he didn’t even see a total of 5 when he came for his 3-day visit.  We decided to risk it, and moved here anyway.  Now that we live in this mostly republican, totally Christian town, and especially since they are so scarce, bumper stickers jump out at me like never before.  However, every one I see seems to tell me that I don’t belong here. As a result, I’ve gone from loving  bumper stickers to hating them, even the liberal ones.

I realize now that bumper stickers are a passive agressive way of telling the world that if they don’t agree with you, you are an idiot, a communist, a bitch or a baby murderer.  You are going to hell, you are the reason the world is going to hell in a hand-basket and your smart kid is a wimp.  Most of them are really quite awful, if you think about the person that has a differing opinion at the other end. I realize that there are a few bumper sticker sayings that are truly positive. But for the most part, what a bumper sticker says is this. “If you don’t agree with me, change your opinion or fuck off.” It’s really not a positive message.  And in today’s world of hatred, intollerence, and non compromise, I really just want to see some positivity out there.

I thought about making a  bumper sticker that says, “Please don’t assume that I agree with you,”  when I first moved here.  However, now I think that saying nothing on my car is better than making someone behind me at a red light feel offended or worse, judging me before ever meeting me based on an opinion that I have about gay marriage (For it!) I am all for a lively discussion of differing opinions, and I also respect anyone’s decision to be Pro Life, Pro Choice, Christian, Jew, Atheist, Republican or Democrat. But I don’t think that we should quietly shout our opinions on a piece of paper stuck to the back of our SUV while we hide in the driver’s seat. It’s time to stop the negativity, and a good place to start is by wiping the ass  of our cars.

And now for your reading pleasure:

Here is a list of  bumper stickers that I have seen in this town. And this quite possibly could be all of them. As I said they are few and far between:

I’ll keep my guns, money and freedom, you keep the “change”

Show me the Birth Certificate

Can’t find a doctor, blame a legislator

Jesus: Don’t leave Earth without Him

God doesn’t believe in athiests

1 cross + 3 nails = 4 given

Fight Crime: Shoot Back

If it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?

Trial riders never die, they just go over the hill again and again

I ride horses and I vote

The 10 commandments are not optional

Does this ass [picture of Obama] make my car look big?

[picture of Obama with x over face] All you’ll be left with is change

Pro God, Pro Life, Pro Gun (This is the most oxymoronic one of them all, yes?!)

Evolution Happens—(That’s on my husband’s truck!)

Side note:  LG, Please apologize to your truck for this post.

Are You There God? It’s Me Superboy.

I do not believe in God.  It’s not a secret, and the fact that I work for a science-based institution and attend a Unitarian Church makes me feel like I am not alone in this world.  Most of my friends are not believers, nor is my father. My husband and my mother understand what I do and do not believe as well.  With this huge cushion of tolerance, I am often taken-a-back when Jesus is mentioned in an inaugural prayer or when families say grace at Taco Bell before a meal, or when my son’s “non-Catholic” Montessori school attached to a Catholic Church sends me information about HIS Glorious Resurrection.  My in-laws, too, are extremely religious and rather than having conversations with me about what I believe and how we are raising our son, they choose to ignore the fact that I don’t believe in God. This causes a lot of stress on holidays (for me anyway) and when they try to tell my son what to believe when I’m not around.  However for the most part, I try to live and let live.

One of the reasons we chose a Unitarian Church was so that our son would learn the stories of the Bible (and other sacred texts) with the freedom to question what is being taught. We want him to make up his own mind and develop his own beliefs while still feeling included in a church community.

With this in mind, it is rather difficult for me to hear things that my son picks up at his school. Did I mention that it is a “non-Catholic” Montessori school attached to a Catholic Church?  Guess what? There is no such thing. While one has the chance to opt out of the “Good Shepard” Catechism stuff, there is still Mass once a month and a  Catholic “nook” in the classroom for children to practice the rosary, etc. The school recognizes only Christian holidays, and it is my understanding that the Board of the School are all prominent Church members.  Finally (and the thing that bothers me the most) the geological time-line that the children learn from and work on includes God.  

I understand that my son might be too young to grasp the concept of God as anything other than “big man in sky who made stuff” but sometimes it gets to me, especially since we work so hard in his Sunday School class to offer all kinds of explanations of what or who God could be. 

Yesterday, I was reminded to calm down about it all, and just let him be six. We were in the car on the way to school.

My son asked, “Mom, how come nobody will make me into a Superhero?”

“Because there are no real superheroes out there honey.”

“But I ask God every night for super powers, and he never gives them to me. ”

“I’m sorry, Monkey.”

He says pouting, “All he gives me is the power to love.”

He’s wrong. If there is a God that grants wishes, he made my son Super Cute.