God Is Not A Woman

He is an invisible boy.

As a toddler, squirming on my mom’s lap in a pew, I complained loudly enough for everyone to hear: “I don’t want to listen to God anymore.” I was talking about the pastor, a human man with brown hair and a Sacramento zip code. I remember thinking he was Jesus, too. It was confusing keeping track of who’s who among all these religious men. To me they were one entity, the loud voice booming from on high was the same one coming from the front of the Presbyterian church. 

A year or so later, we had a new pastor at a new church in a new town. I was old enough then to realize this pastor wasn’t God. She couldn’t be; she was a woman. When we recited the Lord’s Prayer in unison, she’d always say, “Our father and mother, who art in heaven…” She wasn’t fooling me. I knew the men were in charge. 

When I was five I daydreamed about being God. As recorded by my mom, I allegedly said, “I bet it would be nice to be God, then you could have everything your way. But I wouldn’t want to be God. Then you’d have to be a boy, and you wouldn’t be alive. And you wouldn’t have any color on you, because you’d be invisible.” 

After a few years of Sunday school, my theology was taking shape. To sum up my beliefs as of 1997:

• God gets everything his way.

• God is male.

• God is not alive.

• God has no color on him.

• God is invisible.

The receipts from my “Baby Book.”

Maybe I wasn’t describing anything to do with religion, tradition, or deities. I was describing the patriarchy. It’s invisible, it’s everywhere, it won’t die, it always wins. And no, I don’t want to be it. I am a girl.

In our Judeo-Christian North American Puritanical Capitalistic society, you grow up with so many unseen entities watching you, judging you. Santa Claus wants to know if you’re naughty or nice. God wants to know if you’re good or bad. Big Tech wants to know everything. The Tooth Fairy just wants your teeth, and the Easter Bunny doesn’t care what you do, but one’s a girl and one’s a rabbit. Only invisible men have the power to judge.

A line from my short film The Wedding Scene; and yes, I do agree.

When I was four, and five, and six, I was so scared of being bad, or worse, being seen as bad. I was scared of a lot of things. Scary picture books, the wolves in Beauty and the Beast, the spot in the living room where a scary picture book had once sat before my mom hid it away. I had trouble with witches, beasts, and naughty children. Ramona Quimby was too mischievous. Amelia Bedelia was too dense (and old enough to know better). Goldilocks was too selfish. Karen Brewer from The Baby-Sitters Little Sister series was too naughty. Were the boy characters bad, too? I don’t remember any of them.

At that age, I used to tell my mom every thought I’d had and everything I’d done that could potentially be morally questionable. After Confession, she’d usually say, “Okay, that’s fine.” She told me I didn’t need to tell her everything, and eventually I listened. My mom says she was so relieved when I grew out of that phase. But I’m not confident I ever did. I am a ruminator. It is very repetitive inside my head, because I am a ruminator. A ruminator. I. Ruminate. Or…

When I was a kid, I had no chill and very little sense of humor. But can you blame me? I was being watched by invisible men with magic powers and herds of reindeer. They were everywhere and all knowing, and they always got their way.

One summer when I was about eight, I went to a day camp where teenagers wrote plays and cast us, the elementary school kids, in them. We practiced for a few days, and on Friday we performed the plays for our parents. The teenagers directing my group wrote a thinly veiled knockoff of an Austin Powers movie, and in rehearsals I started to question my character’s motives. My friend was in a different play, where every kid got to be a character from a nursery rhyme. Meanwhile, I had to be a corrupt character from a movie I wasn’t allowed to see. The plagiarizing teenagers heard my concerns and told me I was “so sweet” to worry, and “so innocent” to not want to pretend-commit felonies. Since I clearly didn’t want to act, they wrote a new knockoff character for me to play, one much closer to myself: Jiminy Cricket. All my lines were expressing concern about the shenanigans of the other characters. I knew the teenagers were making fun of me, but I was relieved to be cursory, a footnote to the main plot, even if I had to play a boy, and a bug, a conscience with six legs. At least I wasn’t heading for jail, hell, or a stocking full of coal.