Beth Wise

Tag: faith deconstruction

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Much to the distaste of my family, I’ve been re-watching the show Hoarders lately. If you’ve never had the pleasure, let me explain to you the American institution that is Hoarders. It’s a TV show that follows one or two people that have hoarding disorder. Usually, these are older people who have been hoarding for…
I Can’t Put It Back

We got a Christmas tree last year. Up to that point, I had avoided having a tree by using a cloth tree that I sewed that hangs on the wall. After 6 years, the Kid finally convinced me that we needed like a tree tree and not something that I whipped up on my cheap…
Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Wieners and Buns

Let me preface the beginning of this series with a few things: I’m gonna take weekends off for my “writing every day” goal in November. I can do this because I’m a grown ass woman and I want to. I want to explicitly acknowledge that I have AMAZING parents who did the best with what…
Embody Me

(In an effort to jump-start the writer’s block that Zoloft put before me, I’ll try to write every day this month. Most won’t be long and I might try a few different things. This is a stream of consciousness writing from yesterday that I didn’t get to edit until today. So this is from yesterday…)…
As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…

Last August, my little family met my parents in Estes Park. We have done this trip every couple of years since I was a kid. We stay in cabins and hike and explore and breathe in the fresh mountain air. COVID made things a little different, but we were just happy to escape Dallas for…
Atheism for Lent

I once gave up spoons for Lent. For those who are unfamiliar with the Christian calendar, Lent is the 40ish day period right before Easter, starting on Ash Wednesday, a day when many go to church to have ash crosses smeared across their forehead. Many Christians give up something sacrificially, to remind ourselves of the…
A Cemetery Sob

One of the most memorable customers in my first job at the dry cleaners in college was a woman who came in and accused us (me) of ruining a very expensive scarf. She pointed to one tiny thread and insisted that we pay her for the scarf, which was several hundred dollars. It was one…
Let’s Keep It: Confession

I once went to a movie with a boy that I liked. It wasn’t a date, exactly. I don’t remember him paying- it was just more like two friends going to a movie, with one of them being a nervous weirdo. After the movie, he opened the door of his truck for me (this wasn’t…
Dallas Pride, Part 2: The Juicy Fruit

Before kids, Alex and I once went to San Antonio for our wedding anniversary. Coincidentally, it was the same weekend that a Comicon was happening so the people watching was excellent. On our last day, we decided to go off the beaten path and walk away from all the touristy parts of the River Walk. We took…
Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

The Kid recently went to a church lock-in. He loved it, of course. I’m fairly certain that he didn’t sleep at all and ate shit and probably played too many videogames. He informed me that they played a game called Sardines and I was hit with a flashback of epic proportions from my own youth…
For Rachel

If you’ve ever been in a choir, you’ve had the experience where the choir stop singing perhaps for a pregnant pause, and you belt a note out in the silence. Usually you realize it pretty quickly, and you stop before many people can realize it. That feels a little bit like faith deconstruction. I had…
Moving Day

We just moved. Same city, just a little further South. We added a fourth bedroom and it got The Kid into the schools that he wanted to be in (i.e. more POC kids). By just moved, I mean that our garage is filled to the gills with furniture and boxes. There’s nothing new about that,…