Our theme for the month of June is “confessions.”

I’ve never wanted to be a wife.

This makes me a minority but not an anomaly among my peer group and is, I have been told, not a surprise to those who’ve known me for any length of time. Apparently it’s just a vibe I give off. (Not all confessions are secrets, right?)

I’ve also never wanted to have children.

Many women will tell you that they’ve always wanted to be mothers, with a clarity of purpose that I envy. My dedication to non-parenthood is similarly clear, but it’s hard to feel very purposeful about a thing that you don’t want and never will.

And while deciding not to have or delaying having children is an increasingly popular and politicized stance, it’s likewise hard to feel like a part of any sort of bloc or movement. It’s not a decision I’ve made as a response to an increasingly fearful or warming world, or a necessity of circumstance, or because of growing hostility surrounding reproductive rights; it’s just how I’ve always been.

It’s so a part of me that I don’t think about it, unless something external stirs up those depths—like, say, reading a particularly gut-wrenching ex-Evangelical memoir from a former Christian fundamentalist who narrowly escaped her abusive patriarchal marriage.

Of all the exvangelical books I’ve read (and there are many),Tia Leving’s A Well-Trained Wife may be the most harrowing. The abuse she survived would have been shocking even without the layer of Evangelical ick that the people in Leving’s life (at times herself included) used to justify or rationalize the sad or shameful things that were done to her.

I consider myself to have grown up Evangelical-adjacent. The CRC church I once called home was always more interested in creeds than charisma and my family’s direct interaction with Focus on the Family pretty much began and ended with reruns of The Pond on the way home from vespers. And, perhaps most important, my parents believed that a good education was far more important than anything else a young person could pursue—certainly more than getting ready for a “godly marriage” just out of high school.

And yet something about this book, beyond its lack of holds barred, kept tumbling about in my head, and I think it’s because immediately before starting A Well-Trained Wife I finished Candice Fleming’s new nonfiction title, which is about Jonestown. Like any modern cult book worth its salt, Death in the Jungle doesn’t denigrate the survivors or the victims of its subject matter. You can’t know what you would have done, it posits, under the strain of such overwhelming psychological forces.

And I can’t know what I would have done.

When I’m flattering myself, I’m pretty sure that alternate-history-Annaka wouldn’t have ended up anywhere near that vat of Flavor Aid in Guyana, because while I am a rule-follower and a people-pleaser, I’m also lazy and the thought of communal living makes my eyeballs itch. (And I’m white, so while I fervently hope any versions of myself alive in the 1970s would have been as zealous about desegregation as the Peoples Temple was, the practical stakes would have been lower for me than they were for many of its followers.)

But if it had been First Baptist Church in the 1990s instead of the Peoples Temple in the 1970s, I can’t be so sure. If my parents had joined a slightly different church when they moved to Ann Arbor or sent me to slightly different summer camps. If we’d been devotees of Bill Gothard instead of N.T. Wright. If I’d gone to Liberty University instead of—for all its faults—Calvin.

It’s fully possible that I’d be the same person I am now, or the same but a little more repressed. But I can’t know that. Maybe I’d have settled. Maybe I’d have gotten my first divorce before I turned thirty. Maybe I’d still be hoping I could find the strength to leave him someday.

Not wanting to get married or have kids isn’t a function of my upbringing; I’m just fortunate that I had one that didn’t make that the only option. Not having been sucked into fundamentalism at an early age is not indicative of strength of character on my part; it was luck.

There but for the go we all.

Annaka Koster

Annaka Koster (’18) graduated from Calvin with majors in English and history and the University of Michigan a couple years later as a “master” of information science. She’s now a public librarian in her hometown. Outside the library, Annaka can be found doing a sundry of nerdy things, including reading comics, playing board games, and mourning her pet snail, Clive.