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Chapter 1

You Can't Unfriend Family

When I was a kid a giant poster of New York City hung in my room. It was a poster of the Brooklyn Bridge at night, the city lit up like the Fourth of July behind it and in the bottom right corner a dimly lit riverfront street I didn't know. The poster took up half the width of my bedroom wall at my home in southern Missouri. To me it represented everything my rural community south of St. Louis did not: excitement, adventure, opportunity, sophistication. Everything I knew about New York came from The Baby-Sitters Club: Stacey's Mistake (No.18). I wanted to picnic in Central Park. I wanted to see the museums and eat lox and bagels. But when I visited Manhattan for the first time, my childhood dream was shattered, because no matter how large my poster was, it couldn't convey the size of the city. I felt like the buildings were long fingers clasping over me, and I couldn't see the wide-open sky. It was pointless to drive a car anywhere, and the first time I tried to relax in Central Park two homeless people fought in front of me and everywhere smelled like urine and pretzels. The childhood Dana took down that Brooklyn Bridge poster from her mind's bedroom wall.

I never realized my attachment to that wide-open Flyover sky until I had to do without it. As much as I wanted to love and fall in love with NYC, I couldn't. My very first visit to the city left me overwhelmed. I was in town to appear on Wendy Williams's television show. The staff was wonderful and gracious; they put me up at the W in midtown, and some band booked on Jimmy Fallon's late-night show played me to sleep in Times Square. There were so many people and so many things and advertisements and cars and noise that I went to Sbarro, got a slice of pizza, and holed up in my room for the rest of the day watching the city parade past, many stories up, through the glass. I got more adventurous with every visit, although my views of the city were mainly limited to what I could see through the tinted windows of a studio-hired car en route to this or that network. I've been to NYC more times than I can count at this point, but every time I go I take a big breath as the bridge dumps me out of Queens and into Manhattan. I also can't sleep without a white-noise machine that plays crickets and frogs.

My childhood was fraught with upheaval, a tempestuous childhood of domestic violence that resulted in a struggling single-parent household in Flyover. My mother worked in the city because the jobs were in the city, not in the rolling hills and green pastures of the rural farmland where she and the rest of my family originated and still live. I was angry at her for having us live so far from everyone we knew. I hated my elementary school and the kids who didn't like me: I was small for my age, reed thin, and unremarkable in every way. From my mother's feminist, leftist perspective, in rural America you were either a wife, a waitress, or a bank teller at the small branch in town-or you got lucky and scored a job as a makeup artist for the local mortician, as my mother's best friend did after high school. The city offered more opportunities for employment (for her) and education (for me). Every weekend we'd make the two-and-a-half hour journey back to "the country," as we simply called it, the nouveau city mice visiting the country mice. Every weekend my spirit was restored in a tiny one-room church, playing in the creek with my cousins, catching fireflies at dusk, and sleeping at the foot of my grandparents' woodstove as the sound of crickets lulled me to sleep; in the winter it was the sound of complete silence from the woods buried in snow. Nothing was ever so wonderful as being in the Ozarks. My cousins were cared for after school by my aunts, older cousins, and Grandmother. They grew up spending every day, not just weekends and summers, playing in the creek, picking corn, naming Grandpa's goats, chasing Grandma's pheasants when she wasn't looking. Their caregivers consisted of familiar places, familiar locations.

Everyone in the family knew where each grandkid was at any given point in the day. My cousins had one another at school during the day. If you messed with one, you messed with all. They attended one another's basketball and volleyball games; they cheered wildly whenever a cousin made a basket or scored a point. They rooted for one another at the town's annual beauty pageant and gathered at Grandma and Grandpa's beforehand to dress that year's appointed female cousin in the best gown and makeup the Ozarks had to offer. They attended church together and sat next to one another, filling up half the pews in the sanctuary. If you didn't have a father figure in your life there was Grandpa, a bevy of uncles, and older cousins there to fill the role. Everyone always had a partner at recess, company at dinner, a shoulder on which to cry, a hand to hold, a ride from school. They were separated from me by hours of asphalt and rolling hills.

In the city, no one knew who I was or to whom I belonged. An endless string of teenage girls babysat me after school. I felt no particular attachment to any of them. One time one of them forgot to make me lunch and instead made out with her boyfriend on my mom's bed. I turned up the television so Heathcliff would drown out their noises and then ran outside and down the steps to the sidewalk in front of our house, where I sat on the bottom step and embraced my knees. There was no one to whom I could run. I had no tribe. The neighbors on our left were a poor family whose daughter smoked pot and whose bedroom consisted of a mattress and rainbow curtains; her parents fought at night and I could hear her mother's every scream. The neighbors to our right were a family who seemed to find themselves in our hovelly hood due to hard times, and they kept to themselves. My mother did the best she could for me. I hid the transgressions of babysitters so that she wouldn't worry while she slaved away at one of the three jobs she worked so we could avoid taking government handouts.

No one knew me at school. I didn't fit in with the preps, the burnouts, the jocks; I didn't even fit in with the weirdos, which made me the weirdest weirdo of all. I ate lunch alone and pretended that people at my school who remotely looked like me were family members. I sat on the bus alone and no one noticed me. Literally. One day I forgot to get off at my stop and was too small for the driver to see. My mom and the school found me a couple of hours later, crying in my seat in the dark bus shed. It's amazing how you can feel lonelier in a city than in the country. In the city you're isolated by all of the nameless faces and the noise of their conversations. Everyone around you does what you do, so no one stands apart.

During recess I swung. It was a solo activity. I would swing higher and higher until I could look down the hill at the long drive that led up to my elementary school. I'd imagine my mom's green Oldsmobile coming up that windy drive to collect me early from school and take me away back down south to our family. Every Friday that's what she did: She picked me up after school and we'd escape. We'd eat sandwiches, or if I was lucky, I'd eat a McDonald's Happy Meal in the car. There wasn't time to stop and eat anywhere; Mom wanted to be on the road and get to the country as badly as I did. I'd hand her fries while she drove. We'd chase the last stretch of sunbeams across the plains until the white lines on the highway were all I could see. I'd drift off to sleep and wouldn't wake up until I could hear the crunch of Grandma and Grandpa's gravel drive under the well-worn tires of our thirdhand car.

Waking up on Saturday morning at Grandma and Grandpa's was magical. Sometimes I would be so tired that I'd sleep through the rooster's crow, but Grandma's bacon and eggs would wake me up every time. I'd get out of bed and make my way down the hall to their sun-drenched living room. I'd hug Grandpa first because he was always in his recliner, watching wrestling and drinking coffee.

"Are they treating you nice up there?" he'd always ask. I'd always answer yes, even if it wasn't true. I think he knew when it wasn't, but Grandpa never pried. He was selectively half deaf from firing .50 caliber guns on the USS Alabama during World War II. He would pretend not to hear you when he didn't want to but always amazed us with what he would hear and inquire about later. After Grandpa, I'd find Grandma in the kitchen and hang on her waist while she fried eggs. My grandmother was a micromanaging matriarch with a terrible temper, but no one fiercely loved and protected their brood like this woman did. She would kiss my head and tell me that she'd made sure to fill the cookie jar before we arrived. Mom would sit at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette while Grandma cooked. Mom would brief Grandma on everything during those Saturday mornings when I slept in: her divorce, her work, my school, how we were doing. After breakfast we dressed, and then by noon the entire family would descend on my grandparents' house. It was a Saturday tradition. The adults would visit and we kids would tear loose throughout the hills and valleys around Grandma and Grandpa's property.

Where I lived was very different from the country, where the Quik Mart owner, canoe rental proprietor, gas station attendant, town preacher, and everyone else recognized me without even hearing my family name, all because I had the family looks: dark hair, large dark eyes, olive skin, and a slender build.

"I know you. You're Gale's daughter," one would say. "You look just like all of 'em."

"Well, I'll be," said another. "You're the spittin' image of 'em all." They'd watch me and my cousins with amusement as we'd walk into the store barefoot, fresh from the creek, and pick up Sixlets and cream sodas before unfurling damp, wadded-up dollars on the counter to pay for them. There's a certain credit you carry when everyone knows your family. In the city your family name means nothing to anyone. Down here, down in these dark crevices of the Missouri hills, it means inclusion, belonging, familiarity, legacy. Family isn't perfect. You can't unfriend family; you can't unfollow them. They are yours. They are mine. And I know in my soul that if ever I found myself in a situation, my family would be there, just as I would be for them. My cousin once heard about threats I'd received and messaged me that he would "come to the city and sit on your porch with my shotgun." I cried for an hour straight. My Flyover family. They were bred for the woods, for the prairies, bred to live off nature, to fight, and to love. They live in one of the most beautiful parts of the United States, a place people don't see unless they look down from their plane windows at thirty thousand feet.

Aside from faith, name, looks, and mannerisms, I shared something else with my family: their politics. The stereotype is that country bumpkins are just one big Republican voting bloc. They've never met my family. I've said before that Bill Clinton was the second man after my father to screw me over, and it started me down a path of political self-discovery. My faith and my politics are intertwined because, you see, one led me to the other. It was my biggest vulnerability that drove me to God and to a deeper understanding of self-sustainability and responsibility.

I came from a broken home. I am a statistic in that regard. I had a horrible relationship with my father that followed me into my adulthood and nearly killed me spiritually. The entire first half of my life was tainted by its effect on me. I allowed it to control me. I hated men, I hated marriage, I never wanted children, and I believed that the only good place for a woman to be was on her own. I was rude to men, I was cruel to boys I dated, I was angry at the world, and I felt that the entire universe owed me a giant apology. I was uncomfortable in the homes of friends who had intact families. It didn't help that I had friends whose parents viewed me as damaged goods because I had a single mom at home. They went to big churches and prayed to God, but I didn't see any fruits of their faith in their hushed tones and condescending looks whenever my mother would collect me from their house in her old car. I resented them, I resented their faith, and I resented their wealth. I resented that they always had family in the stands cheering them on at track meets while it was rare for someone to be there for me. I raged at God in prayer.

Why did I get the shaft, God?! I would mentally scream. Why did you do this to me? I thought you were omnipotent! He just took it. He took all of it. Over the period of a few years He began to soften my heart (a child's heart!) to the point where I could open a Bible and read it. And I did. The first Bible I read was the giant Bible my grandma and grandpa kept on their coffee table. Some people keep art books or magazines on their coffee tables, but at my grandparents' house they kept a giant Bible. It was in a wooden box specially made for them by a cousin in shop class. Every now and then I saw Grandpa reading through it. (We later learned, after Grandpa got sick, that he hated banks and kept a sizable amount of money in his Bible. His reasoning was that "no heathen is going to take it.") I picked it up one weekend and spent an entire night reading the Gospels. That's how my journey began. I went to Sunday school and church with my grandma, aunts, and assorted cousins. It was a tiny little Baptist church in the hills with three rooms: one for worship and two classrooms for adults and kids in the basement. My family aren't what I'd call "holy rollers," but Grandpa would crack you with some Scripture when needed. It was from this that I asked my mom to start taking me to church. Mom picked up another job on certain weekends, so whenever she couldn't drive south she'd take me to church near our house. From there I attended church camp and was saved. The absence of a father figure in my life had created an abyss in my heart so deep that I almost couldn't function. Without even realizing what I was doing, I began seeking out a way to fill it and through this pain found my faith. I may not have had an earthly father, but I have a Father in heaven. I was saved at a country Baptist church camp when I was eleven. I am still growing in my faith to this day. It has not been without bumps along the way, particularly during my teenage years, but it has been my relationship with Christ alone that has brought me to where I am now.