And then I hit the first roadblock on the race to space. Lunch. They served freeze-dried ice cream as a “treat.”
“This is what they eat in space,” one of the counselors said, cheerily passing out the foil-wrapped squares, each with chemical stripes of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. One small bite of that chalky excuse for dessert felt like a betrayal.
“Ugh,” I said, spitting it into a napkin. “I can’t be an astronaut. No way.”
I hung up my NASA dreams right then and there.
BY THE END OF SUMMER, THINGS WERE TENSE AT HOME. MY PARENTS WERE fighting a lot, each accusing the other of overspending. They always stayed kind to each other in front of Ashlee and me, but sometimes one would have to storm off to keep from saying something nasty.
This made me think about money from a young age, even though we’d never had any, so I didn’t know any different. Before I was born, Dad took out a two-thousand-dollar loan from the one bank in Cross Plains, Texas, and had them keep the money because he knew mom and he couldn’t help but blow through it. Then that money went to pay the hospital when I was born. My dad paid the doctor who delivered me with the Canon 24-70mm lens on his camera. Dr. MacDonald admired it as dad photographed my arrival. “I tell you what, Dr. MacDonald, I will trade you this lens for your bill.”
More and more, I heard them fight, and my dad saying, “We’ll fly by this month. We’ll be fine.” I wanted to help, but didn’t know how until the answer came to me, at where else but the mall? I remember walking by some kiosk that had these ornaments with everybody’s name and its meaning. I saw mine and held it on the hook. “Jessica: The Wealthy One.” It stayed with me. I walked around thinking, I’m the wealthy one, not realizing it meant rich in spirit. I just thought it was about money, and every time my parents seemed worried, I said, “I’m gonna be rich.” I’d be the one to lift my parents out of their struggles. I’d be the one to end their fights, once and for all.
“Well, God provides,” my dad said. “He’ll always provide for you.”
But we needed money now. There was no secret fortune for me to find and no cute barter stories about camera lenses to be had. My family declared bankruptcy to get out from under the weight of the bills. As part of what my mom called a “reorganization,” my parents announced we were moving back to Texas. Dad called around and got a job as a youth minister in Burleson, a little town in the Fort Worth area. So, it was time to say good-bye to my friends again. Soon after we moved, I started first grade. I walked into a roomful of strangers who all seemed to know each other, and I did my best to fade into the background. I was relieved my seat was in the back, and I chose to sit in the back whenever I could at school.
We lived in a two-bedroom apartment, which my mom hated because she’d gotten used to living in a five-bedroom house in Littleton. We weren’t there much, because our life revolved around church. When my dad returned to preaching, I thought we moved because God would tell my dad it was time to move. He studied to be an adolescent therapist, learning how to reach that brain. Because he was such a good storyteller, he could tug at the heart, too. He’d make people weep, holding up their hands as they listened to him share the Word in a way they had never heard. Even as a kid I could feel the energy of change in the room when my dad was working.
And I changed also. In the Baptist faith, you choose to be baptized when you are ready. It’s for believers only, and it’s up to you. You don’t just baptize an infant and make the decision for them, which is kind of cool because for a religion that can be painted as so confining, individual choice is a fundamental part of being Baptist.
On a Sunday that had felt very normal up until that moment, I felt the Word and I made the choice. My dad was up front preaching, and he asked if anybody wanted to come down to be baptized in the name of Christ. I stood up in my white dress, hugged my mother, and stepped forward. As I approached, my father began to cry. He helped me into the baptismal pool, and I felt his hand on my back as he gently submerged me. The water washed over me, and I emerged new. Growing up, there would be kids who would get baptized a lot. I always kind of rolled my eyes at that, because a lot of them did it for attention. It’s not a car wash, you know? The one time took for me.
Dad’s youth minister salary was about $25,000 a year, so my mom was always looking for ways to supplement the income. This was the era of Jazzercise and she saw that Jane Fonda’s Workout was becoming the highest-selling VHS tape of all time. She thought, I can do that. Since we were always at church, she decided to start teaching an aerobics class there. She had to go talk in front of the whole deacon board to get approval, and she brought us along. There was this old country man who kept staring at her as she talked about aerobics.
He finally interrupted her. “You gonna be doing acrobatics in the church chapel?”
“Aerobics,” she said, overenunciating every syllable. “Working out. Good for your heart.”
The men looked at each other. It was bad enough my dad had an earring, and now his crazy wife wanted people dancing in the church.
Finally, she hit on the point: “I’m going to be helping women get their best bodies possible.”
Again, the men looked at each other, but this time they were sold. She started the Heavenly Bodies company, and the class was called Jump for Jesus—
No, I will not shut my mouth. That is really what she called it. Let’s continue.
Jump for Jesus was popular, and I went to almost every class, collecting all the checks made out to Heavenly Bodies. I sat in the back, with all these women jamming to Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant, the cool Christian singers at the time. “Stretch your arms towards the heavens,” my mother would yell. “Lift those knees higher for Jesus!” Mom made her own workout video, which I also sold. If we went to any Baptist conferences, you bet we brought those tapes along.
Laugh, but she got what she wanted. We left the apartment and leased a two-story house as we continued to make payments on our debts. They still overspent, but not on extravagant things. They just wanted to be the parents who said yes when their daughters asked for Caboodles for Christmas. We opened a lot of credit cards, and thank God for layaway. It was part of their relentless positivity. They were in the business of changing lives. Mom and Dad were always taking people in. When parents threw their pregnant daughter out, she needed a place to sleep until they came to their senses. When a kid was trying not to do drugs, he needed to get away from parents who had their own issues with addiction. In the South, there are so many secrets, and my parents were there to give people a safe place. Even when my parents didn’t physically take people in, they collected people to look after.
One day after Jump for Jesus, my mom took me across the street to a young woman’s house. I will call her Jane to protect her privacy. Jane was probably nineteen, a heavyset girl with brown hair who had run away from Iowa to follow some dumb boy who liked her because she wasn’t used to that. He got her pregnant, and he skipped town before the baby boy arrived. She was stranded in Burleson, broke with no support, and her parents thought she had made her bed so she could just stay there.
This was before anybody understood postpartum depression. When it was just women who could recognize it in each other and step in to say, “Let me help you.” But Jane had nobody. That’s why my mom had a heart for her.