The House with No Bathroom

<p>The House with no Bathroom: Growing Up Fundamentalist is about growing up in the mid 20th century as a member of an extremely religious fundamentalist family. The family of five moved around the country to one location after another. With a stay-at-home mother and a father who worked at extremely low paying jobs for the church were out of their culture the narrator and her siblings spent their childhood trying to get a grasp on both their own religious life as well as the culture around them. The book is filled with stories about growing up in an extremely religious family. There are comedy and pathos in these stories. The story tells about a family careening from rural Mississippi during the late 1960's to being homeless in Northern California and bouncing from one situation to another. </p><p></p><p class=ql-align-justify>As a part of a very insular Seventh day Adventist religious community in both the south and the west coast during the turbulent 1970's every aspect of childhood and child rearing was completely different than American culture as a whole then and what it is now. In the church and societal milieu of the family a lot of the behavior encouraged by church leadership was violent and controlling. Violence was glorified as a means for the man the priest of the family to control and dominate his subjects-the wife and kids. Bullying in schools was a normal fact of life.</p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify>The church as an employer paid a pittance and the family lived on next to nothing in a variety of homes including the house with no bathroom. Living was a struggle to maintain both physical needs and a sense of belonging. The extremely strong social constraints of the church dominated life. This was living a dirt poor trad life before it was a thing.</p><p></p>