About

My name is Lisa Enderle, and I’m no one special. Not in the sense that I have credentials. However, I’ve lived long enough to gather some observations about some of the darker undercurrents of American life.

My hope with this blog is to discover a better way forward. An ethic that gives everyone a spot at the table while they figure out who they are and what they believe. While this is a personal blog, I hope this can be the beginning of a larger conversation.

A little bit about me. On paper I am a single mother to a sweet little girl. My fiancé died when I was six months pregnant with our child. So functionally a widow, though I don’t legally qualify as one. Giving birth to my daughter was a shock to the system. I’m not talking about the labor, I’m talking about holding someone in my arms that came from the man I loved and a person I did not know how to love- myself. Simply by existing, she changed how I saw the world overnight and caused me to reconsider everything. Essentially, I realized I had to grow out of my self-loathing because it wouldn’t serve my daughter to remain in it.

I came from an extremely conservative religious background. The kind that told the little girl I once was that my only function in the kingdom of God and society at large was to serve a man and bear his children. This was appealing to my immature mind. Simple. It required no critical thinking from me. Coming from a broken home, a family of my own and sense of security was all I wanted- even if it meant I had to wait a long time for it. Additionally, the faith tradition I came from was largely centered around the idea that the world as we knew it would end at any moment. These beliefs were already contradictory- hoping to have a family someday while being told I wouldn’t reach full maturation before the second coming of Jesus and being sucked up to heaven via heavenly vacuum cleaner. Perhaps this was attractive to family members who got to live their lives, it felt like a death sentence to me even while I was told how wonderful it would be.

This ideology kept me from maturing in an appropriate way. On the one hand I became an extremely responsible young woman. From the time I was sixteen I was hardworking, diligent, and generally appreciated by coworkers and bosses alike. On the other hand, I had no idea who I was apart from the roles I performed. I needed external definitions, and spent a lot of my free time trying to ignore what was bubbling beneath the surface- the sense I’d not grown up in many ways. I was still the child seeking love and approval from authority figures which might make a dream employee, but a miserable and lost human being. The church had also tapped into this, only enforcing the sense that my value and identity was to be found in subservience to an authority of one kind or another. Basically a perfect breeding ground for exploitation.

Then, one day I met the love of my life and the future father of my child. He was the catalyst God used to send me on a long journey. Pursuing truth, reevaluating and often outright rejecting my inherited dogma, and calling everything into question. Two things have dramatically changed me- meeting him, and having our daughter.

I want to tell my story and what I’ve learned, because I know I’m not alone. Someday, I hope this blog tells other people’s stories too. Together, we can seek truth and create a better world. One that will be kinder to our children than it was to us…

…Cuz that was some bullshit.