It Happened To Me: My Aunt Attempted to Baptize Me in Her Swimming Pool (A Jane Magazine Rejection)
My cousin almost killed me and my aunt tried to get me to accept Jesus during a visit to my dying grandma. Jane politely rejected this essay nearly 25 years ago — but here it is now! Praise Jesus?
Hello hello!
BEFORE you read this story, please send in your submissions for our “Unpopular Opinion” and “It Happened To Me” sections. (I just got a note from one of you saying that too many of our opinion stories are still written by men with not enough other genders in that author mix. You - not you dudes, but all the rest of you - can help change that by sending me your Unpopular Opinions or getting friends or enemies to submit theirs.) All of them can come straight to me at jane@anotherjaneprattthing.com, please. We love to publish your stories and pay you for them and then if that goes well, we love for you to become a regular writer here and continue to rinse and repeat that process until eternity. Some of my favorite AJPTers came to me exactly that way, through a submission to one of those sections, like sweet kook Genevieve, to mention one working partnership/odd friendship that will no doubt last a weird lifetime.
Now the reason I encouraged you to submit your stories before you read this entry from today is because the It Happened To Me submission that you are about to read is a little unusual, as you will soon see. But in my defense: I do not generally take 20+ years to publish your submissions. So don’t be daunted by that detail! And sorry, Laura!
I love you all! Enjoy your lives and enjoy this historical artifact.
Love love always,
Jane
By Laura LeBleu
The Backstory
Back in 1996, my aunt tried to baptize me in her swimming pool. I was almost 25 years old.
Five years later, I turned my experience into a story and sent it to Jane magazine. I figured it would be the perfect It Happened to Me article—because “coerced adult baptism” is a pretty rare square on life’s bingo card.
I was only slightly crushed when my article was returned with a short, handwritten note. As far as rejections go, it was as good as it gets: We can’t run this right now, but please don’t hesitate to send something else.
I did not send something else.
That rejection, kind as it was, confirmed what I always suspected—that I didn’t belong in a world any better or cooler than the one I was born into. (Middle class, Texan, white, boring. Somewhere north of mediocre.) Jane was that better, cooler world. A stingingly familiar voice told me I could read about it, but I couldn’t be a part of it.
It took two decades to realize that maybe that voice was bullshit. So I dumped the box of my life out and examined its contents. Every choice, every habit, every excuse, every insecurity, every compromise. Two years—and one epic personal reckoning—later, I divorced my husband of 25 years and set out to remake my life in my own image.
At some point during the fracas, I went to visit my mom. She handed me an envelope of old ephemera she’d held onto, and out slid a copy of the Jane article I thought had been lost to time and outdated technology.
I read it and thought, damn…this is actually pretty good.
Which is why, when Another Jane Pratt Thing came online, I submitted it. Again! Even though that voice, diminished yet persistent, still told me not to expect too much, that I wasn’t worthy of this shiny object of desire. So when I heard back directly from Jane within hours, it was the ultimate vindication. Take that, self-doubt, you incredible asshole! [Annoying interruption here to say that times were so different back when I was running Jane magazine with a staff of well over 100 and not only an Executive Assistant but a Second and even sometimes a Third Assistant to assist the other two. So the layers to get to me were thick and took forever to get through and were sometimes impenetrable - unlike my free and easy streamlined processes of today! So write me! -Jane] And let me tell you—having this published today is a bona fide delight on at least a dozen levels. I’m finally a part of the thing I always wanted to be a part of!
This piece you’re about to read—and I really hope you read it—is as much about the stories we tell ourselves as it is a drive-by baptism. It’s about the stories that say we’re this or that or the other. The ones that hold us back.
Because, if it’s true that each of us writes our own books, I’m proof positive that if your plot sags and your protagonist gets lost, it’s never too late to do a rigorous edit on your own radiant narrative.
It Happened To Me: My Aunt Tried To Baptize Me In Her Swimming Pool
By Laura LeBleu, Written (and Rejected) sometime in 2001
I found God and lost God, all on the same day, in the time span of about 15 minutes.
It began with a gloomy excursion to Corpus Christi, Texas. I had scraped together enough money to fly from my adopted hometown of San Francisco to see my grandmother who was on the verge of succumbing to pancreatic cancer. I was met at the airport by my aunt, an intelligent, well-traveled, robust woman who is also a speaking-in-tongues type of Christian. By the way, Corpus Christi translates into “body of Christ.” Lovely.
Aunt Susanne was my favorite relative as a kid. She remembered my birthday and sent me books (invariably with a religious theme), and told me stories about my father, who died when I was two years old. Aunt Susanne and my grandmother were my sole connection to a branch of the family that was largely a mystery to me.
From the time I arrived, Susanne scrutinized me in the way a birdwatcher studies a rare bird they’d only seen before in books. By this time, I had been living in San Francisco and cavorting with drag queens and having all kinds of debauched fun. I got a sense that my heathen hair would make a fine scalp for her Charismatic Christian belt. Now I was a guest in her house—the prodigal niece on her doorstep.
It was going to be a long trip.
Sometime after my first cup of coffee on my second morning there, I looked down to find my aunt’s body splayed like a starfish on the living room floor, her face buried deep into the luxurious beige pile of the carpet. She explained that she began every day by lying prostrate before God, praying for her sins and presumably the sins of humanity as a whole.
My response to this was something akin to “Wow. Thanks.” I needed a lot more than one cup of coffee to deal with this sort of information.
On the third day, she shared a sample of her speaking-in-tongues language. It was a lilting, Polynesian sort of thing, which wasn’t particularly surprising to me seeing as how she had lived in Hawaii for a time. I kept this observation to myself.
On the final day of my visit, her son made a point of taking me out for a ride around town in his new Porsche. Now, my cousin is, for lack of a better word, a tool. He was one of those guys in high school whose shorts showed about an inch more thigh than necessary, with the collar on his Izod standing vigorously at attention while one tube sock slouched defeatedly onto his topsider. And now he had a fast, phallic car to show me just how cool he was.
We were making our way toward the outskirts of town when he really started putting on speed. I’m not squeamish about pushing limits, but my gut told me that his driving abilities were more suitably matched to a late-80s Yugo. I could tell he was coming into the corner too fast. Sure enough, the back of the car started to slide out from under us as we took the curve.
That’s when I did a strange thing. I prayed directly to God: “Please, God. Not here, not now, and not with him.”
We swung off the side of the road, sliding sideways toward a bank of trees before he overcorrected and whipsawed the car back onto the asphalt where the fishtail continued in the opposite direction. Eyes closed, I clutched the seat until I felt the sweet mercy of tires grabbing the road. We came to a silent stop before he sputtered something about how the low center of gravity and turning radius in a Porsche allows for maneuvers like that. I asked him politely to take me back to his mother’s house.
Shaken, I walked through the garage into the back entrance, and there was Aunt Susanne standing cheerfully by the washer and dryer. We made small talk. How was your evening? Oh, it was fine until your dumbass son tried to kill me.
And then she hit me with the proposition she’d been dying to ask all along: Don’t you think it's time to take the Lord Jesus Christ as your one and only savior in your heart? We can do it right here. Right now. I can baptize you in my swimming pool.