Part 1: Introduction
by Runawaybride
I didn’t start my marriage out to be a Christian, in fact, I was a practicing solitary Wiccan at the time, being in rebellion from my Presbyterian Country Club Church upbringing.
However, I had and still have a voracious appetite for reading about different faiths, philosophies and beliefs. At the same time, the internet was just beginning to get off the ground, which, for a person who researches for fun, was the best toy I could have gotten for Christmas. I got my first PC in 1992, and signed up for Delphi.
It was on their religion board that I first encountered a Patriarchalist, who asked if he could correspond with my husband via regular mail. He did so, and sent him some very poorly but strongly worded letters, with copied and pasted printouts of other people’s writings to support what he felt were truths. My husband, being a very lapsed but well trained Catholic, said the man was well intentioned but somewhat ill informed.
So at the time, we went our merry, single, newlywed way. We bought a house in themed 90s, and moved his grandmother into the bottom of it, since she was in need of familial assistance. It was a big house, a rambling old city “neighborhood” Victorian that I loved on sight. I wanted even then to have six kids, because I liked kids. What I didn’t know was that I was not able to bear them, but that’s another chapter of the story.
The trouble really began for me when I got pregnant with my daughter, now a teenager. I was Hyperemetic and badly so. In those days, they still believed Hyperemisis – non stop vomiting day and night of even just water through the first trimester and into the second for me – was a mental condition. They ( the Drs.) have since recanted that position. But, at that time, there was no medicine available for it, since someone had sued the company that made the one effective medication for it out there, and, we were in a climate of natural everything anyway. These were the days when they were shuffling us out of the hospital 24 hours after delivery. So, I suffered through it.. and I researched it.
Doing that research, I found the Quiverfull people. Pro life, anti birth control, for ANY reason, Christian,…. While they seemed to be a foreign species to me, they fascinated me.
I’m not sure what appealed to me there. Perhaps, as I was expecting, I was doing a little mental “nesting”. I had been into the Wicca stuff since college, and had seen some fairly bad behavior there, things I didn’t want to carry over to my daughter’s life. Perhaps, having been raised a Christian; a little pre-planted mental time bomb went off. Maybe this was even a BETTER way to thumb my nose at the Country Club Christians who had hurt me so much (to be discussed in future installments) than Wicca was.
Perhaps it was the wholesome, healthy happy people and beautifully dressed children – the kind of life I wanted my daughter to have. More than likely, it was all of it. The seduction and brainwashing began. Events of the next several years would take me from a woman who, prepregnancy, lived in spandex leggings, black sweaters just to her hips, miniskirts and boots, to a headcovering, dresses only submissive wife.
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