Isolation

The Beautiful Girlhood Doll ~ Part 9: The Broken Doll

July 2, 2011
Print FriendlyPrint Friendly
by Libby Anne

Soon after this rethinking of my parents’ beliefs, I returned home from college for a semester break more worried than I have ever been in my life. What were my parents going to think about my new beliefs on evolution, the Bible, the pro-life movement, and female equality? For a few weeks I said nothing, afraid of what would happen when I did. But the longer I listened to my parents praising me for my steadfast beliefs and condemning evolution and liberal college professors the more I realized I couldn’t hide my changes in belief. And so I told them. I was used to being only praised and affirmed, so telling my parents about my changing beliefs was probably the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. And sure enough, it was like I had dropped a bomb.

I have never seen my parents as angry or disappointed as they were that day. I had gone from being their golden daughter to being broken, completely broken, in their eyes. With that one revelation, they learned that all of their work had been for nothing. Since their whole reason for raising me was to create a soldier for Christ, spreading their specific views around the world, my changes in belief meant that everything they had done to bring me up was wasted.

My parents’ utter horror was soon replaced with attempts to retrain me and bring me back to the strait and narrow. My mother gave me a pile of Vision Forum materials on daughterly submission and fatherly authority and demanded that I read them. I think that backfired, actually, because having learned to think for myself and having seen a bit of the world, the books by the Botkins and others made no sense. The Botkins seem to think every college girl is a whore, and yet I had spent two years at college and knew this was not true. The Botkins also seem to worship their father in a way that I found extremely dangerous, for I had just realized that fathers are as fallible as anyone else. None of the literature made any sense to me any more.

Slightly more effective than the literature was the emotional pressure. My father, with whom I had been so close, ignored me. My mother told me over and over how much I had hurt my father, and that if I really wanted to follow God and know what was true I should just ask my dad my questions and believe whatever he told me. But this didn’t make sense to me because I had learned that my father could be, and was, wrong. My childhood friends’ admonitions that God spoke to me through my father and so I should listen to him fell on deaf ears, for they no longer made sense. After all, the Bible never said any such thing, and if God wanted to speak to me I felt sure he could speak directly to me.

The Beautiful Girlhood Doll ~ Part 8: Out of the Doll House & Into the Real World

June 30, 2011
Print FriendlyPrint Friendly

NOTE: “For personal reasons, “Liberty” has changed her pseudonym to “Libby Anne.”
by Libby Anne

And then I left for college. College had always been one of my parents’ expectation for me, and I’ve never seen them as proud as they were at my homeschool graduation. With my parents’ approval, I chose a secular college because I wanted to witness to others and make a difference in the world. I had been taught that I was to be a culture changer, shouldn’t I start now? My parents approved of this choice because they believed I was ready.

Of course, I believed my role was to be a wife and mother, but no one had appeared to seek my hand and my parents, both college educated themselves, had never shaken the idea that a college degree is important. I would graduate from college, they said, and then work until someone came to my father asking for my hand, and then marry and settle down as a homemaker, wife, and mother. My plan was to find an upstanding Christian man in college and graduate with a ring on my finger. After all, I didn’t want to delay having children any more than I had to, because I knew I wanted a very large family. Until then, though, I would use my college years to witness to others and further God’s kingdom.

I found out almost immediately upon arriving at college that I did not fit in very well. I thought this was just because I had been homeschooled, but it was more than that. I wore only homemade clothing, had hair all down my back, and didn’t use makeup. I definitely stuck out! In addition to looking out of place, I had no idea how to relate to anyone I met, because none of them shared my exact beliefs or had an upbringing anything similar to mine. I was the very definition of a fish out of water.

Gradually, I began to make friends with evangelical girls I met in my dorm. The god-talk was familiar to me, but their upbringings were still largely foreign. None of my new friends had more than a couple siblings, and none of them believed in female submission the way I did. They were in college so that they could have careers; they didn’t plan to be homemakers. They were astonished when they learned that I believed I would be under my younger brother’s authority if my father died, and they found my clothing and mannerisms strange and funny. Yet they accepted me as I was, and for that I will always be grateful. Without them, my transition to college would have been a great deal more painful than it was.

College quickly taught me first that those who did not believe like I did were neither automatically miserable inside nor bad people. In fact, I found that even Catholics, gays, and agnostics could be lovely people. This confused me but it also opened my world and showed me that dividing humanity into “good” and “evil” was too simplistic.

I realized, though, that I could not witness to others very well when I stuck out like a sore thumb. I therefore bought myself a new wardrobe, cut my hair, and learned to wear makeup. My new clothes were still conservative, but at least they were not floor length homemade dresses. My new look worked, and I began to have theological and political conversations with a number of non-Christians. I worked hard to show them the perfection of the Bible, the evidence of young earth creationism, the evils of abortion, and the love of God.

Strangely, I found a surprising number of my arguments rebutted by arguments I had never heard before. I was told that there were serious problems with creationism, ethical issues with the Bible, and more effective ways to decrease abortion than banning it. I turned to my resources, my books and websites on creationism, theology, and conservative politics, and I tried again. And again. And again. But some things just didn’t add up. I paused my arguments to do some serious research, and I was astounded by what I found.

My Courtship Story ~ Part 8: Courtship Is Not The Answer

June 26, 2011
Print FriendlyPrint Friendly

by Young Mom @ Permission to Live

Looking back, I like many things about our story. I love that we were very honest about our needs and desires as we understood them at the time. I can imagine it would be more difficult to fall in love with someone and then find out afterwards they don’t want children and you do. I can see the benefits of being straightforward and asking the tough questions right away.

On the other hand, there were things that we could not talk about as well. Religious questions weren’t really that relevant, because we were so enmeshed in our families, we hardly had any beliefs that were truly ours, they were all dictated by our families. There are other tough issues that cannot come up when you have intense levels of parental control. Whatever is not safe to talk about in your family of origin, does not feel safe to bring up in the new relationship either.

I think that seeing our relationship as marriage focused was healthy. We weren’t dating just to date, we were discovering each other and searching each other to see if we could see ourselves together. (However I do feel that the marriage focus was taken to an extreme.) I also think that waiting to get involved in relationships until being old enough to start considering marriage makes sense.

I think that spending time together as families is a great idea. You have the opportunity to observe the persons interactions with their own family members and as well as yours. It helps you to learn how to interact with other people as a couple.

Respect for our bodies and sexuality was a good thing. I think it is healthy to have good boundaries in a relationship. Good communication about expectations and mutual respect for each other is pivotal.

The problem is, all of those things could have been implemented by my husband and I as adults in our own relationship. We could have (probably would have) been serious about marriage, boundaries and family relationships and involvement, without the parental control that the idea of Courtship is founded on.

***************************

Actually I can’t think of a single benefit from the parental control and pressure we had throughout our relationship. Even after we were married, it took several years for us to truly “leave and cleave”. We had never been allowed to be our own persons, and old habits died very hard. We would consult our parents and make decisions (trivial or important) based on what they told us. Eventually we progressed to where we would make our own decisions and fret about how to tell our parents what we had decided. It took four years to get to the point that we made decisions and didn’t bother to tell them at all! We were both nearly twenty years old when we started our Courtship, and every decision was taken out of our hands as though we were fourteen year olds. I can only be grateful that my parents were not as extreme as some in the same mindset, such as this girl who was betrothed against her will and ran away from home to escape. Read her story in this order. ONE, TWO, THREE, and FOUR.)

My parents had a long set of rules we were expected to keep during our courtship. Looking back, it strikes me as pretty creepy. My parents were obsessed with controlling a fully grown child’s sex life. I was expected to ask them permission to do anything, and abide by their decision. It was none of their business what my boyfriend/fiancé and I were doing or not doing. The job of a parent entails teaching their children to respect their bodies and even passing on their religious beliefs if they wish too, NOT being the sexual purity police in another adult’s relationship.

In the end, every boundary I had wanted, stayed in place.

My fiancé and I respected the boundaries that each of us had set in place through evaluating our own values and convictions at the time. My parents rules simply did not stick. I was on my way out of their house and their control, and I had no incentive to follow their dictations any longer. (Other than attempting to keep them happy until the wedding day so that we could get married without having to elope.) I had broken out of the mind control enough to realize I would rather get married to my fiancé than live at home, and we did everything in our power to get that to happen smoothly. Other couples were not so lucky.

My Courtship Story ~ Part 6: The Countdown

June 24, 2011
Print FriendlyPrint Friendly

by Permission to Live

Hunk and I and our parents set the wedding date that same night. He was going to graduate school (3 hours away) that August, and we both knew that we did not want to risk our parents nixing a wedding before next summer. A wedding over Christmas or spring break sounded complicated, and we both knew that he would be distracted from his schoolwork driving down to see me. Secretly I felt that I would go insane if I had to go days and days without seeing him. After a few calls to family members who lived some distance away, we settled on a date in July, eight short weeks away.

I now had a ring on my finger, and people who knew me at violin classes were shocked, they hadn’t even known I was dating anybody, and now I was engaged? I was getting married that summer? Who was this guy? Even at our conservative church there were similar reactions, and rumours started circulating that we were pregnant. One of my acquaintances in the church told me that I was being risky, that I “didn’t know that “Hunk” had been after pretty much every girl in the church.” That bothered me some, why would someone say that about him? I didn’t remember seeing that aspect of him over the year I had been in the church. I even talked to my Dad about it, wondering if I should ask “Hunk” what that girl had been talking about. My Dad said that peers opinions were pointless, the real people that mattered were “Hunks” parents, did they have good things to say about their son? Then everything must be fine. In the end I considered the source of the negative comments and decided to ignore it.

**********************

I stressed alot about leaving my family. As the oldest sibling I had so many responsibilities, would my mom be able to do it all without me? I knew my leaving meant that the sisters next down in the birth order would be taking on my chores, and I felt guilty for leaving them with that burden. I felt a burden to be a protector and encourager of my siblings, and even though I failed miserably at times, I loved them all so much. Someone else would be fixing their hair, practicing violin with them, and baking with them. Would any of them even remember me once I moved out? I tried to make time to connect with each sibling by taking each of them out on a date with me in the weeks before the wedding.

I felt the worst about leaving my six year old sister. This was the sister that I had cared for since my mom had put in my bedroom as an infant. I had been almost exclusively responsible for dressing her, grooming and bathing her, feeding her and correcting her. In recent years I had been homeschooling her as well, and she was making good progress in reading and writing and violin. Would she get the attention she needed after I was gone? She was very angry about my getting married, and told me that I couldn’t do it because “then I would have to move in with ‘him’”. I tried to explain to her that I wanted to live with “Hunk”, but that I still loved her and I would miss her so much. She didn’t take it well, and would hardly talk to me over the next six months or so. It was very hard for me to leave her.

My Courtship Story ~ Part 2: Waiting and Hoping

June 20, 2011
Print FriendlyPrint Friendly

by Permission to Live

Now that I had given up on being anything but what my parents wanted from me, I began to gain some sort of sense of contentment. I was still afraid that I was going to be a stay at home daughter the rest of my life, but I had hope that “the time of the singing” would eventually come. So I poured myself into being the best daughter I could be. I had discovered some food allergies that had been impacting my health, and after removing the troublesome food from my diet, I had more energy. I got better and better at cooking and cleaning, I dreamed about how I would run my own house someday. I was usually too tired to work on anything for my hope chest, but I was “happier” than I had been in a long time.

When I was almost 19, my family started going to a church for the first time in 10 years, and I looked forward to the service and fellowship every single week. Breaking out of the isolation my family had been in for so long was making a difference in my life. My skills at the violin were improving, and since music teaching was something I was possibly able to do out of the home if my husband ever needed extra money, I was allowed to get certification in Suzuki Violin Training. I had half a dozen students and I taught once a week at a local music group. I was good at it, and I enjoyed the chance to have an outlet.

I tried not to think about how long I could be waiting for the “time of the singing” to arrive, and spent the time as best I could. I got up early every Sunday morning and my sisters and I tried to get everything ready so we would be able to go to church which was almost an hour away. Every Sunday I would hold my breath and wonder if any of the young men would notice me. We were even allowed to participate in the bi-monthly Young Peoples group since it was attended and led by the parents. So I was getting more time around other teenagers than I ever had.

I had hopes for one young man, but he never really showed any interest. There was another young man I’ll call “Dave” who came over to say hi almost every Sunday, and I hoped that perhaps there was something there. I wrote down everything he ever said to me in my journal, hardly believing that anyone actually sought me out to talk with me. But months went by and nothing further ever happened, no other prospects appeared.

******************

The pastor’s son (who was planning on going into ministry himself) offered a class in biblical Greek, and my Dad decided that this was a great chance for all of us to get better at it, so two of my sisters, myself and my Dad all went together each Monday night to study Greek together.

It was an interesting class, and the teacher was fun. “Hunk” was my age, but I never really considered him as a potential mate. He was tall and had tons of poofy blond hair that stuck up all over his head. He seemed to be a decided nerd, always dressed in dress pants and a polo shirt. He was very smart, and when we had been to dinner at their house earlier that summer, he and I had ended up talking for some time about the Greek language and the recent reading I had been doing on the history of Israel. But he had been interested in another girl from the church, and I was sure that they were going to be together soon, if they weren’t already. Plus he was kind of loud and energetic. You could often hear him talking from the opposite side of the room, and that made my serious reserved self a little uncomfortable.

After awhile, my Dad started to make it to class less and less, he was busy with work, so he would send us girls by ourselves. Sometimes after class we would all hang out for a few minutes and talk before heading home, and I liked this teacher. “Hunk” was interesting to talk to, and he was considerate and smart. But I still never thought of him in a romantic way. Class ended early in the year, and “Dave” who had continued chatting with me every Sunday still hadn’t made a decisive move. I was starting to think that there was no one in our church for me to marry.

It’s About the DAUGHTERS

June 17, 2011
Print FriendlyPrint Friendly

[Note: This piece is being crossposted at No Longer Quivering as a way to introduce NLQ readers to guest writer, Libby Anne's new blog: Love, Joy, Feminism. Read Libby Anne's "The Beautiful Girlhood Doll" series here.]

by Liberty

When it comes to the multitude of problems with Christian Patriarchy, it is the position of the daughters that I am most passionate about. The patriarch has it pretty good – he’s the one who gets to call the shots. The sons usually don’t have it so bad either – they’re patriarchs in training. The mothers may spend their lives having baby after baby and they may believe that they’re to submit to the patriarch in everything, but they generally chose this life at some point, and knew what life was like before on the outside. Then there is the daughter. Unlike her mother, the daughter of Patriarchy has no choice.

She is told that all she is ever to be is a wife and mother. She may someday run a home business, selling herbs or dresses she’s made, but she may never work outside the home or – god forbid! – have a career.

She is told that an education is a dangerous thing. Education in the Bible and in homemaking skills are a good thing, but worldly knowledge is dangerous. The daughter of patriarchy learns early that she must guard her mind from evil thoughts and any question or doubt.

She learns early the importance of submission. She must submit to her parents, and, even when she is grown, to her father. She is taught that women must always be under male authority, and that an independent woman is a dangerous thing.

She spends her days helping her mother, cooking and cleaning and changing diapers. This is her destiny, and it is what she is put on earth for. She has little time with friends, as her mother is busy with baby after baby and she must be counted on to keep the house running.

She learns that the world outside of her patriarchal bubble is an evil and dangerous place. Feminists are selfish and ungodly, girls who wear tank tops and short skirts are sluts and whores, and the world is descending into chaos and damnation.

In sum, she is taught to believe what her father does, do as her father says, and stay in line. Any sign of independent thought is immediately squelched. She is taught a skewed view of the world, brainwashed into believing that those who might be her greatest allies are her enemies, and that to be different is to be evil. She knows nothing of the outside world save fear. Her education is often deficient, and even if she is educated well, she is taught to shoot low and her potential to dream big dreams is stifled, thus sabotaging her potential to even consider a worthwhile or fulfilling career. Thoughts normal girls have never enter her mind.

Adventures in Recovery ~ Souvenirs From The Circus

June 16, 2011
Print FriendlyPrint Friendly

by Calulu

Remember when you were a kid and would go to the circus or the carnival? Sure, there were elephants and chimps, usually crapping everywhere. The air was scented with cotton candy, popcorn and the smell of animals. I remember the games, balloons, darts, tossing things. Besides the lion tamers and the freak show part of the carnival there were usually fortune tellers, people that would look at your palm or into a cheap hunk of round glass and predict you’d meet a tall, dark and handsome stranger. It was exciting and thrilling, wasn’t it, when you were a kid?

When I was a member of Possum Creek Christian Fellowship we used to have something like that, but we called it a ‘conference’. Sometimes there were people there that purported to hear from God for you. They didn’t have crystal balls or tea leaves in the bottom of delicate porcelain cups.

At first I thought it was as equally ridiculous as the palm readers and fortune tellers of the circus even if you weren’t being told something as mundane as the ‘tall dark and handsome’ thing. I recall scoffing over it, saying there was no earthly way the things you were being told were real. But eventually, with enough time and drinking the Kool-Aid I started to believe in these ecclesiastical fortune tellers too.

I’d forgotten about this aspect of my old life until this week. I spent the week clearing out the large storage room over our garage. It’s being set up as my design studio, with all my art supplies, drawing desk and computers for those side jobs I’ve been taking on recently to supplement my studio and teaching income. I found a box that contained my old Bible and various tracts, photos and journals from my years at PCCF.

One of the more interesting bits were three pages of notes from an intense ministry weekend that my husband James and I attended about seven and half years ago. You have to realize this wasn’t long after James had confessed to a depression so deep that it made him consider suicide. He wasn’t long out of the mental ward. None of us knew at that point that it was a combination of internal dissonance between what he knew and believed and what the men of our church were pressuring him to believe. We didn’t know about his chemical imbalance due to a parathyroid gland tumor. We just knew he was deeply unhappy when our life was nearly perfect in most ways.

At a conference at RCCF a big ministry from the Wilmington, North Carolina area was claiming to heal people of depression and many other ‘spiritual’ problems by deliverance ministry, prophetic words from God and prayer. Somehow James got to talking to them and before I knew it scheduled us to go down for a ‘deliverance’ on Thanksgiving weekend.

I was furious, even if I did at that time believe people with various prophetic words for me that were supposedly from the Lord. I was furious I was being drug away from my children during a family holiday for something I did not want to do. I felt no need for ‘deliverance’. Part of me seriously feared what they might say.

We went. It wasn’t helpful, it was just all kinds of weird. It might have fit in well with a freak show or circus somewhere.

The Destiny of a Virtuous Daughter ~ Part 2: My New Love

May 29, 2011
Print FriendlyPrint Friendly
by Starfury

For as much as my parents objected to many worldly things, they gave in on a surprising number of equally worldly things. Most notably, in my case, was the subject of ballet. I had always wanted to dance from a young age, and when I was 8, my parents finally agreed to let me begin to take classes. This was often something I was reminded to be grateful for–they weren’t as conservative as other families, after all.

In truth, I was grateful for it. I loved it with all my heart, and had great dreams of practicing hard and winding up as a prima ballerina for some famous worldwide touring company and performing all the famous ballets. There was only one problem with this idea… I wasn’t sure how I could maintain the necessary strenuous schedule kept by company dancers (classes and rehearsals all day, every day), and still be a loving wife and mother who homeschooled her kids. As the years went on, I slowly began to decide that as much as I loved dance, I probably wasn’t going to end up doing it professionally. After all, I’d wanted to be many other things growing up, including an astronaut and a dolphin trainer, but neither was really compatible with homeschooling 6+ kids (and I didn’t like swimming under water).

Fortunately for my overactive imagination and tendency to jump wholeheartedly into things, ever embracing some new idea for my life that would somehow either be forced to fit the wife and mother mold, or be tossed out the window, my parents decided it was time that my political apathy came to an end. I was summarily informed that I would be participating in a program called TeenPact, which involved me being shipped off to the capital for four days to learn how the government worked. I had always hated politics, but it did offer high school credit, and my parents wanted me to expand my horizons–within the scope they had predetermined, of course.

My first day at the capital had my introversion hitting me full force. I was wearing an ankle-length skirt and my hair was bound up in a snood so I could wear a headcovering, but still seem somewhat “modern.” That was the first time I had ever touched a boy, when one of the boys there came over and shook my hand. There was a brief moment of horror, and wondering if I had just committed a terrible sin, but I decided that it couldn’t have been that bad. Lightning hadn’t struck me, and this was a Christian group, after all.

At the end of the four-day program, I was utterly changed. Politics was my new love, and I wanted nothing more than to go into it myself so I could help make a difference, turn people back toward Christ, and somehow set myself up as an example for how godly women can affect politics. My intentions were never purposefully arrogant–I merely thought that if I want someone to look up to, but the person I wanted didn’t exist, then I should pioneer the way myself. Though my aspirations were gradually turning independent, I realized that I had to keep them quiet… I should be more concerned about how to be a proper senator’s wife, than a proper senator.