proverbs 31 wife
Protected: Vyckie’s Story ~ Part 28: I could not wake up!!!
by Sierra
William Branham with a woman in his prayer line. (He would lay on hands, pray, and they would walk away healed, allegedly.)
If you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always had an answer. If you asked again in ten minutes, it would be a different one. I wanted to be a figure skater, detective, veterinarian, zoologist, writer, astronaut and archaeologist – and not just one at a time. When I went outdoors to play, I climbed rocks and saw them as mountains. When I jumped over streams, I bravely bridged rivers. With stuffed animals as my companions, I sailed pirate ships and submarines and narrowly escaped devastating wars through wit and determination. I harboured refugees and defeated tyrants. In the house, I turned huge cardboard boxes into storefronts and sold pets to imaginary customers. The bar in the basement was converted to a restaurant where I served gourmet meals to my four-footed friends and ran a lucrative business.
And so it came as an utter shock when I began to talk to my friends at church about the future. “What do you want to be?” I’d ask them, dreaming of sailing off to Europe in a wooden ship and forging a new life from grit and grease.
“Oh,” they would say, “a mom, of course.” Genuine surprise crossed their faces at the consideration of anything else. They told me how many baby boys and girls they wanted and what their names would be. They told me about their future houses and the music that would play at their weddings. Their words rattled against my ears, lifeless.
I stared at them in defeat, and wandered off toward the woods where the boys were playing with sticks fashioned into swords. If there was anything I didn’t want to be, it was a mother. The church made motherhood look like a living death. It meant confinement to the house, a constantly bulging belly, eternally wiping up spittle and piss and listening to the grating wail of infants. It meant serving perfect meals to a man who couldn’t make toast. I watched my own father as he concluded his meals with a barked, “Coffee, woman!” and was aghast to see my mother scurry to put water in the coffeepot. As soon as I was old enough to learn, I began to set up the coffeepot in advance and discretely plug it in before he had finished eating, desperate to stave off that disgraceful command. It didn’t work. When I moved to help my mother with the dishes and lessen her load, it drew comments that boiled my blood.
“Look at my two women in the kitchen, just the way it should be.”
I’m not your woman, I seethed inwardly. I may be your daughter, but I belong to me. Continue reading »
by Angel
1 - Only southern gospel music was acceptable for God.
2 - God teaches people different things at different places at different times. Therefore if someone wasn’t like us, we weren’t to judge them, just to pray that they would be more like us!
3 - God teaches girls all they need to know in making them fit mothers. So college is not needed.
4 - As a dutiful daughter, obedience meant doing what dad told us-even if we weren’t sure it was right.
5 - Even when dad is wrong, he’s right.
6 – Giving up and letting someone else win was being the adult in the situation. The weird thing was that usually the person I was giving in to was at least twice my age.
7 - Anyone who didn’t think like we did was bound for hell, and we could pray for them, but we couldn’t hang out with them because they wanted to tempt us into sin.
8 - Every person was born into the perfect family for them. Therefore, I was to be with my family at all times, because they were the only human beings good enough for me.
9 - My virginity was my most prized possession. I was taught this by the man who raped me of it in so many ways.
10 - Unconditional love meant for the person, not for their actions. Therefore, if you loved a person and they did something wrong, you tortured THEM for the action, and hated them to show that they behaved poorly.
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by Arietty
In the last months of my marriage I was gradually coming out of the fear laden fog that had been my life in fundamentalism. Now that I had internet access I would find myself reading more and more things written from a non-Christian perspective. I had joined a few forums based around interests I had but spent more and more time reading the off-topic threads. I was often blown away by how much grace some of these people showed in flame wars or contentious discussions, how much humility they had towards their own beliefs. Wasn’t grace “our” word? It was at first disturbing to learn so much from people who did not follow Christ but after a time I grew used to it and found myself more and more willing to look for wisdom and kindness in places other than my own backyard.
There were several people on the forum who called themselves Taoists. After I got over being fearful of this word I got interested in their discussions about a book called the Tao Te Ching. There was one translation and commentary in particular that they got a lot out of and I was intrigued because it was so utterly different than anything I was used to. One day my husband announced that we were all going camping with a bunch of other homeschoolers at someone’s country property (another great building-my-own-house for 10 years family). Well I knew what that would entail, me setting up all the tents, cooking all the food, washing all the dishes and all the while looking out for 6 children while my husband stood around with the men and talked about how wonderful he was. Maybe I would even get to hear his testimony again as he dragged this increasingly bloated tale out every time he was around anyone new. I was at this point so deeply burned out that I could not imagine going through a whole three days of this and I point blank refused to go. My husband was forced to go on his own with 5 of the children (I am sure all their needs were met by other moms there as happened any time he went somewhere solo with them). I and the baby had THREE WHOLE DAYS at home in peace.
On the first day, when my husband would be driving and unable to call me I took the baby into the city and went to a, *gasp*, Esoteric book store. I was very very nervous. The whole store smelled of incense and there was newage music playing that the fundamentalist tape in my brain reminded me was demonic. It was very peaceful and there were all kinds of people of all ages sitting around quietly reading on cushioned benches. I found the book that I had read about, bought it (with cash of course) and left. As soon as I was out of there I threw out the bag that had the store name on it and stuffed the book into my diaper bag.
Once home I started reading. There was the poetry type stuff which was the actual Tao Te Ching and then there was the commentary. I could not for the life of me understand any of it. People had been reading this thing since before Christ but it was just a mystery to me. Here were the poems.. very charming if vague observational pieces. Here was the commentary elaborating on what the poems might be saying. But.. but.. WHERE were the instructions?? How did my forum friends become Taoists without a book of instructions to follow? Gradually an understanding came to me that life and beauty was not necessarily governed by rules that could carefully followed to insure the approval of God. That maybe viewing every choice in every moment of the day as the following of instructions was stultifying in the extreme. That maybe there was another way to have a relationship with God that was not all about the ticking of boxes.
I have not traveled very far down the road of a way to have a relationship with God that is not based on ticking boxes. Really I’ve only pottered about with the idea. Because I’m no longer driven by fear to pursue spiritual interests I am able to just let it languish, let the ideas come to me now and again. It is totally different from my frenzied pursuit of righteousness while a fundamentalist. Maybe in another ten years I will have something wise to say about it.. or maybe not.
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My life was empty and miserable and I had no idea why. I knew that I loved my husband, but I could not understand why he was not yet a great spiritual leader, seeing as I had tried so hard to be the woman everyone said I had to be in order for him to want to be a great spiritual leader. I was even told that I shouldn’t take any Bible courses if my husband hadn’t taken them because it was “wrong” to know more than my husband about any subject. That just didn’t jive well with me. There were certain things that I should and did know more than him.
During this time of my second difficult pregnancy, with morning sickness until 30 weeks again, I was searching for meaning. I was questioning my faith in everything, and wondering where the truth was. I was a scared and unhappy little girl inside. I was a spiritual pharisaical snob. It was difficult for anybody to like me, as I was superior to them in almost every way.
One day, all that pride came crashing down as I made a huge realization. I was not a Christian. I had never accepted Christ as Savior. I had always wanted to be a Christian but somehow had missed the boat and thought that God would let me into heaven since I worked hard at being so much better than everybody else. I let go of my pride and my sin and I accepted Christ and became a real Christian.
I now felt so incredibly free. I no longer had to strive to be better than everyone else. I was free in Jesus. I’m 24 now and I have three children. My husband and I are using birth control, and aren’t sure we want to have any more natural children, although we know we want to adopt at least one little girl. We hope our sons will meet girls whose parents want them to date rather than court. We are hoping to send them to a good private school, but if not, they will go off to public school. I still have long hair, but I actually believe that it is ok to cut it now. And I still wear skirts and dresses because I personally feel more feminine in them and I like to feel feminine. But I don’t feel like other women must wear just skirts and dresses, and I don’t believe that it is something that I have to do, rather it is something that I choose to do.
Oh, and my husband is a much better spiritual leader now. He could never measure up to a superwoman, but now that I am free and human, he actually has a chance. We are both much happier.
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by Arietty
There were a lot of things in my QF days I professed to love.. no I actually loved. Things that were very important to me. Things I built friendships on. Things I was suddenly so completely over that it’s like another person had those interests. I got a bit of a shock when I realized what some of those interests were really about. Two of them stand out because it’s impossible to be in the home or in the church without being reminded of these past loves.
1. Conferences. OH how I LOVED conferences. Homeschooling conferences, Creation Science conferences, regular old Evangelical bible study conferences. I went to all of them and if something stopped me from attending (with six children the specter of vomiting was always with me) I was quite devastated. Nowadays you could not pay me to attend such an event and it’s not just a changed theology that keeps me home. I’ve had people offer to pay for me to attend conferences they thought would be good for me (“you will be so blessed..”) and I’m proud to say I managed to respond with complete politeness in my gracious refusal.
Why I really loved conferences: Because you got to listen to ideas, talk about ideas and have ideas. That was not my place in my marriage. Any time we had people over my husband would be quite irked if I started talking about ideas, to the point of screaming at me on a few occasions in front of the visitors. The majority of my social life consisted of discussing cooking, toilet training and why it was okay to not to make your child do all 200 problems in every Rod and Staff math lesson. Now there is nothing wrong with these topics but they were not my natural bent at all. Conferences were all about setting my mind free to ideas and being allowed to get excited over them.. I could even go up to one of the conference speakers and ask questions and have an interesting discussion completely removed from the domestic arts.
Once I was free to pursue my own interests and ideas and friendships I no longer had to pay an attendance fee to have an intellectual conversation.
2. Cooking. It pains me to say that I have never rekindled what was a fantastic pursuit of cooking. I honestly thought I was just burned out and the cooking love would come back but after 10 years I have to face the fact that it is gone. I did every kind of possible cooking when my love was burning bright.. Once a Month cooking which I enjoyed the challenge of, Amish cooking (add lard to everything), Health Food cooking (during the Age of Tofu).. and of course I baked all the family bread. I spent years thinking, planning, reading, researching.. all about cooking. And then suddenly this love was completely over. I waited for it to come back, made little forays that would have excited me in the past.. but it never returned.
Why I really loved cooking: It was my only creative outlet. It was always accepted, lauded even in my QF homemaker world. I had sacrificed every other creative outlet I’d had when I became a fundamentalist because they were all WRONG. The literature, the poetry, the love of art.. I was left with a few accepted classics and all my true loves were in the garbage bin. Goodbye erotic poetry collection, goodbye many novels of a very dubious nature, goodbye art painted by deviants. Really that list only scratches the surface. In my remaking of my world into a Christ-centric, Christ approved place I was left with very little of my old life. Nor were there ready-to-go Christian substitutes unless I wanted to elevate Janette Oak to the same level as Margaret Atwood.
Once I was free to pursue my own interests cooking slipped from my heart. My bookcases bulged again and I bought a microwave.
I get a bit nostalgic for these past loves but.. life is good.
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by Angel
I was 17 when my dad leaned over the seat of the car to tell me, “We have a surprise for you when you get home.” I was on my way to a homeschool conference. Instantly my curiousity was peaked. Dad wasn’t going to make me wait, though. “It’s a guy. Do you remember the McDs?” I didn’t. “They run a magazine like ours and they have 11 kids…from Illinois.”
I sat in numb silence while Dad explained to me that their oldest son wanted to court me. “What’s his name?” I wanted to know, but Dad couldn’t remember. He thought it was Michael. I was suddenly curious, terrified, and…scared to death. I was going to meet the guy my dad deemed worthy enough to court me.
All weekend long I thought about that. I talked to my close friend Lynne, asking her advice. She wasn’t all that informed on our family yet, but she had mothered me when mom was sick, since I was about 4. Whatever advice she gave me was forgotten in a rush of nerves. I couldn’t think. This guy was my age, and knowing my dad, he was probably the only person I would ever get to court who was even close to my age. I’d better get this one or else be willing to court one of the many of my dad’s friends who were already asking for the privilege.
Finally the day came. Michael, his parents, and one or two siblings showed up at our house. I still remember that my very first reaction was to think that I liked Michael’s dad more than I did Michael. He wasn’t my type. This feeling was intensified as I learned that he did not read fiction, he loved to work with computers, and he felt that girls should never wear makeup. I didn’t like a lot of things about him, actually. But in my mind, I struggled to find excuses to court him. After all, I would probably not get another chance to get out of my house.
When the family left, my dad paced the livingroom and raved about the boy. He was definitely worthy. Ha. He was definitely boring. I pointed out the few things I liked about Michael. Dad decided that he would let Michael know he could in fact court me.
I think it was sometime the next day that I nervously approached my mom with my hesitations. To my utter shock, she instantly sided with me. She told dad that we could never do a long distance relationship, and gave several other reasons why we should wait on this choice. After a while, dad gave up, and I never saw Michael again.
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by hopewell
With tongue firmly in cheek, I pay homage to those never rattled, never angry, always positive, always thankful Mommys who have made me see my world oh so differently! [And, who have inspired me to find a new form a recreation than reading all their blogs!!! lol...]. I posted this at a Free Jinger to get people thinking creatively about their world. I am not trying to blashpheme, insult anyone. Please relax and take it as H.U.M.O.R., ok?
Sunday started off so very well!!! Our Savior woke us in time to worship him in the fellowship of other believers! This is SUCH a blessing to me I cannot adequately express my thanks! Especially since ds and his friend enjoyed each other’s fellowship until the very wee hours of this morning!! How they do encourage each other! Friend’s Mom, while not (yet!) a Christian, has put aside her presciption RX addiction and stopped submitting questionable medical claims for same since our family has lovingly surrounded her with a hedge of prayerful protection. I can see the seeds we have planted in her heart grow as quickly as her last tanning visit fades. My two prayer warriors and I have also helped her huband to find a purpose in life that does not include supporting the evil Budwieser empire. He has been so defrauded by his wife’s behavior, her cothing, and her reluctance to submit to his Godly leadership in their family. But, I digress from my purpose in this post….
Although with no dh, I had to bow to my son’s authority and allow us to by pass fellowship with other believers so he could get the rest he needed so badly. Poor boy! He witnessed to his friend and fellowshipped with him so long, he had to have rest. Of course, I got his meds for him and made them a YUMMY breakfast of packaged cinammon rolls just to make sure they felt loved and nurtured. Then I began on my daily “blessings”–how silly some women can be to think of these as “chores”" I know I shouldn’t do these on the Sabbath, but my ds really wanted to wear clean clothing–and all of his acceptable clothes were dirty since I hadn’t realized he’d worn all of his clothes in the last two days. I got out my homemaking binder [such a blessing!!] and made a note to myself to collect his dirty clothes and wash them daily so he will be pleased with me [and so I will be honoroing his headship of this family!!]
And, since ds, has kindly pointed out that I do what he calls “nagging,” about his blessings, I decided to forgo the protracted battle bless him by cleaning out the litter box, taking out the trash and getting all the dishes and cups out of his bedroom for him!! I love my son so and know he is a blessing from God and I must show my thanks for this in every little way I can find! And while I do love it when he takes care of these tasks for me, I know his life is full of so many more importatnt things than little household chores that a Mother should be thrilled to take on.
Later, as I was cooking 3 dinners, baking an apple crisp, keeping ds’s laundry going and taking his phone messages, my dd came home with her bf. She is such a blessing!! So encouraging to me. She remarked (how sweet of her!) that the kitchen looked almost as nice as when she cleans it! Of course I gave a slient prayer of thanks for this treasure and the sweet way in which she is growing into a true Proverbs 31 woman!! Her friend had invited her back to her house to do their homework [oh how I wish I had the courage to homeschool her! God is working on my heart....], but instead her parents had asked if they could help blow insulation into their walls and attic. I questioned in my heart if this was really a job for women and girls, but her father needed them to be his helpmeets in this since her Mother was taking care of 3 other children with flu. So, putting aside questions of femininity I let her help. She truly blessed this family!!
Finally at 10 as I was lovingly folding the last of the fluffy clean towels, my son came home to have fellowship with me before bedtime! God is so good! My son has made me very mindful of my critical attitude toward his need for time to evangelize to the teens in our neighborhood. How is it breaking curfew if he’s spreading God’s Word? Honestly, how could I criticise. Tears rolled down my cheeks in frustration at his lack of obediance in joy as I praised him for his work and praised the Lord again for such a Godly young man. After I reluctantly angered my son by asking for his cell phone and laptop for the night, he again reminded me that these, too, belong to the Lord and the Lord’s work!! How silly of me to imagine him sitting up all night texting people or looking at defrauding images! I am so blessed!
http://hopewellmomschoolreborn.blogspot.com/
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Lust Behind the Modest Denim Curtain
by Arietty
During my most deepest, holiest, quivering before God years I would sometimes find my Christian Womanhood alarmingly infiltrated by admirations that were NOT the admirations of a woman whose price was “above rubies”. These admirations stood in stark contrast to my floral blouses and the verses in cross stitch I had displayed on the walls of my home and to the Christian women whose example I wished to emulate. I knew they were wrong, dubious at best and not something I would ever admit to. They were like chocolates hidden in the underwear drawer of a dieter. I knew they were there and I had no intention of throwing them away and every now and then I would have just one..
Bette Midler. I adored Bette Midler. My husband had been coming home later and later throughout our marriage and one day it occurred to me that there was really no good reason to be upset about this–life was completely oppressive when he was there. He eventually was never home before 10pm and frequently much later (what he was doing I have no idea as his work day ended at 5pm). One thing I loved to do in his absence once the children were in bed was watch television. At my most depressed I would watch anything for the numbing effect but I did find myself looking out for certain guilty pleasures and any movie with Bette Midler was one of them. Bette Midler was LOUD. She was brash. She dressed in gaudy, ridiculous, happy clothes. She was very funny and deliciously self-deprecating. My husband hated her guts. There seemed to be regular Bette Midler movies on television and I always came away from one refreshed and depressed.. because it touched on a part of me that I could not express. I secretly wanted to live like Bette Midler did. Grandly, loudly, vividly with no meek and quiet spirit in sight.
Doc Martens. I became aware of these in the 80′s and I immediately fell in love with them. Whenever I was out and would see some goth girl in black velvet and Doc Martens I would be filled with wistfulness.. I wanted to be a person who wore Doc Martens. They made me happy just to look at them. One day in a doctor’s office I found a magazine with a fashion puff piece about wearing them and surreptitiously ripped it out, took it home and hid it in box labeled SIZE 4-5 WINTER DRESSES. I used to take it out and look at it every now and then. I knew if I had not chosen this Godly life I would have been living in a big city and wearing Doc Martens.
The Epicure Guide in the newspaper. The Epicure Guide was all about people who went to funky cafes and had pesto and other exotic dishes and drank beautiful coffee while discussing art, music and ideas. They employed sparkling wit and no one ever pursed their lips in disapproval or talked about “the tongue” in Proverbs. Absolutely no food item featured in The Epicure Guide was suitable for cooking in huge pots and storing in gallon freezer bags as part of the Once a Month Cooking plan. I wanted to be one of those people. The closest I ever got was when I managed to read a courtesy copy of Time magazine over a cup of coffee at MacDonalds with the kids in the playground. I could sip my coffee and read about movies I would never see and place I would never visit.
Shh! Those were some of my secret desires. Don’t tell Nancy Campbell!
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