Joyfully At Home: Chapter Six - Part One

We've finally reached mid-summer in Michigan. I'm having a blast enjoying temperatures in the mid-eighties with very low humidity unlike our normal weather this time of year of 90०F + with 90% humidity.   My inlaws own a we-pick/you-pick blueberry operation and were short on pickers during the week of the county fair.  I offered to help out with part of my wages being paid out in blueberries.  This means that I've been crazy busy picking, cracking skins and drying blueberries.  By tomorrow night, I should have 42 pounds of blueberries dried for the winter.  Well, probably closer to 40 pounds because a blueberry cobbler is calling my name.

Chapter Six of Jasmine Baucham's "Joyfully At Home" aims to disabuse young women of false dreams about husbands.    I giggled a lot through this chapter in which a 19 or 20 year-old single woman explains how marriage will be very different than her readers expect it to be. 

The only quote I'm going to look at today reveals how deeply marriage is prioritized in CP/QF culture as the only acceptable life choice for women:

My biggest credential for talking about the joys of finding out contentment in Christ is the fact that I'm a single young woman of marriageable age. (...)

As we move forward, I want you to keep this question in mind:

What would you do if I told you that you would never be married?

Or if I told you that you would be single for the next 10 years?

Now, I know my audience well enough to know that some of your knuckles are white right now, and your eyes are as big as saucers: never married? Perish the thought! For the sake of full disclosure, I will say that very few things are as exciting to me as a prospect of being a link in the legacy of multi-generational faithfulness that my parents are striving to impart to my brothers and me by imparting it to my own children, and perhaps being able to impart it to my children's children. And, on a much less multi-generational minded level, I'm a hopeless romantic, too! But something I've been thinking about lately is that my dream of getting married, like all dreams in my life - should be held in open palms, not clenched fists. Whatever my state, I need to be able to honestly pray, " Thy will be done." And if his will is that I remain single, the last thing I want to do is to forge the habits of discontentment so early on in my life! And even if his will is that I get married someday, I want to spend a single years enjoy his pursuit of him, not matrimony. (pg. 80)

I disagree with young Ms. Baucham: CP/QF women who have graduated high school should lean into how they feel at the idea of living at home for another 10, 20, or 30 years. 

See, for young women in mainstream society,  becoming an adult who is financially, socially and domestically independent of her parents can be accomplished as a single adult.   In fact, most women live independently of their parents for some period of time prior to marriage.  I moved into my own apartment when I got a full-time teaching job when I was 25.  I married when I was 30 so I was on my own for about 5 years.

Did I want to get married prior to that?  Yup.  Like a lot of people, I looked forward to meeting the right person, settling down and raising a family.   Sometimes, I felt lonely and lost or worried that I'd never meet the right guy.  What kept me grounded, though, was the fact that I was living a good, satisfying life as a single adult.  My first three years of teaching required me to work 60-70 hours a week to keep up with lesson planning and grading for all of my classes.  That didn't leave much time for dating - or a husband and kids.  I had a small apartment where I enjoyed being able to decorate to my tastes.  I learned how to cook for one.   I participated in various forms of American and Irish folk dancing and started walking long distances for fun.   In other words, I was an adult woman with all the benefits therein.  I didn't have to wait for marriage to explore life as an adult.

For CP/QF young women reading "Joyfully At Home", the costs of delayed marriage are completely different.  Since marriage is the start of independent adulthood, waiting 10 years to get married means that a young woman will be in a holding pattern under her parents until a husband appears.   Ten years sounds intermittable for a teenager - but several of the SAHD leaders have been in that holding pattern for 20 years now. 

Lean into those feelings.  If living at home like a teenager into your 30's or 40's sounds horrific, take a long, hard look at how much time and energy your parents are willing to spend finding a suitor for you.  Really think about how many single men know you - and how many new single men you meet a year.  Think about what happens to you financially when the primary wage earner in the family dies when you are in your 50's or 60's with no work experience.  Go to a fast-food restaurant or coffee shop or retail store on a busy day and pay attention to the working conditions because those are the places that hire people with no previous work experience.

Young Jasmine's wide-eyed dreams of being the second-link in her parents' multigenerational plan to outbreed the rest of us is funny rather than tragic because we future-dwellers know that Jasmine marries a suitable man - then throws the plan out the window!  That's the danger of planning the lives of minors; the kids at maturity may well decide on other plans.  Plus, Botkin-esque spreadsheets that detail the expected marriage dates and breeding rates of living children plus generation after generation after generation until all of Tennessee is related to Geoffrey Bokin or Voddie Baucham is futile.  You can't force someone to marry young if they haven't met someone they want to marry.  Writing dreams on slips of paper doesn't solve infertility or provide financial support for a growing family.  Since this belief system is both overly optimistic and rule-based, I doubt either man estimated the number of descendents who never married, never had children or fell away from CP/QF lives. 

Finally, I don't believe in lying to God during prayer.  Yup, Christians are supposed to believe that God's Will will be done - but that's a very different idea than proclaiming that I'm equally ok with every option that's on the table!  The night before my son was born I was praying hard that my son live - and live without disabilities that cause physical pain - and that I survive to see him grow.   I prayed that because those were the wishes imprinted on my heart and soul right that minute.   Praying that I'd accept calmly whatever came next would be false witness against myself - because I was going to be heartbroken if my son died and fucking PISSED if I died.

Christians believe that God is infinitely powerful so I figure an all-powerful Creator can handle my fears and anger as well as my joy or pious resignation.

Next up in this series: Jasmine starts to mock all the bad reasons that an unmarried woman might want to get married.