Joyfully At Home: Chapter Eight - Part Three

In Jasmine Baucham's "Joyfully At Home" the eighth chapter focuses on false ideas that young women may have about husbands.  In the previous post, Jasmine fielded a question from a young woman who wanted to know what she could or should do when she had a crush on a young man.

My answer was to spend time around the young guy.  (As answers go, mine feels self-explanatory.)

When we left Jasmine, her answer involved crying in her dad's office interspaced with implausible scenarios where God is getting her to do non-sexual things like prayer by making her attracted to this guy.   To me, it's a sad commentary on how emotional purity messes people up when the fact of being sexually attracted to a man is so terrifying that Jasmine has to rationalize it as being part of a Divine Plan to achieve completely non-sexual ends.

From there, we return to the minor theme that Good Girls (TM) can beat sexual desire by praying correctly:

We can close our eyes and grit our teeth and ball our fists all we want, but if we are not consistently on our knees before the Lord in prayer, our struggle is in vain. I didn't pray for the young man's future wife. I didn't pray for my future husband. I didn't pray that the young man would be my future husband ( well, not often....). I prayed that Thy will be done. And praying that prayer, and submitting my emotions and my hopes to the future for the Lord, I found a freedom that I never could achieve through my own self-help remedies. (pg. 96)

What a masochistic series of prayer options those are!  All of those prayers require abrogating self
beyond the point of sanity. 

My church teaches that prayer is communication with God.   Under that definition, Jasmine can pray by sitting down and pounding out her feelings - good, bad, and indifferent - about the crush she is having.   I remember praying more than once that I was lonely, sick of being single and irritated that God give me a desire to be married without bringing a man I could marry into my dating experience.  I remember praying more than once that I really, really, really liked so-and-so and maybe I'd like being married to him? 

And honestly - because I was having a conversation about where I was - I was more able to move into asking God to help me see God's Will in my life.  Writing that out sounds noble and spiritually mature; there was a better-than-half chance that I felt crabby that my current wish-wants-and-desires were taking a while.

Here's the thing, though. 

The process of being honest with God and being honest with self followed by waiting....that's how we grow.    I didn't grow beyond desiring marriage when single; that was an honest desire.  By waiting, I accepted that I could have a good life as a single woman.  I didn't grow beyond wanting to marry my boyfriends in the first heady weeks of our relationships, but I realized that relationships can feel amazing while being fatally flawed after being through a break-up.

Why is that different from the quote above?  My religion allows me to have wishes, wants and desires - and God's Will will be done.   I'm allowed to have feelings - just like the authors of the books of the Bible did.  Just like Jesus did.

Most importantly, no one recommended praying for my future spouse or the future spouse of the person I was crushing on.  That's next-level brainwashing techniques that you are applying to yourself - and not cool.

The second way to control our reaction is to embrace accountability. I talked to my dad about my feelings far too late. By that time, I had lost my appetite, I was morose and withdrawn, and I had so many feelings pent up inside that when I opened my mouth to express them, all that came out were inelegant sobs. The thing about a lot of us girls is that our emotions affect every aspect of our personality. Try as we might, we can't compartmentalize our strong feelings. I've found that being open with both my parents about what I'm feeling and for whom: 1) eliminates the stress of trying to keep an embarrassing secret; 2) turns that embarrassing secret into an opportunity to build a stronger relationship with my parents; 3) my parents know where I am emotionally, and helps them as they prepare me to become the wife of one of the men who drives me crazy; and 4) give them a point of reference when they need to admonish me for the occasional moroseness brought on by my - shall we call it a crush? That seems so trite. (pg. 96)

 Thinking back to when I had crushes as a teenager and young adult, my family always knew about it because I was generally in a good mood and talked incessantly about how great so-and-so was.  And did you know that so-and-so....?  Also - so-and-so said.....

In other words, I was neither subtle about what was going on in my head nor particularly unpleasant to be around once the adult listener kindly overlooked that I was dragging a guy they'd never met into every conversation.  I was also rather distracted - but I'm generally scatterbrained so that may not have been as noticable.

Oh, Jasmine.  I'm great at compartmentalizing strong feelings - and I'll bet you dollars to donuts that most of your loyal readers are, too.  To survive in a world that is freaked out by disabilities and death, I learned to stuff sadness and anger deep down inside of me.  Doing that allowed me to pass as a happy-go-lucky everygirl.

I suspect that sounds very familiar to young women in CP/QF land since they are not allowed to be angry, sad, sexual or ambitious outside of home and ministry.

After all, stuffing emotions inside doesn't hurt anyone, right?

Wrong.

Stuffing emotions hurts the person who is not allowed to express anger, sadness, sexual attraction or ambition ever; crushing all negative emotions means that all that negativity goes inward - why am I such a bad fit for my life? - rather than outward - I am angry that I can't flirt with Joe. 

That's a recipe for anxiety, depression and eating disorders. 

Good news is that you can unlearn the habit of stuffing emotions.  I've been doing that for nearly 20 years now.  I did a lot of hard work and in return I'm more centered, more able to handle strong negative emotions when they happen and more happy than I've ever learned before.

Speaking of strong emotions, I hope that Jasmine is describing the standard level of embarrassment that most pre-teens and young teens have when discussing anything sexual or romantic** with their parents. 

What I fear is that Jasmine has absorbed the emotional purity (emo-pure) junk idea that crushes are wrong, shameful, sinful and therefore embarrassing.  The reason I think that is she describes having a crush as needing to keep an embarrassing secret.  I also tried to keep my crushes secret - but not from embarrassment.  For me, I enjoyed having my own fantasies about why I liked So-and-so and enjoy the flush of energy and excitement that a crush brings.  No matter how sweet or sympathetic my parents (or friends) were, talking about a new crush consciously tended to kill my buzz.

As for the last two points, 19-year-old Jasmine can't have realized how oblivious her parents sound if the last two ideas are true. 

 Preparing a daughter to be a wife and a son to be a husband starts in early childhood with teaching children how to use words to express their feelings, teaching children how to share and rewarding patience and perseverance.  If her parents are waiting to start teaching interpersonal skills, job skills or the basics of human sexuality until Jasmine has a crush on a marriageable man, that's insane. 

And speaking of stuffing emotions, since when is moroseness a sin?  People have feelings.  People are responsible for their own feelings - not the feelings of others.  If Jasmine is morose, that's on Jasmine.  Her parents and siblings - but mostly her parents, I suspect - are responsible for dealing with their feelings of irritation, frustration, or helplessness when Jasmine is sad.   Instead, the parents essentially tell her to hide her feelings so that the parents can ignore their strong feelings.

That's not healthy - but that kind of emotional mutilation is the hallmark of CP/QF life.  Tread with care.

**I grew up with parents who treated sexuality in a positive, educational way.  I still went through a phase between 10-14(ish) where I would have preferred to eat broken glass than discuss anything involving my body or budding sexuality with them.  I bring this up because I often hear 2nd generation CP/QF escapees hoping that their kids will be free of embarrassment if their parents teach sexuality just right.   Sex-positivity and age-appropriate education is wonderful and life-giving - but pre-teen/young teens may still feel awkward about discussing things with their parents.