Joyfully At Home: Chapter 14-Part Three

Hello!

I've had a long and crazy day with Spawn.   

Every Wednesday since fall, Spawn and I have gone for walks after I pick him up from preschool.   At first, we just walked the length of the block from the preschool playground to the library.   As he got stronger - and more interested in exploring - we started walking from school to the library to the local diner to pick up lunch before getting in our van that I had parked by the diner.  This is around 4 city blocks total.   

COVID has made this more interesting at times - the school has opened and closed as has the library and the diner - but we just kept trucking along.

Today, we decided to walk from school to the diner and back to the library.   Spawn was strong enough to walk that far - around 6 city blocks with a long rest at the diner on a sunny front step - but we ran into a little snag.   Spawn gets bored walking with his walker - but he's not quite steady enough on his feet to walk without one of my hands while I carry the walker in my other hand.  There were also some uneven icy bits of the sidewalk where I needed to give him a bit of psychological support with my hands on the walker.  

That worked fine when I had two free hands.   On the way back to the van, though, I only had one free hand because our lunch was in a grocery bag in my other hand.  

This lead to a memorable moment that reminded me of that logic problem where you have a coyote, a chicken and a bag of seeds that you have to take across a river in a rowboat with only room for one thing at a time.     

I thought I had it worked out - walk Spawn to a clear part of the sidewalk, settle him in place, get walker and food, walk those to the next clear place, and repeat.

The only problem was that Spawn objected loudly and emotionally to my letting go of his hand.   He was howling "NEED IT!" (e.g., he needed one of my hands for balance) while I chanted "Spawn, nothing bad is going to happen" a bit more firmly than I wanted to while carrying a walker and a grocery bag of lunch foods over uneven ice while he screamed bloody murder nearby on a clean, dry area of sidewalk.

I kept my sense of humor by thinking how grateful I was that he chose to scream "NEED IT!" unlike the time he screamed "HELP! HELP ME!" when I put him down once while loading the car for school.  "NEED IT!" reads like the partial-nervous temper tantrum it was; "HELP ME!" might get some people to stop.

On the far side, Spawn perked up and said "Nothing bad happened!  Mama, no bad!"    I agreed and told him I was glad he had been brave.   But we were still stuck with Mama having two hands and three items that needed to go in those hands.

Spawn's first solution was to have me walk on the farther left side of the side walk, dangling the grocery bag of food over the snow in my left hand while holding Spawn's right hand.  Spawn walked close to me using his left hand in mine to brace while dragging his walker next to him using his right hand.  This meant the walker took up most of the sidewalk, kept getting wheels hung up in the snow on the right side of the sidewalk, and took a crazy amount of effort for Spawn to move.

Then Spawn figured something out.  He was completely over walking IN his walker - you know, the way PTs expect you to use it, silly PTs...... - but the walker has a nice bar across the back that he could use to push the walker in front of him for stability!   He strutted the last block or so pushing his walker in front of him to the visible amusement of various people driving down the road.  

I wish I had gotten a picture - it looked a bit like the walker was possessed and scooting in front of Spawn - but I really did not have a free hand to pull out a camera, lol.

We're working our way steadily through the fourteenth chapter of Jasmine Baucham's "Joyfully At Home".   The first two posts have been about why women don't need to go to college - while mentioning that Jasmine is, in fact, going to college.   This next quote made a ton of sense to Miss Baucham at age 19 - but hasn't aged well: 

However, I can share with you, as a young woman, some of the reasons I decided against going off to school. It was more important for me to remain under the protection of my father and the discipleship of my mother than it was for me to travel cross-country to sit under the discipleship of others. I believe my primary calling is towards my home, and there is no other place I'd rather be, here in my family's home for now, and, Lord bless, someday running a home with my own at educating my own children. I have no desire for a career that would take me away from that sphere. I believe that a Christian home is the best training ground that young women can be afforded and that the safest place for young women to be is under her parents' authority. (pg. 165)

Here we go!

I have no problems with young adults wanting to maintain the discipleship of both of their parents - but "the protection of their father?" 

 There's two ways that can go. 

The first toxic way that this can go is a generalized obsession with keeping women under a male family member as spiritual head at all times.   This is a way of infantilizing women to keep them submissive to their fathers and eventually to their husbands.   The problem with this is that this supremely patriarchal-family structure does not have much support in the Bible.   There are plenty of women in the Bible who exist outside of the correct family structure like Deborah, Esther, Ruth, and Mary.    More broadly, even in patriarchal societies, there are wide swaths of female decision making within a home and family.   A young women needs to figure out how to structure her time somehow and avoid sin; that's not magically going to get easier with a husband and children.

The second, more fantastical way that "the protection of the father" can go toxic, is when the family is living in a group delusion about the relative danger of outsiders.   Geoffrey Botkin taught his teenage daughters that rapists lurk around every corner so the girls had to be armed and accompanied by a brother at all times.  This comes up in several of their free podcasts, blog articles and their book "So Much More".   The Botkin expect a level of physical and sexual aggression seen in active war-zones and occupied countries, not in stable communities.   Voddie Baucham seems to agree with that on some level since he declares that husbands should be "priests, prophets, protectors and providers" - which seems to be a lot to drop on the shoulders of one guy, IMHO.   As a form of family structure, it's fairly anti-Biblical.  Precious few families had enough income to keep the women members of their family safely ensconced at home all of the time.  Most women had to venture out into public places to fetch water, provision their family or work for more wealthy families.  

I appreciate all my parents have taught me - but my parents had me solidly versed in the basics of running a household by the time I was 18.   Simply, we have so many labor saving devices - washing machine, dryer, refrigerator, microwave - and so many consumer goods - clothing, household goods, packaged foods - that running a household is far more manageable now than it has ever been.

In terms of learning about child-rearing and homeschooling, both of those have a large element of learning on the job with your children.   I helped care for my nephew for a few weeks after he was born right around the time I got pregnant with Spawn.   Being around a baby a lot helped me feel more confident about my own caretaking skills - but this took around two weeks of a few hours a day help, not multiple years.

How should moms learn how to home-school?  Honestly, they should to college and get at least an elementary school teacher's degree.  That will at least expose them to the basics of lesson planning, child development, and some methodology for teaching math, reading and writing.

Jasmine Baucham keeps bringing up the false dichotomy of "traveling really far away to go to college" vs. "doing all your classes online at home".  Many, many college students live at home while commuting to college.   Relatively few students travel outside of the state that their parents live in for college. In 2014, 58% of college students attend college within 100 miles of their hometown and 72% live within the same state. 

If living at home is so common, why is Jasmine spouting this myth?  Primarily because she has no way of knowing any different than what her dad told her.  

Why did her dad teach her a false idea about college attendance while living at home?  Well, the real danger of attending college in person is spending time around other peers.  Ironically, the biggest danger isn't from the students who are partying hard in college.  No, the danger is the nice, clean-cut members of various campus Christian groups who will tell the super-sheltered homeschoolers that their parents views are completely insane.

I've always wanted to be a wife and mother.  I didn't date much from high school through my second or third year of teaching because I was getting my career in order.   When I was 26 or so, I realized that I wasn't putting any effort into finding someone to start a family with.  After a few false starts and a lot of first dates that went nowhere, I found my husband and eventually we had Spawn.

When I was in high school, I thought a lot about what I wanted out of life - and I decided that I couldn't be certain that I'd get married.  I wanted to get married.  I knew that I had an excellent chance of getting married and having children based on statistics alone - but I also knew that not everyone marries.  Not everyone who wants to marry does.  Not everyone who wants children has them.  

The question that was starting me in the face was "What do I want my life to look like if, for reasons beyond my control, I am single my whole life?"   (I had already hashed out that I wanted kids in my life if I had a husband.  If not biological, then adopted or foster.  That was a non-negotiable for me)

The simple answer is that I wanted a career that mattered.  I wanted to help people learn about science because I found science absolutely fascinating.  I didn't think I was up for raising a child by myself - but as a teacher I could raise a lot of students a little bit.

Being a stay-at-home daughter was not an option - thank God!  Honestly, though, the thought of the lives of most of the adult women who are stay-at-home daughters after 25 years old in households wealthy enough that they aren't needed to work scares me.  Running my own home is satisfying if exasperating at times; being the parlor maid-nursery maid-go-fer in my parents' home until someone marries me sounds like hell.