Hello!
I found my copy of "The Battle of Peer Dependency" by Marina Sears! It had fallen in the drawer that I keep summer clothes. The hardest part now is finding time to transcribe since my son is old enough that he listens to everything I say.
Chapter Four was all about friends - specifically about how no-one ever needs friends. It was a long slog of extreme isolationism. Chapter Five is all about family - and so far has been a barely coherent with rage slopped all over it. The chapter starts with this rant:
Now, remember, this lady homeschooled four of her own children.
This is her idea of quality writing - six sentences with five different topics.
It's quite hard to critique any of her ideas because there's no support or examples for any of them. How can I disprove that families have been destroyed "methodically" and "at break neck speed" Mrs. Sears fails to explain what either period looks like?
I'm going to skip her list of favored demonic "-isms" for now; I'm sure she'll double back on them later - perhaps even with supports!
No, I think we should focus in on the only two related sentences - the damningly xenophobic 'families vary by ethnic, social, political and religious groups who are only looking out for their own good!' located at the end of the quote.
Mrs. Sears is so intensely Evangelical, white, middle-class, and American focused that she's decided that her definition of family is the correct "Biblical" one - and everyone else can be damned.
Does that even make sense?
Mrs. Sears' excessively truncated family unit of a working father, a home-schooling mother and a group of exceptionally sheltered kids is abnormal to the majority white Evangelical middle-class Americans. The people who most resemble her in race, socio-economic status, nationality and religion don't homeschool their kids. They may shelter kids from media involving sex, profanity, crime or drug use - but they don't freak out when their child has friends outside of the family. The mother is more likely to stay-at-home when her family is young - but many work part-time or full-time as needed.
That section reminds me of a presidential townhall style debate in 2016 when an African-American man asked Trump how he would handle civil rights if he became president. Trump launched enthusiastically into a description of how awful life was in inner-cities and how he'd use increased policing to bring down crime rates.
Trump's face said that Trump believed he'd nailed the question. The questioner's face said otherwise. As commentators pointed out, the majority of African-Americans live in the suburbs and are middle-class. Assuming that a person must be poor, live in an inner city and be afraid of their neighborhood simply because the person is Black is stereotyping.
Mrs. Sears is so busy stereotyping people by race, class and religion that she misses that "I care about my loved ones" is a human universal.
Next, Mrs. Sears word-froths for a bit before diving into this great example of how strange the ATI habit of linking definitions seems to outsiders:
Personally, I got the big idea at "a desolate house". That's a pretty solid descriptor of the level of hardship facing a woman with dependent children when her husband died or divorced her during Biblical times. Honestly, women do take a substantial economic hit after being widowed or divorced today - but the severity of the loss is less than it was when most people worked daily to get the wages they needed to feed their family for the next day.
The rest of the quote borders on absurdity. Seeing that "almanah" is derivative from "alman" is not a large stretch for speakers of Western languages since we have plenty of examples of using suffixes.
Most people, though, would have stopped once they looked up the Hebrew word for "bereave" and realized that it's about the loss of offspring rather than the loss of a spouse. Bereave in Hebrew sounds much closer to "lose offspring to death or kidnapping" than it is to "to widow" or "to divorce".
Mrs. Sears lost her husband in a tragic, freak car accident when they were both young. What I don't understand is why that tragedy has made her so obsessed with the evils of divorce. She routinely brings up throughout the book how awful it is for children to be raised without a father in the home - but her children grew up with their father removed by death. That's far more final than having a dad who lives in a separate home due to a divorce.
And - near as I can tell - her kids turned out fine. Yeah, she wrote this book about how she was locked in a battle against the evil forces of her sons wanting to spend time with their peers - but that's a sign that the boys were developing normally. Sure, she tried her hardest to warp that development into being dependent on their siblings and mother for socialization - but the fact that the "peer dependence" kept cropping up makes it clear she wasn't great at permanently warping them.
Time will tell - but the whole "divorce is the bane of the western world" keeps cropping up in the book.
Maybe it's a case of "I lost my husband like this, and it was terrible. So every loss of a husband must be terrible. How dare anyone actually WANT that!?" Not unlike some people who suffer infertility or pregnancy loss, becoming 'pro-life' because THEY lost or couldn't have a pregnancy, so anyone choosing that must be terrible.
ReplyDeleteLosing a good husband to death is terrible, certainly. Getting rid of a bad husband by divorce, though, is completely different. Sears also has this assumption that all divorced dads completely bail on raising their kids. Does that happen? Sure - but were those dads good at being fathers before they divorced? Probably not. My husband is a great dad to Spawn; he's been involved in direct care since Spawn was in the NICU. If we'd divorce, he'd certainly want 50% parenting time - and I'd want him to have it.
DeleteI hate when women who have never had a life-threatening pregnancy declare that they would "love" to sacrifice their life for a baby. It's not that simple, unfortunately. When pregnancies go bad, there's no reason for the mom to risk her life if the baby is far enough along to be delivered safely. Keeping the baby in the dangerously ill mom is very risky for the baby; the mom's body will redirect oxygen, blood flow and nutrients to the mom and the baby is now in a bad way. For more premature infants, there is some benefit to pushing off delivery for a few days for steroid treatment or to simply grow a bit more - but the OB/neonatology team always has to balance that with the fact at a certain point when a woman is sick enough the baby is safer out than in.
Even after delivery, though, a kid born to a deathly ill mom often needs additional care outside of the hospital - and I'm talking Early Intervention or PT,OT, Speech etc. A kid with special needs is a long road - and one that having two parents is greatly helpful for.
A year or two ago, a woman from my side of the state was diagnosed with the same kind of brain cancer that killed John McCain. There wasn't really any treatment - and she discovered when the doctors were signing her up for clinical trials that she was pregnant. She decided to keep the pregnancy - which some people got worked up about- but since the clinical trials were all Phase I or II her chances of benefiting were close to zero. She got all of the paperwork in order to be kept alive as long as possible. The doctors did everything they could - but she was functionally brain dead by 22 weeks gestation. The baby was already dealing with severe IUGR from the effects that the brain tumor had on the mom's body and was delivered at 24 weeks. The baby lived less than a week.
I bring that up because the dominant narrative in these stories is "Mom risks life and baby turns out fine!" - but only because media rarely publishes follow-up on the cases where everyone dies.
The funny thing about the "varying ethnic, social, political, or religious groups" sentence is that I immediately thought about the comparison between multigenerational households and the nuclear family that Sears champions. A person from a culture where multigenerational households are the norm could well be skeptical of the benefits of a single-nuclear-family household over a multigenerational one, just as much as Sears is horrified about one-parent rather than two-parent families.
ReplyDeleteBeyond this, I think an even bigger difference is attitudes around eldercare. In societies where multigenerational families are the norm (or were the norm until recently), the stigma around putting elderly relatives in a nursing home is extreme. Like most US families, it does not seem like CP/QF families have that stigma (correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't one of the Maxwells' grandparents live in a nursing home?)
The only stigma I've seen about it in CP/QF is in Sears' book where she has a single sentence about the evils of putting elderly people and children with disabilities in institutionalized living.
DeleteNow that I think about it, Sears lived in a multigenerational household for at least a year after her husband died but before she moved to TX.
You know, I don't know where any of the Maxwell grandparents are besides Gigi - who I thought was Terri's mom - who lives in the same neighborhood as the Maxwells. Having one of Steve's parents living in a nursing home would make the whole "Maxwell Church held at a retirement home" make a bit more sense.
I think I may have conflated where Gigi lives with the nursing home... not sure though
DeleteSo what do they think you should do when a loved one's care requirements exceeds your capacity to provide care?
DeleteMinda - that's a question that is never supposed to be asked in CP/QF land. We're talking about the same cultic groups who convinced Teri Maxwell that she should let Steve get his vasectomy reversed despite the fact that she suffered from intractable postpartum depression with each of her first three kids. Or the Duggars who let an entire film crew take photos of Josie in the NICU - which as a former NICU parent, I'd have killed them for letting non-family members into a place where infection prevention is paramount. Or, wait, the Duggars' grandmother who died after a fall into a pool at the house where dozens of mostly grown grandkids lived.
DeleteIt's a bit like Lord of the Flies, really. The average survive while the ones who need more help die.
Should we break it to her that people had different cultures, different definitions of family, were gay, got divorced (or if not able to legally at least separated or escaped) LOOOONG before she and her worldview came along?
ReplyDelete