Maxwell Mania: Sheltering Our Children (and husbands......) - Part One

 Good morning!

We are into the spring crazy time of year at my home improvement store.  I worked in the garden department for four hours today.  During that time, I sold three riding lawn mowers - which blows my mind.  I used to be really hesitant in talking to customers about large-ticket items that were for sale because I didn't feel like I knew enough about the products. 

To remedy that , over the slower winter season, I used downtime at work to research the major selling points of the models we carried in each brand - and I was surprised how much that increased my confidence. 

We're not sales people - I would hate to work under a required amount of sales per week - but I do like being able to help people who have decided that they want a riding mower find the best option for their lives.   

I also gained a lot of time at the Service Desk which has benefited my sales ability in a way I didn't expect.  Lawn tractors and zero-turn mowers generally need to be either ordered online or set up as a "Will Call" to be picked up when the person rents a trailer because relatively few people own a large enough vehicle to transport the new mower home.    Both of those methods of selling are done by service desk workers - but few garden associates are trained service desk workers.  This meant that the garden associates had to find a free service desk worker to finish the customer's order.   I, on the other hand, can find the right tractor for a customer and complete the order which saves a lot of time for everyone.

I didn't have time to transcribe a section I was hoping to this weekend because I covered an extra shift when so a coworker could attend a funeral.   Instead, I'm treating myself to the low hanging fruit that is Terri Maxwell's article "Sheltering Our Children" published on March 1st, 1999.  This was published after two articles where Terri described how the Maxwells slowly removed their kids from all interaction with outsiders.   There must have been a tiny bit of pushback - this was before the Maxwells disabled comments on their website - so Terri attempted to explain their rationale.     

The result is a great example of how sexual gatekeeping sits weirdly with the ideal of male headship.

Here we go!

The past two months’ Mom’s Corners have made me wonder if some of you may be thinking, “This sounds like too much sheltering to me. Shouldn’t we teach our children right from wrong as they grow up, and then let them sink or swim in the real world?”

Um....that's not what the rest of us do, Terri.     That's what CP/QF parents do when their kids finally become full-adults - but that's not what the rest of us do.

We teach our children right from wrong - and we let them move about in the real world.  This means that the first times that our children get conflicting messages from people outside of our family group the stakes are generally very low.   

I've worked diligently to suppress my vague unease around certain insects because I want my son to view insects as a normal, healthy part of the environment.    I have worked hard not to kill any insect if I can help it - and express a sense of remorse on the rare occasion when I do.  

And by the second week back at school this year, my son (in cahoots with his entire class) has decided that "bugs go squish!"    I found this out when we came home from school one day and saw a box-elder bug on the steps.  Spawn asked me what it was.  I told him.   He said - in a very sweet voice - "Oh, how nice!"   then yelled "SQUISH!" as he stomped on the insect.

He's getting two responses to insects.   

Did I yell at him for squishing the bug?  Nope. 

I said, "Oh, we don't squish outdoor bugs in our family" in the same calm, gentle tone of voice as I say other great moral lessons like "Please don't pull on Mama's ponytail; it's attached to my head" and "I love how you are pretending to be a puppy, but please don't lick the floor."  (Yes, the last one is more a social norm than a moral lesson - but please don't lick my floors; I know where we've been.)

Did I pull him out of preschool when I dropped him off the next day and his classmate was refusing to go on a piece of playground equipment unless an adult squished the insect on the equipment?   Nope.

I asked the teachers if I could use a piece of wood to remove the spider and show it to the kids.   With their permission, I showed the ones who wanted to look the eight legs on the spider and moved it to a safe location to eat mosquitos.  

Spawn's getting two responses to insects now - and eventually he'll get different responses to inclusion, sexuality, and recreational drugs.     My hope is by walking him through how we make our choices based on our values when he is very small he'll have an idea of how to do it when he is larger, too.

Subject change: Terri Maxwell and I have very different opinions on affairs:

How many of you have known a godly man who has fallen into immorality of some kind, perhaps adultery? It happens to pastors, deacons, elders, Sunday School teachers, even homeschooling dads. Do you think these men purposed to be unfaithful to their wives? I seriously doubt it!

Terri wrote this when I was 18 years old - and even that young, I would have called this as bullshit.

Yes, Terri, those men purposed to be unfaithful to their wives.   

Did they sit down one night alone in the living room and say "Yes, I am going to find someone to have an affair with tomorrow!" followed by a Montgomery Burns-style laugh?   

No - at least I hope not - but having an affair is not an accident.   It's not like tripping over a shoelace or slipping on some ice.   Being attracted to someone is far more accidental; a lot of physical attraction is simply a matter of unconscious preferences.  

Actions, on the other hand, are conscious.   A married man who is attracted to a coworker can choose to stay professional, on-task, and restrain conversational topics to the same level of intimacy that he has with coworkers who he is not attracted to.   If a woman flirts with him on a business trip, he can ignore the signals or let her know that 's he's unavailable because he's married.    That should work fine at stopping the relationship's momentum as long as the man is clear that he's not going to act on his feelings.   

Compare that view of male responsibility to female responsibility found a little later:

Unfortunately, the girls today are very aggressive, and while we discuss with our sons the need to guard themselves, we would not want them placed daily in the path of temptation.

Married men who were in positions of spiritual leadership had affairs - and Terri Maxwell claims that those men didn't plan or set a course that lead to the affair.

Teenage girls, on the other hand, are ravening man-eaters who will seduce and betray a virginal Maxwell son. 

Now, those girls are single and therefore can be involved in a romantic relationship with another single person without any condemnation from societal or religious mores - but Terri Maxwell slut-shames them far more fiercely than she condemned the men who broke a Commandment.

That might be because she's never detoxified her thinking from the 1950's - or it might be because the stories her husband has told her about his coworkers are wild:

Despite the better working environment of the corporate world, my husband has been happy to leave it, with its immodesty of dress, aggressiveness in women, and the propensity toward doing whatever is deemed necessary to get ahead.

I bet Maxwell's former coworkers love to hear that Steve's been telling his wife that he worked with wild party girls who wore bar-hopping outfits to work.   The bitches who weren't actively trying to seduce him were proteges of Nurse Ratched.   Meanwhile, his male coworkers were trying to outdo Gordon Gekko and - although Steve was too delicate to discuss it with Terri - everyone was snorting lines of cocaine in the bathroom.  

On a similar note, I have a pet unicorn named Starshine who I ride to work.   At night, Starshine snuggles up with our pet Tauntaun Chomp-Chomp.  *rolls eyes*

Seriously, he worked at an aerospace contracting company.   There might have been some solid angling for promotions - but I've never heard anything too horrible about his former company.  Similarly, the women he worked with most likely wore clothing that was more flattering than the tube-jumpers that Terri was sewing en masse for her daughters during this period - but that says more about how unflattering tube-jumpers are for every body type than anything else.    I do wonder how much of his condemnation was reserved for when people told him to knock off trying to convert people related to his job- or they'd go to HR?  
   
Well, that was fun.  Have a great day!