The Battle of Peer Dependency: Chapter Five - Part Three

Hello!

Spring is finally in full swing here in Michigan.   My son discovered that dandelions form lovely balls of seeds that people can blow on to scatter the seeds.  Now, that's a different thing from him picking or blowing on the dandelions; according to him, that's entirely my job.   Honestly, I don't mind.  I enjoy watching the seeds scatter lightly on the air and settle down into the grass.

On a completely unrelated note, our lawn is generally either bright yellow or fuzzy white with dandelions.   I find that they complement the crabgrass quite well especially in the fall when the crabgrass reddens.

I'm nursing a mild sunburn that's more embarrassing than painful.  Now that the insane spring season has hit my workplace I've been doing shifts in the garden center along with the paint department and service desk.  The embarrassing bit is that I forgot sunscreen on a sunny day and also forgot that working on light colored concrete means that I get hit with reflected UV along with sunlight.  That meant I was burnt on my arms with around 30 minutes of sun exposure.  Thankfully, the hat I was wearing plus my ever-present mask blocked enough rays that my face wasn't burnt.

We are chugging along in Marina Sears' parenting book "The Battle of Peer Dependency".  In the fifth chapter, Mrs. Sears spends a lot of time harping on the evils of divorce, name-dropping the evil of homosexuality, and claiming that most of our problems come from the fact that people spend too much time around humans who are not members of their immediate family.  

How second-generation humans are supposed to reproduce or support a family while spending as little time away from their family of origin is not covered at all.

Quotes like the following one do a nice job of illustrating why trying to read this book as an outsider is baffling and comical at the same time:

Breaking away from the traditional view of family is essential. In this view, each member of the family is independent of each other. Each person has his own agenda, schedule, and life. This life include separate classes at church and school. These classes are age divided, grouping only peers together. Most churches segregate the family even further by having young people sit in an area designated for youth only. This gives the young person the illusion that their group of peers is equal to their family. One of the dangers with church youth groups is that the youth minister must have the hearts of the children in order to accomplish his goals. The youth group itself becomes a family unit with the youth minister and his wife acting as the surrogate parents. (pg. 72)

Yes, my four year old often has a completely separate agenda than I do.  He prioritizes playing with toy cars and avoiding eating food much more strongly than I do - but this does not cause me to write a book about the breakdown of American family life.

I feel like I've covered this so many times - but the reason that schools and churches divide up classes by age is that age is a pretty decent predictor of abilities.   A group of 15 seven year old is far more likely to be at roughly the same conceptual level for learning reading or discussing a theological topic than a group of consisting of 15 people aged 0, 1, 3, 5, 7,  9, 11, 13, 15, 17,  21, 31, 41, 51 and 61 years old.  As people get older, the age categories get larger which is why putting adults aged 30-80+ together in a group causes far fewer headaches for a teacher than having an age class of 0-29 years all together.

I've been to a lot of churches.  I've seen a few that have an area where teens sit together - but I've also seen many, many churches where families sit together.    I don't know where Mrs. Sears gets the idea that sitting with your peers at church makes a peer group the equivalent of family, though.   It's not like the teen immediately receives legal emancipation or is given enough money to exist independently of their family of origin.  

If your teenager prefers their youth minister and his wife - because it's got to be that gender configuration - to your parenting, I'd assume it's mostly because the teen doesn't live with the youth minister and his wife.  I think every young teen and pre-teen has fantasies of living with that adult in their life who is fun, lively and not encumbered by making sure the house isn't trashed, everyone is fed, bills are paid and the youngsters are passing school.  

Of course, if you refuse to let your kids hang out with anyone besides their family of origin while cutting them off from most activities for not being "Christian" enough, the bar for "fun adult" becomes so pitifully low that everyone looks like a better parent than Marina Sears.

The claim of a youth ministry program becoming a family unit is bizarre.  There's no shared housing.  There's no legal or cultural expectation of financial support of the members by the youth minister.  The youth minister can't access medical or educational records for the teens nor can they provide consent for medical procedures or changes in educational programs.  

Just because Marina Sears feels threatened by any caring adult who gets near her kids doesn't mean the adults are actually undermining the family structure.

In this quote, Mrs. Sears makes several extravagant claims without any support:

It would seem natural to conclude since young people are segregated into peer groups in school and in church, the amount of time that they are with their peers far outweighs that of home and family.  Each family member creates his own friends and schedule. As a young person this is how I was raised, and it was the norm. Each of my brothers had his own set of friends; I had mine, and my parents had theirs. Still, it wasn't uncommon to hear someone introduce a friend as: " This is so and so; he is a friend of the family." Having people be friends to the entire family is unheard of in our present day. Young people have been so segregated in our society that few can adequately converse outside of their own peer group. (pg. 72)

 The first claim is that young people spend much more time with peers than with "home and family".   Let's clear up the easiest bit first: as long as the older teens are sleeping at home 7 days a week, spending a hour getting ready in the morning, and two hours or so in the evening with homework and relaxing the amount of time "at home" is going to be larger than the time they are in school or activities. 

The amount of time the older teens are with family is harder to quantify simply because parents are usually working at jobs.  I could see how a teen who was going to school, working and involved in after school activities could spend more time with non-family members than with family.  I do have one caveat, though.   The peer group of this busy team is not one homogenous group.   At a medium to large size city, there might be no overlap between classmates and teenage coworkers at a job.   There'd also be a different group of teens in youth ministry and slightly different groupings in the after school activities.  The unique make-up of these groups that change over time make it much less likely that peers become the "family unit" of the teenager.

Mrs. Sears is roughly the age of my parents.  I think I'm roughly the same age as her older kids.   Since Mrs. Sears claims that no one has friends of the entire family any more, a single counterexample can invalidate her claim.   I can think of four people who we'd have described as friends of the family - and the number keeps going up as I think about it.  Our elderly next door neighbor was a peach and we all liked spending time with her.  We had several families who I'd still count as "family friends" - including my lifelong best friend and her family.  

And just saying - my son loves to talk to older men who ideally are as gruff or tough looking.   He's got a group of local men who are kind of loners who he shows his toys to and chats with.   I'm also friends with a bunch of older women who share quilting and crocheting tips with me.

Most importantly - we're like 3/4 of the way though the book and she's still never supported her obsession with sheltering kids with any Gospel quotes and precious few Bible quotes.  

The Battle of Peer Dependency: Chapter Five - Part Two

 Hello!  

Spawn and I were enjoying our walk to the corner after he got out of preschool when he stuck his thumb out at me and said "Mama, what's this?"

I tried not to flinch as I replied, "That's a splinter, Spawn.  I'll fix it when we get home."

I hate splinters - and this one was fairly big in a very small thumb.  A very small thumb attached to a little boy I adore and who I hated the idea of causing transient pain to prevent a worse infection.

We got home and I got out antibiotic/ lidocaine ointment, tweezers and a band aid.   I showed Spawn all of the pieces and told him that I needed to take the splinter out of his finger because the splinter could cause his finger to get sick if it stayed in.  (I had no idea how else to explain an infection to him.)  I also told him that I thought I could get it out without causing pain - but he could tell me if it hurt.  

He let me put antibiotic ointment on first.  We turned all the lights in the living room on so that I could see a bit better.  The good news was that the splinter wasn't deep at all - but it was long and most of it was trapped under a thin layer of skin with an inflamed part at the farthest end.  I tried to catch the free end farthest away from sore spot with tweezers but the tweezers were too large to work with easily.  Spawn was starting to get anxious so I decided to quickly press on the opposite end to force the free end out a bit farther, then grabbed the free end with my fingernails and removed it in one quick motion.

Spawn yelped and started crying when I pushed down.  I felt like the worst human ever - like Nurse Ratched set loose in a kindergarten - but I got the splinter out.   

I snatched him up in a big hug and apologized a bunch of times for the fact that his finger hurt when I took it out.   I really, really hoped I could do it without hurting him - but removing the splinter did hurt.  

I think I said that in part because I remember adults telling me all the time when I was a kid that things didn't hurt as much as I thought they did.   That drove me nuts - and made me much more afraid of medical procedures.  After all, adults of all stripes didn't think splinters or scraped knees hurt when I found them very painful - so how can I trust their opinion of if a shot hurt?  

I also praised him for being a brave boy.  I told him it's completely ok to cry when something hurts - but the fact he didn't try to push me away or clench his hand shut let me get the splinter out fast.  That made him smile spontaneously - and he declared "I'm brave like Bail-Bail" which is a reference to his favorite character on "Word Party" - a quiet, gentle elephant named Bailey who another character calls Bail-Bail.   Spawn often reminds me of Bailey - and I'll sing Bailey's song about happily sitting under a tree daydreaming when we sit together on a curb watching traffic in our small town.

Walking with my son after school.   Sitting on a curb watching cars go by.   Singing silly songs.  Catching up with my husband about our days.   Nursing minor injuries and illnesses.  To my way of thinking,  that's the nuts and bolts of family life.  

Marina Sears in her memoir/parenting book "The Battle of Peer Dependency" completely disagrees with me.   After struggling to recognize the point of chapter five - titled "The Family" - I finally recognized that the point of chapter five is to entreat families to retreat into a tight huddle containing the nuclear family only.    Grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins are completely ignored in this description of family with one exception I'll discuss in a future post.   Families consists of two parents and their biological children - and everyone had better enjoy a close, happy relationships, damn it!  

Here's a pretty standard example of how American families are screwed per Mrs. Sears:

It seems as though the modern-day definition of the traditional American family unit has evolved into people living in the same house, eating one or two meals a week together, and sometimes enjoying a family night or yearly vacation with each other. With hectic busy schedules, many families do not see each other together as a unit except for these times. Sadly, we have replaced the intimacy and fellowship of parents and siblings with our peers. Students are spending more time away from their families and more time with her own age groups. Essential quality time has been delegated to teachers, friends, youth leaders, and other parents. (pg. 66)

Mrs. Sears waxes nostalgic for a way of life that never existed. 

The idea of a family unit that only consisted of two parents and their offspring would have seemed absurd to Americans within the last 150 years.   Family units for European settlers generally contained multiple generations, extended family and servants.  Young people were sent out of their homes to work on farms, in businesses or as domestic servants prior to marriage.   This means that married families had servants who were either living in the household or at least sharing one or more meal a day.   A much higher death rate for working aged adults meant that many marriages were ended by death of one spouse while dependent children were still young.   This lead to many households containing a mixture of step-children and the children of close relatives who were either orphaned or whose family needed temporary alternate care arrangements.    

The only thing that made American life different from life in European countries is that there was not a permanent servant class.  Men and women started as dependent children, lived as servants or apprentices in other families, and eventually became the managers of their own dependent workforce of children and servants.  

More broadly, Mrs. Sears tends to idealize the nuclear family while ignoring the importance of larger community connections.   Why are pre-teens and young teenagers especially so obsessed with their peer groups?  Because they are at an age where they are learning the cultural attributes that will mark them as a member of an age class that will be working together as romantic partners, parents and business associates for the next few decades.    Is that phase a bit obnoxious?  Oh, yes.  It was obnoxious when Mrs. Sears did it, it was obnoxious when I did it and it will be obnoxious when my son does it - but humans are often rather obnoxious during certain developmental phases and we all survive it.   What happens when parents opt their children out of being around peers?   The family runs the risk of having their children bypassed for business and romantic partners.   

In that respect, having the majority of sons who work in a family business is as problematic a sign as having multiple daughters are unmarried by their late twenties; both are a sign that the family is so isolated that the adult offspring are struggling to separate from their family of origin.

This next quote is delightful in its own way:

Recognizing that Satan has perverted the intent and function of the family, parents will be able to accurately define from Scripture what God has designed for their family.  While attending a family camp in Michigan as the ladies' speaker, God gave me a clear, visible definition of a Godly family. This family was comprised of a dad, mom, and three sons. The interaction among family members was incredible.. Brothers delighted in the company of each other, and parents delighted in their children. At the center of the family was the inward and outward evidence that, as a whole, they all delighted in the Lord. (pg.  70)

I have a few impertinent questions. 

Why is Marina Sears a speaker for women at a conference if the Divine Plan for families is to be utterly self-contained at all times?   This speaking gig by her own standards is Satanic because it is drawing her away from her sons and daughter and all of the intimate quality time the five of them are supposed to spend locked away together.

If age-segregation is an evil above all others, why is she the speaker for the adult women instead of having the entire family listen to her?   She might proffer something about how women are not supposed to teach men - but if that is the case - shouldn't the Divine Plan of family togetherness mean that all speakers are male?   Yes, obeying the Divine Plan will greatly impinge on showing off how much better her family is at being SuperChristians than the rest of us - but isn't that the price a person pays to follow the Lord?

Since when does the Bible state that outward evidence of delight in the Lord is adequate evidence of the internal state of a person's soul?  I remember a whole lot of quotes in the Gospels about white-washed graves and pits of vipers - but nothing explaining that looking good in the eyes of the community was what Jesus really wanted from followers.

In a disturbingly relevant example, the Duggar family appeared to most people to consist of siblings who delighted in each other and parents who delighted in their family.   Sure, a lot of us thought their were cracks in the system - how can two parents support and spend real time with 19 kids while enmeshed in a cult? - but the extent of Joshua Duggar's abuse of his siblings and continuing abuse of his wife through having affairs and other minor children through consumption of images of child sexual abuse didn't make the family seem less functional on the surface.

On the flip side, my family unit of my husband, me and our son is fairly functional - but we often look like frazzled, slightly overwhelmed people.   I am the person who had to drag a screeching toddler into playscapes since he was frightened of being around other children. (He'd laugh happily when it was time to leave.)  I wear shirts inside out and backwards about twice a month.  I've ended up at the grocery store three times in one day because I forgot to buy the same item during two previous trips.  I'm always a bit bleary-eyed when I pick my son up from school on Mondays and Tuesdays since I take naps while he's at school to try and catch up on the sleep I miss while working late on Sunday and Monday nights.  Spawn gets really excited when "Daddy and Mama and Spawn all play together!" because my husband and I work opposite shifts to manage working while caring for a small child.

We might be frazzled - but neither my husband nor I have abused children so I'm good with my life choices.   

By Mrs. Sears' rules, my family is Satanic.  By every else's rules, we're thriving during a challenging time - so be aware that her book is toxic as all get out.

Maxwell Mania: No One Is Allowed to Have a Bad Day!

I started this post prior to the announcement of Joshua Duggar's arrest on possession of images of child sexual assaults - and realized that I needed to redo the entire thing.
  

Let's be honest: training women to be good victims is the overarching theme of CP/QF life.

You start young by doing a half-assed version of homeschooling that prioritizes indoctrination over thinking skills of any type.  (See this recent post by Steven Maxwell to see how well one of his granddaughters has been trained in Maxwellian analysis of literature. Since the granddaughter is 11 or 12, I would hope that her grandmother/mother would be beginning to teach how to write a summary conclusion paragraph - and that is not a great example even for a junior high school student. )  

You continue in their teenage years by depriving your daughters of work experience while ideally teaching young women that the only virtue that matters is having an intact hymen at marriage.   If at the same time you can manage to convince them that all men outside their family are either going to rape them or convince them to have sex then abandon them and a parent-led courtship is the only way to prevent their lives falling apart like a Victorian novella, all the better.

The most effective method of teaching someone to be a victim, however, is to police their emotions rigorously.   Label a tiny bandwidth of emotions as allowed - like happy! content! - while labeling all other emotions as wrong.   

The part that would make this hard for most people is that we've learned that there are extenuating circumstances and that we should provide added kindness when someone is in the middle of a hard time.  For example, we'd assume that someone would look sad or tired or grumpy if they were dealing with a flare of chronic pain.  In the wider world, that would be a normal, acceptable reaction to illness because being ill makes you sad, tired and grumpy.   Instead of chastising the person, we'd offer whatever comfort we had available - medication, cuddling up on the couch with a favorite activity, or making them a beverage of their choice.

Compare that with Terri Maxwell's self-dismissal of a miserable health day for her in "Unwanted Feelings - Part 5":

I have lived with chronic back pain for many years. One day last week, I had my normal back pain plus a new pain that caused me to hurt every time I took a deep breath. I knew this new pain was temporary and would be gone in a day or two, but it still hurt right then. In addition, I had a sort of allergic reaction in my mouth that was causing the roof of my mouth to burn, ache, and itch. That morning a family member shared with me something I had said to them that they felt had an attitude behind it.

Were any of those very big problems? No! However, added together that day, they presented a spiritual battle. Rather than fight the spiritual battle with my thoughts of self-pity, I decided to cry.

Let's be honest: that sounds miserable.   

Terri's at higher risk for chronic pain than most people due to the fact that she's a woman, she's had a long history of untreated depression, and she's had eight pregnancies go to term.    Depression is a brain-based illness - and leaving it untreated means that the person's brain is producing chemicals that seem to make the person more susceptible to pain.   Scientists aren't sure why women seem to have more chronic pain issues than men - but repeated pregnancies, the physical demands of breastfeeding combined with the rigors of caring for small children do put women at risk for back issues.   Bluntly, the human back is designed to be used in a four-legged quadruped gait, not a two-legged bipedal gait.  Pregnancy adds a large amount of weight to the abdomen while stretching the abdominal muscles due to the increasing volume of the uterus.  People tighten their abdominal muscles to protect their back - but that's not a workable option during the second half of most pregnancies.   Add in the fact that a woman's body is producing a large amount of a hormone that loosens the ligaments and tendons in her body so that her pelvis will be able to expand to birth a baby - and it's pretty amazing that any woman who has been pregnant has a working back.

That's just the chronic pain issue! 

I had pleurisy once when my son was an infant.   That caused stabbing, ripping pain in my chest every time I breathed deeply.   I've never been that miserable in my life - and I include every physical complaint of being in multiple organ failure when my son was born with that.   There was nothing I could do to distract myself from the pain because I had to breathe.     I ended up in the ER because I had thought I had a pulled muscle - but the pain was spreading and getting worse by the minute.  I was given an MRI to verify that I didn't have a pulmonary embolism and then given a heavy duty steroid to end the inflammation in the areas surrounding my lungs so I could heal.     What I remember most from that ER visit was the fact that after the MRI I got into a pain cycle that was so severe and unrelenting that I started thrashing around on the gurney and lost the ability to control my breathing at all which meant I was alternately hyperventilating and gasping.   Thankfully, the nurses watching my vital signs recognized that I needed help and the room filled with people.    The nurses needed to get me on nasal oxygen and give me some pain medications in my IV - and that's the only time I remember being so out-of-it that I kept throwing my arms in front of me to keep the nurses away from my face.  I was very apologetic once my oxygen levels stabilized - and my nurse told me that I had nothing to apologize for; my body was obeying a very primitive set of commands to protect myself rather than any rational thought.

Let's discuss the hell of allergic reactions.   A good, solid allergic reaction for me makes me want to remove my own skin using my fingernails or some other sharp object.    I don't generally give in to that temptation because I do not want a raging staph infection - but if I have an allergic reaction, assume that most of my mental energy is going to preventing me from scratching the area raw.   The worst bit for me is that the itching is so obnoxious that I prefer the pain of raw skin to itching - so I'm literally having to remind myself that the relief I get from creating a wound on my skin is not a good life choice.

Honestly, if I had all three of these things going down, I'd be on my way to either urgent care or a doctor's office.   

Terri Maxwell, on the other hand, gets a lecture from her husband about how she said something with 'attitude' towards him.    He's quite a catch, isn't he?

My husband would be driving me to the doctor - and he says he likes my attitude, thank you very much.

Instead, Terri makes a list of how having a very natural cry on a day where she's quite ill and Steven is a dick makes life hard for everyone else:

Here is the outcome of my good cry.

• Red, puffy eyes
• A terrible headache
• A runny nose even after I stopped crying
• A perpetuation of my self-pity
• A bleak countenance
• A concern in the family manifested by them asking me if I was okay
• An insecurity in one family member indicated by her thinking she was the cause of my crying
• A sadness that pervaded our home that evening.

As I evaluated that period of crying, I couldn’t figure out one positive benefit that had come from it. All the outcomes were negative.

Looking like crap after crying is pretty normal.   My eyes puff up when I cry; it's annoying - but it does pass in a few hours.  My nose also gets runny, but nothing compared to what I deal with during allergy season.   The headache will go away if Terri drinks a good amount of water and takes an NSAID of her choosing.   

Does she get blotchy?  I get blotchy - and my son is as blotchy as I when he cries.   The last time he got upset about something while overtired I realized that he gets blotchy all over his scalp as well.

In terms of self-pity, well, no one else seemed particularly concerned about Terri - so she deserved to do some self-care if nothing else.

Now, when she describes that her family members were asking if something was wrong and that one of the daughters was upset that she might have caused Terri's sad mood, I assumed the Maxwell offspring were young during this interlude.   Everything is more complicated when you have a house filled with small children and there was a time in the late 1990's when Steven, Nathan and Christopher were working outside of the house leaving Sarah and Terri to deal with five kids under 10.  I could see easily how if Terri was sick, the small kids could very easily blame themselves for their mom being sad and sick.

Turns out the post was written in 2012; Nathan was married with children, Sarah was 30 and Mary was 15.   There's literally no reason Terri needed to be out of bed that day since she had at least Sarah, Joseph, John, and Anna as adults living at home who could hold down the fort.  Crap, Jesse and Mary were certainly old enough to feed themselves and do their classwork for a day.  

In that case, the amount of emotional enmeshment in the family is weird.   In every family, there are days where one or more member of the family is having a rough day.  Most families make a game attempt to help the other person feel better - but most also have emotional boundaries to continue having a nice day in spite of someone else having a bad day.

The lack of emotional boundaries is part of what CP/QF families try to instill in their children.  They don't do this because it is healthy; they do it because it primes the entire family to hustle rapidly to fix any issues that bother the male leader of the family.   The downside is that the rest of the family can end up sad and isolated when one of the non-leader members is upset but the leader doesn't care.

The Maxwells present a carefully curated set of vignettes to pass themselves off as an ideal family - but the reality is pretty brutal when you see the amount of distortion of family members required to keep up the illusion.

Josh Duggar Arrested on Possession of Child Pornography Charges.

 I feel sick.   

I worked a long shift yesterday after getting my house cleaned up and didn't look at the news after around 9am.  

I woke up this morning and my Facebook feed was filled with various people telling Anna Duggar that if she's ready to leave Josh, there's a lot of support for her outside in the world.

I hit the internet and found out that Josh has been arrested for possession of child pornography.  

He's got a house filled with small children - and he's watching child porn.

I feel sick.  

Anna, it's time to go.   

You've hung in there with Josh for nearly thirteen years- and he's proven to be a terrible person.

Did he tell you about all the times he molested young women before you married?  Did he tell you that he molested them while they were asleep or too young to explain what happened to parents?   Or did he marry you with a giant secret that didn't come out until you were bonded to him?

In a thirteen year marriage, you've given him seven children - for most people, that'd be plenty of evidence that you've been available for sex plenty.   Instead, he cheated on you - and you had to deal with the fall-out of all of that in the public eye.   On television.   With a newborn.    Has he ever seemed genuinely remorseful for  all you had to do?  Or does he just talk about how hard all of it was for him?

While you were dealing with that with a level of aplomb that was admirable, your mother-in-law was posting that wives needed to be available for sex 24/7/365 days a week to keep their husbands from cheating.   I've had issues with my in-laws before - but that's psychotic.   It's also the type of parenting that raises abusive men, fyi. 

So far, all of Josh's sexual abuse had been "in the past" or aimed at his wife.    At this point, though, Josh is waving all of the red flags of abusing children right now.   And the children he has the easiest access to are your kids.   

Who would they tell?   Most of your family is still trapped in CP/QF land where admitting that abuse happens means that 1) you weren't submissive enough and 2) you need to forgive and show super-human spiritual gifts because of the abuse right now.

You need to go.   Ask your siblings for help - the ones who don't like Josh.    Ask Jill Dillard for advice; she's made it quite far away herself.  Read a book on abuse like "Why Does He Do That?" by Lundy Bancroft or "Protecting Your Children from Sexual Predators" by Dr. Leigh Baker.  Both of them are available for a few dollars on Amazon in the used-books section.   

It's one thing to tolerate an abusive husband who is harming you - although I don't want anyone in an abusive relationship period.   When your kids are at risk - you need to leave.    You'll get a new life, a better life in return - but you have to go first.