Hello!
I'm sorry I disappeared for a week and a half. I had an unexpected outbreak of atopic dermatitis and needed to go on prednisone. Normally, prednisone doesn't bother me much - but I was nauseous, jumpy and an insomniac this time through. I mostly feel like myself again finally.
During the same time, Spawn's had another big jump forward in his confidence in walking by himself. Like a lot of kids, he doesn't like to try a skill in a new place or in front of people until he's comfortable - and he's started walking short distances in new places. At the local restaurant he waved my hands away when I reached out with the statement "Leave it alone. Maybe do it later!" as he started walking towards the exit. The regulars were so excited for him - and so was I.
Thankfully, we are close to the end of Geoffrey Botkin's video titled "What if My Husband Dies?" He's spent a lot of time rambling about how important he thinks a family-based business is and how important it is for a father to plan out exactly how he wants the kids raised - but none of that's particularly useful for keeping a roof over the heads of a family if the business is not profitable.
He's just finished encouraging women to figure out how much more money they could make in a family business rather than in low-wage jobs - of which I am skeptical - when he launches into this major subject change without any transition:
Wait - are we talking about family businesses, foreign wars, or risks of death during a pandemic?
I'm assuming this is an attempt to bring back the idea of the letter writer and her husband talking to their sons about their father's COPD and the increased risk level he has if he gets COVID - but what a strange way to re-introduce the topic. CP/QF families are so staunchly individualistic that they don't join organizations where someone else would be able to give them commands like the military or a police department which makes Botkin's willingness to trot out military families ironic.
I think being open with the boys as far as their age allows about their father's higher risk of death due to COVID is a good idea. I would also talk about what the entire family is going to do to help keep Dad safer like wearing masks, social distancing and washing hands.
I think it would also be a good idea for the sons to be aware of how much their life will likely change if their dad dies as well. I don't see a way for a family with many small children with presumably limited assets to have a mother who is a full-time stay-at-home mom who homeschools especially once the youngest child is old enough for full-time public schooling.
Throughout this video, I've often felt enraged on behalf of Victoria Botkin.
Like a lot of CP/QF moms, she's done the heavy work in her family for decades.
She's given birth to seven children. When she was hemorrhaging after having a home birth with Anna Sofia, Geoffrey's response was to pray over the ovaries of her newborn daughter. Geoffrey's told that story so many times publicly that it's the opening vignette of Joyce's book on Quiverfull.
She homeschooled her large family while Geoffrey was busy playing religious leader, lobbyist, media mogul, religious leader and pretend advisor to the president. She's created plenty of media about homeschooling and worked the homeschooling conference circuit for decades. I'm sure the income that she's brought in has equaled or exceeded the amount that Geoffrey brought in in certain years.
And yet, when a question comes in about how a woman could support a smaller family after her husband's death, Geoffrey never bothers to loop his wife in.
Would Victoria Botkin be devastated if her husband died? Of course she would.
Would she have been able to take care of her family? I believe she would. She was already pulling more than her fair share of the responsibilities in the family between child-rearing, homeschooling, keeping up a home and running a small business while Geoffrey dabbled in whatever new brilliant plan this year brought.
Would she need her sons' help? I think that depends entirely on how many small children were in the house more than anything else. Her oldest sons' ability to work part-time jobs as teenagers would have been a large help when there were still elementary school aged kids to be supported. In one of those ironies that point out the flaws in the idea of "every man should own his own business" the son whose business is supporting most of his family members is the second youngest kid in the family. To my way of thinking, that would mean that most of the family would have needed to get jobs as teenagers to help keep enough income coming into the family. Geoffrey Botkin would be horrified at the idea of his precious, super-sheltered children mixing with the common riff-raff - but the kids would have likely benefited from that exposure.
If nothing else, the Botkin offspring would have picked up that the family's habits of photographing the unmarried daughters and sons cuddled up together accidently sends a message in the US that those people are a romantic couple rather than available adults to be courted. Different families are comfortable with different forms of affection - and that's great - but the conventions of formal family photographs in the US are that single adults stand without anyone's arms wrapped around them. Married and committed couples stand together and are usually either turned towards each other or have some visible contact. When Anna Sofia and Elizabeth sent an overwrought letter to Cindy K. years ago bemoaning how many romantic relationships never happened in their family due to her blog, I remember thinking that the family had probably had more damage done from friends of friends seeing the family Christmas picture and thinking "Oh, how nice that all of the Botkin kids are married now!" instead of "Huh, that cute Botkin girl or boy is still single. I should mention that to so-and-so."
Such is life - and I've digressed a bit.
We are almost at the end of this series and I've not heard from the one person who could probably give actual advice - Victoria Botkin.
Maybe ask her for advice next time?
Monday, March 22, 2021
Friday, March 12, 2021
Joyfully At Home: Chapter 15 - Part Two
Good morning!
.
Spring has finally returned to Michigan. I saw daffodils plants peeking out of a southern-facing slope. My lilac bush has had enough snow melt around it that I can continue taking down most of the woody stems. It's more like a small lilac tree - and that's not healthy since a lot of the stems are cracking under their own weight at the ground. My parents have received their first doses of a COVID vaccine. My twin is fully vaccinated. My younger brother and I are in a friendly race to see which of us can get vaccinated first since we are both essential workers.
My mood has greatly improved since I can get outside for walks every day again. Armed with a new cheery mood, let's dive into the fifteenth chapter of "Joyfully At Home" by Jasmine Baucham. In the first post on this chapter, we saw that Jasmine's definition of a novel, ground-breaking home-based education was confined by the dictate that students learn to support the exact same ideas as their parents. In this next quote, Jasmine gives us a glimpse into the educational method of her family's school while reminding us that the educational goal of total agreement with her parents' views worked in her case.
I was struck by how Ms. Baucham's education in science and economics mimicked the Christian Patriarchy/ Quiverful slap-dash method of Biblical studies.
In traditional, mainline Christian churches, studying the Bible seriously demands more effort than cracking open the Bible and reading it. Serious scholars discuss the methods used by the person or people who wrote a section of the Bible to reach their target audience. That audience came with cultural and experiential expectations that were both universal - like how a mother comforts a child - and very alien - like how to morally act as a slave owner. Armed with information about the culture of the writer and important current events at their time, we can begin to suss out the difference between temporal matters that bleed in and larger theological truths.
In CP/QF land, on the other hand, no one needs external context for anything. Anyone can crack open the Bible, read a verse or two, and expound on that verse without providing any context.
The Bauchams educated their children in the same manner. Jasmine believed that she completely understood evolution at age 19 because she read "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin. She believes that she completely understood communism because she read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels.
Now, I don't have much experience in economics - but I have a ton of experience in evolutionary biology. Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" is not required reading for evolutionary biologists at any academic level. It was a seminal book in the history of evolutionary science - but it was published in 1859 so there is 162 years of experimenting, refining and change since then! I have read "On the Origin of Species" because the history of science fascinates me. The book was an interesting read - but Darwin had many, many unanswered questions at the end of the book. And - to be fair to Darwin - the chances of him intuiting mendelian genetics, the structure of DNA and the genetic code from what was able to be observed in 1830-1858 was zero.
I realized mid-sentence that I was forgetting that Ms. Baucham's biggest objection to Darwin wasn't that he couldn't explain the finer details of how island finches developed different beaks. Her objection is that evolution didn't directly support the timeline of creation lined in the Bible. From that perspective, her critical reading of Darwin is spotty and underwhelming. "Yup, Darwin certainly deviates from Genesis 1 therefore his entire hypothesis is invalid" is a poor effort on all fronts.
I was - and still am - a voracious reader. My mom attempted for a while to pre-read most of our books just to be sure we weren't venturing into nightmare territory - but between my twin sister and I trying to read our way though the library in elementary school she had to settle for asking us about what we were reading and discussing any themes that might be more adult than the average elementary school kid ran into.
That's my life experience so this next quote is baffling to me:
Yeah, Mom probably would have had me avoid "Madame Bovary" in elementary school - but as a teenager? As a young adult? Oh, hell no.
If CP/QF adherents are supposed to convert the world, they need to be mentally strong enough to hold a belief in the face of strong opposition. I, for example, am quite vocal about how harmful many of their beliefs are to the development of their children.
That's the level of disagreement they need to handle in life - but Ms. Baucham is saying that her parents didn't trust that she could handle mild cognitive dissonance as a teenager. After all, reading a book from a different century in a different culture - which is essentially what she's doing by reading Darwin and Marx rather than Dawkins and Davis - is about the least threatening form of exposure to an idea that I can think of.
I know that Ms. Baucham is trying to present her education as broad-reaching, modern and inspiring to other Christians, but I feel like she was raised in a glass cloche instead of a field. Cloches, cold frames and greenhouses are great at protecting young plants when they are small and the weather is extreme - but if used too long, the plant develops a weaker central stem and poorer roots due to the lack of exposure to wind and periodic drought. Yup, the growth of a plant seems to slow down for a week or two during the hardening off process when the cloche is removed and the plant starts to solidify their stem and expends more energy on root growth - but that time of slowness is needed for healthy mature plants.
Raising kids is the same thing. I shelter my son a lot right now because he's 4. Explaining the details of why we wear a mask in public to avoid COVID-19 would be truly disturbing to him - so I fudge the details. On the other hand, I shelter him much less than I did when he was a small infant. I let him run around with kids his age. I send him to school with adults who are not his parents. There are moments that he is sad or uncomfortable for short periods of time - but that's part of the process of growing up.
Better to start hardening your kids off a bit at a time during childhood than launching them into the world without a strong core.
If CP/QF adherents are supposed to convert the world, they need to be mentally strong enough to hold a belief in the face of strong opposition. I, for example, am quite vocal about how harmful many of their beliefs are to the development of their children.
That's the level of disagreement they need to handle in life - but Ms. Baucham is saying that her parents didn't trust that she could handle mild cognitive dissonance as a teenager. After all, reading a book from a different century in a different culture - which is essentially what she's doing by reading Darwin and Marx rather than Dawkins and Davis - is about the least threatening form of exposure to an idea that I can think of.
I know that Ms. Baucham is trying to present her education as broad-reaching, modern and inspiring to other Christians, but I feel like she was raised in a glass cloche instead of a field. Cloches, cold frames and greenhouses are great at protecting young plants when they are small and the weather is extreme - but if used too long, the plant develops a weaker central stem and poorer roots due to the lack of exposure to wind and periodic drought. Yup, the growth of a plant seems to slow down for a week or two during the hardening off process when the cloche is removed and the plant starts to solidify their stem and expends more energy on root growth - but that time of slowness is needed for healthy mature plants.
Raising kids is the same thing. I shelter my son a lot right now because he's 4. Explaining the details of why we wear a mask in public to avoid COVID-19 would be truly disturbing to him - so I fudge the details. On the other hand, I shelter him much less than I did when he was a small infant. I let him run around with kids his age. I send him to school with adults who are not his parents. There are moments that he is sad or uncomfortable for short periods of time - but that's part of the process of growing up.
Better to start hardening your kids off a bit at a time during childhood than launching them into the world without a strong core.
Monday, March 8, 2021
Babbling Botkin: What if My Husband Dies? - Part Fourteen
Hello, friends!
After a few days where the temperatures never dipped below freezing, the snow has melted back far enough that I can go for walks again. When I came back from my first walk, I realized that part of why I was so agitated by being stuck at home was because it was reminding me of how trapped I felt after my son was born. I was so sick after Spawn was born that I needed a wheelchair to get around the hospital where I was staying and to navigate the unit where Spawn was at for the first week after he was born. In the second week, I could make shift to walk around my house and Spawn's unit but I needed a wheelchair to get to and from the parking ramp. I could walk slowly from a car to the unit by the third week although I usually flopped into a chair and caught my breath as soon as I could. The day before Spawn was born I walked two miles in spite of being a bit winded and having a sore hip. I was able to walk that far eight weeks after Spawn was born.
The cycle of restrictions continued after I recovered. The four months Spawn was in the hospital was fairly simple; I was pumping every few hours, but I got good at packing a pump with me. When Spawn came home, I couldn't leave the house with him alone until he had good head control. Before that, I needed one hand to hold his body, one hand to hold his head, one hand to carry his oxygen tank and oxygen monitor and one hand to open doors. This wasn't the end of the world since we were social distancing a few years before we had a term for it - but I did get sick of having to make lists of things I needed to do as soon as someone could watch Spawn at home.
We got a bit of a break the summer after he came home. He was off-oxygen for long periods of time and was robust enough that I could take him places where he wasn't going to be around children. He was also small enough that I could carry him easily and he fit well in a stroller. Now, according to Spawn, I was kidnapping him illegally outside of the house against the rules lined out by the Baby Geneva Convention. He'd glower at me whenever I looked at him in the stroller.
When winter came, we went back into isolation to avoid RSV. By the spring, Spawn was big enough that he was out of the danger zone for RSV - but he was also getting big enough that carrying him long distances was harder and harder for me. I've only really appreciated how much work that was now that Spawn is able to walk up to a mile with two handed support. I no longer have to pre-plan outings to make sure I can move him by stroller and carrying on my hip to playgrounds - and that feels awesome!
Random subject change - Geoffrey Botkin's "What if My Husband Dies?" has been heavy on the importance of a family starting a business from scratch and very, very light on the details of how to financially support a family of 5 if the only breadwinner dies. Next, he tosses out this sop of comfort that this not-yet-formed family business could be the financial savior of the family:
Yup, the listeners should totally do the math instead of Botkin! After all, we have no idea the age of the four boys, the career history of the letter writer, or the part of the country they live in. It's like a family with sons who are 14, 15, 16, and 17 born to a mom with lots of connections in a rural farming area will have the exact same outcome as a newly arrived family with sons aged 4, 3, 2 and infant in the same community.
Nevertheless, let me make a whack at it. With a family of five, the federal poverty level is $31,040. That's not going to be nearly enough for a middle-class living - but it's a number to work with.
Out where I live, many people have side businesses like raising livestock, seasonal you-pick crops, farm stands, or custom crafting. When I lived in the city, I knew a lot of people who did gig work (the city version of a side business), nannying, house cleaning or specialized in refurbishing home goods collected at a low cost.
I don't know any people with small, home-based businesses that clear $31,040 a year after expenses and taxes, though.
For one adult working 40 hours a week as an employee somewhere, the lowest wage that will work for that is $15.52.
Is the mom going to earn that her first year? That really depends on her work history. If she's got specialized trade knowledge, a client base of house cleaning, a college degree with some work history, or great connections, she might make that. If she's Botkin's idealized SAHD who married young without any advanced education....that's very unlikely.
I work a pretty basic retail job at an employer who hires lots of people with little or no work history. Thanks to the pandemic, my employer realized bargain-basement wages normalized in the South was not working for a company that is spanning the US. We got a good pay jump and I now make a whopping $13.50 per hour. I'm assuming that most people are hired in at around $13.00 per hour. Without overtime and no vacation, the mom would take home $27,040 a year - which is still more than she'd make at an imaginary home-based business.
Other ways to make the numbers work - hope a son is old enough to work part-time or use government benefits.
If she's got a son who is 16 or 17, he can find a job at most fast-food restaurants for $12-14 dollars an hour. My state has pretty strict laws on how much a kid who is still in school can work - but if he graduated from homeschooling at 16 - which a weirdly high percentage of CP/QF kids do - he could work 40+ hours a week since completing high school or a GED allows a person to circumvent the labor laws around hours.
If he's still in school, he will probably be able to work 12 hours a week. At $12.00 an hour for 50 weeks of work a year, he makes $7,200 dollars a year - which brings his family to $34,240 per year. For a family at the poverty level, that's a make or break amount of money. That's the reason I had many, many, many teenage students who were working one legal job reported to the IRS and a half-a-dozen under-the-table jobs; their income was literally critical to feeding and housing their younger siblings.
What if none of the kids are old enough to work? That's where the skimpy safety net for poverty prevention in the USA comes in. It's not enough by a long shot - but it's something that can make a difference in poor working homes.
After a few days where the temperatures never dipped below freezing, the snow has melted back far enough that I can go for walks again. When I came back from my first walk, I realized that part of why I was so agitated by being stuck at home was because it was reminding me of how trapped I felt after my son was born. I was so sick after Spawn was born that I needed a wheelchair to get around the hospital where I was staying and to navigate the unit where Spawn was at for the first week after he was born. In the second week, I could make shift to walk around my house and Spawn's unit but I needed a wheelchair to get to and from the parking ramp. I could walk slowly from a car to the unit by the third week although I usually flopped into a chair and caught my breath as soon as I could. The day before Spawn was born I walked two miles in spite of being a bit winded and having a sore hip. I was able to walk that far eight weeks after Spawn was born.
The cycle of restrictions continued after I recovered. The four months Spawn was in the hospital was fairly simple; I was pumping every few hours, but I got good at packing a pump with me. When Spawn came home, I couldn't leave the house with him alone until he had good head control. Before that, I needed one hand to hold his body, one hand to hold his head, one hand to carry his oxygen tank and oxygen monitor and one hand to open doors. This wasn't the end of the world since we were social distancing a few years before we had a term for it - but I did get sick of having to make lists of things I needed to do as soon as someone could watch Spawn at home.
We got a bit of a break the summer after he came home. He was off-oxygen for long periods of time and was robust enough that I could take him places where he wasn't going to be around children. He was also small enough that I could carry him easily and he fit well in a stroller. Now, according to Spawn, I was kidnapping him illegally outside of the house against the rules lined out by the Baby Geneva Convention. He'd glower at me whenever I looked at him in the stroller.
When winter came, we went back into isolation to avoid RSV. By the spring, Spawn was big enough that he was out of the danger zone for RSV - but he was also getting big enough that carrying him long distances was harder and harder for me. I've only really appreciated how much work that was now that Spawn is able to walk up to a mile with two handed support. I no longer have to pre-plan outings to make sure I can move him by stroller and carrying on my hip to playgrounds - and that feels awesome!
Random subject change - Geoffrey Botkin's "What if My Husband Dies?" has been heavy on the importance of a family starting a business from scratch and very, very light on the details of how to financially support a family of 5 if the only breadwinner dies. Next, he tosses out this sop of comfort that this not-yet-formed family business could be the financial savior of the family:
Yup, the listeners should totally do the math instead of Botkin! After all, we have no idea the age of the four boys, the career history of the letter writer, or the part of the country they live in. It's like a family with sons who are 14, 15, 16, and 17 born to a mom with lots of connections in a rural farming area will have the exact same outcome as a newly arrived family with sons aged 4, 3, 2 and infant in the same community.
Nevertheless, let me make a whack at it. With a family of five, the federal poverty level is $31,040. That's not going to be nearly enough for a middle-class living - but it's a number to work with.
Out where I live, many people have side businesses like raising livestock, seasonal you-pick crops, farm stands, or custom crafting. When I lived in the city, I knew a lot of people who did gig work (the city version of a side business), nannying, house cleaning or specialized in refurbishing home goods collected at a low cost.
I don't know any people with small, home-based businesses that clear $31,040 a year after expenses and taxes, though.
For one adult working 40 hours a week as an employee somewhere, the lowest wage that will work for that is $15.52.
Is the mom going to earn that her first year? That really depends on her work history. If she's got specialized trade knowledge, a client base of house cleaning, a college degree with some work history, or great connections, she might make that. If she's Botkin's idealized SAHD who married young without any advanced education....that's very unlikely.
I work a pretty basic retail job at an employer who hires lots of people with little or no work history. Thanks to the pandemic, my employer realized bargain-basement wages normalized in the South was not working for a company that is spanning the US. We got a good pay jump and I now make a whopping $13.50 per hour. I'm assuming that most people are hired in at around $13.00 per hour. Without overtime and no vacation, the mom would take home $27,040 a year - which is still more than she'd make at an imaginary home-based business.
Other ways to make the numbers work - hope a son is old enough to work part-time or use government benefits.
If she's got a son who is 16 or 17, he can find a job at most fast-food restaurants for $12-14 dollars an hour. My state has pretty strict laws on how much a kid who is still in school can work - but if he graduated from homeschooling at 16 - which a weirdly high percentage of CP/QF kids do - he could work 40+ hours a week since completing high school or a GED allows a person to circumvent the labor laws around hours.
If he's still in school, he will probably be able to work 12 hours a week. At $12.00 an hour for 50 weeks of work a year, he makes $7,200 dollars a year - which brings his family to $34,240 per year. For a family at the poverty level, that's a make or break amount of money. That's the reason I had many, many, many teenage students who were working one legal job reported to the IRS and a half-a-dozen under-the-table jobs; their income was literally critical to feeding and housing their younger siblings.
What if none of the kids are old enough to work? That's where the skimpy safety net for poverty prevention in the USA comes in. It's not enough by a long shot - but it's something that can make a difference in poor working homes.
The first one is the public school system AND its free and reduced meal program. Yeah, yeah, I know that homeschooling is the only way to raise a proper Godly(TM) child. Think of that as an aspirational goal for when you have enough income of some kind and as your kids get older and need less direct supervision. If you've got a kid aged 5 or over, you are all set. Call the nearest elementary school from your house and tell them you have a kid who needs to be enrolled in school. The secretary will set up a meeting time and tell you what to bring. A birth certificate, immunization records and something that demonstrates you live in the district like a driver's license or a utility payment will be on the list. Many districts automatically have parents apply for free or reduced lunch during the enrollment process. The income limits for getting free or reduced breakfasts and lunches are generous; in my state, the program reaches to 185% of the poverty level.
Why am I starting by putting your kids back in school first? Well, public schools are an easy way to access government services. They also provide excellent education for 6-7 hours a day while feeding your kids two meals. Accessing this form of governmental childcare with free food is a major support of families living in poverty.
While you are there, inform the secretary that your family is dealing with the recent death of your husband which is causing severe financial hardship and you need to speak to the district social worker. (Ideally, I'd prefer you put the kids in school ASAP so they've had some transition time in case your husband does die - but I'm also assuming that if you are writing Botkin for help, you are going to avoid that option until the last moment.) Every school I've worked in has had either a social worker on staff or has a social worker on call through the county. This social worker can smooth your application for other government services.
What other services? Well, that depends a lot on the makeup of your family and how many assets you have.
If you have less than $15,000 in assets, limited income and children under 18, you may qualify for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) - also known as welfare. You'll receive a small cash payment to cover non-food essentials. You'll also be under a lot of pressure to get a job and get off of TANF. Don't blame me; I'm a gleefully tax-and-spend liberal and have been for decades. No, the same politicians who are pro-life are also extremely pro-work - to the point that one serious worry of Sen. Romney's (a Republican from Utah) proposed monthly payment to families of children is that the payment might cause single mothers to work fewer hours. You know - single mothers like a widowed former homeschooling mom with four kids. God forbid they spend some time at home.
Why am I starting by putting your kids back in school first? Well, public schools are an easy way to access government services. They also provide excellent education for 6-7 hours a day while feeding your kids two meals. Accessing this form of governmental childcare with free food is a major support of families living in poverty.
While you are there, inform the secretary that your family is dealing with the recent death of your husband which is causing severe financial hardship and you need to speak to the district social worker. (Ideally, I'd prefer you put the kids in school ASAP so they've had some transition time in case your husband does die - but I'm also assuming that if you are writing Botkin for help, you are going to avoid that option until the last moment.) Every school I've worked in has had either a social worker on staff or has a social worker on call through the county. This social worker can smooth your application for other government services.
What other services? Well, that depends a lot on the makeup of your family and how many assets you have.
If you have less than $15,000 in assets, limited income and children under 18, you may qualify for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) - also known as welfare. You'll receive a small cash payment to cover non-food essentials. You'll also be under a lot of pressure to get a job and get off of TANF. Don't blame me; I'm a gleefully tax-and-spend liberal and have been for decades. No, the same politicians who are pro-life are also extremely pro-work - to the point that one serious worry of Sen. Romney's (a Republican from Utah) proposed monthly payment to families of children is that the payment might cause single mothers to work fewer hours. You know - single mothers like a widowed former homeschooling mom with four kids. God forbid they spend some time at home.
If you have less than $15,000 in assets - but your home is excluded if it is your primary residence - and meet income requirements, you'll receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Payments - known as food stamps or SNAP. You receive around $1 per meal per day per person - but scale tends to work in the favor of larger families rather than single adults. For example, I attempted to live on $86 dollars per months of food items for half a year when I was a single adult to raise awareness about our crap-tastic benefits. I did it - but my meals were very monotonous because I had to make the same bulk buys stretch. For a family of five, the benefit would be around $430 dollars - and the mom would have ten meals per kid covered by school lunches. My $86 dollars had to cover 90 meals or $0.96 cents a meal. For the LW's family, the $430 dollars would need to cover $400 meals which is $1.08 per person per meal - which means a food budget of $5.40 per meal.
If you have a kid under five, you will qualify for the Women, Infant and Children's Supplemental Nutrition program known as WIC. I'm very fond of WIC. We've qualified for WIC since Spawn was born because he's covered by Medicaid since he's got some fantastic medical diagnoses and enrollment in Medicaid automatically qualifies a child, pregnant woman, or postpartum woman for WIC. WIC covered all of Spawn's expensive pre-digested formula as a baby and nutritional high-calorie drinks as a tot. That was around $100 - $150 dollars in food for him per month covered. On top of that, some counties allow children to receive formula and food at the same time - especially after age 2 if they have special needs. We receive around $125 dollars in healthy foods each month for Spawn. What does that look like? There are booklets that describe what brands and sizes of food you can get but here's what we get in an average month: 3 gallons of 2% milk, 2 18oz boxes of Cheerios, a pound of mild cheddar, two pounds of whole-wheat spaghetti, 2 64oz bottles of juice, four cans of beans (or one jar of peanut butter), a dozen eggs and $9.00 worth of frozen veggies - which is around 9 4 serving bags. It's a huge amount of food for our one, slightly-built child - and would make SNAP stretch even farther.
You'll qualify for CHIP - free or very-low cost health insurance for your kids - and Medicaid or highly subsidized marketplace health insurance for you. The hardest part for some people is finding doctors who take it; where I live, that's not so hard because the local Catholic hospital system takes all Medicaid options. My doctor is in that system; my family started at a practice that helped an area with very high poverty and homeless rates because the practice was taking clients when they moved. We've stayed because the staff is caring and highly competent. When I've had private insurance, I go there because I know the higher reimbursement rates will help subsidize care for others; when I was on Medicaid, I had the exact same excellent medical care as I got in private insurance.
I digress.
Are there other benefits out there? Yup - but a lot of the benefits are scattered and patchy so that's why I'm trying to attach you to a school social worker who can get your family into the Medicaid/CHIP program ASAP. In that program, you'll be assigned a government social worker who can help navigate that system.
Look, I know you've been told that putting your kids in public school, working outside the home, and depending on the government for welfare is a sign of being an anti-Christian communist who hates babies.
You've been lied to. Sorry - there's no easy way to say what is true - Botkin and his buddies have been selling lies to other people to put off actually working for their own living.
Most Christian kids go to public schools - and plenty of them "keep the faith".
Most moms work part or full-time outside of the home - and their kids do fine.
Many, many, many people need government benefits for some period of their lives. That's why they are there - to support you and your family in a time of extensive need. It's not a sign of weakness; it's a sign that life is fucking shitty from time to time and no one can do it all alone.
If you have a kid under five, you will qualify for the Women, Infant and Children's Supplemental Nutrition program known as WIC. I'm very fond of WIC. We've qualified for WIC since Spawn was born because he's covered by Medicaid since he's got some fantastic medical diagnoses and enrollment in Medicaid automatically qualifies a child, pregnant woman, or postpartum woman for WIC. WIC covered all of Spawn's expensive pre-digested formula as a baby and nutritional high-calorie drinks as a tot. That was around $100 - $150 dollars in food for him per month covered. On top of that, some counties allow children to receive formula and food at the same time - especially after age 2 if they have special needs. We receive around $125 dollars in healthy foods each month for Spawn. What does that look like? There are booklets that describe what brands and sizes of food you can get but here's what we get in an average month: 3 gallons of 2% milk, 2 18oz boxes of Cheerios, a pound of mild cheddar, two pounds of whole-wheat spaghetti, 2 64oz bottles of juice, four cans of beans (or one jar of peanut butter), a dozen eggs and $9.00 worth of frozen veggies - which is around 9 4 serving bags. It's a huge amount of food for our one, slightly-built child - and would make SNAP stretch even farther.
You'll qualify for CHIP - free or very-low cost health insurance for your kids - and Medicaid or highly subsidized marketplace health insurance for you. The hardest part for some people is finding doctors who take it; where I live, that's not so hard because the local Catholic hospital system takes all Medicaid options. My doctor is in that system; my family started at a practice that helped an area with very high poverty and homeless rates because the practice was taking clients when they moved. We've stayed because the staff is caring and highly competent. When I've had private insurance, I go there because I know the higher reimbursement rates will help subsidize care for others; when I was on Medicaid, I had the exact same excellent medical care as I got in private insurance.
I digress.
Are there other benefits out there? Yup - but a lot of the benefits are scattered and patchy so that's why I'm trying to attach you to a school social worker who can get your family into the Medicaid/CHIP program ASAP. In that program, you'll be assigned a government social worker who can help navigate that system.
Look, I know you've been told that putting your kids in public school, working outside the home, and depending on the government for welfare is a sign of being an anti-Christian communist who hates babies.
You've been lied to. Sorry - there's no easy way to say what is true - Botkin and his buddies have been selling lies to other people to put off actually working for their own living.
Most Christian kids go to public schools - and plenty of them "keep the faith".
Most moms work part or full-time outside of the home - and their kids do fine.
Many, many, many people need government benefits for some period of their lives. That's why they are there - to support you and your family in a time of extensive need. It's not a sign of weakness; it's a sign that life is fucking shitty from time to time and no one can do it all alone.
Hang in there. You'll do fine in the long run - but please - don't ask Botkin for advice.
Friday, March 5, 2021
Joyfully At Home: Chapter 15 - Part One
Jasmine Baucham's fifteenth chapter in "Joyfully At Home" is Jasmine's reasonably sensible plan to deal with a problem she sees among extensively sheltered homeschooled daughters. Jasmine wrote that chapter to help the readers of her book spend some time learning a deeper explanation of why the family homeschools, runs their own business, keeps their daughters at home etc. than "That's what my family does" or "Because my parents want it that way."
I don't have a wide enough base of experience with Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull families who shelter their kids by homeschooling to have a feeling if this is a widespread problem - but I trust that if a young woman in that society thinks the problem exists, it exists.
In some respects, the need to justify a family's religious practices is a relic of Protestant Christianity's formation. For many religions, the actions of worshipping matter far more than the believer's ability to understand or explain exactly why they worship in the way they do. I am Roman Catholic and the Church thinks the discipline of attending Mass on Sunday and receiving the Eucharist matters far more than a person's ability to explain consubstantiation or why we worship on Sunday instead of Saturday. For many religions formed prior to the Enlightenment Period, this focus on right action rather than right thought still exists.
The net outcome of this is that many believers of a variety of religion are rather bewildered by the aggressive questioning of 'why?' a religion does what it does. When your religious belief is based on faith in the actions of worshipping God, dealing with someone who expects you to justify every action from a scripture feels bizarre. Why do we do that? Because that's how we worship God. If you want to know if it works, do the action; don't expect me to rummage around in my Bible for a verse to justify it.
That's a bit of a digression - but Jasmine's attempts to explain how her family taught her shows a frequent paradox found in CP/QF homeschool discussions. Ms. Baucham attempts to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time. The first idea is that CP/QF methods of homeschooling create students who are more creative, better at flexible thinking and more articulate than public schooling. The second idea is that homeschooling allows parents to raise children whose beliefs and thought processes are in perfect alignment with the Christian ideal.
And there's the problem in a nutshell. You can't raise a child to be the perfect defender of CP/QF - or Catholicism or atheism or any other religion, philosophy, or belief system - without suppressing some critical thinking skills.
I know this from personal experience. I did K-12 schooling in a Catholic school system and received an excellent academic education. Because I received an excellent academic education, however, I rejected quite a few social teachings of the Church. Thanks to a strong background in academic reading comprehension, Biology and statistics, I recognized that natural family planning (NFP) is a ticket to a very large family for most adult women. Thanks to the wide amount of reading required and a high school morality class that pushed critical thinking over indoctrination, I recognized that the Church's view on LGBT issues was harmful and obsession with clerical chastity strange.
Was this the end of my faith. No. For better or worse, I am Catholic. I see the world through a certain series of lenses involving human rights and dignity that I learned from the Church. I order my year around a Liturgical Calendar that is as ingrained for me as the seasons. I find attending Mass to be comforting and invigorating and I hope to pass on similar experiences to my son.
But I digress. I'm a 39-year old woman raised by parents who wanted me to own my life and religion. This section of "Joyfully At Home" was written by a 19-year old woman whose father prioritized formation of ideal Christians - and this is what you get:
The example she choose is telling. Because CP/QF Christianity is militantly devoted to the Republican Party, every reader of Ms. Baucham's book in the US would instantly recognize that the Baucham's answer to "Is Obamacare a good thing?" would be a resounding "no!". A deep aversion to any form of government regulation or safety net over rugged individualism is a key plank of the Republican Party.
It's important to the pro-business Republican Party - and the interests of various insurance companies and for-profit medical businesses - but does that mean that resistance to a single-payer governmental medical insurance program is Biblical?
Not really; the Bible is so broad with so many different times and genres represented that people can make Biblically based arguments for both private medical insurance, public medical insurance, mutual aid societies like Samaritan....pretty much every method of paying for medical care I can find.
Why doesn't Jasmine know this at age 19? Because her homeschool experience prioritized right doctrinal thinking over critical thinking.
When I taught high school, I encouraged my students to write one opinion paper a year (out of several) that contradicted their personal belief systems. For example, write a paper against nuclear energy if you were in favor of it or a paper about why steroids should be legal for professional athletes if you believed should be illegal. I got a whole heap of papers about outlawing marijuana each year :-).
Why did I do this? Well, I'm sure the Bauchams' or Maxwells or Duggars or Botkins would tell you I was a godless teacher trying to corrupt their kids - but I had no interest in changing the viewpoints of students.
No, I wanted my students to take the time to assess what the major points that motivated people who disagreed with them. Unless you can see the major motivation points of another person, you can't really understand their viewpoint. By teaching young adults to assess a different viewpoint - then support that point using real data points - I was attempting to show why well-meaning, educated people who care can reach radically different views on the same subject.
That would also help students see that people on the opposite side of an issue weren't evil or stupid; they were usually just putting different weights on certain values. That viewpoint is a bit more compassionate and gives a starting point for working together.
As I type that, though, I realize that teaching the Botkin kids that "liberals are people, too!" or "that person who wants to reform drug laws might be doing it out of care for others!" is a form of corruption of their worldviews. Whoops - but I was teaching kids to become citizens of the current USA - not a theological autocratic regime run by their father.
What would have happened if young Jasmine came back with a handful of Bible quotes that supported Obamacare based on the shared responsibility of Christians to support each other, Jesus's statement about giving to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and multiple passages about healing the sick?
Where I went to school, that'd be an A paper - but would it be in the Baucham house?
What if Jasmine read the Communist Manifesto - *rolls eyes* - and declared that it reminded her so much of the portions of the New Testament where the local community supported each other by sharing what everyone had to fulfil what everyone needed?
I think we can safely assume that Jasmine would be sent back to collect the right ideas - but I'm more concerned about the fact that Jasmine has been so sheltered that she seems oblivious to the idea of how her beliefs could morph over time.
The good news is that twenty-something Jasmine has been vocal about how her personal beliefs have changed markedly from her father.
I rolled my eyes about reading "The Communist Manifesto" because CP/QF homeschoolers seem to have an obsession with reading out-of-date materials as a sign of academic prowess. We'll see that more in the next post in this section.
Monday, March 1, 2021
Babbling Botkin: What if My Husband Dies? - Part Thirteen
Hello, friends!
I don't believe I've ever been happier to see the snow melt than I have this year. I usually like deep snow because I can ski and enjoy a few days or weeks of being a couch potato in the house. Thanks to the pandemic, I've greatly improved my couch potato performance rating this year and even a few glorious days of skiing could not outweigh my feelings of being trapped.
I've been working a few more hours a week at my job recently - and that's causing me to be a bit frazzled. Case in point: I kept my kid at home on a Tuesday for a Thursday virtual doctor's appointment to get his referrals for PT and speech renewed for another year. I didn't realize my mistake until it was far too late for me to take my son to school - so I loaded him up with his facemask and we went to a local botanical garden. I used to volunteer there for years before I moved out to the country and I remembered that the indoor garden had plenty of butterflies in the month prior to their spring "Butterflies are Blooming!" event. Personally, I found the amount of butterflies released during the event proper to be too much; there were so many butterflies that the butterflies would form swarms.
I enjoyed the butterflies; Spawn adored the many, many pieces of heavy equipment present for the ever ongoing construction. He even found a 2 foot gap caused by a snow bank in the construction fence and was dead set of going to join the "stuction workers and firemen". I told him no because he would need a hard hat, safety goggles, a hi-vis vest and steel-toed boots - and they do not make steel toed boots in little kid size 9.
Spawn's fairly calm acceptance of a mild disappointment and chipper greeting of construction workers - "Hi, stuction workers! Good job! Do great job!" - makes me feel like I'm raising my child in accordance with our worldviews. We don't always get what we want in life - but try to enjoy what we have. Be respectful of others and give plenty of praise to people.
Meanwhile, I'm slogging through Geoffrey Botkin's rambling monologue on how to raise children in "What If My Husband Dies?" and wondering what planet he lives on. For example, he seems to steal Steven Maxwell's spiel about departing from the dangers of corporate life, then makes it better by doing when his sons were young:
I don't believe I've ever been happier to see the snow melt than I have this year. I usually like deep snow because I can ski and enjoy a few days or weeks of being a couch potato in the house. Thanks to the pandemic, I've greatly improved my couch potato performance rating this year and even a few glorious days of skiing could not outweigh my feelings of being trapped.
I've been working a few more hours a week at my job recently - and that's causing me to be a bit frazzled. Case in point: I kept my kid at home on a Tuesday for a Thursday virtual doctor's appointment to get his referrals for PT and speech renewed for another year. I didn't realize my mistake until it was far too late for me to take my son to school - so I loaded him up with his facemask and we went to a local botanical garden. I used to volunteer there for years before I moved out to the country and I remembered that the indoor garden had plenty of butterflies in the month prior to their spring "Butterflies are Blooming!" event. Personally, I found the amount of butterflies released during the event proper to be too much; there were so many butterflies that the butterflies would form swarms.
I enjoyed the butterflies; Spawn adored the many, many pieces of heavy equipment present for the ever ongoing construction. He even found a 2 foot gap caused by a snow bank in the construction fence and was dead set of going to join the "stuction workers and firemen". I told him no because he would need a hard hat, safety goggles, a hi-vis vest and steel-toed boots - and they do not make steel toed boots in little kid size 9.
Spawn's fairly calm acceptance of a mild disappointment and chipper greeting of construction workers - "Hi, stuction workers! Good job! Do great job!" - makes me feel like I'm raising my child in accordance with our worldviews. We don't always get what we want in life - but try to enjoy what we have. Be respectful of others and give plenty of praise to people.
Meanwhile, I'm slogging through Geoffrey Botkin's rambling monologue on how to raise children in "What If My Husband Dies?" and wondering what planet he lives on. For example, he seems to steal Steven Maxwell's spiel about departing from the dangers of corporate life, then makes it better by doing when his sons were young:
Honestly, I have no idea how Botkin has earned enough money to raise a large family - but I've never seen or heard anything that he's connected with that sounds remotely like a for-profit large business. He's always been attached to cultic ministries like The Great Commission or Vision Forum. My assumption was that he was erudite enough to earn a stipend or a salary for his writings and speeches and that Victoria picked up the slack by drumming up a very loyal following for her homeschooling materials.
Assuming that Vision Forum was at least part of the business that he's talking about, I find his total lack of regret ironic. He sold the rights to his daughters' more popular book "So Much More" to Vision Forum which means Anna Sofia and Elizabeth lost both the revenue stream available to most self-published stay-at-home daughters through book sales. At the same time, Vision Forum was being run by Doug Phillips who was accused of molesting the teenage nanny his family used. Even if Anna Sofia and Elizabeth were not directly hurt by Doug Phillips, having a friend be sexually assaulted by your dad's boss is traumatic.
It's also exceptionally unusual to be that screwed over by an employer - so maybe think about getting a corporate job rather than joining cult.
Assuming that Vision Forum was at least part of the business that he's talking about, I find his total lack of regret ironic. He sold the rights to his daughters' more popular book "So Much More" to Vision Forum which means Anna Sofia and Elizabeth lost both the revenue stream available to most self-published stay-at-home daughters through book sales. At the same time, Vision Forum was being run by Doug Phillips who was accused of molesting the teenage nanny his family used. Even if Anna Sofia and Elizabeth were not directly hurt by Doug Phillips, having a friend be sexually assaulted by your dad's boss is traumatic.
It's also exceptionally unusual to be that screwed over by an employer - so maybe think about getting a corporate job rather than joining cult.
Yup - because most extremely sheltered homeschooling families found in Christian Patriarchy/Quiverful (CP/QF) are going to just give their son over to the first adult male who offers to teach him something.....
Actually, I take that back. CP/QF society seems to attract a disturbingly high number of control freaks who use the mantle of male headship to disguise abusive behaviors towards family members or members of their community while benefiting from the community's refusal to think bad of their own.
Actually, I take that back. CP/QF society seems to attract a disturbingly high number of control freaks who use the mantle of male headship to disguise abusive behaviors towards family members or members of their community while benefiting from the community's refusal to think bad of their own.
Check out any potential apprentice masters carefully. Ask to speak to some former employees or apprentices. Ask around to make sure they have a good name in the community. I can think of a few people in my community who run very successful businesses but who have used business practices that I find sketchy; I'd not want my son working with them until he was a legal adult and showed he had a good head on his shoulders.
Every time Botkin says the word "business", I hear Sam Eagle's character from "Muppet Treasure Island" lecturing young Scrooge about being a man of "BUSINESS!" Literally every time.
Look, most kids are raised by parents who are employees or business owners who don't need their kids underfoot at their job. Those kids still pick up work ethic and values because little humans pick up plenty of lessons from day-to-day life. Does a family value hard work? Do they reward their kids when their kids work hard? Odds are that the kids will learn to work hard - even if they learn it by volunteering with a secular group to clean up a woodland.
Then - without any transition - Botkin drops this whopper on us:
Really?
Describe, in as much detail as possible, the business you started when your sons were small, Botkin.
How many hours a week did you work at that alleged self-employment and how much income did you earn weekly, monthly, and yearly?
Next, explain in as much detail as possible, how your wife Victoria would have been able to take up working that many hours a week while still providing care and homeschooling for your seven minor children.
How much extra money would she have to expend in increased clothing needs for her, processed food in lieu of cooking from scratch and childcare costs in the first year after your death?
How would the business support those costs in the immediate aftermath when the owner of the business up-and-died?
Exactly.
At least Botkin was honest enough to use the conditional tense of "may prove". He knows well enough that most family businesses don't clear expenses let alone provide enough income for the family - but that's not the line that he wants to sell.
Don't ask Botkin for advice.
Look, most kids are raised by parents who are employees or business owners who don't need their kids underfoot at their job. Those kids still pick up work ethic and values because little humans pick up plenty of lessons from day-to-day life. Does a family value hard work? Do they reward their kids when their kids work hard? Odds are that the kids will learn to work hard - even if they learn it by volunteering with a secular group to clean up a woodland.
Then - without any transition - Botkin drops this whopper on us:
Really?
Describe, in as much detail as possible, the business you started when your sons were small, Botkin.
How many hours a week did you work at that alleged self-employment and how much income did you earn weekly, monthly, and yearly?
Next, explain in as much detail as possible, how your wife Victoria would have been able to take up working that many hours a week while still providing care and homeschooling for your seven minor children.
How much extra money would she have to expend in increased clothing needs for her, processed food in lieu of cooking from scratch and childcare costs in the first year after your death?
How would the business support those costs in the immediate aftermath when the owner of the business up-and-died?
Exactly.
At least Botkin was honest enough to use the conditional tense of "may prove". He knows well enough that most family businesses don't clear expenses let alone provide enough income for the family - but that's not the line that he wants to sell.
Don't ask Botkin for advice.
Friday, February 26, 2021
Babbling Botkin: What if My Husband Dies? - Part Twelve
Hello!
I realized when I was driving home from work yesterday that I have a cold. I'd been feeling off for a few days previously and finally recognized that I had a sore throat from post-nasal drip.This is the second cold I've had in the year since COVID came to the U.S. compared to about one a month prior to that. That made me wonder just how many other illnesses have been minimized by the social distancing, handwashing and masking protocols from COVID. I'd bet that the total number of circulating cold viruses has dropped.
Speaking of looking back, I mentioned early in this set of posts how revealing the number of filler words and pauses that Geoffrey Botkin uses is for his level of discomfort. When he's talking about theoretical situations where he has a lot of control, he uses minimal filler words. When he's discussing the actual life experience of the woman who wrote him to ask "What if My Husband Dies?" of COVID worsened by COPD, he uses so many filler words that sorting out the content is hard. Look at this quote when Botkin brings up the idea of discussing the husband's wishes for his sons' education if he dies:
People are often uncomfortable talking about death in American society. We've lost a framework for discussing the fact that everyone will die let alone what will happen when I die.
I'm not surprised with Botkin's discomfort in that context - but this isn't a spontaneous conversation between a husband and wife. We're watching a video post to a website. Botkin could have - and should have - practiced his monologue enough that he could say "Honey, if you died how would I train the boys? What are your preferences?" without floundering for 30 seconds.
Geoffrey Botkin likes control. He's been in one cultic religious group - The Great Commission, Vision Forum- after another since he was college age. Currently, he's branched away from being a member of a larger religious group to running his own personal family religion while diving deeply into QAnon. The main theme between these groups is that they offer a form of gnostic knowledge (secrets known only to the initiated or "educated") combined with a framework for Botkin being the undisputed leader of his own family.
He struggles during this portion because he glances tangentially at the reality that some day he will die, too - and his wife and unmarried adult children will be left to carry on without him.
Botkin concedes that talking about how the family will carry on after the patriarch dies is important - but shares no stories from his life. |
That's unfortunate because families who have been marching along to the Vision Forum/ATI/IBLP/CP/QF ideas of stay-at-home daughterhood and multigenerational faithfulness now have unmarried sons and daughters living at home in their late 20's, 30's and 40's.
How is this supposed to work out as the older generation ages and dies?
Who is responsible for maintaining the single daughters who have no work experience outside of their families? Are the married sons responsible for room and board for the daughters? Do the unmarried sons going to support their sisters?
What happens if an unmarried son wants to make a later in life marriage?
I don't know that the letter writer should be asking Botkin for advice because he's got a lot of loose ends flapping around involving his own four single adult children.
Next, Botkin runs away from the entire subject onto a much more comfortable just-so-story:
When Botkin says "fifty years ago", what decade is he placing himself in?
If he's talking about today, he's discussing the recruitment of the 1978 Astronaut Class - that one he probably wants to forget about since it included - *gasp* - women and people of color. Lazily scanning through the biographies of that class of astronauts I found that a lot of the astronauts lived in highly populated areas like cities where family farms are non-existent. On the other hand, all of the astronauts had multiple advanced degrees in math or science. Since the advanced degree requirement was included on the employment advertisements along with physical fitness, I suspect NASA found it more important than "grew up on farm".
If Botkin was talking fifty years before the 1990's or 1980's, he'd be talking about.....no one, actually.
The Mercury Seven were put together in 1958.
Well, let's pretend he was talking about the Mercury Seven because they are the type of white, clean-cut, all-American men that Botkin admires. Of those seven men, only Deke Slayton grew up on a farm. The other six men grew up in families where their fathers worked outside the home in white-collar or blue-collar occupations.
You know, just like most kids do.
And the job posting for the first set of astronauts included a maximum height, age limitations, a college degree requirement and that the candidate had finished test pilot school - but no requirement of where the kid grew up.
Yeah....don't ask Botkin for advice. If you are worried about family income - don't buy a farm in hopes that your sons will have strong work ethic. Instead, follow the mothers of the Mercury Seven most of whom worked outside the home.
Monday, February 22, 2021
Joyfully At Home: Chapter 14 - Part Five
Hello!
Brrrr! I am chilly this morning. I had a temperature reading of -4 degrees when I got my son in the car this morning which dropped to -9 degrees in the lowest topographic point on the drive in.
After another snowfall event, I've got snow depths between my knees and thighs through most of the yard. A few drifts are as tall as Spawn.
Spawn's enjoying the snow. When he sees a snowdrift, he wants to kick holes in the drift using his foot "like an excavator!". This has left a fascinating series of vertical slashes all over the driveway. He also likes to make snowballs - but it's been so cold that the snow is very powdery and dry. That kind of snow doesn't compact well so the snowballs are really fragile and lightweight.
That doesn't matter to Spawn.
He took to throwing them at me yesterday and giggled when the snowballs exploded into dust on impact. My first instinct was to dump the kid into a snowdrift as tall as he was - but that seemed a bit much. Instead, I tossed a snowball back at him.
While I'm huddled under a blanket on the couch, I figured I'd finish writing up this chapter from Jasmine Baucham's book "Joyfully At Home". So far, we've had four posts on the first question "Should women go to college?" I can't remember her second question - but neither the question nor the responses were particularly interesting or objectionable. The third question, though, is a fair question that Jasmine takes seriously:
The only place that I've seen this question tackled is the spectacularly tone-deaf "Our Response to Rapunzel" on the Botkin Sisters' defunct website. The Botkin Sisters' response is no surprise to anyone who followed Vision Forum (VF): Rapunzel is a sinful media creation - but if she were real, she'd be morally obligated to toe the line for her "mother" - e.g., the woman who kidnapped her - until the woman was physically abusive or until Rapunzel had incontrovertible evidence that she was kidnapped.
Lovely.
Jasmine Baucham, on the other hand, takes a more nuanced approach. She recognizes at 19 that there are plenty of ways that a potential SAHD might be thwarted. The most common way, I suspect, is when non-cult member parents refuse to accept having an employable daughter pretending that learning housekeeping is a full-time job for the foreseeable future. An equally common issue among the average 'ideal' huge CP/QF family with one marginally educated manual laboring father for income is that most of those families can't afford to support one or more employable adult daughters at home for years. As a Black young women in CP/QF culture, she may well have recognized that not all adult men are safe around teenage girls; she mentions in her adult blog that she had plenty of horrible things said to her at purity functions.
For whatever reason, Jasmine gives CP/QF SAHD-wannabes an out. If you can't stay home, you can't stay home.
Unfortunately, she leaves us with this gem:
Brrrr! I am chilly this morning. I had a temperature reading of -4 degrees when I got my son in the car this morning which dropped to -9 degrees in the lowest topographic point on the drive in.
After another snowfall event, I've got snow depths between my knees and thighs through most of the yard. A few drifts are as tall as Spawn.
Spawn's enjoying the snow. When he sees a snowdrift, he wants to kick holes in the drift using his foot "like an excavator!". This has left a fascinating series of vertical slashes all over the driveway. He also likes to make snowballs - but it's been so cold that the snow is very powdery and dry. That kind of snow doesn't compact well so the snowballs are really fragile and lightweight.
That doesn't matter to Spawn.
He took to throwing them at me yesterday and giggled when the snowballs exploded into dust on impact. My first instinct was to dump the kid into a snowdrift as tall as he was - but that seemed a bit much. Instead, I tossed a snowball back at him.
While I'm huddled under a blanket on the couch, I figured I'd finish writing up this chapter from Jasmine Baucham's book "Joyfully At Home". So far, we've had four posts on the first question "Should women go to college?" I can't remember her second question - but neither the question nor the responses were particularly interesting or objectionable. The third question, though, is a fair question that Jasmine takes seriously:
The only place that I've seen this question tackled is the spectacularly tone-deaf "Our Response to Rapunzel" on the Botkin Sisters' defunct website. The Botkin Sisters' response is no surprise to anyone who followed Vision Forum (VF): Rapunzel is a sinful media creation - but if she were real, she'd be morally obligated to toe the line for her "mother" - e.g., the woman who kidnapped her - until the woman was physically abusive or until Rapunzel had incontrovertible evidence that she was kidnapped.
Lovely.
Jasmine Baucham, on the other hand, takes a more nuanced approach. She recognizes at 19 that there are plenty of ways that a potential SAHD might be thwarted. The most common way, I suspect, is when non-cult member parents refuse to accept having an employable daughter pretending that learning housekeeping is a full-time job for the foreseeable future. An equally common issue among the average 'ideal' huge CP/QF family with one marginally educated manual laboring father for income is that most of those families can't afford to support one or more employable adult daughters at home for years. As a Black young women in CP/QF culture, she may well have recognized that not all adult men are safe around teenage girls; she mentions in her adult blog that she had plenty of horrible things said to her at purity functions.
For whatever reason, Jasmine gives CP/QF SAHD-wannabes an out. If you can't stay home, you can't stay home.
Unfortunately, she leaves us with this gem:
I have no problems with young adults thinking about how they were raised by their parents and deciding how they want to raise their children. That's a good, sensible way of trying to avoid issues that you disliked about how you were raised and deciding what you want to keep.
I do suggest, though, that you use a bit of humility when judging your mother and father as parents - especially if you do not yet have children in your household. Raising children brings great increases in the amount of stress in a family's life financially, emotionally and physically. Deciding how to raise imaginary children with an imaginary spouse in an imaginary future can be a useful exercise - but it's a very different exercise than raising this child with this spouse in this reality.
Similarly, I agree that people who marry with the thought of having children should make sure that their spouse shares some basic ideas about childrearing. First - foremost - make certain you both want children. Marrying someone who has different views on having children in hopes they will change their mind is cruel to both parties and a recipe for disaster. Knowing exactly what kind of father a man will be - or mother a woman will be - is not really possible ahead of time, though. Before I married my husband, I made sure he had the bones of a good father. He wanted kids, showed patience and enjoyment around small children, and didn't have unreasonable expectations about child behavior - but that's about as far as I could figure out ahead of time.
I severely dislike, though, the idea of young women deciding how their moms should have been better wives to their fathers. Being a wife is a very, very different role with very different responsibilities than being a dependent daughter. For a CP/QF SAHD, there are two roles to balance - daughter and sister. Those two are pretty easy to balance in a family unit where obedience is the main family value.
Upon marriage, a wife has to balance her roles as spouse, daughter, daughter-in-law, sister, sister-in-law and neighbor. Once she's pregnant, the role of mother gets added - and for each child afterward a separate "mother" role adds each time.
In other words, it's easy enough to say "You should have been more obedient/more industrious/more hospitable" as a young adult daughter looking at her memories of her mom from when she was nine - but it's a different view when you remember that your mother was caring for aging in-laws who didn't want to move in with their children or a retirement home while homeschooling five children, dealing with ongoing medical problems from her last delivery and not having any extra money all at the same time.
Yes! Go back to 1994 and eat dinner weekly with the Maxwells. Or split your dinners up among the Maxwells, Botkins and Duggars.
Watch as the first Maxwell marries only to find out that he and his wife have severe fertility issues. Watch the first Botkin son marry, then bail on the lifestyle.
Watch two Maxwell sons have public engagements called off. Watch two more Botkin sons marry and produce small families.
Really feel the entire stress level of everyone go up as the dual nightmares of the Duggars raising awareness of the sheer amount of sexual abuse happening in CP/QF families collides with VF and ATI collapsing under allegations of sexual abuse by the founder.
Watch the Duggars launch their daughters into marriages that splinter the family cohesion. Compare that outcome with the slow fade of Sarah Maxwell, Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, and Jana Duggar as they reach over 30 years without marrying.
Watch one Maxwell son slow fade out of the Maxwell lifestyle after marriage. Watch his younger brother sell his much-lauded debt-free home to go live in an apartment when he marries.
If nothing else, let this sink in: You cannot control the fate of adult children - even if you control their childhood meticulously.
This, my friends, is why I reviewed Jasmine Baucham's book - and why I suspect she turned out as well as she did. In spite of a rigid upbringing, Ms. Baucham recognized that different people can sincerely believe different things.
That one section was a breath of fresh air - and one that I hope swells in homes with CP/QF beliefs.
I do suggest, though, that you use a bit of humility when judging your mother and father as parents - especially if you do not yet have children in your household. Raising children brings great increases in the amount of stress in a family's life financially, emotionally and physically. Deciding how to raise imaginary children with an imaginary spouse in an imaginary future can be a useful exercise - but it's a very different exercise than raising this child with this spouse in this reality.
Similarly, I agree that people who marry with the thought of having children should make sure that their spouse shares some basic ideas about childrearing. First - foremost - make certain you both want children. Marrying someone who has different views on having children in hopes they will change their mind is cruel to both parties and a recipe for disaster. Knowing exactly what kind of father a man will be - or mother a woman will be - is not really possible ahead of time, though. Before I married my husband, I made sure he had the bones of a good father. He wanted kids, showed patience and enjoyment around small children, and didn't have unreasonable expectations about child behavior - but that's about as far as I could figure out ahead of time.
I severely dislike, though, the idea of young women deciding how their moms should have been better wives to their fathers. Being a wife is a very, very different role with very different responsibilities than being a dependent daughter. For a CP/QF SAHD, there are two roles to balance - daughter and sister. Those two are pretty easy to balance in a family unit where obedience is the main family value.
Upon marriage, a wife has to balance her roles as spouse, daughter, daughter-in-law, sister, sister-in-law and neighbor. Once she's pregnant, the role of mother gets added - and for each child afterward a separate "mother" role adds each time.
In other words, it's easy enough to say "You should have been more obedient/more industrious/more hospitable" as a young adult daughter looking at her memories of her mom from when she was nine - but it's a different view when you remember that your mother was caring for aging in-laws who didn't want to move in with their children or a retirement home while homeschooling five children, dealing with ongoing medical problems from her last delivery and not having any extra money all at the same time.
Yes! Go back to 1994 and eat dinner weekly with the Maxwells. Or split your dinners up among the Maxwells, Botkins and Duggars.
Watch as the first Maxwell marries only to find out that he and his wife have severe fertility issues. Watch the first Botkin son marry, then bail on the lifestyle.
Watch two Maxwell sons have public engagements called off. Watch two more Botkin sons marry and produce small families.
Really feel the entire stress level of everyone go up as the dual nightmares of the Duggars raising awareness of the sheer amount of sexual abuse happening in CP/QF families collides with VF and ATI collapsing under allegations of sexual abuse by the founder.
Watch the Duggars launch their daughters into marriages that splinter the family cohesion. Compare that outcome with the slow fade of Sarah Maxwell, Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, and Jana Duggar as they reach over 30 years without marrying.
Watch one Maxwell son slow fade out of the Maxwell lifestyle after marriage. Watch his younger brother sell his much-lauded debt-free home to go live in an apartment when he marries.
If nothing else, let this sink in: You cannot control the fate of adult children - even if you control their childhood meticulously.
This, my friends, is why I reviewed Jasmine Baucham's book - and why I suspect she turned out as well as she did. In spite of a rigid upbringing, Ms. Baucham recognized that different people can sincerely believe different things.
That one section was a breath of fresh air - and one that I hope swells in homes with CP/QF beliefs.
Friday, February 19, 2021
Babbling Botkin: "What if My Husband Dies?" - Part Eleven
Hello!
I am decidedly over winter right now. I'm enjoying having enough snow to cross-country ski out behind our house - but we've had high temperatures in the mid-teens for over a week. Every time I leave the house, I'm cold for at least a half hour after I return inside.
It's way too cold for Spawn and I to enjoy our weekly walks from his school to the local greasy spoon - and I miss those walks much more than I expected to. We'd probably be ok enough on the walk - but he's got my pale, dry, eczema-prone skin - and he's been getting windburn on his cheeks in the few minutes he's outside on the way to and from school.
I'm soothing myself by remembering that spring is right around the corner. I'll be setting up a low-tunnel to warm up the soil for cold weather crops within two weeks and get my specialty tomatoes and peppers started in the basement.
And soon enough, I'll be crabby because I'm hot and stuck outside working in that dratted garden all the time.....
Here's the next installment of Geoffrey Botkin's video "What if My Husband Dies?" In the previous post, he'd happily explained that young men can become lawyers in Virginia through an apprenticeship - but hadn't done the background work to realize that the first qualification required to enter the apprenticeship is a college degree.
Awkward.
The next minute of video features Botkin doing a stream-of-consciousness patter about what young men need to learn from working next to older men:
Botkin-rambles like these cause me to wonder what Geoffrey Botkin thinks the life of a stay-at-home mom of many, many littles who are also being homeschooled looks like.
Are young men oblivious to the sheer amount of work that their mothers and sisters do in a day?
Cooking three meals from scratch while teaching all of the students and managing the many mini-crises in the life of tiny ones is a never-ending slog of work. I have many reservations about massive families trying to home-school - but I've always assumed "willing to work beyond the point of exhaustion" is a given character trait.
Maybe Botkin is simply passing on a two centuries of Western civilization's view of women and work: work is only worth praising if it is done for currency. Women shouldn't demean themselves by working for currency.....so women's work inside a family structure isn't work.
Botkin's sudden obsession with "capacity" is a hoot. Extensive sheltering of homeschoolers mutes a child's or teen's ability to compare their personal skill set against peers. If Botkin had allowed his daughters to compare their writings with the writing skills of other teenagers, the daughters would have realized that one sister is a solid writer and the other sister has some serious short-falls in fluency, sentence structure and planning of topics.
The part where Botkin declares that boys can't learn about business from a textbook - then suddenly remembers that business textbooks do exist! - causes me to giggle every time. In fact, there's an entire section of ethics that deals with businesses - but that might cause Botkin's mind to explode.
Oh, Lord....that could be his next business venture if he ever clears his head of his current QAnon fixation......
I'm a bit lost as to why young men can only learn about work ethic from other men. I imagine most of the early learning about work ethic happens at home. Parents can encourage or ignore the work ethic of their children. I grew up in a family that appreciated hard work and I replicate how my parents raised me with my son. He's spent a great deal of his childhood so far working at PT, OT, and Speech. I praise my son for working hard and notice when he continues working on a difficult task - regardless of his end result. The process of working hard is something I want to pass on to him - so I point it out with pride when he's working hard even as a preschooler.
The bit I disagree with Botkin on is that hard work doesn't always lead to success. I've spent a great deal of time and effort attempting to learn how to do two-dimensional art. The outcome of all of that hard work is that I am a very poor sketcher or painter. I do not regret the time or effort I've used in that area - but I simply lack much aptitude in visualizing how a three-dimensional object becomes lines
and in getting my hand to make lines that match the line in my head.
Not everyone is great at a task - and knowing when to spend more time on more productive area is a skill worth having, too. After all, a basic aptitude plus hard work is a great foundation for excellence. I am very weak at drawing or painting - but I'm a very talented textile artist in both crochet and sewing. I've spent thousands of hours crocheting since I learned when I was 12. My first pieces were very basic and showed a normal lack of technique - but I found a crochet hook and yarn easier to manipulate than pencils or paintbrushes.
Slowly, I learned how to keep the yarn tension constant which made the gauge of the stitch even. I learned how to count stitches and to recognize when a row didn't look right.
As I got more skilled, I learned how to adapt patterns and make my own.
I remember the first time I recognized that a line of written pattern was clearly not right. I also remember the first time I was able to write out the correction to the pattern.
I learned the wisdom of starting over when my first plan for a project turned out wonky. (Hello, the three false-starts on Spawn's winter hat!)
I learned the importance of trying a small practice swatch when doing a new complicated pattern because unraveling a six-inch by three-inch swatch of yarn leftover from your son's hat is way less exasperating than unraveling 40 inches by 4 inches from a baby afghan.
Where did I learn this work ethic? From my parents - neither of whom worked at home.
Mom worked at a retail store - but her coworkers all seemed to think she worked hard. When my twin and I applied to work at that same store as teenagers, the managers were clear that being our mother's daughters was a great asset because they assumed we work hard.
Dad taught - and I saw how much time and effort he put in outside of school on his job. That and the sheer amount of effort and enthusiasm he brought to high school and community theater.
I didn't have to sit and watch them work every day because I saw how they worked at home, too. Mom and Dad both expected us to help out our elderly neighbors by shoveling their driveways during the winter and raking leaves during the fall. We did it because that's what we saw the adults in our family doing.
For the woman who wrote to Botkin in the first place, please don't start a family business because Botkin thinks it's the only way for kids to learn a work ethic. It's not. Most hard workers come from families where parents worked outside the home - and that's ok.
I am decidedly over winter right now. I'm enjoying having enough snow to cross-country ski out behind our house - but we've had high temperatures in the mid-teens for over a week. Every time I leave the house, I'm cold for at least a half hour after I return inside.
It's way too cold for Spawn and I to enjoy our weekly walks from his school to the local greasy spoon - and I miss those walks much more than I expected to. We'd probably be ok enough on the walk - but he's got my pale, dry, eczema-prone skin - and he's been getting windburn on his cheeks in the few minutes he's outside on the way to and from school.
I'm soothing myself by remembering that spring is right around the corner. I'll be setting up a low-tunnel to warm up the soil for cold weather crops within two weeks and get my specialty tomatoes and peppers started in the basement.
And soon enough, I'll be crabby because I'm hot and stuck outside working in that dratted garden all the time.....
Here's the next installment of Geoffrey Botkin's video "What if My Husband Dies?" In the previous post, he'd happily explained that young men can become lawyers in Virginia through an apprenticeship - but hadn't done the background work to realize that the first qualification required to enter the apprenticeship is a college degree.
Awkward.
The next minute of video features Botkin doing a stream-of-consciousness patter about what young men need to learn from working next to older men:
Botkin-rambles like these cause me to wonder what Geoffrey Botkin thinks the life of a stay-at-home mom of many, many littles who are also being homeschooled looks like.
Are young men oblivious to the sheer amount of work that their mothers and sisters do in a day?
Cooking three meals from scratch while teaching all of the students and managing the many mini-crises in the life of tiny ones is a never-ending slog of work. I have many reservations about massive families trying to home-school - but I've always assumed "willing to work beyond the point of exhaustion" is a given character trait.
Maybe Botkin is simply passing on a two centuries of Western civilization's view of women and work: work is only worth praising if it is done for currency. Women shouldn't demean themselves by working for currency.....so women's work inside a family structure isn't work.
Botkin's sudden obsession with "capacity" is a hoot. Extensive sheltering of homeschoolers mutes a child's or teen's ability to compare their personal skill set against peers. If Botkin had allowed his daughters to compare their writings with the writing skills of other teenagers, the daughters would have realized that one sister is a solid writer and the other sister has some serious short-falls in fluency, sentence structure and planning of topics.
The part where Botkin declares that boys can't learn about business from a textbook - then suddenly remembers that business textbooks do exist! - causes me to giggle every time. In fact, there's an entire section of ethics that deals with businesses - but that might cause Botkin's mind to explode.
Oh, Lord....that could be his next business venture if he ever clears his head of his current QAnon fixation......
I'm a bit lost as to why young men can only learn about work ethic from other men. I imagine most of the early learning about work ethic happens at home. Parents can encourage or ignore the work ethic of their children. I grew up in a family that appreciated hard work and I replicate how my parents raised me with my son. He's spent a great deal of his childhood so far working at PT, OT, and Speech. I praise my son for working hard and notice when he continues working on a difficult task - regardless of his end result. The process of working hard is something I want to pass on to him - so I point it out with pride when he's working hard even as a preschooler.
The bit I disagree with Botkin on is that hard work doesn't always lead to success. I've spent a great deal of time and effort attempting to learn how to do two-dimensional art. The outcome of all of that hard work is that I am a very poor sketcher or painter. I do not regret the time or effort I've used in that area - but I simply lack much aptitude in visualizing how a three-dimensional object becomes lines
and in getting my hand to make lines that match the line in my head.
Not everyone is great at a task - and knowing when to spend more time on more productive area is a skill worth having, too. After all, a basic aptitude plus hard work is a great foundation for excellence. I am very weak at drawing or painting - but I'm a very talented textile artist in both crochet and sewing. I've spent thousands of hours crocheting since I learned when I was 12. My first pieces were very basic and showed a normal lack of technique - but I found a crochet hook and yarn easier to manipulate than pencils or paintbrushes.
Slowly, I learned how to keep the yarn tension constant which made the gauge of the stitch even. I learned how to count stitches and to recognize when a row didn't look right.
As I got more skilled, I learned how to adapt patterns and make my own.
I remember the first time I recognized that a line of written pattern was clearly not right. I also remember the first time I was able to write out the correction to the pattern.
I learned the wisdom of starting over when my first plan for a project turned out wonky. (Hello, the three false-starts on Spawn's winter hat!)
I learned the importance of trying a small practice swatch when doing a new complicated pattern because unraveling a six-inch by three-inch swatch of yarn leftover from your son's hat is way less exasperating than unraveling 40 inches by 4 inches from a baby afghan.
Where did I learn this work ethic? From my parents - neither of whom worked at home.
Mom worked at a retail store - but her coworkers all seemed to think she worked hard. When my twin and I applied to work at that same store as teenagers, the managers were clear that being our mother's daughters was a great asset because they assumed we work hard.
Dad taught - and I saw how much time and effort he put in outside of school on his job. That and the sheer amount of effort and enthusiasm he brought to high school and community theater.
I didn't have to sit and watch them work every day because I saw how they worked at home, too. Mom and Dad both expected us to help out our elderly neighbors by shoveling their driveways during the winter and raking leaves during the fall. We did it because that's what we saw the adults in our family doing.
For the woman who wrote to Botkin in the first place, please don't start a family business because Botkin thinks it's the only way for kids to learn a work ethic. It's not. Most hard workers come from families where parents worked outside the home - and that's ok.
Monday, February 15, 2021
The Battle of Peer Dependency: Chapter Five - Part One
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.
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.
Friday, February 12, 2021
Joyfully At Home: Chapter 14 - Part Four
Spawn's been in preschool for a little over a year now.
His classmates and teachers join us as imaginary playmates in games. This week, when we walked to the local restaurant, Spawn informed me as we entered the back door that the school bus pulled up and all of his classmates were joining us for lunch. I said that I'd need to order more French toast and French fries, then, between stifling giggles at the thought of herding seven energetic preschoolers into the local greasy spoon for lunch by myself.
Most days, Spawn is a dinosaur when he gets out of school. I know this because he says "I'm a dinosaur! Roar! Roar!" as he takes off down the sidewalk as fast as he can. When he gets past me, he says, "Mama dinosaur, catch you! Catch you!" (Using the correct direct object pronouns has been a challenge for Spawn). I turn and lumber after him. Sometimes, I'll say, "Oh, I am trying to catch my little dinosaur, but he is so fast I can't quite get him." At first, that would cause Spawn to giggle and run faster. Right now, he slows way down so that I can "catch" him by putting my hand on his head or tickling his neck. Other times, he wants me to go first and he catches me.
His giggles are the best. I know I'm biased - but his giggles are deep, throaty and use his entire body. You can't feel bad while he's giggling - and I love making him giggle. Heck, his giggles are the reason I bought a bunch of Solo cups and some "indoor snowballs" for a game we call "Crash!Bang!" That's a game I created where we build a pyramid of Solo cups on the floor throw indoor snowballs at the pyramid until it crashes and we all yell "Crash!" or "Bang!" Spawn created a modified version where toy cars are used to knock out the bottom cups causing a big crash. It's a great way to blow off steam for all of us while being stuck indoors due to deep snow and cold temperatures.
When he's sad-angry and his chin wobbles, I want to bulldoze whatever problem is making him sad because it reminds me of the first time I ever saw and touched Spawn a few minutes after birth when he was crying loudly enough for me to hear with teeny-tiny chin wobbles.
His classmates and teachers join us as imaginary playmates in games. This week, when we walked to the local restaurant, Spawn informed me as we entered the back door that the school bus pulled up and all of his classmates were joining us for lunch. I said that I'd need to order more French toast and French fries, then, between stifling giggles at the thought of herding seven energetic preschoolers into the local greasy spoon for lunch by myself.
Most days, Spawn is a dinosaur when he gets out of school. I know this because he says "I'm a dinosaur! Roar! Roar!" as he takes off down the sidewalk as fast as he can. When he gets past me, he says, "Mama dinosaur, catch you! Catch you!" (Using the correct direct object pronouns has been a challenge for Spawn). I turn and lumber after him. Sometimes, I'll say, "Oh, I am trying to catch my little dinosaur, but he is so fast I can't quite get him." At first, that would cause Spawn to giggle and run faster. Right now, he slows way down so that I can "catch" him by putting my hand on his head or tickling his neck. Other times, he wants me to go first and he catches me.
His giggles are the best. I know I'm biased - but his giggles are deep, throaty and use his entire body. You can't feel bad while he's giggling - and I love making him giggle. Heck, his giggles are the reason I bought a bunch of Solo cups and some "indoor snowballs" for a game we call "Crash!Bang!" That's a game I created where we build a pyramid of Solo cups on the floor throw indoor snowballs at the pyramid until it crashes and we all yell "Crash!" or "Bang!" Spawn created a modified version where toy cars are used to knock out the bottom cups causing a big crash. It's a great way to blow off steam for all of us while being stuck indoors due to deep snow and cold temperatures.
When he's sad-angry and his chin wobbles, I want to bulldoze whatever problem is making him sad because it reminds me of the first time I ever saw and touched Spawn a few minutes after birth when he was crying loudly enough for me to hear with teeny-tiny chin wobbles.
I was thinking about how grateful I am to be Spawn's mom while prepping some materials for blog posts when I realized viscerally how badly CP/QF has lied to young women about education, careers, marriage, and motherhood. I have achieved what in CP/QF-land is impossible; I have a college degree, a career, a husband and a child.
Jasmine Baucham trots a fast overview of false dichotomy in Chapter 14 of "Joyfully at Home":
Jasmine Baucham trots a fast overview of false dichotomy in Chapter 14 of "Joyfully at Home":
In Christian Patriarchy/Quiverful beliefs, women are locked into a dichotomy between choosing education and careers or being a wife and mother.
Women who choose post-secondary education or careers will never be satisfactory wives and mothers.
Conversely, women who forgo education or working outside of a family business/ministry will always become wives and mothers.
Well, for people outside of CP/QF, that dichotomy is palpably false - but CP/QF homeschooled kids whose parents extensively shelter them have no way of poking holes in that dichotomy since everyone they know is telling them that attending college and having a career will destroy their ability to become wives and mothers.
Ironically, the girls from CP/QF families that are the poorest may well have the most exposure to the wider world since their families can't afford to keep them isolated once they can earn money. Working at a local retail establishment or a restaurant will quickly demonstrate that there are certainly women with college degrees who are good wives and mothers. At the same time, having a job makes a young woman more visible to young men who are looking to settle down. CP/QF parents live in terror of premarital sex - but keeping your daughter invisible from young men also decreases her chance of marriage.
The well-known CP/QF stay-at-home daughter authors generally have one or two parents with college degrees, have many fewer sisters than brothers, and can live indefinitely as dependent adults with their parents without undue financial stress. This group includes Jasmine Baucham, Sarah and Grace Mally, Sarah, Anna, and Mary Maxwell, and Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin. For those young women, their choice between college and motherhood was stark; their families on paper should have been able to educate them to college-ready standards and should have been able to afford supporting the young women as they attended college.
Five of the teenagers chose the safest path; they avoided anything that brought them outside of the safe world of their immediate family. Three of the teenagers chose a riskier path; they ventured outside of their immediate family and built careers.
Fast forward 15-20 years after the height of stay-at-home daughterhood.
Jasmine Baucham completed a college degree, worked outside the home, got married at age 24 and is the mother of two children. Sarah and Grace Mally founded and sustained two independent ministries that they treated as full-time jobs; Grace Mally married in her early thirties and has a baby girl. Grace and her husband introduced Sarah to a local minister with whom she fell in love and married in her early forties.
Those three stay-at-home daughters made it the status of adult women in CP/QF since they've married.
Many of their fellow famous stay-at-home daughters have not fared as well.
Sarah Maxwell has written 11 children's books for her family's vanity press between 2003 and 2020 with a four year hiatus between the end of the Moody series in 2015 and the beginning of the Hill Top Adventures in 2020. Her family acknowledged for the first time this year that she's been running Titus 2 Ministries since she was a teenager. (Compare that with the Mally Family who was always clear that Sarah initiated and built Bright Lights Ministry). She mentions sporadically that she does bookkeeping for her brothers' businesses - but whether that will continue as Nathan and Joseph's businesses grow and become more professional is an open question. As of this month, she is 39.
Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin made a small effort in 2017 to revamp their website/blog known as "Botkin Sisters". Since the new site hasn't been updated since 2018, I've placed it in my "moribund" site list that I check in once or twice a year. Outside of that, they've spoken at a few small conferences about networking. Anna Sofia seems to be in a MLM scheme of some kind and has made connections with her local chamber of commerce after they awarded something to her brother Lucas' company. Elizabeth Botkin hasn't listed any kind of work experience on any of her pages. Based on my back-of-the hand calculations, Anna Sofia turns 36 this year; Elizabeth turns 34.
Anna and Mary Maxwell have continued to be teenagers living at home well into their twenties.
Anna apparently worked as a customer service representative for Nathan's company. That could be a useful gig - but Anna rather catty blog post about how many of the questions could be answered if the customers "just Googled it" combined with the revelation that she, in fact, Googles the solutions would make me squeamish to take her on as an employee. At my current retail job, I often use the internet to seek out answers for customers' more obscure questions - but I definitely don't imply that my job would be useless if people just did it themselves! Why? Because I use my combination of science literacy and media savvy to sort the results into "possibly good", "probably bad", and "could lead to fatalities" before quickly reading the material to decide if it is a workable solution. Anna turns 29 this summer.
Mary doesn't pretend to do anything as venial as the family businesses. Mary is an artist and creates lettered signs of Bible quotes for family members. She face-paints children (along with Anna's balloon critters) to draw visitors to their conversion booth at the State Fair. She also worked with Anna prior to COVID to plan and execute a single children's Bible study a week at a local apartment complex. Most of Mary's activities, though, are on hold now because of COVID. Mary turns 25 this year.
TL;DR: Jasmine Baucham and the Mally Sisters spent their SAHD years working outside of the home in careers and ministries as a full-time job - and all three of them married. The Maxwells and Botkins, on the other hand. had 3 part-time jobs between the five women - and none of them seem any closer to marriage or motherhood than they were at age 16.
I hope I'm wrong. For all that I dislike CP/QF theology immensely, I do not have a personal issue with any of these young women. I sincerely hope that each of them find a nice man to start a family with if that's what their heart desires - or create a niche for themselves as satisfied single adults.
My heart simply aches for them. I've made my choices in my life freely. My life doesn't look like I thought it would when I was a girl or a teenage or even a younger woman - but I am content because I made choices based on my values and my desires rather than anyone else's.
I spent the morning at the ophthalmologist with Spawn. His lovey - a stuffed ginger tabby named Kitty-Kitty - needed an eye exam. On a completely unrelated note, Spawn's eyes are doing fine. We got up, ate breakfast, got dressed, listened to "Mama's music" (read: Irish folk tunes) on the drive in, commiserated with a crabby, screaming newborn, and walked Kitty-Kitty through her eye exam. Afterwards, we brought lunch home and played with trains.
I had an average day with a little boy who is as much a part of me as my right arm - and I regret nothing of my choices that lead to being his mama because I never had to sacrifice my given desire for a career in exchange for the hope of being a mom.
Women who choose post-secondary education or careers will never be satisfactory wives and mothers.
Conversely, women who forgo education or working outside of a family business/ministry will always become wives and mothers.
Well, for people outside of CP/QF, that dichotomy is palpably false - but CP/QF homeschooled kids whose parents extensively shelter them have no way of poking holes in that dichotomy since everyone they know is telling them that attending college and having a career will destroy their ability to become wives and mothers.
Ironically, the girls from CP/QF families that are the poorest may well have the most exposure to the wider world since their families can't afford to keep them isolated once they can earn money. Working at a local retail establishment or a restaurant will quickly demonstrate that there are certainly women with college degrees who are good wives and mothers. At the same time, having a job makes a young woman more visible to young men who are looking to settle down. CP/QF parents live in terror of premarital sex - but keeping your daughter invisible from young men also decreases her chance of marriage.
The well-known CP/QF stay-at-home daughter authors generally have one or two parents with college degrees, have many fewer sisters than brothers, and can live indefinitely as dependent adults with their parents without undue financial stress. This group includes Jasmine Baucham, Sarah and Grace Mally, Sarah, Anna, and Mary Maxwell, and Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin. For those young women, their choice between college and motherhood was stark; their families on paper should have been able to educate them to college-ready standards and should have been able to afford supporting the young women as they attended college.
Five of the teenagers chose the safest path; they avoided anything that brought them outside of the safe world of their immediate family. Three of the teenagers chose a riskier path; they ventured outside of their immediate family and built careers.
Fast forward 15-20 years after the height of stay-at-home daughterhood.
Jasmine Baucham completed a college degree, worked outside the home, got married at age 24 and is the mother of two children. Sarah and Grace Mally founded and sustained two independent ministries that they treated as full-time jobs; Grace Mally married in her early thirties and has a baby girl. Grace and her husband introduced Sarah to a local minister with whom she fell in love and married in her early forties.
Those three stay-at-home daughters made it the status of adult women in CP/QF since they've married.
Many of their fellow famous stay-at-home daughters have not fared as well.
Sarah Maxwell has written 11 children's books for her family's vanity press between 2003 and 2020 with a four year hiatus between the end of the Moody series in 2015 and the beginning of the Hill Top Adventures in 2020. Her family acknowledged for the first time this year that she's been running Titus 2 Ministries since she was a teenager. (Compare that with the Mally Family who was always clear that Sarah initiated and built Bright Lights Ministry). She mentions sporadically that she does bookkeeping for her brothers' businesses - but whether that will continue as Nathan and Joseph's businesses grow and become more professional is an open question. As of this month, she is 39.
Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin made a small effort in 2017 to revamp their website/blog known as "Botkin Sisters". Since the new site hasn't been updated since 2018, I've placed it in my "moribund" site list that I check in once or twice a year. Outside of that, they've spoken at a few small conferences about networking. Anna Sofia seems to be in a MLM scheme of some kind and has made connections with her local chamber of commerce after they awarded something to her brother Lucas' company. Elizabeth Botkin hasn't listed any kind of work experience on any of her pages. Based on my back-of-the hand calculations, Anna Sofia turns 36 this year; Elizabeth turns 34.
Anna and Mary Maxwell have continued to be teenagers living at home well into their twenties.
Anna apparently worked as a customer service representative for Nathan's company. That could be a useful gig - but Anna rather catty blog post about how many of the questions could be answered if the customers "just Googled it" combined with the revelation that she, in fact, Googles the solutions would make me squeamish to take her on as an employee. At my current retail job, I often use the internet to seek out answers for customers' more obscure questions - but I definitely don't imply that my job would be useless if people just did it themselves! Why? Because I use my combination of science literacy and media savvy to sort the results into "possibly good", "probably bad", and "could lead to fatalities" before quickly reading the material to decide if it is a workable solution. Anna turns 29 this summer.
Mary doesn't pretend to do anything as venial as the family businesses. Mary is an artist and creates lettered signs of Bible quotes for family members. She face-paints children (along with Anna's balloon critters) to draw visitors to their conversion booth at the State Fair. She also worked with Anna prior to COVID to plan and execute a single children's Bible study a week at a local apartment complex. Most of Mary's activities, though, are on hold now because of COVID. Mary turns 25 this year.
TL;DR: Jasmine Baucham and the Mally Sisters spent their SAHD years working outside of the home in careers and ministries as a full-time job - and all three of them married. The Maxwells and Botkins, on the other hand. had 3 part-time jobs between the five women - and none of them seem any closer to marriage or motherhood than they were at age 16.
I hope I'm wrong. For all that I dislike CP/QF theology immensely, I do not have a personal issue with any of these young women. I sincerely hope that each of them find a nice man to start a family with if that's what their heart desires - or create a niche for themselves as satisfied single adults.
My heart simply aches for them. I've made my choices in my life freely. My life doesn't look like I thought it would when I was a girl or a teenage or even a younger woman - but I am content because I made choices based on my values and my desires rather than anyone else's.
I spent the morning at the ophthalmologist with Spawn. His lovey - a stuffed ginger tabby named Kitty-Kitty - needed an eye exam. On a completely unrelated note, Spawn's eyes are doing fine. We got up, ate breakfast, got dressed, listened to "Mama's music" (read: Irish folk tunes) on the drive in, commiserated with a crabby, screaming newborn, and walked Kitty-Kitty through her eye exam. Afterwards, we brought lunch home and played with trains.
I had an average day with a little boy who is as much a part of me as my right arm - and I regret nothing of my choices that lead to being his mama because I never had to sacrifice my given desire for a career in exchange for the hope of being a mom.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)