The Battle of Peer Dependency: Chapter Six - Part One

Hello!

Chapter Six of Marina Sears' parenting book "The Battle of Peer Dependency" teaches her readers far more about how her brain works and what she expects out of life than I expected.  We've seen in other portions of the book how she's very rigid about her personal beliefs and expects her children to join her in being a shining example of God's providence for widows and orphans.   She also frequently denigrates the normal behavior of her two oldest sons by twisting the reactions of her youngest sons to justify keeping her children sheltered and excluded from the rest of the world.  

The first quote begins to explain the paradox that defines Marina's life:

Shortly after marrying Jeff, we joined a bible-believing church where I began to study Scripture, and it soon became my desire to be a woman of faith. I admired the godly heroes of Scriptures, my pastor's wife, Patricia Gentry , and wonderful Christians, like Corrie Ten Boom who was at the top of the list. Since I was in a " classroom of suffering" I had hoped it would be a natural byproduct, but I was wrong.  Just being in a painful situation didn't guarantee that I would glean the wisdom and character that God wanted me to acquire. As I searched Scripture for the formula to success, I found that I, like most people, am looking for something like 1 + 1 =2 . This type of formula was based more on what I could do to help, how I could manipulate, or control the situation, rather than by faith, trust in God. As they continued to search, I discovered there is a formula found in Scripture, but many, wishing for instant results, may be discouraged in the journey. (pg. 79)

Marina Sears is stuck between two mutually exclusive premises.

Premise One: There is no single, formulaic method to achieve success in life.

Premise Two: There is a single, formulaic method to achieve success in life!

All throughout the book, Marina Sears' writing is often scattered and hard to make sense of.  In re-reading this chapter, I realized that one of the reasons for her difficult writing style is that Mrs. Sears is often combining examples of Premise One in the middle of trying to prove Premise Two.   In this sample paragraph, Mrs. Sears explains that suffering alone doesn't automatically give people character or wisdom.  I think that's a fair statement; suffering can lead to character and wisdom or it can lead to brokenness and muddled thinking.  That makes the statement about suffering =/= wisdom and character an example of Premise One: there is no singular formula in life.  

So...the paragraph is chugging along fine when Sears declares that formulas are about controlling and manipulating the situation rather than trusting God.   Surprisingly to her, I would also agree with that statement.  Mrs. Sears throughout the book shows no faith in anyone.   She doesn't trust her sons to be able to handle going to play volleyball because it doesn't serve the family purpose.  She doesn't trust any other adults to be involved in the training or education of her sons.   Most jarringly, she often claims that she trusts God, but she spends so much time trying to manipulate her sons to do whatever she wants that I really doubt she trust God's Leading in her sons' lives at all.

While that's a jarring confession combined with Mrs. Sears' lack of self-awareness, the paragraph has held together with the overarching theme that "there is no one formula for success in life".  

Then the final sentence says "Ha, ha! There actually IS a formula - but you posers are too weak to carry it out!"  

Good Lord, woman!  This entire book is chalked full of Mrs. Sears trying to manipulate her growing sons to stay dependent on her to make decisions - and generally failing miserably.   By some ironic fluke, Chris and Davey are remarkably impervious to Mrs. Sears' attempts to guilt-trip them into living at home forever.  

Here's another great example of an inchoate paragraph caused by trying to force a paradox to work: 

Faith does not believe that if I do certain things God is obligated to bless me and change my child. Faith understands that God, the Creator of my child, has given me a gift. The gift is the child whom He has entrusted to my care, to nurture, love, and train. These are my responsibilities as a parent. What is not my responsibility is whether or not my child will love the Lord his God with all of heart, soul, and might. Understanding and then making application in one's life of this principle is very important in rearing children. For who can change the heart of another individual? Can we, as parents, do things to influence and change another's heart? The answer to that is yes.  Realizing that as we influence our children, God is in control and he does the changing. (pg. 79)

Most of this paragraph follows very basic Christian dogma.   Most Christian groups believe that God is ultimately in control of changing someone's heart and that a person's willingness to have God change their heart helps the process along.   Different denominations and people disagree over how much to emphasize a person's willingness to change compared to God's Grace - but the two ideas do co-exist.

Marina Sears also sticks to a fairly common and uncontroversial application of parenting.  God gives parents the responsibility to raise their children to be good people - but the faith journey of their child is ultimately between God and the child.  Honestly, that makes basic sense from any point of view because faith is a internal attribute of a relationship between God and a person.  I cannot force any two people on Earth to trust each other - and similarly - a person's willingness to trust God is based on the state of their relationship with God which is affected by a myriad of factors that are out of anyone's control.  

In this vein, Mrs. Sears holds to Premise One - "there is no one formula for success" - until the last four sentences of the quote.     Near the end, Mrs. Sears asks a rhetorical question about the ability of one person to change another person's heart.   The standard response to that question is "No, the only person who can change their heart is the person themselves (or God)."   

Something in that question triggers a major shift in Mrs. Sears' thinking.  After having stuck with Premise One for most of a paragraph, she modifies the question to deal with the specific case of parents and children before diving into Premise Two - "there is a formula for success that I know".  

The most bizarre thing for me as a spouse, parent and professional is the fact that Mrs. Sears last paragraph completely ignores any sign of agency in the child regardless of age. In Mrs. Sears' world, a parent controls a child - that's what "influences" is short-hand for - and in return, God makes the kid's heart into the form that the parent wants.   

That's a good recipe for a piece of computer controlled equipment - the user puts in the desired specs and the equipment performs - but it's palpably crazy as a theological concept and devastating as a parenting technique.

The Battle of Peer Dependency: Chapter Five - Part Five

Hello!

I'm writing this while listening to my son describe each of the toy cars he's packing into a new "Thomas the Train" carrying case his Oma gave him. 

He's grown and hit so many developmental milestones in the last year that I often feel like I have a completely different child than I had two years ago. 

Between a year and four years of age, Spawn stopped singing.   Six months ago, he started singing again - and I'm amazed how many songs he learned while listening to songs on the radio in the car and listening to me sing around the house. We were playing on the floor yesterday when he asked me to sing "the song about what a bus does" with him.  I really enjoyed singing "The Wheels on the Bus" with him.

He's really into pretend play now and I find playing with him to be delightful.  Right now, he wants to pretend to be adults doing jobs that he sees around in the world which means he wants to be a mailman or a cashier or a farmer.  He's been "helping" in our garden by planting corn seeds in a bed that we were going to leave fallow as a composting area.    Hearing him exclaim "Mama!  I'm a farmer!" makes me smile every time.

Spawn can walk enough with one handed support that he can make it around our small local grocery store without needing to sit in the cart.   In fact, he also wants to be able to carry the small basket I use while we are there - but Spawn's still a bit short for the baskets at the store as evidenced by the fact that the basket drags on the ground when he tries to carry it.    Instead, I can usually convince him to help me carry it.   He's also very helpful at putting the items in the basket after I take the off the shelf.  

Marina Sears, I hope, enjoyed similar simple pleasure moments with her children when they were young.   Reading her book "The Battle of Peer Dependency" leaves readers with the impression that Mrs. Sears spent every moment of her children's childhood wishing that she had a different group of children who were more docile, more tractable and less independent.   Here's a revealing quote from the fifth chapter:

Sitting in a conference, listening to a workshop on finding individual life callings, I found myself wondering if God might also have a calling or purpose for the family. Different families had crossed our paths over the years that seemed to have a family purpose, but I saw that as a rarity rather than the norm. It seemed, as though my spirit had suddenly been taken aware of the fact that Jeff's death did not take God by surprise. Nor was He baffled by the strong personality traits my children possessed. It seemed as though the spirit of God was urging me to understand that he had put us together as a family, with their individual strengths and weaknesses, spiritual gifts, gender, and birth orders. All these factors together would tend to pull the family apart until I realize that the molding and blending of these traits were what would speak to a lost world. (pg. 74-75)

I was a bit taken aback by Mrs. Sears' surprise and dismay that her children had strong personality traits - and I doubt she viewed those traits positively.  I'm surprised at her surprise because Mrs. Sears clearly has a powerful personality herself!  She's spent the book explaining repeatedly her belief that her family needs to be a shining beacon to the world showing off God's Providence to widows and orphans - and she'll be damned if her kids get in the way of that goal.    

I've spent a few weeks trying to think of any family I knew that had a "family purpose" - and have been completely drawing a blank.   I suspect that's because most families are content enough to do whatever motivates them without needing to trumpet their purpose to everyone they meet.

More broadly, Mrs. Sears isn't picking a family purpose by deciding what makes sense based on her family.  She's using the idea of a family purpose to shame, guilt-trip and force her kids to follow her whims for as long as she can.   Why do I think that?  Well, this next quote is a doozy:

It is sad to discover that many other parents think that the only purpose of parenting is to provide instruction, provision, and protection for their children until they reach 18 years of age. These children are then considered to be on their own. Parents, who go a little bit further and believe the children are a part of the family until marriage, still miss the mark.. (pg. 75)

There is no escape for Mrs. Sears' children.   She is setting up a paradigm where she is to be in charge of their lives forever regardless of age, marital status or presence of children.   

Will that work?  Probably not.  There's yet to be a Christian Patriarchy family who has married adult children who has not lost one or more of those children to increased worldliness.  Not because the kids have become anything like the average secular family, but because the parents have gotten so used to having the personal whims of the parents satisfied at all times that a child's choice of doing something differently is treated like a war crime.  (See the Maxwell response to Jesse living in an apartment and the Duggar response to Jill.)

Is it Biblical?  Nope.  While there is definitely support for Hebrew men acting in concert with their paternal family line in the Old Testament, we have relatively little support for the idea that there was one paterfamilias who was making decisions for the entire family line.  On the other hand, the Bible is filled to the brim with people acting outside of the rules of patriarchy.   Men stole the birthrights of their older brothers.  Women disobeyed their husbands and fathers.  Mary appeared to conceive Jesus out of wedlock.  Jesus and his disciples were all pretty much behaving outside of family lines while various concerned and exasperated family members tried to stop them.  

If you remember nothing else, remember that Mrs. Sears would have stopped the Apostles from following Jesus.  That's the kind of great advice you're getting from this author.

The Battle of Peer Dependency: Chapter 5 - Part Four

 Hello on a hot, dry day in Michigan!

I've been a bit spoiled the last few years because we've been getting decent rain amounts during the growing season.   This year feels different, though, because our grass is already going dormant in patches three weeks earlier than usual..   I've started carrying water out the six fruit trees and four fruiting shrubs we have; I haven't done that since the year I planted the trees when Spawn was a baby.  

Spawn's old enough that he finds all of this fascinating - but not quite coordinated enough to be much help yet.   Instead, he will take some toys and play in a spot where he can watch me until I'm done.   I appreciate that - and he's old enough that when I say something like "Please move your trucks so I can walk down the steps" he knows which toys to move.   He's getting more and more mobile every day.  Spawn can walk several city blocks with one handed support so we've been going to more and more places together.  (The fact that the number of COVID cases locally has dropped to less than 10 per 100,000 helps as well.) 

After four years of being nervous about the cows on our property, he's decided they are the best toy he has.   Every day, he collects a handful of cars and we walk out to show the cars to the "mama cows" and the "baby cows".    The cows seem duly impressed and some of the older ones have started to moo in response to Spawn asking them questions.   Today he collected pieces of corn and wheat to put into the bed of his toy pickup truck so he could pretend he was driving a feed truck.  

We are slowly making our way through Marina Sears' parenting book "The Battle of Peer Dependency".  I've been a parent for a relatively short time - but nearly every advancement Spawn makes drives home how very little I like any of the ideas that Mrs. Sears shares.   The fifth chapter is about how parents and children should form a tight-knit, indivisible group that fulfills the emotional and social needs of the family.   Honestly, her ideal family sounds claustrophobic as hell.   In this post, we'll look at an example that Mrs. Sears shares that manages to both undermine her theory while being used as a guilt-trip towards her older sons: 

An older brother or sister who invites a younger sibling to go with him or her on an outing and stays involved with them as the activity progresses will assure the younger sibling of the older sibling's love. This became real to our family at the camp in Michigan. Ben, the son of the camp pastor had just turned 16. This meant that he had recently acquired his driver's license, something that every young man anticipates. The day before camp started been lost his driving privileges. This saddened him, but he kept on and fulfilled his duties at the camp very well. At the close of camp, my youngest son Jeff, was approaching the bus which would take him home. He was nine at the time and as we reached the bus, Jeff noticed Ben was walking towards us. What Jeff didn't know was that parked across from the bus was Ben's family vehicle. He had just been given back his driving privileges, and was eagerly approaching his vehicle for the drive home.

Jeff yelled out to Ben, " Hey Ben, are you going to ride in the bus?"

Ben then said the most amazing thing. "Jeff, do you want me to ride in the bus?"

"Sure,"  Jeff said. 

So Ben, smiling, put his keys in his pocket and got onto the bus with Jeff. (pg. 73)

This story to me is fairly average and rather sweet.   There have been plenty of times where I was a kid who appreciated spending time with a teenager from another family - and plenty of times where I was the teenager.   Like the idealized youth minister from the previous post, the main benefit of having a relationship with a person from a different family is that both parties are enjoying the relationship without the normal stresses that occur in family life.   

The weird bit is that this entire anecdote points out all the flaws in Mrs. Sears theory that nuclear families should be self-contained.   

First, Mrs. Sears is the person who brought her four children to a camp situation in the first place.  I'm assuming she was working as a lecturer or something like that - but that doesn't change the fact that she's profiting from other families choosing to interact with other families.   Even worse under her theory is the fact that she is the instigator of bringing her family to the camp in the first place! That's the wages of sin!

Second, her family seems to be fairly integrated into the camp structure.  Mrs. Sears knows a whole lot of background information about Ben and his driving practices.    Either she was talking with other adults about raising their kids and succumbing to peer dependency herself or one of her older sons picked up that information from Ben himself and they were being peer dependent.   Really, even knowing Ben's name is dangerous; an ideal family wouldn't need to know Ben, right?

Third, we have no information on what her other three kids are doing during this time.  Maybe Chris, David and Camille are all deep into peer dependency - or maybe they are each hanging out with other multi-age groups.    Maybe they are asleep on the bus.   Maybe Chris is hanging out with Ben's younger brother who has taken a shine to him.    

Last unrelated point: Mrs. Sears is comparing apples to oranges again.  Earlier, she was disturbed when Chris and David as pre-teens wouldn't bring their five-year old brother to a volleyball game for preteens.  I still think the boys made the right decision; a five year old isn't going to do well at a junior high volleyball pickup game.   Meanwhile, Ben's a shining example of sacrifice for riding the bus instead of driving his car - but in this case - Ben is delaying a solitary pursuit for an hour or two instead of dragging a kid to an age-inappropriate activity.   This is a rare situation where I am very confident on this point because Ben and I were both teenage drivers in Michigan around 1994.   At 16 with his first temporary license, Ben wouldn't have been able to drive with any minors in the car with him.  (This was a statute to limit teenagers from driving with other teenagers.)  Ben's choice was certainly sweet - but Jeff wasn't asking him to tag along to a high school pick-up basketball game, either.

I stared at him in astonishment and with a broken heart. I was amazed that young man would be so sensitive and understanding with a nine-year-old boy. I was amazed to see that he understood the need of Jeff's heart. What Jeff was truly asking Ben was if he wanted to ride with him. The sensitivity and picking up the need of Jeff's heart was incredible. The sadness came as I wondered if Jeff's own brothers and sister would be so kind. Did they understand the needs of each other, and did they even care?  Were their own brothers and sister important to them, and did they desire to be with them, regardless of the activity, circumstances, or what age group was there? 

I realized in that instance what a tragic mistake I've been making. I had actually trained and encouraged my children to prefer people outside of our family to be their best friends. My heart was broken as I thought about the state of my family, and what I was going to do.  (pg, 74)

Mrs. Sears' plaintive wails about how she's lead her family into peer dependency AGAIN has gotten old.   We've had it happen when she joined a home-schooling church when Jeff was 2 or 3 followed by the volleyball game when he was five and now she's screwed up again by the time he was 9.    That's not a ringing endorsement of the ability of any family to live this lifestyle.

Mrs. Sears often brings up transient, mild distress on Jeff's part - or equally transient and mild pleasure - as a rationale for keeping her family on a tight leash.   I don't think that's because she's particularly in-tune with Jeff's feelings or that she favors him.   No,  Jeff is the youngest and most dependent especially compared to Chris and David who are 7 and 5 years older than Jeff.   Being extremely solicitous of Jeff's feelings covers slightly Mrs. Sears' long-term plan of keeping her children dependent on her for as long as humanly possible.

Why do I think this?  Well, in her hand-wringing story, she's equally critical of the ability of her two older sons and her one daughter to be perfectly in tune with Jeff's needs.   Since Chris is around 16 and David roughly 14,  I can see how she could make the argument that the two boys should be more able to suss out what Jeff wants and needs even if I find the argument faulty.   Her daughter Camille, though, is one to two years older than Jeff so she's 10 or 11 when Jeff is 9.   Why is she being held liable by her mom?   Shouldn't Jeff be more in-tune to Camille's wants and desires?  Jeff will be the leader of his own family after all.    

Mrs. Sears may seem more invested in Jeff's needs - but she is using Jeff's needs to camouflage her desire to keep her family isolated and dependent.   

The Battle of Peer Dependency: Chapter Five - Part Three

Hello!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Battle of Peer Dependency: Chapter Five - Part Two

 Hello!  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This next quote is delightful in its own way:

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

I have a few impertinent questions. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's be honest: that sounds miserable.   

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

That's just the chronic pain issue! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the outcome of my good cry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josh Duggar Arrested on Possession of Child Pornography Charges.

 I feel sick.   

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

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

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

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

I feel sick.  

Anna, it's time to go.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maxwell Mania: Sarah Maxwell's Recovery and New Car!

 Hello!

Back in early February, Sarah Maxwell explained that she had been posting less than usual because she was recovering from a concussion she got while exercising at home.   She had been doing back extensions, overshot when returning to the initial starting position and smacked her head hard on a post.  Her description of a concussion brought back lots of memories for me.

Back in November of 2015, I was in a car accident on my way home from my graduate school program. I was driving north on a busy two-lane road and stopped on a bridge across the Grand River while wondering if the powers that be would ever widen the next intersection to include a left-turn lane with designated traffic pattern because traffic always backed up like this during the evening commute.   I had stopped a bit tighter than I liked to the truck in front of me because I had came up on the stopped traffic suddenly and I looked in my rear-view mirror to see that whoever was behind me was going to stop.  

What I saw was a 3/4 ton or 1 ton red pickup around 0.2 miles behind me going the normal speed of 60 miles per hour.   The driver was looking in his rearview mirror and had not seen the slowdown.   I honked my horn to try and get his attention.   It didn't work - so I prepared for an accident.  I made sure my wheels were dead straight.  I didn't want to hit the truck in front of me - but that was a much less risky option than being pushed to the left into oncoming traffic or to the right into the Grand River.   I took a half-a-second to make sure my seatbelt was low on my hips with the chest restraint in the right spot since I'm short and the belt always seems to be moving on me. I brace my arms against the steering wheel since I'd prefer an arm injury over a head injury.

I looked up to see the driver of the truck realize that he was going to hit me and slam on the brakes, but his reaction was far too late to slow the truck down. I closed my eyes.   I prayed fervently that the accident wouldn't hurt on impact - I'm a wuss about acute pain - and tried to relax my muscles as much as possible.

I was amazed and relieved when the accident didn't hurt at all.  The shoulder restraint caught my torso long before I got near the steering wheel and the car seat was surprisingly soft when it stopped my acceleration backwards.   My car had been shoved forward a few feet by the impact, but my brakes had held and I didn't hit the truck in front of me.   My car was still running and I was able to move it out of the way of traffic.  

In the immediate aftermath, I felt fine.   The accident took place in a slightly more populated rural area of a rural county so we had to wait a half an hour for an available officer to drive in from nearly the other end of the county.    I was decidedly jittery - but no pain or any signs of a concussion.  In one of those strange coincidences, my brother-in-law drove one of the family's cattle trucks by the accident soon after it happened so he called my husband immediately and my husband got to the scene before the officer did.   My husband agrees that I was acting like myself with no signs of a concussion.    

We reported the accident.  I drove the car to our standard auto body shop where my husband who had followed me picked me up..  My car was less maneuverable than I had expected from what I had classed in my head as a "minor" accident - but I wasn't planning on driving it again until it was checked out.  It turned out my car was totaled; the chassis had broken in multiple places and the mechanic was surprised/horrified that I had driven it 10 miles after the accident.  

I was starting to feel a bit off by the time we got home.  I chalked it up to nerves, fading adrenaline and a long day so I laid down and took a nap.   I got up in the evening and started trying to finish my proposal PowerPoint presentation I was going to make to my committee the following week.   I was struggling to summarize each paper.  I kept looking at my notes and the original papers - but I was making a mess of the PowerPoint.     I figured that this was not a great night to work on that, figured I'd be better in the morning and went to bed.

As the night went on, I alternated between wake and sleep - and was showing more signs of a concussion that I was too addled to figure out.   I couldn't remember the order I was meeting with my committee members the next day at first and lost the times I was meeting with people later.   I got up to take some Motrin for the headache that was bothering me and couldn't remember what the bottle looked like.   I read the bottles - and couldn't remember if I needed acetaminophen or ibuprofen.  I think one of the bottles said something like "Compare the active ingredients to Motrin" so I took that one.    I really wished I had an anti-nausea drug because my stomach was upset, too.

By the time my husband woke up at 7:30 that next morning, I was struggling to string sentences together and really dizzy.   He loaded me up in his truck and took me the nearest urgent care.   The receptionist listened to me struggle to answer questions like "What is your name?" and "What brings you hear today?" and went directly to the triage nurse who got a doctor ASAP.  (My husband could hear all of that while he was steering me towards the reception room. )

The doctor recognized that I had a blown pupil on my left side and recommended that my husband take me to one of the two emergency rooms that were a 5 to 7 minute drive away for an MRI or CAT scan to rule out a brain bleed.   I remember the doctor saying something about an ambulance vs. my husband driving me and I knew he was telling us one to be safe - but was softly recommending the other - and I couldn't figure out which one was which.   I decided that I'd just ask my husband to make the decision and my husband told me that we were going in his truck.   When I asked him about  it a few months later, he said that the doctor said that they could arrange ambulance transport if we preferred - but we'd get there much, much faster if he transported me himself. 

We went to the ER.  I was moved into a room quickly.  Doctors did a neurological exam and sent me back to get some imaging done.  My brain looked great - which is pretty standard for a concussion so they loaded me up with some anti-nausea meds and sent me home with instructions on how to gently add more activities and how to know when to back off on activities.

The next few months were rough.   At first, I was exhausted and nauseated.  My speech was slow and halting.  I couldn't read without feeling horrible.  Doing basic chores like unloading the dishwasher took 3-5x as long as normal - and I could only do one thing before needing a nap or I'd get waves of nausea.

The first activity I added back was walking.  I figured the last thing I needed was a bout of depression or anxiety and I knew my legs would start cramping if I didn't exercise so I started with very slow, gentle walks preceded and followed by naps.   

I had my husband set my Kindle font much larger than normal and load some easy reading books at junior high Lexile levels so I'd be able to read to relax again.   

I took up sewing and crocheting in earnest.  My procedural memories were still working fine so I could whip out a cloth diaper for my soon-to-be born nephew or crochet a baby hat even if I couldn't work out the math for what size I should cut the cloth.

I remember the first time I cooked a meal after the accident.  I chose a super-easy one pot meal  where I needed to make a box of couscous, add a can of drained tomatoes and top with sliced pre-cooked sausage.  That's an meal I've made while cooking another meal and cleaning the kitchen all at once; just doing that single, easy meal made me feel like I'd run a marathon.

I remember I could handle talking on the phone far better than reading, writing or watching TV - which came in handy while dealing with all of the appointments that came from the head injury.  I remember the rather freaked out expressions on my professors' faces when super-slow, halting speech Mel came into to school to fill out some paperwork to get a medical withdrawal.  I remember getting completely confused, disoriented and scared on my first trip to a slow grocery store on a weekday morning; I couldn't process all of the stimuli.

The accident was in early November.  The soonest I could get in at the regional concussion clinic was mid-January.     The timeline of when I was able to do different things is fuzzy - but by January, I was able to read and write again as well as talk on basic topics without noticeable impairment - and the headaches, nausea and fatigue were gone.  The part that was killing me was waiting until I could perform at the academic level I was used to - and the slow process of learning to drive again.   

I re-learned to drive by taking my husband's pick-up truck around the local roads at night.  My most vivid memory of that is having to figure out which lights I could see mattered because they were headlights compared to lights that didn't matter because they were street-lights.   The most bizarre thing about the concussion was that my procedural memories were all intact even though my declarative memories were shot.   In other words,  I had no problem getting into a truck, starting the engine or driving the truck - the only thing I struggled on was processing what I was seeing and what that meant.

The concussion clinic was anti-climatic.  I was given a short battery of very basic memory tests - the type where the proctor tells you three common words and sees if you can remember them a few minutes later - and a slightly more challenging processing test.   I passed both with flying colors and was pronounced to be functioning at the expected level for a 34 year old woman.  I remember saying something like "but I'm nowhere near functioning like the 34 year old woman I was before the accident" to the doctor who went over the results.   She was sympathetic - but said that the fact that I had healed as far as I had meant that my other skills would return given more time.  She compared it to how healing would look different from a desk worker compared to a professional athlete after a bad leg injury; the desk worker would be able to use their leg for their job much sooner than the athlete - but that's because the athlete is asking the leg to do a whole lot more than the desk worker.

The clinician was right.  I was able to start reading academic history books again within the next month, could make decent notes on education journals by February and was pretty much at my previous level by early March.  

That's a four month recovery from someone with a known history of brain damage due to prematurity. 

 Needless to say, I was freaked out when Sarah Maxwell disclosed that she was having headaches and nausea some days six months after her concussion - and had a major relapse when she smacked her head on some cabinets.  (Ouch!  Been there; done that; no relapse, though.)   I was really worried that her doctor told her that her self-care regimen was fine and was working a bit on the headaches.

Thankfully, in her most recent post, Sarah said that the doctor pretty quickly let her know it was time to see a specialist.   My family doctor got me signed up ASAP - but my family doctor is in the same hospital network as Mary Free Bed - a really good inpatient/outpatient rehab hospital that houses the Concussion Clinic.  Sarah had a 5 week therapy and medicine regime with them and seems to be doing really well now.  

Ironically, I had been wondering about how credit scores for stay-at-home daughters work.  It's not unheard of for someone who is 25 to not have much of a credit history - but Sarah is 39.   Most of us have at least a car loan or a student loan or two we paid off by that age.   By Sarah's age, a lot of middle class families have a mortgage as well.     

As I was thinking about that, I realized the biggest hurdle isn't the part-time, family based employment for the Maxwell daughters. 

No, the issue is their father's obsession with living completely debt-free - even though he admits that he was unable to do that in "Buying A House Debt-Free: Equipping Your Sons."

That line of thought smacked firmly into the fact that Maxwell's unmarried daughters have been sharing the family car.  Notice that Sarah refers to the family car in the singular tense - there's only one for Steven, Terri, Sarah, Anna and Mary to use.   

Now, the Maxwells will tell you that the girls don't have cars because they don't need one -  but that's highly unlikely.   Leavenworth, Kansas is not known for their public transportation options and the Maxwell's neighborhood looks to be residential without any commercial buildings in easy walking distance.

More honestly, the Maxwell parents raised their daughters to be minimally employed and unable to socialize with peers due to excessive sheltering and fear of being attacked or seduced.   Those traits will make it seem like their adult daughters don't need cars - but the lack of independent mobility also works to keep their daughters infantilized by adding complications to finding outside work and forcing their daughters to justify all social outings to their parents.  

I'm glad that Sarah Maxwell got her very own car.  That's a first step towards adulthood and a small step towards more freedom from her enmeshed family.

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

  Hello!

I'm fighting a mild stomach flu bug.  It's nothing that's going to kill me - but I'm already tired of eating saltines.  

It's been a crazy week.  My father-in-law tested positive for COVID last weekend and was hospitalized for a few days.  He's doing better now.   Apparently, he got his first dose of a two-dose vaccine but hadn't received the second dose yet. (His age group has had the vaccine available for several months here in Michigan, so I'm not particularly sympathetic when everyone I know in his age band was vaccinated in February.)   

So far, my sister-in-law has tested positive and my brother-in-law is waiting on his results.  This also mean my 4-year old nephew is stuck at home for the foreseeable future since he could be an asymptomatic carrier which means he's not getting the in-person therapies at school that have helped him a ton. 

Needless to say, I'm angry and rather crotchety right now.   The only reason I'm not incandescently furious is that by a sheer fluke no one in my immediate family was around my father-in-law long enough in the two weeks prior to risk infection.  (The only day my son normally would have been around him was the day that my mom-in-law and I went to the zoo.  She's fully vaccinated + several weeks out.)  

So, yeah.  Disgruntled writer on the loose.  That means it is a great time to take on the second half of Terri Maxwell's "Sheltering Our Children" article.  The first post covers a series of quotes that I'll summarize as "Men are horn-dogs who can barely keep it in their pants as is so it's everyone else's job to keep them from having a spontaneous affair."  The second half continues that theme while building on the Maxwellian belief that even grown-ass men can't handle hearing about sinful practices second-hand without being tempted:

Our twenty-two-year-old son volunteers one night a week at the City Union Mission in downtown Kansas City. In addition to being exposed to secular thinking in his work place, he is exposed to the real world at the mission. He is ready for this challenge. He has a one-on-one Bible study with one of the residents. We have encouraged him in this ministry, but have cautioned against such things as listening to details of immoral, or evil, practices.

Nathan's always had a smidge of a wild child in him that the Maxwells couldn't crush out of him.  In their book on childrearing, they allude to a time they sent Nathan to a teenage computer camp - or something like that - for two weeks and when he came home he wanted all sorts more freedom!   

Oh, the horrors!

Since then, everyone has been sent out in packs of Maxwells beside Sarah who was allowed to sporadically go visit married friends who needed respite care while having their 4th or 5th kid before the oldest kids were of an age to be useful.  The catty side of me thinks that the Maxwells couldn't bring themselves to make a different family pay for room and board for another adult daughter for two weeks under the guise of protecting Sarah.

Back to Nathan.  The Maxwells were sure as hell not going to let him slip up again - so when he worked as a computer support rep at the same company that Steve did - the two of them carpooled 70 miles each way every day.   That's a really long commute even for the Midwest where we're pretty car-centric.  By comparison, I have a 20 mile commute and a lot of people pity me for that.   My dad and I commuted together sometimes when we were both teaching at the same summer school program - but not every day.  We each had outside obligations and social commitments so somedays we each took our own vehicles.  Somehow, I doubt Nathan was allowed the freedom to take his own car to go out with co-workers after work.....

Nathan might have gotten some freedom when he took a job at a different major employer in the Kanas City area - or not.  If he was still living at home, Steve keeps a tight grip on his sons until they marry.

Here's another great example of Steve's need for protection:

Another example of our philosophy of “protectionism” involves not only our older children but also Steve. Steve chooses to not have lunch alone with another woman, or ride alone in a car with one, even when business related. One might ask if this means he is not strong in his faith or not independent. Of course not!

Nah, it just means that Steven is discriminating against female coworkers because he's afraid that his overwhelming attractiveness and suave conversational skills combined with being in the incredibly sensual environment of his high mileage economy car will lead to adultery.

To paraphrase the incomparable Alison Green of "Ask A Manager" -  you can accommodate religious beliefs by doing social gestures with everyone or no one.  If you cannot shake hands with members of the opposite gender, then shake hands with no one.  Yes, it will be slightly awkward - but much less offensive than shaking hands with three guys then refusing to shake hands with one woman.  This holds even more true with refusing to go to lunch with a female colleague alone.   In that case, she's being punished by less access to places where connection and mentorship happen because Steve is afraid of his dick.   Which  makes him A Dick - but I doubt he'd get the irony.  

The more I learn about Maxwell the less surprised I am that he didn't make it through a major downturn in aerospace construction in the late 1990's.   The fact that he was convicted and purposed to start his own business at that exact moment was a coincidence, I'm sure.

Next up: how the Maxwell daughters got trapped as superfluous virgin aunts:

As far as our daughters go, I wonder how many of us developed independent spirits during our college or working days. Has this made it more difficult for us to submit to our husbands in the meek and quiet way we would like? A family shared with us their concerns for their daughter after she began working. They said, “One of our goals for our daughter is for her to have a submissive spirit to a future husband, if she marries, but we are also training her towards an independent spirit.” They did ask her to stop working, sharing their heart’s concerns, and she was willing.

Terri Maxwell would not be on any list for wives who are independent.   To the best of my knowledge, she caters to Steven's whims even when they are directly harmful to her or the kids.   

She supported Steven's desire to reverse his vasectomy and spent fourteen subsequent years of her life depressed while raising eight kids.

At the same time, she was homeschooling her kids who were old enough despite clearly not enjoying homeschooling.   She had objected to homeschooling soon after she brought the oldest three out of private schools - but she caved nearly as soon as Steve asked her to continue.  This lead to the Maxwell Schedule and Maxwell Homeschooling.   The Maxwell Schedule is where a person pre-plans their day in 30 minute increments from the planned time of waking up to the planned time to go to bed.   The Maxwell Method of Homeschooling is the bleak logical next step: the parent decides what section of a textbook kids should read, which questions or worksheets they should answer and which tests they should take.  I assume the parent is around to answer questions - but this is far less interactive than a kid would receive in a bad public school classroom today.

She did fight slightly harder to keep Nathan and Christopher in sports - but Steven won out in the end as well.   

Did she have any energy left to fight by the time the kids were of courting age?  Probably not.  

Maybe the Maxwell girls are glad they've not married.  Their sisters-in-law seem to be doing ok - but the specter of untreated severe depression must hang over their childhood memories even if they don't consciously realize it. 

Did the other girl get married?  Who knows.   The Maxwells don't do follow-up very often.

Finally, one area the Maxwells have succeeded in:

Does this mean we keep our daughters in our house and never let them out? No, but it does mean we determine the learning, working, and ministry opportunities that will best help them toward their goals. One of our goals for all of our daughters is that they would remain holy and pure. When I hear worldly teens, and even some Christian teens, talk these days, I am very saddened by the crudeness and impurity of their conversation. I would hate to have my daughter in an environment where she was constantly exposed to that.

Their daughters have certainly remained pure.  (Also underemployed - but that's a whole other ball of wax.)

Unfortunately, becoming a wife and mother in CP/QF land does require having sex - albeit under the purifying action of married sex.   

The Maxwells seemed to have struggled hard with Jesse's wild-and-crazy idea of getting married, selling his debt-free house, and living in an apartment before moving to Kansas City.  (Actually, none of that is wild or crazy - but cultic living warps views.)   

With that much stress and wringing of hands around Jesse moving out of the neighborhood. I would not want to be around the first time the parents got together with their newly married daughter after she had sex.   They've spent so much time and effort on infantilizing Sarah, Anna and Mary that seeing one of them as sexually active adult women might cause some very ugly feelings and actions to rise to the surface.

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

 Good morning!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we go!

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

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

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

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

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

He's getting two responses to insects.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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