Jill Dillard's "More than Sex" Post On Marriage: Issues Surrounding Family of Origin Issues

Hello, all!

Today is the start of my vacation!  The last vacation I took was a trip to Mackinac when I was 21 weeks pregnant with my son.  (It blows my mind to realize that I gave birth five weeks after that because I was simply not that pregnant at the time....)   My parents are watching my son while my husband and I go to a cousin's wedding out of town for three days, then I cleared my son's schedule for two days so I could enjoy time with my twin sister, her wife and her daughter while they are in town for a week.   

I've gotten so used to either taking the Spawn to therapy appointments or working that the idea of five days without either obligation feels surreal to me - but I'm sure I'll adjust quickly.

In that vein, I decided to cover a theme in Jill Dillard's post "More than Sex" that I summarized as "Issues with Families of Origin, amiright?"   All marriages require communication and compromise about how to combine two different sets of traditions and expectations to create a new nuclear family.  My husband's family introduced me to the joys of county fairs, vegetable gardening, and living within walking distance of extended family.   My family introduced my husband to community theater, ad-libbing new holiday traditions and ice-cream trucks during the summer.  Equally importantly, each partner needs to decide how they want their marriage to be in terms of similarity and differences between what they saw modeled in their family of origin.

While those are both areas that all marriages have to navigate, Jill Dillard mentions three different areas that are worth discussing.   Here's the first example:

-Never allow your husband to think you’re his mother! Whether it’s making demands, delegating, or licking your finger and wiping something off his face…if he says “I feel like you’re my mother when you…”, then pay attention to that and ask him what you can to do change/how to handle the situation the next time!

A basic skill that people work on in their preschool years is to recognize what characteristics join members of a group and explain why one object doesn't belong in that group.  For those of us of a certain age, this was covered by "Which of these things is not like the other?" on Sesame Street. 

I bring this up because Jill's list has discordant members in it. 

For starters, let's all agree that cleaning your spouse's face with saliva is a poor solution to the problem.   My preferred option is to say, "You've got food (dirt, oil etc) on your (fill in body part)" once someone is old enough to clean themselves up.   That option feels more respectful of their bodily autonomy.    Removing smut from someone's face with a finger also makes more sense in a household where the material is probably food; it becomes a much more fraught idea when the smudge could be food....or dirt....or manure....or oil.    Really, the only person I give spit-baths to is my toddler - and only when I have no options available.

On the flip side, delegating chores is a form of emotional/household labor that the wife in a family takes care of.    That option might not work well for Derick - but Jill's habit of delegating work to him is hardly abnormal or unusual in the US.   I'm mostly curious about how Derick offered to change the way delegation happened in their home.  Was Derick willing to take over dividing the work?  That'd be a solution I'd be fine with in my household.  Was this an unconscious way for Derick to wiggle out of doing household chores - i.e., I feel like a teenager when you tell me what chores to do because real men don't do chores?   Does Derick get to choose what chores he wants to do and Jill is responsible for the rest?  Do Derick and Jill discuss who is going to do what chores and make decisions as a team regularly?   In my marriage, I mostly keep track of what chores need to be done weekly, divide them up among the two of us, and my husband lets me know if he wants to adapt who does what.

Finally, he doesn't like it when his wife makes demands?   Darling Derick, that's what happens when you take up being the supreme leader of a household.  You get all the glory and decision-making power - but you also get all of the complaints and grumbling as well.

The next quote adds another dimension to the "don't be his mother" argument:

-Remember, your husband is not your dad. You are teammates and he is your God-given protector. Keep this in mind and let it shape the way you relate.

Honestly, I'm struggling to write about these quotes because I've never confused my husband with my dad - and he doesn't confuse me with his mom - on any major issue. 

And, actually, only on two minor issues.

Like, in the first year we were married, I made stuffed peppers for the first time.   When my husband came home, he asked me if I was upset about anything.  I wasn't.   My husband kept hanging out in the kitchen and asking if there was something he could do to make my day better.  There wasn't - because my day had been going fine until he started annoying me by asking me weird questions.  After around 30 minutes of this, I remembered that his mom only made stuffed peppers when she was mad at his dad because his dad hated stuffed peppers.   I let him know that I had only made stuffed peppers because they sounded good - not because I was mad in a passive-aggressive way.    My husband startled, thought about it for a minute, then relaxed.  Similarly, my dad often took waaay longer to complete do-it-yourself home improvement projects than he thinks he will so when my husband tells me that he'll have the new dishwasher installed in one afternoon, I'm always surprised when he gets it done in the right time frame rather than taking a weekend or week.

Those are the only two examples I can think of in a relationship that is nearly ten years old.

I can't imagine rebelling against my husband's dictates like a teenage girl would do to her father because my husband doesn't give me dictates - or I him.   We are both integral members of our family economy - not a boss and employee or dictator and subject.

Sadly, Jill can't explain any reasons for why women shouldn't rebel against their husbands other than parroting the old Basic Life Principles hogwash taught by molester-in-chief Bill Gothard.  What exactly has Derick protected Jill from?  Derick allowed her parents to parade her on national TV to defend her parents' unconscionable behavior in failing to restrain Josh's molestation of his sisters. Derick accepted money from Josh Duggar to fund their missionary/extended vacation in El Salvador.   Derick's attempted accounting, reality TV star, foreign missionary, domestic college campus minister, substitute teaching, and is 1/3 of the way through law school in the last 5 years so presumably the Dillards are living on money from Jill's appearances on "Counting On".  Derick's unhinged rantings towards Jazz Jennings lost his place as a recurring character on "Counting On".  They have two sons together - but they've been saddled with medical debt from their first son Israel's unplanned C-section and their second son Samuel's unplanned C-section and NICU stay.    Derick might have 'saved' Jill from being an old maid living in her parents' house - but marrying him is like going from the frying pan into the fire.

This last quote is simply sad:

Don’t let habits become problems. For example, if you start and then get used to always asking your husband permission to do something (different than getting his take on something or discussing something together)…more like the dad role, then he could start to expect it just because he is used to it. It might be easy to make a habit of this, especially if you don’t want to take responsibility for the possible consequences of a choices you make, and would rather have someone else make them for you so they bear the weight of the decisions if it doesn’t work out, but we are also responsible to God for our lives. It’s good for your husband to know you have a good head and can make your own decisions. (And I do believe you should be open with each other and try to be on the same page with decisions and work together as a team! Our husbands should know us best and their counsel should be valued above everyone else’s, as long as it’s consistent with the Bible!)

What the hell did Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar do to their daughter? 

Yes, asking permission to do things is completely appropriate for an elementary school kid.   When a kid is a teenager, parents trust their teen's judgement on "Can I eat cake right now?" or "Can I do my homework after this TV show?" so parental permission is only needed for big things like "Can I use your car?" or "Can I borrow $20.00?".   Jill is not a teenager - so why is she asking her husband's permission for anything besides an unusual invasion of his personal property or space? 

I'm racking my brain to think of the last time I asked permission of my husband...and am drawing a blank.   I often bounce plans off of him like "I'd like to go swimming tomorrow morning" - but that's in the spirit of talking out how we will balance work schedules with caring for our toddler son.  Similarly, we often ask if the other person wants a certain food before we take the last slice of pizza or finish a half-gallon of ice cream - but that's just basic courtesy.   Once or twice a year, I'll borrow his truck to transport a purchase that won't fit in my car...but that's not really asking permission either because we both own the truck and car. 

 About the only thing I can think of is when I'm thirsty and I ask if I can drink some of my husband's pop.   He always says yes - but I'd be ok if he said no because it's his pop.  That's it....

Really, the bit I find the most disconcerting about these family of origin issues is the fact that Jill Dillard brings up avoiding treating your spouse like your literal parent in the middle of a blog post riddled with reminders that wives must be ready to have sex all the time.   For me, having sex with someone is a pretty solid reminder that they are not my parent.

In the next post in this series, we'll look at Jill's not-subtle reminders that wives need to be ready to have sex 24/7.

Joyfully At Home: Chapter Five - Part Three

Communication is a hallmark of human life. 

My son entered independent life much earlier than most babies - but I was amazed how quickly he figured out how to communicate with us through wiggles, grunts and growls.  He was fuzzy all over at birth - but his real hair on his head grew into a Patrick-Steward type ring of male-pattern baldness by the time he weighed 3 pounds.  That was around the same time he was moved into the 'big babies' room and Spawn started sulking when the other babies were crying too loudly.   Between his male-pattern baldness, the fact that he had very little fat on his face, and the fact that he has a killer scowl, I often felt like I was cuddling a curmudgeonly old man while cooing, "I know they're loud, Spawn, but they are new babies, not an old baby like you. They are too young to know that you only cry for serious reasons like diaper changes or a nurse weighing you."

Spawn's 2 and a half years old now - and we finally got a tentative diagnosis of apraxia for his speech delay.   I've always had some niggling concerns about his speech.   For example, Spawn's repetitive babbling sounded different than any other infant I knew.  Most infants go through a period where they make repeated plosive consonants combined with a vowel sound like 'babababa' or 'dadadadada'.  Spawn would occasionally give a single plosive sound - but he mostly babbled with a 'y' in the place of the plosive like "yayayaya' or 'yeyayayeya". At a year, he could say "ma", "da", "-ooh" (book), "meow" (cat) and "-ock" which was about right for his age.    By the time he was around 18 months, he was picking up new signs at a rate of around three signs a week, was trying to combine signs when he wanted to describe an object or action he didn't have a sign for (like 'food-drink' for an applesauce pouch) and was imitating lots of environmental sounds - but he had around 5 verbal words and was acquiring less than one new verbal word a month.   By two years, he was starting to use signed verbs for 'help', 'walk' 'do it again' and 'sleep' and starting to do new combinations of nouns and verbs that we'd never demonstrated like "Masha again!" when he wanted to watch an episode of "Masha and the Bear" - but he still had around 5 verbal words. 

The hardest part for me was trying to explain to medical and rehabilitation professionals that Spawn's skills in speech seemed way behind his ability to communicate.   Using sign language with small children has gone from being an anathema when my twin and I were tots in the early 1980's to progressive parenting today - but that only bridged some of the gap.  (Especially when professionals still don't understand the idea of a name sign like the one we made for Masha.... I digress.)  I've seen Spawn react with confusion when I tell stories about involving a coworker with the same name as Spawn.  Spawn looks at me like "Mama, I didn't do that!"  instead of grinning when I tell stories about his newest skills or glaring at me when I used to explain his tricks to new therapists*.  He's figured out a process to show me what he means by a sign when I am clueless by looking at my eyes, doing the sign, looking directly at the object, repeating the sign, then looking back at me to see if I get his drift.  He mimics the cadence of conversations and mimics different levels of intensity when talking to himself in his crib or in his car seat.  Heck, he used to run entire conversations that sounded like a business meeting that sounded like him alternating between someone who disliked an idea and a person who was trying to convince the other person - at less than a year old.   And that's ignoring the entire series of "Hootie the Babyfish" concerts** he would produce in lieu of naps.

People listened - but I kept getting a mix of platitudes (boys talk later than girls!  he's quiet! different schedules of development!) or explanations of how I should change what I do....to what I already do with him.  I was losing my ability to be professional - or at least courteous - when people told me to use one or two word phrases repeatedly and provide context clues like holding a toy pig while saying "pig".   I was concerned that I would flash back, "Damn, here I thought toddlers enjoyed Melville!  No more Moby Dick for you, Spawn!  In your professional opinion, should we do Chaucer or Tolstoy first?".

With that background, you can imagine my relief when his most recent speech and language pathologist evaluation started with a simple question "Are you more worried about Spawn's communication or his speech?"   I teared up slightly and said, "Speech. I think he's pretty close to his age in communication across the board - but he wants to be able to talk like the rest of us and he just can't.  I didn't mind waiting it out before he started seeming frustrated - but he's acting more frustrated in communication now and I'd like to figure this out."  After an hour of medical background info, developmental info and yet another parent-reported behavior analysis, the SLP said that she was pretty sure that Spawn's low muscle tone issues that have made it trickier to learn how to walk also affected his mouth and made it harder for him to figure out how to make certain sounds.  The good news is that they see a lot of former preemies with that issue at his outpatient rehab center and that Spawn is at an age where he's participating more and more willingly in therapeutic activities either because he finds the activities fun, because he enjoys showing off to other adults or because he makes some connection between the activities and doing more things.

From that standpoint, I think you will better understand while I find the next section on communication in "Joyfully At Home" by Jasmine Baucham completely exaspering.   Yeah, communication is an art form and we can all learn new skills - but Jasmine is talking about communicating with members of your family of origin about household expectations.   Believe you me, this is something that started when Jasmine was a toddler and her parents worked on having her put her toys away and not standing on the couch.  By the time a teenager is graduating out of homeschooling and becoming a stay-at-home daughter (SAHD), the lines of communications between parent and child should be ingrained regardless of how functional or dysfunctional the family is.

Take this quote as an example:

We have to communicate. What do your parents expect from you on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month to month basis? Something as simple as, " Jasmine, when you do such and such a thing, I don't like it -- stop" ( in much kinder, more biblically grounded terms) gives me something to go on. Something like, " Jasmine, by the end of the week, I want this done" or " Jasmine, it would really help us out if, every day, you did these chores" set clear boundaries. I don't make plans that infringe on the expectations my parents already have for me on a given day, for instance, and because we communicate about what exactly those expectations are no one has to become frustrated if they aren't met. (pg. 69)

I had daily and weekly chores starting when I was an elementary schooler - and I doubt I'm very unusual in that respect.   The chores were hardly onerous; it was "put the dishes away" daily and "dust the living room then vacuum the downstairs" on Saturday morning.   By the time I was capable of doing an adult's amount of work in the home as a late teenager, the instructions became less detailed because I knew what "clean the bathroom" entailed - but I also earned more freedom in discussing when making dinner would fit into my schedule of homework and extracurricular activities.   After all, children need a lot of help scaffolding time and daily living activity skills because they are still learning how to do both.   Young adults should need minimal - and ideally no - scaffolding from their parents to figure out how to fit daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal chores into their lives.

The largest impediment I see to developing these skills in CP/QF land is homeschooling.  In traditional schools, teachers are expected to collect work from students in a timely manner and track the skill progression of their students.  From a student's perspective, this leads to a mixture of daily assignment, longer-term projects and unit assessments that have due dates attached firmly to them.  As a teacher, enforcing the consequences of missing work was tedious - but students are not my kids.
When I taught, any disagreements over consequences had a firmly scheduled end because of changing classes or the end of the school day.   If a student failed to turn in an assignment and was angry/grumpy/sulky/whining because the resulting zero hurt their grade, I only had to deal with them for the remainder of that class period.   Occasionally, a particularly determined student might resume the argument the next day - but that 23 hours of cooling off tended to dampen their urge to change my mind.   I can only imagine the fun of being in the same household as a pissed-off teenager who missed an assignment deadline and trying to enforce that boundary.

Plus, over my 8 year teaching career, I taught at least 600 students which limited the amount I needed to prove based on any one particular student's academic track record.   In homeschooling, the ties that bind a teacher and student are so much stronger - but also more entangled.   The tiny numbers of students that a single parent-teacher will ever have in their homeschool makes the process fraught.   If a homeschooled kid drags their feet at doing their schooling, rushes through an entire subject the week before vacation and earns a 62% (D-) overall in high school Biology, how many parents are going to honestly record that grade on their teen's transcript - the only form of professional excellence that a parent-teacher can submit to colleges? How many parents would chose instead to make their kid redo the class the next year and use that grade instead?   How many parents would give their kid a higher grade based on 'outside interests' or some other philosophical construct?  In a traditional school, students retake classes if they failed them - but the new (hopefully higher) grade is added to the transcript rather than replacing the original D- unless there are extraordinary circumstances in play.  I did have a few focused, highly motivated students manage to scrape out a passing credit by doing 16 weeks worth of work condensed into a week - but the passing credit was generally in the "D" range and far more students who attempted this failed to meet enough standards to get a passing grade in the class.   That made me sad for the student - but I had 20 (or more) other students who passed the class.

That line about parents having to couch all of their requests in biblical terms harks back to the last post in this series on the dangers of living with a spiritual director.   People who live together can ask a relative or housemate to stop doing that irritating thing simply because it is irritating as hell  Making everything into a biblical thing is ridiculous.

This next quote makes me wonder if Jasmine was raised on the Pearl's horrible idea of first-time-obedience for children.   For anyone who has not heard of first-time-obedience, it is the idea that kids should obey their parents instantly and cheerfully without questioning or arguing.   The Pearls get this level of subservience by beating children early and often; they include recommendations for the correct diameter of plumbing line to use starting at under one year of age.   I bring up this because it's the only way I can think of to explain why Jasmine connects these two ideas in one sentence.

When your parents give you a directive you don't understand or don't agree with, learn to ask polite, respectful follow-up questions, and to make a gentle, biblical appeal when necessary. (pg. 69)

For normal human beings - and I include military commanders dealing with new recruits in this group - there's a world of difference between clarifying what a person wants you to do and objecting to doing an action.   At a staff meeting at my home improvement job, a store director asked for someone to help flat-stack the lumber department.   Being new, I had no idea what flat-stacking was so I asked what flat-stacking was.  The store director explained that flat-stacking was the process of dragging lumber to the front of shoppable displays in a roughly similar process to facing shelves in my paint department - but the lumber required the use of reinforced hoes.   I said that I could help out doing that.   That's an example of asking for clarification.  At that same meeting, a paint coworker was directly asked by the store director if he would assist in flat-stacking.  Said coworker had no interest in flat-stacking (based on his facial expression and his general dislike for extra work as observed in the department), but he simply explained that he had two paint chores that needed to be finished before the store closed.  The store director agreed that those two chores were more important and my coworker returned to paint.    I have no idea what a Biblical appeal looks like - but this interaction fit well within the framework of professional objection to a directive.

What I didn't do was jump onto the nearby display of throw rugs and scream to the sky, "What is it with you and all the jargon here?  WHY, GOD WHY?" while crumpling to my knees in agony and my coworker didn't begin chanting "Strike! Strike! Strike!"  While much more fun and memorable, those would be inappropriate ways to get clarification or object to a directive.

I worry very much about a culture where teenage girls need instructions on how to say "I'm lost on which lawn you wanted me to rake first, Dad" or "Can I switch that chore with my brother?" or "Can I do it on Friday instead of Saturday?"

This last quote makes me wonder if more communication is a good thing in a CP/QF family:

This one's hard, but if you keep those lines of communication open, you're bound to hear some correction from your parents. If you've made a conscious choice to live under the authority of your parents after high school, then know this: As an adult daughter, you are going to have to learn how to submit your will to the will of your parents. When I was a younger teen, the very word submit made my skin crawl - I wanted to be my own woman! But I had to learn that the authorities God has placed in my life weren't a punishment, but a blessing; my family and I were a team, and we all played in different positions, and we're all shooting for the same goal. Sometimes, daughters, you have to " take one for the team," so to speak, swallowing your pride, and trying to see things from a different perspective: every hill is not a hill to die on. (pgs. 69-70)

Just when I thought I'd faced all of the drawbacks of being a SAHD, Ms. Baucham brings up another one: your parents get to nag you about your spiritual shortcomings AND they get to use your labor to accomplish their goals regardless of your opinion about the goal.   Ironically - and thankfully - Ms. Baucham's mother informed Jasmine that Jasmine needed to lead her own life rather than trying to do her family's goals - and Jasmine is now a wife, mother and teacher.   Compare that outcome with Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin's attachment to the Western Conservatory of Arts and Science founded by Geoffrey Botkin and Sarah Maxwell's laboring going to keeping Titus 2 running while occasionally receiving some faint praise as the family's blogger.

God seems to have put a drive for independence in everyone - absolutely everyone.   Why shouldn't we celebrate the blossoming drive to accomplish new goals when it appears in young adults rather than squash it in women?    Some families work because the husband is a driving force, some work because the wife is a driving force and others work because both parties trade off being the driving force.   Honestly, forcing women with strong drives for achievement to be subservient to a more-laid back husband sounds like a recipe for disaster. 

The next post is three surprisingly good pieces advice from Ms. Baucham.

*He had an entire routine as a small infant where he'd slump over, cough dramatically three times, slowly raise his head with his last bit strength, bravely make eye-contact with his therapist, and give one deep hack.  I translated that as "PT, I really want to do PT with you today, but my multwi-dwug resistant tuburculosis -hack-hack-hack- is worsened by PT.   I will only survive if you cuddle me...." and start laughing.  Oh, if looks could kill, I'd be dead from the looks Spawn gave me.

**I tried to stop a "Hootie the Toddlerfish" concert during one nap time this month by going into his room and saying and signing "Spawn, you need to sleep now!" in a calm but serious voice.  Spawn looked completely innocently at me like "What do you mean, dearest mother?" , signed "Sleep, sleep" very seriously, put his head down like a good toddler - and began hooting and vocalizing as soon as I closed the door again.    

Jill Dillard's "More Than Sex" Post on Marriage: How to Greet Each Other!

There's something about anniversaries - specifically the ones that are multiples of five - that inspires interesting blog posts.   Jill (Duggar) Dillard has been married to Derick Dillard for five years now.   Honestly, I was a bit surprised by that.  I'm coming up on my seventh marriage anniversary and I thought she got married before me.   In honor of that milestone, Jill wrote a long post about how to love your husband. 

Her premise is that she found it highly annoying when people chalked the passion between Derick and her as a sign of being in a new relationship and thanks to a lot of work the two of them are still in love five years later.

That leads to my first comment: your mileage may vary.   I'm skeptical that Derick and Jill are still in the limerence stage of a relationship.  That's the heady first stage of a romance when your romantic partner can do no wrong.  They are the most perfect creature God ever created and you want nothing more in life than to tell everyone what an amazing person they are.   Limerence is the reason hiding a crush is far more difficult than the person with a crush thinks it is; humans tend to talk about the person they have a crush on incessantly and with weirdly upbeat takes (from the perspective of an outsider).   

Limerence is wonderful - but it is transient.  Between 18 months and three years into a relationship, couples naturally transition into cycles of stress/doubt, molding expectations, and happiness.   The ability to form a lasting partnership for a couple is based on being able to navigate this cycle together.   I suspect that there are nearly infinite ways for a happy, lasting partnership to work - and following Jill's advice would have shattered my marriage because my husband and I are not Jill and Derick.  

A clear example of how your mileage may vary is the ironclad way Jill describes how to greet a husband who arrives home.   The examples are scattered through the post so I've clumped them together in a summary:

1. Be super-excited when your husband comes home.  At the very least, sprint across your abode to meet him.  If your kids are gone, jump his bones right then and there.  If the kids are around, have everyone meet him at the door!
2. Kisses when he's coming or going should last at least 6 seconds.   It's an affair-proofing vaccination.
3. Get rid of the kids, dinner, phones or any other secondary distractions for at least 15-20 minutes of quality talking time.   Added bonus: if you point-blank tell people that you're cutting their conversation off because your spouse came home, that action counts as a public service because other women might start doing it too!
4. Listen diligently to your husband regardless of how tired you are, how agonizingly boring the topic is or how many other things need to be done.   The hardest bit is forcing yourself to enjoy his hobbies that don't fit you at all - but if you keep it up, you'll learn to fake it well enough, I suppose.

My husband and I do fine with our routine when one of us comes home.   We greet each other and exchange a very abbreviated rundown of how our days went.  This is also when we exchange those random issues that popped up during the day that you need your spouse to deal with since we're both still in working mode like "We need more Pediasure" from my husband or "Can you cover Spawn's speech appointment next Tuesday at 9am?" from me.  

Since my husband has worked on farms and in HVAC positions and my retail job is both dusty and paint-covered, the next item of business is a shower to decontaminate before settling down for the evening.   I've jumped in the shower with my husband for fun adult time before Spawn was in the picture, but I don't trust my two-year-old enough to leave him unattended for more than about 5 minutes and not without having both ears peeled for signs of trouble.   Also - and this might just be me - hopping in the shower while Spawn is awake would lead directly to an emergency room trip where I'd have to explain that I didn't see my toddler fall off the couch and smack his head on the floor because...I was in the shower with my husband.   Finally, I would be so fixated on if any sound was a sign that Spawn was standing on the couch...or found an electrical outlet...or whatever toddler mayhem was on tap...that I would not be a particularly good shower partner for adult sexy time.

I like kissing my husband.   An informal experiment to see if kissing him for six seconds improved anything was terminated, however, when I realized how distracting counting the seconds in my head was.   On a related note, being told that we should kiss for at least 6 seconds by a former Duggar is a total romance killer.  This might be because I kept saying, "Jill Dillard says this is important!" before kissing my husband.    Your millage might vary.

Did I mention my husband is a very patient man?

Anyways, we save any deep talking until we are both cleaned up and fed.   We are both the type who come home rather wound-up from work and we both appreciate having our spouse wind down a bit before talking for any extended period of time. 

There was a period where my husband wanted to discuss his job frustrations before his shower - and that was a massive stressor for me.  He was so wound up that he'd cycle on the same idea or same event for 30 minutes or more - but the same idea or event after a shower was 5-10 minutes to work out. 

I laid out how frustrated I was by our talks prior to his shower.  He listened and was ok with trying to shower before discussion time.   We adapted and our current system works for us. 

That was a great example of a small cycle of unease -> molding -> new happiness that mature relationships move through.

In terms of discussing interests and hobbies, yikes! 

Yes, part of being a good friend in general and good spouse in specific is occasionally maintaining your end of a conversational topic that your friend enjoys and you do not.   My husband enjoys sci-fi/fantasy novels much more broadly than I do.  I, on the other hand, take a simple pleasure at watching homesteaders fail miserably on various TV shows.  We both listen patiently to our spouse's most recent adventures in entertainment because we love each other even if we're just not that into the topic. 

Having said that, we have very different hobbies that do not overlap.  My husband plays the ukulele with several pick-up groups.  I swim and do water aerobics.   My husband adores crossword puzzles.  I crochet.   We each pursue these hobbies without dragging the other spouse into the hobby because being married doesn't mean losing your own self.

Equally important, I don't feel like I need to monitor and cling to my husband because he'll have an affair if he is left unattended for more than 30 seconds.   More on that in the next post.

ATI Wisdom Booklet 24: Fallen Empires - Mayan Empire

Howdy!

Welcome to a new segment of reclaiming history from the warped and crazy summaries created by unpaid (and probably sexually harassed) workers for Bill Gothard's Advanced Training Institute!

In the last post, we learned how the Inca Empire fell because of laziness, false gods, and corrupt leaders.   I'm pretty sure that ALL empires past and present could be accused of all three - but life moves on even when governments fall.  Just ask China, Russia, England or the USA - we've all been there.

The next empire to receive a glancing overview of skills followed by an entirely made-up reason for their downfall is the Mayan Empire.  The Maya had an advanced civilization with massive building project, intensive agricultural works and a variety of written works at its height.  The Classic Mayan Empire collapsed around 900 AD - some 400 years prior to European contact.  The writers of the Wisdom Booklet seem to have missed this tidbit - but the Mayan Empire contacted by Europeans was much more fragmented and depopulated than it had been in the past.  That Classic collapse has had a variety of theories over time - but the best supported theory currently is that an extended drought of 200 years occurred across the Yucatan Peninsula.  Cities in areas where the water table dropped below an accessible point collapsed and survivors moved towards areas where water was available through rivers or cenotes - a settlement pattern seen at the time of European contact.

European contact and conquest followed a starkly similar pattern throughout the New World.  The first Europeans introduced a variety of disastrous epidemic diseases to the Maya who had no previous exposure to the pathogens.   Native Americans lost 70-90% of their populations in a short time prior to any incursions by European warriors.   In spite of this level of catastrophic loss, it took the Spanish Empire nearly 200 years to conquer all of the existing Maya states. 

One surprising advantage for the Mayans was their use of flint for arrowheads, spear tips, etc.   See, flint is a rock that is easy to shape, takes a sharp point, but is easily fracturable.  That fracturability greatly increased the mortality rate among injured Spaniards since the shattered flint in a wound introduced a high risk of fatal infections.

Let's get into the selected quotes:

This first sentence is the only direct placement of the Mayan culture within a timeline until the author brings up an event from Nunez de Balboa's expedition across Central America.  The author straight up ignores the fact that the fall of the Mayan Empire around 950 AD is separated from the later event (which has some additional problems discussed later) by 563 years.   An awful lot happens over 5.6 centuries; compare any European country in 1456 to today to serve as a comparison.

A lot of CP/QF history suffers from the same flaws as young-earth creationism (YEC).  YEC often makes a statement in a way that implies that the statement is a well-supported fact when in reality the statement is highly suspect outside of believers.   In this quote, Mayan civilization is casually described as being directly connected to Noah - but there is no evidence given at all for that claim.   There are at least 30 Mayan languages either used today or extinct but with enough written examples to allow analysis of linguistic connections - and no one can connect those languages with ancient Middle Eastern languages.    I suppose that YEC could argue that this lack of connection is due to the incident of the Tower of Babel - but that doesn't explain why population geneticists can show that humans left Africa in several different waves instead of one wave propagating outward from the Middle East.

The section on the Mayan invention of zero deserves a better explanation.  Several previous civilizations had a place-holding zero like the zero in 204 that represents 2 groups of one hundred, four ones, and no tens - but the Mayans had the first example of a zero that meant a total absence.  Figuring out how to deal with nothing seems easy - but it is a breakthrough that took many civilizations a long time to figure out. 

The Mayans were excellent at astronomy and determined lots of accurate future dates of astronomical events.  Really, my only pet-peeve with the Mayans is the fact that they created a roughly 5,125 year cycling calendar and left behind a stone tablet.  Some modern translators made a mistake when translating the stone tablet in the 1960's - and the next thing you know - I'm stuck with 30,000 questions about the world ending in December 2012 throughout the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 school years.   It's not the fault of the Mayans but I still flinch slightly when Mayans are mentioned because I'm afraid I'll get dragged into a boring conversation about the end of times.

Woot-woot!  The Mayans homeschooled!  Woot-woot! 

Of course, homeschooling wasn't enough to prevent their civilization from collapsing, was it?  What do you mean that's not the takeaway message?  *shrugs*

It took the Spanish nearly 200 years to control all of the Mayan states - and I suspect that historians and anthropologists could argue that the Spanish never really brought much cultural change to most areas.  Oh, various officials tried hard to get taxes or resources from the population and members of the Catholic Church tried various carrot-and-stick-but-mostly-stick methods of getting people to convert - but Mayans had the advantage of remote locations and an ability to syncretize their religion to appear Catholic while still honoring their religious beliefs.

That graph is a hot mess.   The vertical axis is a bit wonky - but I can kind of see it.  The Mayans developed new technologies on a smooth curve before losing said achievements in two collapses.  As a theoretical concept, it works - but the Mayan civilization existed - so I'm left with the feeling that the person who constructed the graph was half-assing their job by not actually determine how many technologies were lost over units of time.  That feeling gets worse when I look at the horizontal axis.  "Time" needs a unit of some kind.  We know that the Mayans had a high achieving Classic period that lasted roughly 600 years ending around 950 AD.  That could work for the top of the graph - but that means that the rest of the graph covers 1800 years and all hell is about to break loose in Central America.  The other option is to declare that second drop of technological advances is roughly right for the invasion of the Spanish - but it also means that the Mayan people are still losing cultural and technological advances - which feels wrong, too.

Next, we dive into the patently false ideas about why the Mayan Empire fell - but the false ideas do give a great deal of insight into how ATI works.

*slow claps*

Teaching kids to appreciate art from different cultures requires some patience and effort.  ATI decides to avoid that extra work by declaring that art that looks ugly by ATI standards is abhorrent to God.

The Mayans used political prisoners (e.g., conquered nobles) for sacrifices.  If you don't want to be sacrificed to the gods, be a peasant farmer like the vast majority of humankind.   Or at least make sure you have the best trained soldiers....your choice.

It's always fun to blame the human desire for novelty for everything wrong in the universe - but most of us are simply trying to raise a family and not die horribly at a young age.   That's the real human experience.   Another human universal is that "things that I do" are normal and divinely sanctioned while "things that outsiders do" are abnormal and demonic.   The Mayans could easily make the same claims about Christianity - and I'm disturbed that no one in ATI seems to have noticed that.

As near as I can tell - and it took a lot of digging - this entire smear on the Mayan Empire (and the Aztecs who are mostly ignored) is roughly third-hand at this point. 

Yes, when Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama, he discovered the Pacific Ocean.

 Prior to that, he was moving through Central America looking for gold, silver and emeralds as a conquistador.  While he was governor of Veragua, he worked at subduing the local populations through diplomacy, negotiation or force. 

 At the same time, there was a great deal of discussion and hand-wringing in Spain about how Native Americans should be treated.  One line of thought was that Native Americans could be converted to Catholicism.  Since they could be converted to Christianity,  Spaniards had the duty to treat them like fellow humans who had rights in terms of governance and property.  The other line of thought was that Native Americans were not really human and so Spain had no reason to treat them as humans.

With that background, the story recorded by Peter Martyr d'Anghiera was meant to reconcile actions of conquistadors with the idea that Native Americans were humans.    The story goes that Nunez de Balboa came upon a group of 40 noble men who were engaged in homosexual activities so he had the men killed using his war dogs and the local people were happy that that abomination was destroyed.    IOW, the evil nobles were doing wrong in the eyes of the humble peasants who knew that the gods (or God) hated immorality and Nunez de Balboa freed those peasants from evil leaders and divine wrath.

I can make the history make a certain amount of sense - within the senseless hatred of racism and homophobia that is - but the ATI workbook proceeds to take a single event in a single polity, ignores the obvious spin placed on the report by the killer, and decides to insult the rest of the empire for fun. 

Oh, and they drag in the Aztecs.  *rolls eyes*

*sniggers*

Most cultures have one form of astrology or another.  Heck, we use astrology to place the right dates for Easter.   It's another human quirk; we look at the movement of the sun, the moon, and various other astronomical bodies and try to use them to figure out what will happen next.  The idea is not so crazy when you consider that watching the movement of the moon let people estimate 1/12 of the year and determine when tides and seasons would change.  The biggest body orders a day, the next biggest orders the months, so why shouldn't the smallest bodies order events in human lives?

Conversely, the US has had various forms of astrology in use since colonial times - see your handy Farmer's Almanac for details - so if the Mayans were screwed, so are we. 

The next post in this series is on why Classical Greece fell. 

Joyfully At Home: Chapter Five - Part Two

Howdy, folks!

I've mentioned a few times on this blog that I'm Catholic.  The Catholic Church has a thoroughly troubled past and present - but it does occasionally hit on a good idea or two.  One idea that the Catholic Church has used with some success over the last two millennia is having spiritual directors.

I don't have a really detailed history of spiritual direction prepped for this post (sorry; I blame having a toddler who has new AFOs and wants to walk now!  Right now!  Why aren't we walking right now? What do you mean your back hurts from bending over to let me clutch your hands?  Immaterial; walking time!), but I think we can wing it.  The idea is Biblical in nature since one could argue that the point of the Epistles is spiritual direction coming from the author to communities.  The rest of the history consists of the exquisitely human habit of asking another human for help when a person hits a wall.

The important bit for this post, though, is that spiritual directors don't live with the people they direct.  In cases where the two people live in the same location like a mother superior and a novice in a convent or monks in an abbey, there's a third spiritual director checking in with the mother superior or elder monk. 

Why is this third person necessary?   

Well, they are needed because of the equally human tendency to find the people you live with to be completely and totally obnoxious.  Everyone has personal quirks.   Everyone also has areas of their spiritual lives that needs improving.  The danger of a spiritual director living with a student is that the director must apply super-human patience and forbearance to suss out the difference between "activity that harms student's relationship with God" and "quirk that drives the director absolutely batty".   It's so easy to try and eliminate the absurdly annoying quirk by labeling it as a sinful activity - or even better - an activity that is slowing the student's progression towards holiness.  Hey, a student might question why sniffling instead of blowing their nose is a sin - but they might take labeling the same activity as a sign of sloth as being plausible.

That's a level of protection needed by consenting, unrelated adults with a mild power differential.  Jasmine Baucham opens an even larger can of worms in "Joyfully At Home"' when she discusses the importance of living at home peacefully with your parents.   The first quote from the fifth chapter sounds like a good Christian home is one part trade school and one part monastery boot camp:

The home is a training ground for life ahead, which entails much humility as we are constantly taught, trained, guided, and directed by Mom and Dad, as we are refined by the Lord, as our besetting sins are cast in the spotlight of everyday life, not hidden from those who knows best; we are sanctified in a way that we were never before. And that's difficult. (pg. 66)

Seriously, the first two clauses of that sentence describe what the first few weeks at a new job are like while the next four clauses describe the initiation period in a monastery (minus the potential promise of a feeling of Zen or ecstatic bliss, of course.) 

Here's the bit I don't understand.  I imagine a person's besetting sins are obvious to their parents by the time the kid is 10 years old or so.  Their issues might be visible even earlier if we think of  "besetting sins" as personality traits that interfere with the person's growth into the person they want to become.  For me, my besetting sin - such as it was - was fear.  I struggled with medical-grade anxiety starting after my brother died when I was four.  In later years, I also struggled with depression, but for me, anxiety is much harder to live with than depression. 

And you know what?  In spite of the fact that I went to public schools before kindergarten and parochial schools for the rest, my parents could list my 'besetting sin' by the time I was 4.5 years old. I assume this is true for the parents of SAHDs as well - but why does this process take the parents of the SAHDs until the girls are in their twenties...or thirties...or beyond?    If the same besetting sins keep cropping up, why should girls believe that their parents' method of spiritual growth will benefit them in their remaining years of single adulthood since those methods failed during their childhood and adolescence?

At what point do parents transfer the responsibility of spiritual growth to their daughters?   Oh, wait.  I forgot.  They never do.  There is apparently never a time where a woman must be responsible for herself.  She's either the ward of her parents or husband.  This is such a grim lifestyle.

The home a place where we can bless those nearest and dearest to us. Even when we're tired of them; when they snap at us; when it's easier to be " slow in anger" to people outside of our immediate family; when we realize it was more fun to hang out with our friends because they didn't know us quite as well as our siblings do, and couldn't see our glaring sin nature as well; when we look at other homes as outsiders and paint the inner workings as the perfect, blissful family unit; or when we forget that, even if there were such a thing as a perfect family, as soon as we entered it, our sin natures would derail the perfection.. (pg. 66)

Wow.  How little time did Jasmine Holmes get to spend with her friends during her teenage years?  I hung out with a fairly normal group of nerds and choir geeks during high school plus my best friend.  I could quite easily - and effectively - list the irritating quirks and personality flaws of my friends as well as I could list the flaws of my siblings or parents.  I am equally sure that those friends could do the same for me.  For example, I hate when people take longer to make a decision than I think they should.  I am also very opinionated - which means I can completely steamroll over people by judging them to be wishy-washy or vague and use that judgement to ignore their need for more time - and their right to take more time to make a decision.  Likewise, I can be impatient and start barking orders at people when I feel a group is spinning their wheels.   On the flip side, I was often more welcoming of new people than some of my friends and more likely to give people the benefit of the doubt during stressful times. 

Hanging out with your siblings can be fun because you have such a deep store of shared memories.  Hanging out with friends can be fun because you have access to a wider store of separate memories and experiences.  The CP/QF false idea that time spent with peers undermines the quality of sibling relationships irritates me.  If the only way that parents can get their siblings to interact peaceably is to cut off all access to peers, the parents need to seriously evaluate what has gone wrong in the way they run their home!   

The Calvinist obsession with smashing the depravity of human nature all the time gets old.  I don't mind the message of "we are all flawed sinners" - because we are.  We all make mistakes.  We all react in ways that hurt one another.  Because of that - no family is perfect.   Another way to look at it is that the peaceful home viewed from a distance may well feel stodgy or confining from the inside or an active family may be exhausting once inside.   Ms. Holmes' quote, though, feels more like a reminder that anyone who questions the status quo should be silenced with a sharp reminder of their own failings - and that's not acceptable, either.   People within a family should be able to discuss their preferences for activities and ways to recharge.   Families may not be able to give everyone what they need at the same time - but there should be a give and take.    In my family, I need quiet time to recharge my batteries, but my tot is far too young to understand that it's a bad time to play with his toys while jabbering loudly so I might put in earplugs or go for a walk.   My husband's ukulele group overlaps with a swim time for me - but I have so many more options for swimming that missing two times a month doesn't feel like a loss.   My husband takes care of my son when I've had a long day and want to eat at the local greasy spoon to recharge by reading a book, chatting with locals, and having downtime without any family members underfoot.   

The next post in this series will be about figuring out how to communicate with your parents as a stay-at-home daughter.....although I'm not sure why SAHDs haven't already figured that out previously.

Joyfully At Home: Chapter Five - Part One

Hello!

Spring has finally arrived in Western Michigan.  I received my yearly shipment of tomato and pepper plants which are hardening off on the front porch right now - and I'm not living in fear that they will be frost-nipped.  I've gotten a late start on my cold-weather crops but they are growing in a part-sun space this summer so I think they'll do alright. 

I've started a section of parsnips.  I love growing parsnips - with one caveat.  Be sure that you like parsnips AND like parsnips growing in the bed you start them in because that bed will be the domain of parsnips forever afterward.   For example, I seeded a raised bed with parsnips at my in-laws' house six years ago.  The last time I did anything to that bed was a week before my son was born when I harvested a late fall crop in hopes of switching from a frantic and often forgotten spring harvest to a fall harvest schedule.   We're still getting parsnip seedlings in that bed six years after seeding and after three years of benign neglect.  I view my new parsnip section as a perennial bed - and that makes me happy.

I've added two more pseudo-perennial beds this year: tomatillos and sunflowers.  I think the correct term for these is strongly self-seeding annual plants - but they act like mildly invasive perennials in garden beds.  I like that habit because I have a weedy, gravelly area between our backyard and the farm yard that just looks grim.  Sunflowers will do pretty well there and I like watching all the different spontaneous crosses that happen.  A favorite from my inlaws' patch was a 8-10 foot tall scarlet sunflower with a good sized terminal flower that also produced little flowers along the axials.   Tomatillos are a nice, somewhat leggy plant, that grows to between 2-3 feet tall/round, will cover itself in small yellow flowers and grow green fruits in abundance.    Hopefully, I'll get enough fruits for two canner loads of salsa verde.

I'm enjoying my job at a home improvement store a lot.  While I had originally applied to be a cashier, I feel like I dodged a bullet by accepting a position in the paint department.  I like staying busy during a shift; having nothing to do makes time drag.  Unlike my previous cashiering job, the amount of work for cashiers at the home improvement store is flood-or-famine.  There are either a million people who need to be checked out - or no one.   Now, the paint department has moments - and sometimes hours - of floods of people who need paint, but having a few aisles of merchandise that must be stocked means I always have something else to do once everyone has gotten their paint fix for the day.

Having a job that lets me get out of the house for 25 hours a week along with the return of outdoor chores sits strangely with Chapter Five of Jasmine Baucham's book "Joyfully At Home".  In this chapter, Ms. Baucham tries to give detailed advice for young women living at home to make their lives less boring.

And, really, that's the irreducible problem of the stay-at-home daughterhood (SAHD) movement.  Being a housemaid, classroom aide, sous chef,  and nanny for your mother while being an intern/go-fer for your father's business makes a bit of  sense when you are 12-16 and no sense at all once you are 22-26.  The thought of being twenty years into life as a household servant and ministry underling like Sarah Maxwell, Jana Duggar, Anna Sophia and Elizabeth Botkin are fills me with stultifying boredom interlaced with dread for the future.

Apparently, though, no one thought that permanent SAHDhood was on the table when they started according to Jasmine Baucham:

When we first decided to shift our focus, to turn our hearts towards home, we were enthusiastic in vibrant, purposeful and driven, meticulous and focused, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. We had a grasp of the bigger picture: a vision for the home as a hub of ministry and discipleship, as a training ground for life ahead, as a place where we can bless those nearest and dearest to us, and in turn, turn that blessing outward, towards others in our church and in our community. (pg. 66)

My translation is that the SAHD advocates figured they'd be living at home for a few years while picking up tricky skills in cooking, cleaning and toddler-wrangling - but mostly enjoying good, clean, wholesome company with fellow church members as they did ministries that kept their young female minds safe and didn't require any advanced education.   Around the time that living at home became tedious - one year? three years? - they'd meet Prince-Charming-Of-Correct-Theology-Without-Baggage.   A chaste, romantic courtship would cement the SAHD's purity credentials while showing off how much of a better wife she'd be since she already knows how to sort laundry and roast a chicken unlike those slatternly college-graduates who are working and must not, therefore, be able to wash clothing or cook poultry.   She'd demurely walk down the aisle dressed in white - a deserved white wedding unlike those college graduates who have kissed a man before! - and start an easy, pain-free middle class life with their bevy of well-behaved kids and enough income to make being a SAHM look easy.

Well, with the benefit of time, there's two ways this story ends. 

The lucky SAHDs manage to be found by Prince Charming and start their own families.  Mrs. Holmes' website is a bit wonky right now, but she alludes to how hard it was for her to be newly married, recovering from a miscarriage, moving frequently for job opportunities and living in a rural place with a newborn and a husband who worked long hours to support their family of three.  Jill and Jessa Duggar have had similar trajectories, although their financial situation have been mitigated by a television show and the largess of the Duggar real estate business.

For the rest of the SAHDs, they learned eventually that 'the training ground for life ahead' was far more literally settling into the role of dependent daughter for the remainder of their parents' productive lives. WIth the sole exception of the Mally Sisters, SAHD never switch into an outreach beyond their immediate family or possibly a carefully curated experience like running a Bible study group for kids.  It's a pretty grim scenario.

In a deliciously funny twist, 19-year old Ms. Baucham attempts to blame the tedium of being a stay-at-home daughter on society at large:

The home is a hub for ministry and discipleship. Perhaps you haven't found your niche yet. Ministry in and from the home is something that you're still getting used to. Turning your focus outward instead of inward is a difficult journey in the individualistic society we live in. You're used to focusing on your own plans, and now you're working as part of a team. It's difficult to adjust. (pg. 66)

Let me see if I understand the basic assumptions in this paragraph:

Assumption One: Most CP/QF teenage girls who have been homeschooled and sheltered are confident and secure with their role in the wider society but are completely adrift in their own family structure.   They've been happily fulfilling their dreams of becoming feminist union leaders (or androgynous statist Marxist in Botkin terms ) without any guidance from their parents - but are completely baffled by the idea of cooking dinner, watching their younger siblings and folding church bulletins.

Assumption Two: An "Outward" focus means collapsing your goals to fit within 1950's gender stereotypes for white, middle-class, married women with a college education because Jesus wants that.

Assumption Three: These teenage or young adult women have never been on a team before - despite living with siblings in a homeschool environment.

So...either CP/QF daughterhood is a whole lot more rebellious than I've ever seen before - or this paragraph is a sad attempt to blame 'the world' for the fact that doing the same thing every day is borning.

This next quote is still a favorite of mine because the SAHD movement is full of young women who independently learn that Betty Friedan was right - without ever picking up the irony:

We can also be a blessing to those in our church and community. Hospitality. Service. Cooking. Cleaning. It may seem romantic when debutantes on the 1950s TV shows don June Cleaver aprons and get to hacking, but perhaps cooking just isn't your forte, cleanliness and organizational skills don't come easy to you, and social climates make you antsy and nervous. You have just realized that, no, because you decided to embrace the high calling of a keeper at home does not mean that your heart thrills at the sight of dirty dishes. (pg. 66)

One of the major themes of second-wave feminism was that expecting women to be intellectually satisfied with a life that consisted of cooking, cleaning, mild community volunteerism, and raising a few kids was crazy-making for a lot of women. Throughout time and place, women and men have worked together to feed, clothe, and shelter their children while caring for dependent adults.  The introduction of a cash economy weakened women's labors compared to men's since women's work produced no wages- but women's labor often allowed cash to be saved, stretched or supplemented.  The Victorian Era brought the idea of ensconcing women in a safe, home bubble protected from the sullying influences of economic marketplace - but the number of women who were wealthy enough to live that dream were dwarfed by the number of women who worked as servants, merchants, or factory workers. The economic collapse of the 1930's followed by the uncertainty and demands of the 1940's war era were stressful - but at least women mattered during that time.    The 1950's in the US created a short-lived economy where most white men could support their wife and family on one income regardless of educational level of the man.   This was the first time that the Victorian Era ideals could be realized without huge numbers of women working as servants thanks to technological innovations like electricity. 

 And what was the outcome?  Unending boredom for women.

It turns out that no one really enjoys doing the same chores everyday.  Even worse, once kids are in school, a woman had eight hours of time to fill - and there just aren't that many chores for a suburban housewife.

For CP/QF wives, the picture is slightly more exciting.  Pregnancy can be a grind - but babies are an instant source of public approval.  Newborns are a lot of work - but the sleep deprivation takes the edge off of boredom.   Older babies and toddlers are a lot of work - and they create more work as they explore their surroundings - but that does limit the boredom of empty time.  Plus, toddlers turn into preschoolers who need a homeschooling mom.  Added bonus: tight finances mean there is never enough of anything to go around - so that's a whole lot more work to conserve and modify what resources a woman has.   

For a CP/QF SAHD, all the work is there - but none of the glory.  Babies reflect praise to their parents, not their teenage sisters.  Toddlers know who has the power in a household - and it's not their older sister.  The Duggar's television show has shown us that sisters who raise their younger siblings can certainly have deep relationships - but those relationships exist at the discretion of the parents and will likely be disrupted by the marriage of the sister eventually.  To me, there is a pathos to the fact that Jessa Duggar Seewald always chooses to have Jennifer who was her "buddy" announce the birth of Jessa's kids to Jessa and Jennifer's siblings.  It's a super-sweet way to keep Jennifer connected to Jessa - but Jessa still had to leave the first daughter she raised behind to have biological kids of her own.    In that respect, I can understand why Jana Duggar may prefer being single since she'd get to be with the kids she's raised until they are fully grown.

My last point: where in the Bible did Jesus advocate domesticity as the epitome of Christian life?  Jesus encouraged people to leave their parents to spread the Good News throughout the land.  He expected his followers to heal, support, and live as members of a larger community.   Yes, there are probably people who do need help cooking, cleaning and taking care of their homes - but is that the only issue a community is facing?  How can a SAHD who becomes a SAHW/M help communities that are struggling to find work?  How can she reach out to people of different economic or cultural backgrounds when she's had less exposure to people than most? 

I think it is important for all people to know enough cooking and cleaning skills to keep their home in order - but people also need to acquire skills to help other people.   The focus on practical human services in CP/QF land like teaching, nursing, social work, community building and advocacy has become squashed into a puerile oversimplification of anti-abortion politics - and that's sad.

In the next post, we learn about the issues when your spiritual advisors are your parents.

ATI Wisdom Booklet 24: Why Empires Fall - Incas

I haven't done a Wisdom Booklet review in a while.  Honestly, I'd forgotten about them until I got dragged down a rabbit-hole involving figuring out how involved the Duggars are in the revamped version of Bill Gothard's cult known as the Institute in Basic Life Principles which has spawned medusa-like different heads including the ALERT Academy, Journey To The Heart, and the Advanced Training Institute (ATI) which produced the Wisdom Booklet series.

My net takeaways from the rabbit-hole digression were:

• The Duggars are still neck-deep in IBLP with the Maxwells reaping the benefits of being 'independent' but hanging on the Duggar coattails.
• ALERT has quite a racket going for pseudo-military and emergency readiness training that people can get for cheaper with employable credentials closer to home.  And of course, there is the option of joining the US military - but that's highly discouraged in CP/QF circles.
• I refuse to go on retreats that do not have any information available about the agenda ahead of time, Journey to the Heart organizers.  Plus, the thought of people being flown into either of the two Chicago airports followed by a 6-7 hour van trip through scenic rural Wisconsin to end up in equally rural Watersmeet, Michigan makes me carsick by proxy.   Flying into Minneapolis/St. Paul drops the drive time by at least an hour (and probably a lot more if you drive 60-70mph on rural roads like people do).

The Wisdom Booklets I've read generally have a misguided history section that I've ignored - but #24's section on why various empires fell is so egregiously horrible that I feel like I could take a shot at it.  I don't have any official history credentials - but most of my casual reading is on historical topics.  I think this one caught my attention because I've been re-reading Jared Diamond's "Collapse" which has a section on the collapse of one area of the Mayan civilization and I doubted that the ATI version would be anything like Diamond's take on the situation.  (Spoiler alert: it isn't.)

I have one criticism or concern about Diamond's works.  Like many popular science authors, his works start to make mistakes when he ventures into areas where he is not as as versed.  For example, in "Collapse", Diamond explores human settlement and failure patterns throughout Oceania. It's a cool chapter - but he wrote it without learning the basics of island biogeography which is the study in biology of why islands support different species.   This leads to a cringe-inducing paragraph where he states that no one knows why islands that are close to each other are less likely to lose all their forest plants than more widely spaced islands.  For an evolutionary biologist like me, that's a head-slap moment.  The widely accepted and demonstrated fact is that islands that are close together send more genetic information (read: seeds of timber palms) to each other than islands farther apart.  In plain English, a palm tree makes floating nuts that can disperse to different islands if caught by a tide.  The likelihood of a single palm nut making it to another island is based largely on the size of the island and the distance.  A big, nearby island will catch a lot of palm nuts; a small, distant island will not.

Having gotten that out of my system, I need to be clear.  If your options are teaching your kid using ATI Wisdom Booklet #24 or Diamond's "Collapse", use "Collapse".  My concerns about "Collapse" are truly academic in that 99% of Americans will live happy, productive lives without ever caring about island biogeography - and that's great!   Using your handy-dandy ATI Wisdom Booklets will teach your kid a bunch of racist lies that are palpably wrong when stated to anyone outside their cult.

The theme for "Why Empires Fall" is amazingly simple.  Step one is that the people do something that annoys Bill Gothard....I mean....God.  Step two is that the empire falls because God has turned away from his people.   Of course, making civilizations in the New World that did not have exposure to Abrahamic religions fit this mold takes some work - but mostly requires some creative editing of history and suspension of disbelief by readers.

The factual information on the skills and achievements of the Inca Empire take up one full column of a page in the ATI booklet.  The information on their downfall takes up 2.5 pages.😖 

 Here's my crash course: the Inca pulled off some amazing architectural gems like Machu Picchu without wheels, without animal pulling power, without a written language, and without hardenable metals.  Their masons were so skilled at dry-fitting stones that buildings have survived for centuries without mortar - and this is an earthquake prone area!  The Inca people built terraces that greatly increased the amount of arable land in a mountainous area.  At the same time, they incorporated irrigation into the design of the terraces.  They built 25,000 miles of road that was passable for humans and pack animals.  They created gorgeous textiles in llama, alpaca and vicuna wools.  The Inca also figured out how to do trepanning procedures with an 80-90% survival rate thank in part to having coca plants and alcohol available for painkillers during the procedures.

I get the purpose of this next selection in connecting the fall of the Inca Empire to ATI's theme of "Displease God and Smiting Will Occur!" - but the implications are seriously weird: 

Um....did ATI just admit that the Latter Day Saints of Jesus Christ were right that pre-Columbian civilizations were visited by Jesus and/or some of the Lost Tribes of Israel?   That feels surprisingly broad minded for fundamentalist Christians.

Oh, wait. 

The purpose of this tall tale is to quash any sympathy for the Incas who were crushed by Divine Wrath.  We all know that it is not fair to hold people accountable for rules that they were unaware of - right?   A merciful God wouldn't crush people who had no opportunity to be converted.  But the Inca Empire did fall so clearly the solution must be that God sent some unknown missionaries to the Incas.  Those missionaries converted some number of Inca but then the Inca went back to their previous religious beliefs and only left some pretty hymns.   That feels more like fundamentalist thought patterns.

Another fundamentalist thought pattern: everything human that is beautiful must be derived directly from the Judeo-Christian Bible. 

Now that we've denigrated their religion enough, the ATI authors dive into another favorite obsession: drugs!

Nope.  There's no sign that the Inca peoples ever made cocaine - meaning the highly concentrated cocaine alkaloid illegal drug.  Some areas did figure out that chewing coca leaves with some ashes (which are a base) would release more of the cocaine alkaloid - but there's a huge difference in strength between the amount of cocaine released by chewing on coca leaves or drinking coca tea compared to snorting cocaine or mainlining it.   It's like comparing eating a poppy seed bagel to taking Oxycontin - palpably ridiculous.

The Inca Empire worked on a barter system with taxes paid through labor to the king.  No one used coca beans as a currency any more than they used wool or ceramics or metals or labor.

So the Incas are now hopped-up on drugs after rejecting the Abrahamic God.  The next quote combines Bill Gothard's hatred of sloth with a great slur on Catholic Spain.

There are so many things wrong with this. 

Let's start with the Achilles' heel of the Inca Empire.  The Inca Empire was greatly overextended for control by a government dependent on human foot speed.   The Incas were not the first empire to have this problem or the last.  The farther away from the seat of government the more likely local discontent is to spread into a rebellion.  Having said that, the Inca Empire was doing pretty well prior to contact with Europeans in 1526.

In 1526, Pizarro and de Almagro contact the Inca Empire before returning to Spain in 1528 after political issues in Panama prevent them from launching another voyage.  In the intervening 18 months, the Europeans had spread one or more contagious epidemic disease to the Incas that the Incas had no immunity to.  These probably included smallpox and/or measles.  Newly contacted populations have had documented losses of 90% of their pre-contact population after exposure to European diseases so it is safe to assume that the Inca Empire was dealing with the destabilizing influence of massive population loss.  In approximately 1528, the Inca Emperor Huayna Capac died of one of those diseases.  This lead to a civil war between two of his sons which ended right before the Pizarros showed up with the rest of the Conquistadors.

Yes, Francisco Pizarro captured Atahualpa Inka who had just put down his brother's rebellion and accepted a huge ransom.  Francisco Pizarro was against the kangaroo trial that the Conquistadors held that found Atahualpa Inka guilty of killing his brother and plotting against the Conquistadors which lead to his execution.  Actually, the trial and execution of a sitting king did not go over well in Europe when the news got back home.  Monarchs had a long history of executing siblings who were traitors to the crown - and seriously - no one really expects people to not fight back against invaders.   Ironically, Pizarro's objections were more pragmatic since there were a whole lot of Incas compared to very few Conquistadors so killing a very valuable hostage seemed like a recipe for disaster.

The Incas were easy prey?  Tell that to the Conquistadors.  It took over 50 years for the Inca Empire to be fully defeated.  I'm not a military historian - but I do think that if the Incas has figured out how horrible horses did in mountain areas a bit sooner the Spaniards would have been failed invaders in spite of hardenable metals, horses, and better resistance to communicable diseases.

Historians don't have a way of qualifying the laziness of a given society but most pre-industrial societies required insane amounts of effort simply to stay alive so I'm gonna give the Inca a pass on this one.

If the authors are going to use child sacrifice as a touchstone for the downfall of the Inca Empire, they should get the details right. 

Yes, the Incas practiced child sacrifice.  The ages of the victims were between infancy and 16 years of age.  The children were picked because they were exceptionally beautiful and without any scars or blemishes so that the people were giving the best children they had back to the gods.  Based on isotopic evidence, the victims were fed very well for months to years prior to being killed.   When it came time for the actual killing, the victims were fed a sedative potion that would knock them out before they were stabbed, strangled or left to die of hypothermia.  The murder of children is never pleasant to think about - and based on the fact that the Incas drugged the kids so heavily - it seems like the Incas wanted their deaths to be as quick and painless as possible. 

Europeans like to act morally superior - but at the same time there were massive amount of abandoned newborns left in dumps or wastelands when their parents couldn't support another child.  The rationale was that the parents didn't actually kill the kids - and there was a chance that someone would rescue the child and raise them - so it wasn't technically murder.  Newborns can be surprisingly robust - so the ATI should spend some time reflecting on the likelihood of newborns taking a few days to die without the benefit of cocaine.

The last sentence ends with "incest, cult prostitution, and other perversions."

The presence of incest in so many royal families is not related to lust; it's related to money and theology.  Once a royal family becomes the living representation of the gods - or demi-gods - or actual gods, marriage partners become tricky to find.   How can a god marry a mortal?  Their kids would be less than divine - so the family starts marrying relatives.   Genetically, humans can survive some inbreeding for a generation or two - but strict inbreeding creates more issues.  The first genetic issue to crop up is often infertility issues.  When marriage partners include a woman in her teens, the couple is likely to end up with a few kids even with subpar fertility - but this also means that the number of related marriage partners drops over time. 

Before ATI members get too haughty, they should look carefully at the royal families of any European country.  Everyone is pretty inbred.   That inbreeding is part of the reason the royal families tend to be very wealthy.  Marrying out of the family is good for breeding purposes, but terrible for wealth management since wealth keeps being diverted to outsiders.

In terms of cult prostitution, I'm curious what scholarly material that the ATI authors had access to that the rest of the world doesn't have.  No one else seems to know about Inca cult prostitution.

Mmm-kay. 

Inca textiles are simply amazing at the outset; they were so finely woven that the Inca treated them as treasures worth more than gold or silver.  That kind of weaving takes a lot of work.  So does preparing wool and spinning it.  Remember, the Inca sheared vicunas!  Vicunas are not domesticated because they require two different territories located at substantially different altitudes that they travel between daily for feeding and sleeping and go more than a little bonkers if these territories are denied.  This means Incas were rounded up vicuna herds in the mountains, herding them into pens in the daytime territory, shearing them, and releasing the vicuna to return to the mountains without the help of horses or dogs!  I'm tired just thinking about it.

No, the fall of the Inca Empire fits a more simple pattern. 

European diseases --> depopulation stress and civil war --> conquest by Europeans.   And even with those stresses, it took the Inca Empire over 50 years to fall.  That's impressive in my book.

One final question: Am I the only person who thinks that photo makes more sense as a shot from a Monty Python skit?

Homeschooling Badly: Why Math-phobic Homeschooling Parents Frustrate Me

Howdy, folks!

I never cease to be amazed by the sheer repetition of articles on homeschooling mom blogs that claim that parents who are really bad at math personally can totally homeschool math through high school through a few easy tips.   I mean, you'd think I get some kind of callus after a while, but I'm still horrified each time.  Amy at Raising Arrows wrote a post to advertise "Teaching Textbooks" that lead off with this admission:

It’s not a story I like to tell…

The one about how it took me 3 tries to pass the test to get into College Algebra.

Or the one about how my math score on the ACT brought down my entire score.

Or the one about how I would have had a 4.0 if it hadn’t been for…you guessed it…MATH.

So, when it came to homeschooling, math was the ONLY thing I was worried about. Sure, I could add and subtract, multiply and divide (as long as you didn’t throw a lot of extra stuff in there!), I could use fractions and decimals well enough to bake a cake or figure a tip, but higher level mathematical concepts made my eyes cross and run for the nearest calculator – even though I had no idea how to make the calculator do what I needed it to do to solve the problem.

Allow me to translate this into what it would sound like if she was admitting a similar level of unease with written English:

"It took me three tries to get into English 101 - General Composition.  Thank goodness!  Anything lower is considered remedial classes that don't count towards graduation credit.

My Language Arts score brought down my whole ACT test score! (ok, that statement might explain why it was so hard for the author to get into College algebra, actually, since she doesn't understand how averages work.)

I would have had a 4.0 (at some unstated educational level) if I didn't have to take English!

English was the only thing I was worried about when homeschooling.  It's not like you need writing in any other subject areas!  I can conjugate most tenses, use punctuation pretty well, write a 5-sentence paragraph, and spell most words (as long as you don't throw a lot of extra stuff in there!).  I can write a note to my spouse or my boss in a pinch, but higher level writing concepts make my eyes cross and run for the nearest dictionary - even though I had no idea how to make the dictionary write that college paper for me."

Let me explain how I created that paragraph.  Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fraction and decimals are covered in 5th grade or below.  I looked up the Common Core standards for 5th grade writing and inserted those into Amy's introduction along with the correct college course equivalent for College Algebra  which is generally the lowest entry-level math class that can count for graduation credits.

Can you imagine the level of outrage homeschool parents would have if a public school math teacher admitted that they were just barely functional at 5th grade math while teaching 5th-12th grade?  Oh, wait.  That can't happen in schools with certified teachers!  The minimum course of study in my state to teach secondary school math is a college minor in math which means the teacher would have to have passed calculus I and II plus college statistics.  Instead, homeschool parents console each other with the idea that no one is really good at math and since no one is good at math the parents have no responsibility to raise their personal math skills before teaching their kids.

Her first tip is to focus on the basics because basic math skills like addition and subtraction are the basis of all higher math.    That idea is true - but terribly misleading.   There are large conceptual jumps between basic addition, addition including "lots of extra stuff", adding like terms and adding two equations.   To use a history analogy, she's telling parents to just focus on dates of events because dates of events are the basis of history.  For English buffs, she's telling people to just hammer home vocabulary because words are the basis of reading and writing.

She leads off the basics section with the same hoary chestnut of comfort that all homeschool math deniers drag out at some point:

There’s no escaping the fact that it actually is true that only a select group of people will go on to use the concepts and equations taught in higher level math classes.

Yup.  The first group is people who want to pass out of College Algebra - which is a pretty huge swath of people in collegiate programs. 

 The second group would be all people in college degree level jobs in medicine, science, engineering, mathematics, statistics, agriculture, computer science, data analysis and education along with specialized careers in law, art restoration, archeology, and business off the top of my head.

I speak English, conversational ASL and broken Spanish.  My kid is very young, but I do not comfort myself with my lack of linguistic prowess by saying, "Well, not many people really use proficiency in a second language on a daily basis".   After all, he may well make a good living as a translator or an analyst if he learns more languages from the skilled teachers he will meet in school. 

I don't - but apparently homeschooling parents who are afraid of math are willing to close off entire career paths rather than learn some more math on their own.

Her next two points are a digression about using manipulatives followed by the idea that parents shouldn't move on in math before their kid is ready.  I like manipulatives.  I thought the basic benefit
of homeschooling was that the pace of the class could be tailored perfectly to the student; guess I was wrong about that!

Her fourth point is that math-phobic parent-teachers just need to find a program that teaches their kid instead of the parent.   She lays out the ideal program (e.g. Teaching Textbooks) for us:

You need a math program that is self-paced and doesn’t require a lot from you. Even better, it should grade itself and offer a multi-faceted approach to teaching math. We use Teaching Textbooks for this very reason! I needed a curriculum that my kids liked, was easy to use, and gave me time to focus on other subjects with other children.

That sounds like a lovely program for the parent-teacher and a potential nightmare for the student.  A lot of traditional schools use computer-based math programs for students in junior high now.  Those programs are self-paced, feature computer-based instruction and automatically grade classwork and homework assignments.  The main difference is that there is a certified teacher in the room who can individually help students who are lost after the instruction section.   What happens when a kid has the same problem at home - and the parent is dropped in to the middle of a math topic? 

My favorite bit, though, is the fact that she claims Teaching Textbooks is a multifaceted program.  I went to the website to check the program out; it's simplistic in the extreme.  Students read the textbook, watch the instructional media then complete self-grading problems and tests.  The term "independent learner" is used so many times that I feel like the sellers of the curriculum want to be clear that failure is due to the student's lack of independence rather than poor curriculum  or the lack of a teacher.

I cannot find a document for any of the levels in Teaching Textbooks that explains the layout of the curriculum for a level or the entire series.   I am always suspicious of any curriculum that fails to include a scope-and-sequence document (also known as benchmarks or learning standards or any one of a dozen other educational jargon).  These documents show exactly what topics are to be covered in each class, what level of mastery is expected and what order topics should be introduced if topics build on each other.  This sounds complicated but the actual document could be as simple as these examples:

• A kindergarten student will be able to correctly identify diagrams of squares, rectangles, rhombuses (diamonds), triangles, circles, hexagons and octagons.  They should be able to draw squares, rectangles, triangles, and circles accurately.  
• A second-grader will be able to add two two-digit numbers.
• Third graders will memorize the multiplication tables between 1 and 12.  Students will begin multiplying two digit numbers by a single digit number after multiplication facts are memorized.
• Chemistry students will be able to determine the number of protons, neutrons and electrons for neutral atoms based on the periodic table.  Once the previous skill is mastered, chemistry students will use charges to determine the number of electrons in ions while recognizing that the number of protons and neutrons remain unchanged.

I dislike Apologia Science intensely - but they do include scope-and-sequence documents for their curriculum while Teaching Textbooks cannot be bothered to write up the end goals for their curriculum which I find distasteful.

Next up, Amy sets the minimum high school requirements in the state as the bar to aim for when educating kids in math and then touts consumer math.   I like consumer math as an option for high school students especially those who are not planning to move directly to college or post-secondary training - but her idea of consumer math worries me:

Can they figure a tip? Can they figure tax? Can they quadruple a recipe? Can they measure a room? Can they figure a dilution rate or divide up a paycheck. These and other math life skills will most likely be more important than any Algebra they learn. In fact, many states allow Consumer Math as a high school math credit. I honestly believe this ought to be a requirement in all states.

Psst!  Let me give you a hint.  The reason Consumer Math is not a mandated graduation requirement is that those of us who passed Algebra I and II - also known as College Algebra - already knew how to do all of those things prior to high school.   I remember taking the PSAT as a junior in high school and being bored during the math portion because the math was so basic.  The hardest problem was solving the square footage of tile needed around the outside of a pool which requires using the quadratic equation to solve.  That took me about 5 minutes because I took the time to check my answers.  Like all the other math examples included so  far, she's trying to pass off 5th grade math as high school level work.      Really, Amy's examples are only interesting if you start to stack them together.  For example, measure the square footage of a series of rooms that are made of irregular polygons with bay windows and determine the overall cost of flooring for three different options including sales tax.    Next, determine the cost per bimonthly paycheck if the flooring is financed over 12, 24 and 36 months at three different interest rates.. Finally, determine the cost of installation based on a table of wages per worker given by the teacher.  That's high school level Consumer Math.

When I was reading her post and writing, I realized that Amy's kids really might be better off with an outside math teacher since she labeled the next point as "4 - Find a math resource for when your child is stuck".   The advice for finding someone who gets math to explain it to your kid in a pinch (and presumably for free) is decent.  The issue is that there are no points labeled 1-3 anywhere...and the one labeled 4 is the sixth point.   Granted, it's probably just poor proofreading, but I'm a bit freaked out now.

The seventh point (labeled 5) recommends using popular media involving math like "Numb3rs" or "Odd Squad" to motivate kids.  I think that's a good idea; my husband and I grew up on PBS' "Square One" show which was an amazingly nerdy attempt to make math fun and accessible.  Every few years, I dress up as Kate Monday from "Mathnet" for Halloween.

The eighth/sixth point is that students really like being able to teach their parents' math!  It's great for the kid and the parent! 

I'm doubtful that this is a universally positive experience for the student.

 For me, I found it rough once my parents weren't able to help me in math any more when I was an upperclassman in high school.  I'm sure I could have taught them some math - but why?  I appreciated their moral support and knew that I'd get whatever problem I had straightened out the next day by my teacher who was excellent at that level of math.   In a similar vein, I appreciated when my students taught me some colloquial Spanish, kept me up-to-date in various music genre, or brought me various science issues to solve - but I never expected them to teach me how to balance an equation.   After all, I was responsible for being able to teach them the curriculum, not the other way around.

We agree on her last point: don't let your dislike of math poison your kid's math experience.  For parent-teachers who can do that, more power to them!  Personally, I'd like my son to have the same chance I did to learn math from people who find math to be gloriously fun rather than a tolerable part of life.   I think students deserve to be exposed to teachers who live, breathe and think in their subject of choice.  Not every teacher is like that - but I found that I was touched with how excited various teachers would get about art, music, languages, math, science, history, theology or language arts.    I'm never going to be a great 2D artist - but I loved seeing professors show students how to improve their works.  I'm not much into poetry - but reading the works of my teachers blew my mind.  Or the time one of my theology professors went on a tangent about the nature of the Trinity that made me realize that there were entire areas of theology that were beyond my understanding.  Listening to math teachers discuss how to solve math problems that I couldn't conceptualize let alone solve was amazing.  And I wanted to have the experiences that the science teachers gained through labs, field studies and academic research.