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Post by arietty on Oct 8, 2010 21:16:46 GMT -5
Humbletigger that is great!!! (your decision)
And even if your marriage never returned to the bad stuff and went from strength to strength your husband might suddenly die for some reason and you would be very happy of your professional qualifications. If you can do it I encourage you to.
And Jo, powerful stuff. We need to hear about how damaging patriarchy and this lifestyle is to the men as well. I always remember the little Kings who exerted their tyranny over their chattel/family but thinking about it there were men clearly suffering under enormous stress and not getting off on a power trip there too. Especially as family size grew.
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Post by arietty on Oct 8, 2010 17:15:33 GMT -5
I've been thinking, when you're dependent on other people for charity, you lose your choice. I would not WANT other people to make the decision about where I live, what I drive, what I eat, what clothes my kids wear. I want to provide for them so I can make those choices. So it's not so much that I think of those things as "blessings," especially not when the people receiving the "blessings" had the choice to begin with. (It would be different if something sudden and non-preventable happened to them despite their best efforts.) I can't imagine choosing to live in a way that would make me dependent on charity. I wouldn't enjoy it at all. Yes well for one thing if people give you stuff, especially big stuff like a place to live they have a tendency to feel invested in what kind of living/use you are making out of their "blessing". Believe me my friend who has been heavily dependent on the "blessings" of christians in the past has felt the sting of this, whether lightly in the form of prying and comments or full blown meddling in her family being the payoff someone expects. A couple of really awful situations when she was younger with christians who liked to "rescue" people and then control them. I've always had finely tuned radar for that kind of subtext so have pretty much avoided this kind of "help".. my friend was always more positive about people and trusting and it has taken her about 20 years to see these kinds of subtle agendas which is sad. Now the flip side of this: if YOU are the giver, the one who generously offers food, appliances, a place to stay, a car.. please try and see your gift as something without strings and without expectations on your part. Give it, be happy the receiver is happy and let go of it. If that person you gave it to still needs help a month later, still has problems, don't list your gift as something that should have pulled them out of their bad choices. It wasn't a gift then, it was an investment in fixing someone. It had conditions. Some people will not be moving out of their poor life choices for decades--there is nothing wrong with being kind to people along the way.
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Post by arietty on Oct 6, 2010 17:24:51 GMT -5
I just want to add I have nothing against people boycotting whatever for whatever reason.. just not into any group pressure to do so. Also, do some research and don't just rely on an email fwd to tell you what is "bad"! LOL
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Post by arietty on Oct 6, 2010 16:51:12 GMT -5
Here is the snopes piece about Proctor and Gamble's supposed satanism: www.snopes.com/business/alliance/procter.aspI used to send snopes links to my fundy relatives in response to the near endless email fwds about ~something bad~ and they did actually read them sometimes. But now there is a story circulating about some liberal thing the Snopes people believed/did and this means they will no longer read anything from Snopes. How convenient, LOL I was told the Proctor and Gamble story for the millionth time by a christian friend only a year ago. People love to be outraged. I do believe a lot of boycotting fervor comes down to it being an easy hit of self-righteousness. It's disturbing when people won't drop it when the original complaint is proved to be a total falsehood--I still get fwds about Jane Fonda being a commie traitor whose behavior led to the execution of a POW even though the POW in question (a nice conservative republican) has publicly stated that this story is a total lie. People are just attached to their hit of outrage. Now that I have a totally different crowd of friends I find myself in trouble for not boycotting companies that aren't on the ethical trading or free trade lists. So far I have been mildly rebuked for.. buying certain brands of tea, eating certain kinds of fish, drinking coffee from a cafe that uses the "wrong" coffee, buying items made in China.. it's all a lot more tame and understandable than SATAN though. I'm just not invested in much these days and while I might purchase something because it comes from somewhere GOOD (oxfam project or whatever) I can't be bothered not purchasing from some long list of bad.
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Post by arietty on Sept 30, 2010 21:12:42 GMT -5
As to the "blessings" of everyone helping certain families well.. they tend to be quite verbal about their needs and it is as simple as that sometimes. I know at one point the church I was in was paying all the bills for a single parent who was fully employed and had one child.. she was always in a financial disaster with utilities being threatened to be cut off. Everyone knew about her difficulties because she talked about them ALL the time. At the time I was a single parent with 6 kids, on government benefits.. I did have a deacon come to me and ask if I needed bills paid and I said no, because I was a perfectly good budgeter and I had never had trouble paying them myself. Looking at the other mom I did not feel any jealousy over this, I felt sorry for her because she was fairly manic and clearly had huge boundaries issues which led to financial disasters.. though she might not have needed help on paper if you looked at her incoming and outgoing financial facts she DID need help in reality because she could not take care of her own life. (And yes someone did spend a lot of time helping her with budgeting, setting up payment plans etc..)
A single parent friend of mine with four kids has gotten free vacations, cars, clothes, rent, food, home repair, appliances.. really just about EVERYTHING you could spend money on from churches and friends over the years and it all comes down to her constant talking about her needs and to her direct asking of well off people for things (like, "can we please use your beach house for a week for free we really need a vacation"). She once told me she found it very very difficult to ask anyone for help and I burst out laughing to her face, LOLOL. She just has a completely outgoing personality and tells everyone about every single thing in her life.. and I am the complete opposite. And that's fine because frankly some of the nasty crap that has come back to her with people expecting spiritual things from her based on them having given her a washing machine or whatever is IMHO not worth all this "care". When people tell you your children really need to go to their youth group because they helped your family.. well I would rather do without than deal with those kinds of people.
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Post by arietty on Sept 30, 2010 21:00:06 GMT -5
Shelley you do remind me of me in my friendships of the past quite a bit. I gradually realized that with people like Cecelia their complete inability to uphold a friendship the way other people do is because they don't actually need you at all, not you personally and not anyone else either. I got to the point of depersonalizing it by looking at the Cecelia Person's life and seeing that they did not actually have any normal, mutual friendships. It wasn't about me and my perceived inadequacies, it was about THEM not being friendship people in the first place, for whatever reasons. And so they go through the purely social etiquette motions of saying they missed you, how lovely to hear from you, they look fwd to catching up.. and it's just a puff of air.
I'm glad you feel you are out from under the bondage that Cecelia exuded as an expectation of good christianity but I do think you need to drop any expectations and hope for a mutual give and take normal friendship with her. If you have never seen her in this kind of friendship with anyone else it's not going to magically happen between the two of you.
In the last few years I have made some really healthy normal friendships and it has made me look back at how ridiculous some of these so called friendships I strived for in the past were. For one thing if you are always striving and wringing your hands over whether the person will respond to your overtures this is not a healthy adult friendship and it's not going to transform into one through any change of circumstances or renewed effort on your part.
I'm not sure when you wrote that piece--are you still pregnant with your fifth? Congratulations! Have you moved to Penn yet? I hope you like it better there. If I had to look for a church now I would probably do the opposite of what I've done in the past and try a really big one, just to expand my friendship possibilities and to have perhaps more diverse people in the congregation.
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Post by arietty on Sept 28, 2010 21:27:34 GMT -5
I recognize Father Denton, as well. He's been a part of my life for over 50 years, albeit in different forms with different names: pastors, elders, "special speakers", and ex-husband. It's one thing I noticed immediately in my New Life, and at the beginning, I was both disconcerted and amazed. Was this how men on the "outside" behaved, looking me in the eye, smiling, and nodding in agreement at my contributions to conversations? Treating me with respect, not condescension or ignoring me altogether? I could hear the naysayers from my Old Life saying I was a Jezebel, and these men could only be worldly and intent on one thing. Their integrity, kindness, and respect was merely a front to hide the wicked purposes in their hearts. At first, I thought I'd "be in trouble" after these visits with my new man's friends, family, and peers, for opening my mouth when I hadn't been invited to speak. I'd cringe in the truck or the bathroom, waiting for the boom to fall. But he reassured me that his friends are well-mannered and NORMAL people, and I am a person worthy of respect. Was that so strange, he'd ask. Um. Yes. That's a powerful testimony Whiteclover (for want of a better word!!!) I had similar experiences with "the world". I discovered that "grace" which was supposedly a big part of Christianity actually existed as a natural instinct in a lot of non-christians who had no religious reason to judge and weigh everyone elses lives. I found that even though in QF life my value was supposedly "above rubies" the non-christian men I began interacting with in every day life actually valued what I said, they were interested in my thoughts and opinions! I am sure you know how shocking this was at first!! It was exhilarating and scary at first.
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Post by arietty on Sept 27, 2010 21:39:04 GMT -5
Not sheltering isn't totally goof-proof (I have 2 exes), partially because, although one can avoid the most obviously abusive people for partners, we may all have some unrealistic romantic fantasy that we try to fit (speaking for myself anyway). Also, over time people may grow and change differently. The trick I want to know, how to impart this to my daughters, is how to be able to GIVE UP on a jerk and get the hell out. Because women invest years waiting for change, feeling they love the guy all the while enduring horrible abuse. If you actually showed the young girl a couple in which she could see the same abuse going on she would be horrified.. but still stuck when she finds herself there. How to get unstuck.. even without the (overwhelming) religious fear of divorce women get stuck. Defendant I am so so so so happy you are out of this. My ex husband was always at his most physically abusive when I was pregnant.. pregnancy was absolute hell in so many ways.
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Post by arietty on Sept 9, 2010 23:18:18 GMT -5
Your dad reacted that way because you embarrassed him by causing a complaint. You were there as his showpiece, how great a dad he must be to have this perfect christian girl, so your "shortness" rather than being seen as the modesty he had emphasized your whole life was seen as a failure to please these people HE wanted to look good to.
Really really horrible, and painful to read about. AWFUL stuff and I hope that someone, somewhere is reading this story and thinking twice about what they are putting their teenager through.
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Post by arietty on Sept 9, 2010 22:49:30 GMT -5
As a single Mom I was NEVER, EVER accepted into a Christian homeschool group even though I WAS and AM a devout Christian and I had adopted my kids. Never good enough. Happily I grew up with Church-hating parents and didn't see the need to worry about this! God loved me. Don't you know Hopewell as a single woman you might ENTICE the menz!! And where is your covering girl? Maybe if you talked about your dad a lot..
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Post by arietty on Sept 9, 2010 22:37:03 GMT -5
Fat moms and the mom with the hairy mole on her cheek doesn't get much. You got it! Ditto single Moms for the most part, although my Church family was a real life-saver during one spell of unemployment. There are the "right" families that everyone helps to the point they have freezers full of food and boxes of uneaten pizzas whenever someone has the sniffles. Then there are the quiet humble families that don't say a word and live on oatmeal and pancakes because they don't shout their needs loud enough to be heard. It's exactly this "favored families" stuff that gradually eroded my church going down to a few times a year, and the church I was at was really perfectly good, egalitarian, pro-women blah blah.. really a good place in many ways. But the favored families were feted, prayed for, pizza-blessed out the wazoo while other families were just unseen. It wasn't in the least malicious. It was really at its heart a club and you were either in it or you were fringe. Fringe people made friends with fringe people, you never got to be friends with the club. This always bothered me but it wasn't until I started meeting all kinds of non-church people through pre-school that I realized I had always blamed myself for being one of the unseen ones. All of a sudden I re-discovered that I am perfectly fine at making friends, get along with a wide variety of people and that all kinds of people like me and are friendly with me.. that there is a social world outside of the club of church and damn it is a lot less work. I spent too long internalizing feelings of fault because I didn't fit in there and now I just don't want to go any more. And no, I don't want to go anywhere else either, LOL.
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Post by arietty on Sept 4, 2010 19:43:54 GMT -5
When I first got married I didn't know a thing about cooking or running a house.. NOTHING. And I taught myself how to cook and bake bread from books bought in a thrift store. I taught myself how to do crosstitch (during my abortive Christian-Women-Do-Crafts phase) from books from the library. I learned about baby raising and child care from watching other moms and from the La Leche League book I bought second hand when pregnant with my first. And a zillion other things I either learned by doing because they were common sense or I sourced books about them.
All of which is to say that it is utter nonsense that a girl has to stay home for years focusing on how to run a house as though this work is a doctorate in medicine. It is EASY, it is common sense combined with minuscule brain application. I realize that making it out to be "the most important job in the world" etc.. makes people feel better if that is what they do with their days (and I am one of those people myself, still have pre-schoolers) but important doesn't mean you have to spend your whole childhood and adolescence training for how to do it. It's just a big crock to make out like the home arts are the equivalent of college learning.
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Post by arietty on Sept 3, 2010 21:01:55 GMT -5
I can't get over how much I used to agonize over every purchase.. I used to stand in the supermarket and work out how much per gram each brand actually cost. I remember doing the mental arithmetic over toilet paper, this was cheaper but it had less sheets.. so how many sheets did you actually get per dollar with each brand. In the back of my mind I was always fearful about getting in trouble for spending, even though my ex was fairly oblivious and spent whatever he liked on himself. He ate out for lunch every single day at work and would come home telling me about expensive restaurants he ate at with his work colleagues, and yet I would spend huge amounts of time choosing in a supermarket how to spend no more than 5.00 on me and 6 kids for lunch if we ended up out too long and I had failed to pack sandwiches.
I remember I used to pay things off very slowly.. I bought a set of the Chronicles of Narnia and it took me TWO YEARS to pay it off.. I would just go in and put on 1.00 at a time on the set, every few months. Totally ridiculous. Now I would just buy it, or anything else that is not a luxury without thinking. But in those days everything relating to me or the kids, even our food, was a luxury that had to be agonized over.
It was quite bizarre to realize that as a single mom with literally 1/3 the income of my married life we lived SO much better and enjoyed our food and entertainments.
The frugality culture of QF was kind of a hobby for me (since I couldn't have other hobbies, lol) and I know that was the case with a lot of people. I knew many women who went to great lengths to be frugal while their husbands bought themselves nice clothes, a new computer, sporting equipment. There you are making your own sanitary pads out of cloth and rejoicing over this fabulous savings and your husband is spending thousands of dollars on some whizzbang laptop because he needs it to take notes on in church. Yes true story. There is a lot of weird stuff around frugality that has nothing to do with actual poverty.
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Post by arietty on Sept 3, 2010 20:04:04 GMT -5
Cindy, the pressure to reproduce in many right-wing evangelical churches can indeed be crushing. You are considered worldly, greedy, and worse if you don't have children. I was aware of that in my mainstream but fundy oriented church, women who were married but chose to pursue careers past the acceptable 2-3 years you were allowed to enjoy newly married life sans children were suspect. The longer you put off having children the more of a feminist you must be, and I do remember that these women were viewed VERY negatively by many men. We were praying for one woman who was infertile for 10 years and there were always snide comments about "should we pray for X too" because everyone knew X and her husband were, gasp, simply not choosing to have children even though they had been married for a long time! And then of course if you had more than four children (still an acceptable number here) you were under judgment for having too many. You were now under pressure to get control of yourself and all the jokes and comments went in that direction. This is what I don't miss about church at all, constantly being under some judgment for not doing or being what the majority deemed the good way to be. It's very overbearing (though subtle at times) when it is a group that you belong to that views you this way.
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Post by arietty on Sept 3, 2010 19:28:11 GMT -5
Abeka: my kids really liked Abeka because it had COLOR pictures unlike the endless Rod and Staff. And the chapters were short unlike the endless Rod and Staff..
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Post by arietty on Sept 3, 2010 19:27:32 GMT -5
What boggles my mind about QF/P people is that they do not seem to trust the job they did raising their own kids! I know families whose adult kids still live at home [This in an of itself is not necessarily a bad thing; a college student can save tons of $$ by commuting instead of living in the dorm!] and who have to ask their parents' permission for everything from "Can I go to the store?" to "Is it okay for me to be in a relationship with so-and-so?" On one hand, I am told that these kids are so much more mature and head and shoulders above others their age, but the lack of freedom they receive tells me the opposite. In my house, the more trustworthy/mature/level-headed we proved ourselves to be, the MORE freedom we were given. And once I became an adult, my mom never stopped loving me and praying for me, but it was up to me to start living my life - making decisions - and yes, sometimes failing and learning what to do when I messed up.! Yes I have certainly seen this.. and you really bring out the weird contrasts you get in some sheltering families. On the one hand you have the seemingly mature adolescent who can talk politics and express themselves well and impress adults but on the other hand they have to run everything past mom and dad for approval long past their teenage years. My QF friend has recently expressed exasperation that her daughter in her 20's is not seeking their approval for decisions but just .. DOING them. LOL. She was the only "good" child of the her adult ones and yet she isn't following the formula! In many families these ridiculous ideas just fade away as unworkable and the adult kids are adults, whatever seminar tape lectured the parents into thinking it should be otherwise long forgotten. But sometimes the parents actually succeed and that is not a pretty sight. I know several families still have all the kids at home into their 20's now, no girlfriend or boyfriend in sight, still working in the family business in some cases.
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Post by arietty on Sept 3, 2010 19:20:18 GMT -5
I had a gratifying discussion with my eldest daughter, who is 28, this week. She told me that she couldn't imagine being able to have the discussion we had a few years ago without feeling like she was being judged and put down by my worldview and list of rules of what constituted godly living. Instead we were able to look at what she was struggling with from a more reality based and non-judgemental perspective. Her telling me that and the real connection we made was worth more than anything else on the face of the planet to me. That is great to hear Cheryl and I agree, it's worth SO MUCH. I love the relationship I have with my kids now, I love their freedoms to explore life and ideas. They are all on their own paths.. I was allowed my own path in life, why shouldn't they be allowed the same? (Oh right.. because the path is narrow.. bleh)
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Post by arietty on Sept 2, 2010 18:46:43 GMT -5
One thing that will help teenagers to make good choices is critical thinking, the very thing that you have to jettison if you are going to swallow fundamentalist culture/dogma. There is a pat answer for everything, no grey areas.
My teenagers now love to discuss ethics, choices, motivations.. we have very lively discussions. However my first lot of kids the discussions consisted of "what does the bible say about it" and that was it! It wasn't a discussion, it was a catechism.
I like to think that all the critical thinking that they actually learn in school as well as the naturally inquiring and wrestling with issues family culture they are growing up in helps them make good decisions. Unlike our catechism days they actually believe that thinking about things provides you with answers and understanding. When I was a fundamentalist one of my (many) favorite verses was "Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding" Prov 3:5 This meant you could NOT trust your own ideas at all, and trusting in the Lord meant referring to the bible as your template for everything. The only so-called critical thinking that was applied was to eschatology, the real world had ready made answers available in the bible that didn't require much thought at all, only a lot of bible reading.
I can remember the newness when I was freshly exited from fundamentalism of actually thinking about life issues, thinking about what my response to them was rather than just thinking "well the bible says.." It is really quite an expanding experience.
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Post by arietty on Sept 2, 2010 17:39:55 GMT -5
If your argument is that all kids should have the same experience growing up then you need to address all those kids in private Jewish schools or Catholic schools. What about people that immigrate? Should they have to watch so many hours of Brady Bunch before they can enter the country? For all the whining folks do about individuality and freedom of choice I'm hearing a pretty loud message about conformity and fitting in on this thread. Seriously? Of all the issues that people have with fundamentalism and religiosity I think loss of teen culture should be the least of their worries. I wasn't making an "argument" fft, I was making an observation. I could make MANY observations about homeschooling families, this is just one observation of one dynamic I have seen. I have also read a lament about missing out on your generation from homeschooled daughters on this forum many times and it's been good for me to think about as my older children experienced this but my younger children did not. In my homeschool circles our IDEAL was that our children should be untainted by the culture of the world. Some people were pretty successful at that.
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Post by arietty on Sept 1, 2010 20:30:20 GMT -5
I had a washer just like that hand one years ago and it worked REALLY well. It also only washed one pair of jeans at a time. Good for camping.. or for the camping 24/7 life that people find themselves in.
As montanamom said a lot of this stuff is just crunchy lifestyle (crunchy being an affectionate term for people embracing simple living). Once you somehow think what you are doing is a spiritual requirement you are on your way to bondage.
And yes it is the WOMEN who do all this labor intensive penny pinching.
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Post by arietty on Sept 1, 2010 19:49:09 GMT -5
Sometimes when you meet homeschooled teens they do seem refreshing and adults are often impressed because they seem more adult in their conversations. One reason for that is they have NO culture of their own generation.. they are just little replicas of their parent's interests and values. Remember whey you were growing up and your music and clothes and movies were all shared by your peers, and how now you get to look back with affection on those days and sometimes laugh about your decade? Well the homeschoolers don't have that, they are completely cut off from the current culture their peers enjoy and express themselves in. I realize being completely cut off from this culture is viewed as a good thing by older people who don't relate to a younger generation and see it as suspect--even though it isn't much different than their own generation.
Cutting your kids off from their own generation and making them into copies of yourself means your own peers find them charming. And their peers find them alien. This works for fundamentalists because they are perpetually viewing the world as a terrifying place that victimizes anyone who dabbles in it.
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Post by arietty on Aug 31, 2010 0:25:35 GMT -5
If you will read my post you will see that though I mention showers in passing I am talking about the idea that meals should only be provided if you are worthy, ie haven't failed to provide for yourself in other people's eyes. My entire point was that meals are not about feeding so much as showing love. I am sure you would all make a meal for a friend to show your love if they had some illness or sad thing happen in their family, even if they were perfectly capable of buying pizzas. You wouldn't say "oh they can afford to get pizzas, no need to make them a meal", because you would know that your meal was about more than food. This is theoretically what church casserole making is also about, more than food, a gesture of care and friendship. And yet some people are still more "in the club" than others and are viewed as deserving of this care.
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Post by arietty on Aug 30, 2010 20:17:02 GMT -5
One father is a wonderful person, honestly if you met him you would LOVE him! But there is a problem, he has no one job that will support his family. He teaches a few music lessons ($20 a week a student) and he is music director for our tiny church (a very part time job). I think all his hopes right now are resting on a CD he just cut, and I hope it sells, but his first CD *I* couldn't listen to and I really wanted to like it! They just had their 5th child- and no one signed up to bring them meals. People are just tired of helping them out, even though we really LIKE them! Oh, and they LOVE their children, and are super nurturing parents. Making a meal is too onerous a form of helping out? Frankly that's just petty and unkind. I have been the person who had too many kids so people didn't bother making me a meal when one more arrived. I will NEVER be the person who looks at a family and wonders if they are deserving enough for me to spend half an hour of my life making them a freaking meal. You keep saying that people "LOVE" them.. well guess what a meal is about a lot more than whether the family could or should be able to make a meal for themselves. No matter how poor you are you can probably scrape together some kind of meal. A meal coming from friends and church is a way of showing them that you "LOVE" them.. you actually care enough to remember them and spend a little of your time and money on them. It's not love if the person has to deserve it first. I kind of thought that was the whole point of the gospel? This makes me very frustrated. It's a horrible to thing to have to earn kindness by meeting the expectations of others. We are not talking about some family demanding their mortgage be paid or that the church buys them a car, it is a MEAL. I know a real kick in the gut for me in my church was seeing meals and baby showers heaped upon first time moms and with my last child I received nothing at all. I had made about 50 casseroles for the food bank there over the last few years too, that was a contribution I felt fitted my abilities as a mom of many. Yet for some reason it wasn't very exciting to fuss over a mom with number 8 baby, like it was to fuss over the ones with number 1 or 2. And no it wasn't that I needed food because I was poor, or because I'd just had a baby (thank you Gentle Spirit magazine for your make 30 meals and freeze in a day articles). What I needed was for someone to actually care about me and show it with simple, caring gestures. I still do not understand this. When I read the above I am right back there, not understanding it.
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Post by arietty on Aug 28, 2010 0:10:33 GMT -5
By entitlement the QF mom means putting yourself first in any way. Having desires that don't immediately benefit the family. When a mom says "I really need a night out from the kids" that is entitlement.
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Post by arietty on Aug 28, 2010 0:07:30 GMT -5
Well I don't know about the not-so-favorable thing (and would rather not, so don't explain on my account!) but she is eminently quotable: That is so true! I think the economic pressure is the real reason behind the "college is a waste of time and money" talk. The truth is that they can't afford to send anyone to college, much less all their children. This is completely true. I've said this before but.. as the pressures mount the homeschool family inevitably has a revelation that education is NOT the point of all this. If they were college friendly before hand they will now see college as unnecessary at best and maybe destructive. They will ditch algebra in favor of character and may even write testimonies about how they had lost their way and forgotten that the real education was in godliness. All of this happens when they hit that high school wall where they can no longer teach the material and where they are struggling financially and realize they will never send any of them to college (and that there is no hope of them being academically ready anyway). It's a constant revision of your life so that whatever you are doing or failing to do is all a part of God's lesson for your family.
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