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Post by rosa on Apr 9, 2010 11:02:00 GMT -5
I know that's a popular belief, but hardly any Christians follow it. There's something else going on than just the chapter and verse, because it's so different in the submissive wife fundamentalist churches than in even regular Evangelical churches.
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Post by rosa on Apr 9, 2010 9:28:07 GMT -5
Arietty, here's the thing that baffles me - not just about your story, but about all of these. Over time, you start to feel that something isn't working and you want to fix it, and you're unhappy, so you start looking around for solutions. Of course you can't undo having kids. But you can undo getting married. No matter what subculture you live in, you are still surrounded by the rest of the world and you know, somewhere, that it's an option. Yet over and over again I hear that either huge major-effort overhauls of the entire family seemed more likely to work than getting divorced, or that suicide seemed like a more acceptable option. I've read a ton of stories where women spent weeks or months contemplating death before divorce even occurred to them. How does that happen? To me, that's right up there with believing that being more submissive will make an angry, controlling, abusive man become sweet and gentle - something really manipulative has to happen to make that belief seem plausible.
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Post by rosa on Apr 6, 2010 22:54:06 GMT -5
Awesome post, Journey. And that quote in the end really is jawdropping, no matter how many times I read it. I've quit jobs - jobs where i was an actual subordinate, not a partner - because of being micromanaged. Nobody should have to put up with that.
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Post by rosa on Mar 20, 2010 19:47:31 GMT -5
Yeah, Arietty, that's straight-up Dobson. Never back down, you always have to win. I had this girlfriend who came from a really abusive family - she acknowledged the sexual abuse but the beatings were just old-fashioned discipline, not a problem, totally out in the open (as long as you didn't tell anyone at school or the shrink you got sent to). One time we were hanging out with her little brother and a new neighbor of theirs, who had a hobby farm and a really well-trained big dog. The dog did some trick and her brother said "That dog behaves like it's been beat!" That's what I think of when I see those "perfect" kids. I'm sure not all of them are abused - it *is* possible to occasionally all behave perfectly all at once. But I don't believe any free person is always well-behaved. And the one-upsmanship over what the girls can achieve - it's regular parental pride but totally misplaced, I think. It's admirable when people thrive and succeed in really difficult circumstances, but it's not admirable to be the person who put them in that situtation.
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Post by rosa on Mar 16, 2010 9:31:41 GMT -5
Thank you so much, jwr! That's an amazing insider/outsider article.
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Post by rosa on Mar 11, 2010 14:29:37 GMT -5
People can be crazy and religious at the same time. I wonder how much of the bad stuff we're seeing is the combination of mental illness with doctrines of faith healing/avoiding psychiatric help.
Kiery, your parents were very selfish. Lots of parents I know go to churches they don't agree with 100%, or live in neighborhoods they aren't 100% happy with, to give their kids the stability of established church, friend, and school relationships. Your parents chose not to, and it's not fair.
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Post by rosa on Feb 25, 2010 17:09:21 GMT -5
I think a lot of us are being more gentle here than we are in other places.
And for me personally, since it was so much work to get comfortable with conflict, it's an effort. I know I fail at it sometimes.
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Post by rosa on Feb 25, 2010 14:24:28 GMT -5
Charis has posted here in the past, she changed her name to Beloved Disciple sometime around the last time she posted on this thread.
Vyckie linked to aCharis/Beloved Disciple made on her own blog about NLQ, in I think the most recent comment Vyckie made on this post.
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Post by rosa on Feb 25, 2010 13:18:39 GMT -5
Sierra, I think it probably would be helpful to a lot of moms and daughters here to have a conversation about the anger and pain of being in patriarchal families, partly just because it's always easier to talk to/about someone else than to your own kids or parents. But that doesn't mean it's your responsibility to contribute, if it hurts you. I know for me, my little brother and my mom had a lot of healthy, angry confrontations when he was a teenager. I never got to have them, because my dad was still at home when I was a teen (he left not quite a year before I did) and only he was ever allowed to be angry. The two of them are a lot closer than the two of us. So it has taken, literally, almost 2 decades for me and my mom to work through a lot of this stuff, and we STILL have conflicts when my experience of being her daughter conflicts with her need to see herself as a good mom. I know I bored you all with my stories of how I ruined Christmas this year - at base, that was conflict between her need to have us all be happy all the time and my need to be able to be honest about my feelings. It took me a lot of struggle to get to where I can be honest about negative feelings in the first place, so I'm pretty fierce about defending that.
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Post by rosa on Feb 24, 2010 20:02:58 GMT -5
Also, I wish we could extend the benefit of the doubt not just to moms with kids leaving QF situations, but also to people who don't say where they're coming from. Not everyone is ready to talk about their families, or their hurts, or their own mistakes or their parents, or their siblings, or whatever their reason for having an interest is. Assuming that anyone who criticizes is just an outsider with no idea means people have to keep restating their bonafides the way Sierra just did.
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Post by rosa on Feb 24, 2010 19:59:01 GMT -5
I would like a moratorium on the abortion topic. Has ANY good ever come out of it on this forum? I agree.
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Post by rosa on Feb 24, 2010 17:16:32 GMT -5
Sierra's also been there done that...but not by choice at all. She was born into it. A lot of the conflict lately has been between kids of religious parents and moms who have been there. It's not just one side feeling attacked, judged, or pushed around. We're all evolving.
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Post by rosa on Feb 24, 2010 10:40:22 GMT -5
Musicmom, for what it's worth, I think you and Journey and the other moms who were in this milieu, looked at its results, and said "No more" are exactly the kind of heroes we're talking about in relationship to Milgram. And it's the existence of people who can and do recognize when the ideology is causing harm that makes me ascribe guilt to the people who do not. It's a combination of ideology and the willingness to really hurt a child that cause these tragedies - ideology alone won't do it.
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Post by rosa on Feb 22, 2010 23:24:57 GMT -5
First they'd have to stop a minute and think about it being physical abuse.
Though I'm sure the two are linked. I'm just stuck on the "beat the trauma survivors" issue.
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Post by rosa on Feb 22, 2010 21:52:53 GMT -5
Oh, Jo! Thank you - I had forgotten about Created to Be His Helpmeet. The whole ministry is sick.
And, Gloriamarilyn, I'm so sorry this is triggering you.
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Post by rosa on Feb 22, 2010 16:45:11 GMT -5
I think another FAQ about why beating your child isn't Biblical would be great, and crosslinking with the many gentle/grace parenting sites out there that come from a Biblical perspective would be really good, too. But I'm not sure it's specifically Quiverful - the spare the rod stuff seems to be a fundamentalist mainstay and, to a lesser extent, a part of Evangelical culture. It looks from the outside like one of the places where the QF types are going with other conservative churches instead of pulling them along.
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Post by rosa on Feb 22, 2010 12:20:19 GMT -5
Nimue, at least one of their daughters, Rebekah (sp?) is continuing their "ministry" with her husband, a good distance from her parents because they deliberately chose the state with the least restrictive laws they could find. Several other are working for their parents spreading the word.
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Post by rosa on Feb 19, 2010 17:22:39 GMT -5
Thank you, WanderingOne. Stuff like this needs to be out there.
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Post by rosa on Feb 15, 2010 22:59:45 GMT -5
You know, some of us liberals hate James Dobson because our parents used his parenting books. Just saying. oh, and I'm not going to read any of his drivel to come up with real quotes but Wikipedia quotes his "win decisively" line here (along with his statement that parents should spank but "not harshly", whatever that's supposed to mean) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dobson#Views_on_discipline_within_the_family
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Post by rosa on Feb 15, 2010 21:46:19 GMT -5
And, WOW, dangermom, that other article at the gaither blog - WOW. I wonder how many states have that joint decisionmaking language in their divorce laws? Having patriarchal beliefs so strong you can't coparent equally disqualified Mr. Gertner from custody. Full stop. How much more antifamily can a belief system be?
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Post by rosa on Feb 15, 2010 21:41:54 GMT -5
Wow, thank you for following up on that, Dangermom. Musicmom, the places where people have made childcare really public, it hasnt' worked very well - the Israeli kibbutzim have mostly (maybe all by now) given up communal childrearing as the kids raised that way grow up, and the various communes in the US that do it (Twin Oaks in Virginia, for sure) gave it up after brief stints. There was an anabaptist group that also broke up nuclear families - maybe one of the Hutterite groups? Anyway, the groups that do this are so small it's like being raised in extended family, and they don't do baby creches - they keep babies in the bedroom w/mom and dad for up to 2 years, and with mom all day.
I'm trying to think of other groups that did it - the Osho people didn't give it up, but their movement fell apart before the kids they were raising grew up. The Amana Colonies took in lots of unattached kids right before they fell apart, but before that families mostly stayed together.
Kids really need a specific person to bond with, no matter how good all the other aspects of their lives are. That's not surprising -adults need it too. On the other hand, day child care - which, no matter what the anti-working-mom types say, isn't "letting strangers raise your child" works great, especially with well-funded daycares with good training and low staff turnover. And that's fairly achievable.
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Post by rosa on Feb 11, 2010 17:09:55 GMT -5
Congratulations, AustinAvery! On the baby and the snip!
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Post by rosa on Feb 6, 2010 10:50:13 GMT -5
Wow, is this our first ZPG driveby?
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Post by rosa on Feb 1, 2010 16:35:09 GMT -5
KR, I'm on the "i can't believe we're still discussing whether X, Y, & Z verses mean women have to be enslaved" side - but that doesn't lower the value of your work at all to the people you're trying to help. Or to yourself, of course. Aside from Journey's personal testimonial about needing that kind of support as she stepped out of abuse, there are a whole bunch of people who still live and breathe Bible study who are not going to listen to the "if it's not healthy I won't sign on" talk at all. There are a a whole lot of patriarchal and complementarian people taking up bandwidth with their interpretation, and the egalitarians are a lifeline in that sea of b.s.
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Post by rosa on Feb 1, 2010 0:51:10 GMT -5
Susan, I'm sure this varies state to state, but this isn't true where I live:
My partner's name is on our son's birth certificate, but he's got my last name (for purely aesthetic reasons - my boyfriend's Polish-American and we didnt' think it would sound good with our son's first name.)
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