Graduating next month =)

Hello any readers still out there in cyberspace.  The end of net neutrality means that the rich will soon control your access to the thoughts and words of little people like me, so I thought I'd make a final post while I still could.  And to think I once believed in trickle-down economics, silly child that I was.

So, here's the scoop on my marriage, career and family.  I am still married, even though my husband occasionally endulges in abusive behavior.  It happens far less frequently, and ends far more quickly, because I am so close to complete financial self-sufficiency that it is as good as done.  Nothing like seriously working on your exit plan to get a man to take you seriously. ;-)

I graduate in May and I have assurance of a well-paying job with "all the hours I want" to quote my potential new supervisor. I am one of the top five graduates in my community college.  I have already passed the national registry exam in my field which means I will graduate as a credentialed professional.  Can I get an "Amen"?

Our whole family stopped going to church two years ago.  My husband has been sleeping in church for years, or going in the back room with his laptop because he was on call.  Yes, sometimes it really was work, but other times, Sudoku or Minesweeper were what was calling to him.  So when my pastor called me and chewed me out, yelling and calling me insulting names over a facebook post that a) he admitted was true and rational but b) did not admit was hurting his "brand" and might have a potential negative impact on his income if read by reactionary small-minded people who can't understand basic English (his target audience =), my husband had no problem just not going anymore.

My son, great-hearted guy that he is, kept going for awhile, since he doesn't carry other people's grudges.  He still loved God and loved being part of the worship band, so continuing to go was the right thing to do.  Unfortunately, the pastor was not as emotionally mature as my teenage son.  He transferred his hatred towards me over to my son and started treating my son like an enemy instead of a friend.  Eventually my son stopped going as well.  Thank you, Pastor Todd for freeing us from the confines of the cultish business empire that is today's American evangelical Christianity.  Go now, you are forgiven. 

My daughter is out of the Air Force and wants no part of the war machine.  She saw through it quicker than I did, smart girl that she is.  She lives with her boyfriend, a man who clearly dotes on her.  He was also raised to go to church every Sunday and be a good American Christian.  So much for parents doubling down on religion, eh?   Why he won't marry her I don't know (she asked but he turned her down), but this I do know: he seems to truly love my daughter, I know she truly loves him, and they are by all accounts very happy with things the way they are.  So, I am happy for them.

My son is a wandering spirit at this point, his heart captured by poetry and art.  Where he will end up vocation-wise I do not know, but that is not my journey.  He is free to follow his own path, and I will love and accept him wherever that path leads.  I want nothing less than for him to follow his conscience and be good to all people to the best of his ability, and nothing more for him than self-sufficiency with generosity.  I am confident he will live up to my expectations, such as they are.

So, thank you faithful readers. And thanks to all in the evangelical community who shunned us, condemned us and turned your backs on us.  Here outside the wall, with all the other lovers of God and lovers of humanity, the "bleeding hearts and artists", life is truly worth living.  My prayer for you is that you too will also eventually escape "the mask of life they had placed upon the face of death"*, i.e. current American evangelical Christianity and all it encompasses.

*Damascus Road by Rich Mullins

New Home School Parents, Heads Up!

I am so proud of all the home school graduates I have met!

Without exception, they are all strong-willed, courageous people who are finding their own authentic way in life.  I think that no matter the quality of one's educational experience, or the degree of emotional nurture vs. emotional neglect or abuse even, home schooling in itself transmits these qualities by its very nature.  To home school is to go against the flow of larger society, and children who are home schooled constantly hear that decision praised.  Even the religious home schools (maybe especially the religious home schools?) are continually hearing that going against what is easy and popular when conscience calls you to do so is a good thing, the right thing, the best thing.

So it is no surprise then, that these home school graduates have a strong sense of responsibility to improve the lot of those who come after them. Homeschoolers Anonymous is a web site dedicated to sharing the stories of home school graduates that will not be featured at home school conventions or plastered on the cover of Practical Homeschooling magazine.  (These stories need to be heard, too!) It was created by home school graduates, to help improve the lives of home schooled children who come after them.  Their goal is to improve things by the shining the light on areas that need improvement.  All of the stories shared there are authentic, written by home school graduates themselves.  These stories need to be told, and the home school community needs to listen and learn. 

New home school parents especially, be wise!

Take notice!  Don't just listen to the home school salespeople trying to get you to be just like them.  Do not be foolish, only listening to those whose children are still at home.  They have the option of still believing they are doing everything right and because of that, they can predict how life will turn out for their children.  Those whose children are already grown adults, that's who you should be seeking out for advice.

You are in a much better position than earlier home school parents, because you have the opportunity to inspect the fruits of the labors of home school parents who came before you.  Make the most of that opportunity!  As scripture counsels (Proverbs 18:17, Luke 14:28-33), get all sides of a story before you decide.  Really investigate what you are trying to accomplish.  Check out what has already been done by other people so you can figure out what you want to do differently and what you want to emulate.  

I realize this will be difficult, for many reasons. One is that when a family experiences "failure"- any result that is outside the advertised shiny, bright, happily subservient, doctrinally and sexually pure teenager- that family will disappear from most home school support groups.  Sometimes they are kicked out, but more often they drop out. These parents may feel ashamed that the product of their home school didn't turn out as advertised.  They may be asked to leave, especially if the results they are experiencing don't conform to the religious side of expectations.  A poorly educated but morally upright teen/young adult is not nearly so embarrassing to many home school support groups as a teen/young adult who is seen as morally compromised.  

On the other hand, they may leave the support group because of disillusionment.  When their marriage is falling apart, their teenager turns up pregnant, or is caught doing drugs, shoplifting, looking at porn, etc. then they may wake up to the fact that they have bought into and been promoting a lie and want no part in it anymore. Or they may be compelled to put their children in public school because of any number of reasons- a severely ill parent, financial constraints that require the home schooling parent to work- and so leave the home school support group.  All home school support groups require that a family be home schooling to belong, so any family that stops home schooling for any reason will not be at support group meetings sharing their stories.  You will have to search them out.

And the final reason that talking to home school graduates, and parents who have graduated all their students, to see where life takes them, is the passage of time.  You won't hear about gay home schooled Christian teens because they don't come out to their parents until years have passed since leaving home.  You won't hear about atheist home schooled graduate of Christian home schools because they don't leave the faith for years after leaving home.  In fact, you won't hear about any of the graduates who go off script after leaving home unless their dong so actually involves criminal activity that splashes across the headlines, like the Alexander story in Louisiana.  

[A home school boy dutifully marries the courtship bride his and her parents decided upon. His wife gets pregnant right away because they follow the script and don't use birth control.  Coudy goes to work, and interacts with people outside of the home school movement for the first time.  He falls in love with a co-worker, quite unexpectedly I am sure.  He has never experienced such strong attractions before, as he was assigned his wife and wasn't allowed to even date.  He and the co-worker begin a romance.  And somehow, truth always outs.  His young bride finds out about the affair.  Maybe he even told her himself, I don't know.  As she is packing to leave him, the weight of the shame that will fall on him from his community overwhelms him, and in a panic, he kills his young bride.  THAT is a direct result of the Christian home school fantasy and the expectations he felt to fulfill them as a star of the movement.  He was never allowed to just be Coudy, and figure out who he was at heart and what he wanted.  His life was dedicated to doing what his parents wanted, because somewhere along the line the Christian home school community became confident that what they wanted, God wanted.  It ended in heartache.]

All of the Christian home schooled youth want to please God.  Those whose parents and churches claim to speak for God the most adamantly are the ones whose children are at most risk of leaving the faith eventually.  You can not control their environments forever, and eventually they will start to run into the mysteries of life and find the pat answers they were taught are insufficient.  You will read many stories along this vein at Homeschoolers Anonymous but you won't hear them at your home school support group. They won't be brought up onto the platform at home school conventions (though some were paraded there back when they were still teens at home) to tell their story today.  They will not be featured in home school magazines. 

All of which is a real shame.  The inquiry for truth seems to have been abandoned by the home school movement's leadership. They believe they know all truth, and so they just dismiss and ignore all reality that exposes their "truth" as a lie.  Instead of being smart enough to listen to the adult children, children raised by all the standards and methods the movement promoted, leadership is just doubling down on the standards and methods that have failed.  They turn deaf ears to anything that doesn't support what they want to believe.  That isn't right. Home schooled children deserve better!  

Finally, the absolute worst stories out there, the ones we as home schoolers want to ignore and should not, are the stories of child abuse.  Sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, spiritual abuse is happening in the home school community, and the home school community had best address it!  It's no use trying to explain it away with the True Scotsman defense. Our adult home schooled graduates are well versed in the dynamics of logic and debate.  No, it's happening.  It happened under our watch, under my watch.  So, what are good home school parents going to do about it?

HSLDA's response to these stories of neglect and abuse?  Silence. Denial of being in any way responsible for these children.  Not shock, not horror, not remorse.  Instead of leading the charge to put distance between nurturing home schooling families and abusive home schooling families, something that can only happen with transparency and accountability, HSLDA is trying to make it easier for abusive parents to home school. Witness this recent attempt to remove all transparency and accountability from the home school law in Iowa.  The current regulations are not burdensome and they are working well.  Why would HSLDA be working to remove all accountability and transparency from Iowa home school regulations?  

That's a question every home schooling parent, every home school support group leader, every home school support group member, should be asking themselves.  I know I never had anything to hide, and was in fact proud of the education and the home environment I was providing.  If you, home schooling parent, can't say the same, you shouldn't be home schooling.  You should make sure your children receive lots of love, good nutrition, emotional nurture and educational opportunity every day.  If you are doing that, and  I believe most home schooling parents are doing just that, then you should be open and transparent to the community in which you live about what goes on behind your closed door. 

 Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. I Peter 2:12

The public needs to be able to see your good deeds.  Being transparent and accountable honors God.  Don't seek to hide in the darkness of obscurity, be eager to show the world the wonderful work that your home school in accomplishing!  Do it for the children, because Jesus calls us to love children  (all children, not just our own) and treat them with dignity and care.  Read carefully Matthew 18:1-9.  

It's time for the home schooling community to cut out and cast away families that abuse their children!  The only way to do it is to come out in the open and show the world what's happening in all our home schools.  The righteous will be rewarded, the wicked will be found out, and all of society will be better off for it.  

Lead the way, home schooled graduates! Lead the way, new home school parents!  Don't let the old guard lock you into making the same mistakes they (we) made.  Do it not only for your children, but for all children.  Heads up! You are the new face of home schooling.  Please let it be an open and honest face, publicly displayed, that has nothing to hide and much about which to proudly smile.

What NOT To Do When Your Home Schooled Teen Rocks the Boat

Hi blog readers, if any of you are still around! *waves excitedly*

I am taking a ten minute block out of studying for finals to write this VERY HELPFUL post!  I hope that parents of home schooled teens will share near and far, because for some strange reason this does not seem to be common knowledge.  I am not sure why, except... well, maybe I do understand.   But at any rate, for whatever reason, some people need to know these things.  So, in case any of those who are at a loss are searching the web for help, here we go:

#1 DO NOT TAKE AWAY YOUR TEEN'S CELL PHONE

I hope you got them that phone as a lifeline to help no matter where they are.  The fact that they can talk to friends on it is a social bonus, but that is not the main purpose.  When your teen is rocking the boat, looking for more freedom or respect than you are ready to give, do NOT take their phone away. That is beyond stupid.  When/if they run away or leave home, how are you going to contact them?  That's right, you can't, you took their phone away!  And really, if your teen is out somewhere without your all-controlling protection, don't you at the very least want them to be able to call 911?  Seriously, stop and think.

#2 DO NOT TAKE AWAY YOUR CHILD'S ACCESS TO EDUCATION

If you take away the laptop they use for online classes, or take them out of co-ops and/or lessons, how will they get the education they need to become self-sufficient?  And if that is the point, and you are PURPOSELY ISOLATING THEM and sabotaging their ability to become independent by denying them access to education- you are in violation of human decency, at the very least, and quite possibly the law.

You don't have to give them unlimited access, but they need to get their school work done at the very least.

Remember HSLDAs advice to keep a prominent presence in your community as a means of avoiding a visit from social services?  That continues to apply when your little ones become teens.  You look like an abuser when you isolate your children from the community.  It may be because you are one, and if so, I hope you get busted. But it may be only because you're confused and afraid and got bad advice from an overbearing control freak, pastor, or both. Don't do it.

#3 DO NOT CONSIDER SHADOWING AS AN APPROPRIATE WAY TO RELATE TO YOUR CHILD

I never heard of this before I met C. online, but apparently some Christian author out there somewhere has promoted tethering your teen to momma 24/7 as an appropriate way to parent.  If any normal person hears about this, they will darn sure call social services, and well they should.  That is insane in the brain.  A teen is an autonomous human being, inexperienced but clearly capable of independent thought and action.  Shadowing is psychological torture, and you could even go to jail for it.  Don't be that person, bringing shame on the home school community, your family and your church.  Why do I even need to write "don't torture"?

#4 IF YOUR CHILD LEAVES HOME AND YOU FIND OUT THAT HE/SHE IS WITH RESPONSIBLE ADULTS IN A SAFE PLACE, DON'T HARASS THE RESPONSIBLE ADULTS OR THREATEN THEM.

 Making overbearing demands on people you don't know is NOT going to improve your position.  You will look like an ass, and everything your teen says about controlling parents looks 100% right on. Further, if you threaten them, then law-abiding adults have only one option: ask the teen to leave.
So what then?

Your teen is no longer with responsible adults, no one has any idea where the teen is and the teen doesn't have a cell phone.  Great, what if real trouble starts?  Would you really rather your teen be in a jam with no access to 911 than allow them to talk to friends you don't agree with?  That seems rather extreme.

Plus now, when/if your teen does speak to social services and mentions the threats of total domination of personal space (shadowing), social isolation and denial of education, there are responsible adults who can testify to your domineering behavior.

Smooth move, Ex Lax.

#5 DON'T CHOOSE SCORING THEOLOGICAL POINTS OVER WINNING YOUR TEEN'S HEART  BACK

Teens love their parents.  They really do.  Most of them would do anything to get their parents to be proud of them.  The distance growing between you is a normal part of growing up.  Reach out in good will and bridge that gap with love.  Allow your teen to think differently than you do, believe different things than you do, like different things than you do, and show that you love and accept them just the same as always. That's how you win a teen's heart, and that is way more important than being "right".

And the one thing you SHOULD do:

TRUST.  Trust in your parenting, that all the years you spent have given a good foundation.  If you are a believer, trust in God who is everywhere, who sees all, and who loves all parties involved.  Why freak out in a tizzy if you have faith in God?  That seems to put the lie to all you claim to believe.

Finally, trust your teen.  Odds are good that your teen would love to come home, love to continue in relationship with you, if you would just stop being pompous, controlling, self-righteous know-it-alls and go back to being Daddy and Mommy.  Ever watch Intervention? The ones who are going to make it always have family members who:  Remember the good times and talk about them, show affection, express faith that the person in the jam can turn things around, and promise to love them always.

Then, and only then, do people start mentioning consequences.  Take a lesson here, and go and do likewise.

You're welcome.

My Daughter, My Hero

My daughter amazes me.

She is extremely talented in several ways.  She's an amazing artist.  It comes to her naturally, things that I never got right even though I took art in public school for several years.  She was born seeing all the layers of color in the every day world around us, and since childhood she has incorporated this talent into her art.  She sees the color in white.  She can correctly put one hundred different hues of a color in order, with no mistakes, in record time, and she does it for fun.  She remembers color, something I was told is not possible.  For my daughter it's possible.

She's an amazing musician.  When she was seven, she started taking guitar lessons at a local music store.  Her first instructor was a nice enough guy, but she was quickly losing interest.  She played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at her first recital.  At the end of that year, I called a musician friend to look for an instructor who might make it more interesting for her.  I was told there was only one instructor in the area, and she gave me his name.  Rex Willis, music professor at the local university, took her as a student and at eight  she began playing classical guitar.  She was good at it, and good at it without practicing for hours a day.  She played for the next six years, and then quit as suddenly as she had begun.  Recently she picked her guitar up again, and in a day it all began coming back to her.  She plays beautifully.

The girl has language skills.  As a tween, she used to co-write adventures with friends as characters they created from the world of Neopets.  Neopia, I think it's called.  She learned to read seemingly effortlessly at the age of four, and used to devour books from the library.  In the early years, I would get twenty books from the library each week, the most one could check out.  She would sit and read them all, one after the other, in a single day.  The fact that she recently graduated cum laude from university is due in no large part to her exceptional talent in language arts.

And this talent is not confined to English only.  She also has foreign language skills.  I started teaching her Spanish when she was in kindergarten.  She grew bored with that by late elementary and wanted to learn Japanese.  Though it took a few years before I actually found her a tutor, she did not become discouraged and give up on that dream. She also taught herself some Russian and studied codes, including gypsy codes, online.  Probably the most unique part about her is how she put her language and analytical skills to to use by coming up with her own code. She kept her diary in code starting in middle school, a complicated written alphabet that looks to me a lot like Tolkien's elvish.  It's hauntingly beautiful.  I thought she had created an entirely new language, but it is all English, just in code.  Still, it's very impressive and she worked with it continually, changing and evolving it several times through the years.

All of these talents and interests are pretty darned impressive, but her innate talent is not why she is my hero.  Her character is why she is my hero.  She is a better person than I am in so many ways.  My hat is off to her this morning, and I want all of you to also know why I am in awe of her.

She does not back away from hard things.  While her many talents are impressive, every day things have not come easy to her.  Her large motor skills were always lagging behind other children her age.  Yet even though physical coordination does not automatically come to her easily, as it does for so many of us, she has not backed down from physical challenges.  She joined ROTC as a sophomore in college, worked hard to earn a spot at field training, and passed.  This was incredibly challenging for her, and yet she took it on and worked hard, really hard to earn her top score of 90 on her physical fitness tests.  She also was part of a mime team at church in her teens.  She swing dances, something I am not coordinated enough to pull off myself.  Because it was difficult for me, I never tried very hard to learn to dance.  Even though it is very difficult for her, she has kept at it for several years.

She works hard to accomplish and achieve many things the rest of us take for granted.  When she went to college, finding her way around campus was far more difficult for her than writing a paper.  In her freshman year, she lived on campus at a small school whose entire campus took up only one city block.  Her sophomore year, she transferred to the big city university and lived off campus.  I did not appreciate at the time how much courage and determination this took, because I shrugged off her difficulties with spatial awareness.  I scorned her when she confessed to me as a middle school child that she couldn't find her way around our neighborhood.  I accused her of not paying attention to her surroundings and being stuck in her head, when the opposite was true. She has always had to seriously concentrate on her surroundings, because she sees everything.  Where my brain ignores so much of what I see and helps me naturally focus on only the important features of the landscape, she sees everything.  If I were her, I might very well never leave my home.  But she did leave home, and successfully made her own way in this world.  Her senior year she moved even farther off campus and got a place of her own, with no help from her parents  That may be common for most of us, but it was bold and audacious for my daughter.

Driving falls into the same category. Now that I am finally starting to understand how her brain works, my admiration for her grows daily.  She was not eager to get the keys to the car as a teen. It was just one more way the world (and I) blew her off as weird.  She is not weird.  She is careful and thoughtful. She waited until she was ready to take on the challenge successfully before stepping out to earn her driver's license.  She resisted a lot of peer pressure to start driving before she was ready.  When she finally decided she WAS ready, she passed her driver's test on the first try.  I didn't pass my driver's test on the first try, and I have an easy time navigating my way through space.  I do it effortlessly.  She works for it.

In fact, my daughter does perseverance unlike anyone I have ever known. She does not stop until she has accomplished what she set out to accomplish.  The recent undergraduate degree she earned, in spite of all she has going on to accomplish everyday living, is a testament to her diligence. She graduated, cum laude, with  a Japanese major, an aeropspace engineering minor, and she did it in only four years.  It took serious daily application of effort, far more effort than we regular folk will ever know, over those last four years.  She accomplished it with honors.

But of all the character traits she has that I admire, it is her loving heart that I most appreciate.  She is kind, tender-hearted, and forgiving like no one else I know.  Since coming to realize how often she has been misunderstood, unappreciated, criticized and even ridiculed unjustly, the love that she shows everyday amazes me.  I am in awe of her loving heart.

So many of the comic book super villains have their evil hearts explained because they suffered injustice and loss and could not get over it.  We humans resonate with that, because we understand the concept of having a breaking point. We understand it because the world is full of bitter, angry people who can not get over the injustice they suffered. We ourselves all have a hard time with moving on from heartache and pain.  While all of us have been misunderstood and falsely accused, few of us have known such experiences on a daily basis.  My daughter has.

Honestly,  if I sent this to you, the odds are good that you have misjudged and rejected my daughter.  Aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents have all been angry at her or rejected her for what appeared to be resistance, apathy or rebellion.  In a new situation, she needs more sleep and more time to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings than neurologically typical people.  Because of this, people misjudge her as lazy.  It takes a lot of concentration on her part to master all the visual stimuli her eyes and brain see, and the quietness she exhibits while she is concentrating has been judged as being unfriendly.  The fact that she is never at ease or relaxed in these stressful situations means that her relatives call her weird, and say she has a personality problem.  With rare exception, though all of our relatives are Christians, self-righteous condemnation has been the most common gift my daughter has received from her relations.  I include myself in that number.

The rest of the world is no kinder.  People are expected to behave more or less the same with very little variation allowed among us.  We call it "normal". When someone's neurology puts them outside the norms, whether that is in the form of great talents (which  my daughter has) or in ways that make life more difficult (which my daughter has), this world is not at all welcoming.  You would think that with such amazing talents, she would be lauded and encouraged to develop her talents to the fullest.  That rarely happened. The cattiness and jealousy people have expressed over her talents hurt just as much as being misunderstood and rejected for her social difficulties.

And yet, she loves.  My daughter loves.  She loves God who created her and is the closest friend she has ever known. She doesn't love religion so much though, as it has never been a place of comfort and welcome to her.  But she has a rich and full spiritual life with the One who never casts out those who come to Him.

She loves and forgives those who have rejected her.  Painfully, she has learned that pursuing relationships with jocks and other haters will always be a waste of effort.  The extra effort she puts in to keep up with such people is not even noticed, much less applauded.  Yet she herself is not a hater.  She is welcoming to all, only later weeding out the people who prove to be more harm than good to her.  Love tempered with wisdom, you could call it.  I  greatly admire her for managing to keep her love alive.

So, just so you all know, I am very proud of my daughter. In fact, she is my hero.  I admit she is a better person than I, and I am lucky to have her in my life.

The Look

Recently I was spending time with a younger Christian mother.  Her children are still small, three years old and five years old.  I asked how they were enjoying the holidays, and she mentioned the joy of sharing all of her childhood favorite movies with her children- Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, etc.  I smiled with her, remembering the fun of having little ones around at Christmas.  Our shared good will was warm and mutual.

Then she asked if I had watched any holiday movies with my family this year.  Without thinking, I blurted out that the only movie I had seen this season was Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas.  I was still smiling, as I was intending to follow up with how much I had learned about myself and my family by watching it, when I saw it: the look.  The smile froze on my face as I watched the expression on hers change.

Fear and disgust danced across her expression in an instant, but only for a moment.  She realized that this was a superficial social situation, unsuited for sharing her true opinion of my choice in holiday movies, and the smile returned to her face almost immediately.  Too late.  I had recognized the look at once, and understood all too well the thoughts behind them.  I was once a young evangelical Christian mother, up to my eyebrows in Focus on the Family movie reviews.  I once had the same revulsion to all things goth and/or related to that devil's holiday, Halloween.

Inwardly I thanked her for how quick she was to stifle the look.  She can't help it, I reassured myself.  She's been indoctrinated to think this way and the cult control of modern Christian culture is very effective.  It's sad that she has started down that road to isolation in the golden Christian ghetto, but hopefully she won't stay long.  I woke up and escaped.  Jesus can lead her out to, if she ever wants to leave.  At least she still has enough kindness in her heart to spare me the lecture I know she could easily deliver if she wanted to do so.

But though we went on as if nothing had changed, something had changed.  I had been about to open my heart and share my learning experience.  I wanted to talk about how my heart had been softened and my eyes opened by watching the forbidden film.  But now I knew: it would not be understood, it would not be welcome.  Her mind had been set in a certain direction, and there was no way to reach her with an understanding outside of her paradigm.  I had lived that paradigm.  I knew it all too well. Halloween is demonic.  No good can possibly come from associating oneself with Halloween.

Watching The Nightmare Before Christmas, I thought I had come to a better understanding of my daughter. Turns out that was only the beginning.  The look on my companion's face, the one that stopped me in my tracks and cancelled all hope of understanding and intimacy between us, that look brought me from understanding to empathy.

I had given that look to my daughter.

How many occasions had I given that look to my daughter?  How many times had she been trying to share her heart with me, and gotten instead that look?

Even worse, how many times had she been trying her hardest, putting much more intention and effort into living every day life than I ever have, and gotten that look from me for not performing at a level 9 or 10 instead of a mere 6 or 7?  How many times had I given her that look for not moving quickly enough, not being friendly enough, not trying hard enough to "get along"?  How many times had I given her that look for having an expressionless face, because I truly believed that all good Christians should be smiling and welcoming in expression?  How many times had she shut down from overload at the intense effort it was taking for her to get by, and I screamed at her to get moving?  Or yelled at her for not caring?

A chill crept into my heart.  I managed to enjoy the rest of the evening on the outside, but inside all these thoughts were tumbling together in my subconscious.  While I smiled my welcoming expression and made pleasant small talk, the thoughts inside me were making new connections and growing bigger.  I said my goodbyes at the end of the visit, got in my car, and drove home quietly, distracting myself with pleasant smooth R and B on the radio. The thoughts had not yet broken to the surface of my consciousness.  Soon enough they would.

The middle of the night came.  I woke up thirsty, and as I reached for my bottle of water on the nightstand, it hit me.  No more did I consider how many times *I* had reacted with disgust and fear at my daughter.  That was bad enough, for your mother to treat you that way.  But how many times has she unexpectedly and undeservedly seen that look cast her way by others?  Aunts, uncles, cousins, peers?

How many times?

When did it start?  Looking back, I know it started earlier than I want to recognize, earlier than I want to admit.  I think back to her early years, in preschool.  I think back to her years in soccer.  I thank back to her years in Girl Scouts.  I think back to all those times in church, in so many churches, and the times I heard the adjectives "weird" "unfriendly" "passive" "mean" "strange" and the question "why is she that way"?  That way?!

The enormity of the amount of rejection my child has faced in her short life overwhelmed me.

I have been crying off and on ever since.

Mulan's Big Win

Did you know that Tim Burton has Asperger's?  I didn't.  Did you know my daughter has Asperger's?  I didn't, not for sure.  I suspected it, starting when she was about fifteen, but I was so horrified by the possibility that I put quite the negative spin on it.  Stop being that way! I would demand.  You don't want have Asperger's, do you? You do NOT want to have Asperger's.  Stop acting like you do.

(Some of you may hate me now.  Go right ahead.  I deserve it.  But I am not the only mother to react this way to her suspicions, I'll bet you dimes to the dollar.  I am just one of the few honest enough to admit it.)

When my daughter was sixteen, I paid cash to visit a child psychiatrist to consult about whether I should seek a diagnosis.  The doctor listened patiently, asked very pointed and appropriate questions, and then offered me a solution.  She rightfully pointed out that seeking a diagnosis would only prove beneficial if my child wound up in need of special assistance to succeed in life.  If that were the case, then and only then would it be the best course of action.  She gave me a checklist of teenage social developmental milestones, and a timetable of six months.  If all, or even most, of these criteria were met, I should just relax.  If less than half were met, I should seek an appointment for my daughter to be evaluated.

Six months came and all the blocks were checked off the list. I breathed a sigh of relief.  My daughter did not have Asperger's, I reassured myself.  It had all just been a phase.  *whew*

Wrong.

My daughter, being the hard-working, beautiful-hearted, amazingly talented person that she is, just worked extremely hard to compensate for her neurologically atypical wiring.  I am in awe of her accomplishment.  Here, in someone else's words, are what it took for her to pull this off:

http://archive.autistics.org/library/more-autistic.html#analogy

An Analogy for Some Kinds of Autistic Skill Acquisition

The following is only an analogy. The real world is much more complicated than this, and this is not true for all autistics.

Pretend there is a way of measuring doing a certain skill, so that there is a "resting performance level" in that skill and an "active performance level" in that skill. The scale is from 0 to 10.

9 or 10 is the way people are expected to perform in that skill.

Most NTs have a resting ability of 7 to 10 in a skill they have either learned or been born with.

Many autistics have a resting ability of 0 to 3.

In order for an NT to do that thing, it takes either very little effort or no effort. If their resting level in that skill is 10, then they don't even realize that they are using that skill.

In order for an autistic to do that thing, it takes considerably more effort. It takes the degree of effort that it takes NTs to do things that they usually have a resting ability of 0 to 3 in, such as multiplying large numbers in their head.

But when an autistic gets practice, they get used to pushing themselves.  They may push themselves so that in public they are functioning at between 7 and 10 in that skill at all times.

The NTs around them, taking for granted that 7 is the lower limit, don't even recognize that the person maybe had to climb all the way up from 0 to get to 7. They start taking for granted the autistic person's ability in that area, because it is within the limits of the only range of abilities they even know. The autistic person's effort gets unintentionally ignored, and NTs wonder what's going on when the autistic person gets exhausted and overloaded from doing "normal" things, or suddenly stops being able to do something they were "good at" before.

One example of a thing that NTs are usually at a 10 at is recognizing the objects in front of them. Unless they have had brain damage (at which point they're not technically NT anymore), they usually can easily and effortlessly perceive and differentiate between familiar objects and name them.

Some autistic people, in order to do that, have to do things like decide to look at something, see a garble of shapes, start differentiating individual shapes, focus in on one of the shapes, figure out that the shape is a Thing, figure out what the Thing is, and figure out what the Thing does. And that's all just to get to the bare minimum of what NTs do automatically, and it's leaving out things like differentiating one sense from another and doing this in a non-passive setting.

Doing that kind of thing all day with all your senses can be very tiring and overloading. That does not mean doing all the things NTs do to function all day, mind you, it just means understanding our surroundings. That's the background that a lot of autistic people have to work up to to then do the "ordinary" things like go to school, obey teachers, do schoolwork, housework, and stuff.

Some autistic people can get extraordinarily good at holding this together to the point where it becomes pseudo-automatic (doesn't require conscious effort, but takes a huge energy drain), or can devise ways of dealing with the world that don't involve having to perceive all of it all the time, but there are usually things going on that an autistic person is doing consciously that are a lot more basic than what you're used to thinking about. It's not necessarily always in the area of sensory perception; that's just one of many things that can be like that for us.

It doesn't often get recognized that even if an autistic person gets up to a metaphorical level of 7 to 10 in a skill, and performs that skill in that manner on a regular basis, in all likelihood they are still performing all of the complex maneuvering consciously. We are less likely than NTs to just get used to things, and even when it becomes pseudo-automatic the drain on our resources does not necessarily go away.

The natural inclination of many NTs when they see an autistic person at a 7 to 10 in that skill is to believe that that skill has been "mastered" and is now fully automatic, requiring very little effort. They then push the autistic person to pile more skills on top of that skill, into a really big stack. The problem is that the more skills get added that the person then has to monitor and deal with, the more likely that the lower-level skills will falter and bring the whole metaphorical "house of cards" down. That can look like overload, shutdown, or meltdown when that happens.

When it happens for a long time and some of the skills do not get built back up again, then it often gets called "regression", which is not a word I'm fond of. I suspect that's one reason that autistic people sometimes shut down on skills we've supposedly mastered a long time ago when learning new things. Skill mastery simply doesn't work the same for us.

Nightmare Before Christmas

Tim Burton’s movie entitled “The Nightmare Before Christmas” was released to the public in 1993.  My daughter was three years old. 

I was a fully committed fundamentalist Christian mother at that time.  Determined to pass on my faith to my precious daughter, I filled our home with Christian books, Christian videos, Christian music, and Christian toys.  I took her to Sunday school.  I took her to Mother’s Day Out at our church.  I took her to Vacation Bible School each summer.  Every day in every way, I sought to fill her environment with words of faith and love.

Faith and love were my intention, but faith and law were instead often the result.  So many things seem to be like that in parenting.  We embark on a course of action with every positive intention, and when the course is run, we are stunned to find that we are nowhere near where we intended to end up.  Like the many parents you can see each week at Disney World waiting for the evening parade, the frustration of having all our good intentions stymied can be maddening.  We put all this money, time and effort into trying to create this magical experience of wonder and amazement in our children’s childhood, and then they instead experience something entirely different and not always pleasant.  Who wouldn’t be upset?

Most parents’ initial reaction is anger.  They (we) scold the children for being (fill in the blank) ungrateful or selfish or rude or ugly or call them whiners or sissies or other unpleasant names, when they are experiencing our efforts as a negative instead of the positive we intended.  Good parents catch themselves and stop, apologize, and do a logistics check to look for the cause of distress.  Hungry?  Tired? Sunburned?  Cold? Thirsty?  Sick?  Over-stimulated?  Need to go to the bathroom?  Activity age appropriate?  I liked to think I was a good parent, especially when my daughter was very young.

But then, when my daughter was somewhere around eleven or twelve, things went awry.  I was doing all the right things- Christian devotions, daily prayers, fun activities, church socialization, teaching to her interests and strengths, providing lessons outside the home, exposing her to social groups (Girl Scouts in this case).  Why was my daughter so depressed?  Why was she so “rebellious”?  What was “wrong” with her? 

Looking back now, the signs are everywhere obvious.  She needed me to stop with all the religion and constant moralizing and spiritualizing everything and listen to her. I should have listened to her, and listened without any idea in my head of what the “right” answers were, the “right” feelings were, the “right” thoughts were.  I am sad, truly sad, to say I did not do that.  I was full of Christian culture claptrap, up to my eyebrows, and I knew what were the right answers, the right feelings and the right thoughts for all good Christians.  I was quick to point out to her where she was wrong, why she shouldn’t feel the way she did, and why she should not think the thoughts she was thinking.  I called her thoughts and feelings evil and demonic.

To those of you not up to your eyebrows in Christian culture claptrap, I know that sounds heinous- it is heinous to say that to a child!  But to those of you steeped in Christian culture, it will sound right and good doctrinally.  We are always being tempted by the devil and his demons to think evil thoughts and hold on to evil feelings like fear, resentment and jealousy.  These are not perfectly normal or understandable human emotions and reactions. They are sin.  If a person does not repent of them right away, then they are under the power of the demonic.  That is the spirit at work “in the children of disobedience”.

 Ephesians 2:1 And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; 2 Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: 3 Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. 

Poor kid.  She was having a hard time figuring out who she was and how she fit into this world, and she was getting no breaks from me.  I thought I was the most loving and supportive Christian parents a child could hope to have, and I was.  I was living the Christian version of the Eagle’s “Life in the Fast Lane”.  I knew all the right people; I took all the right "pills".  I had the scriptural answer to everything. 

But she did not need a Christian parent, she needed a loving parent. She did not need religion to tell her how she should feel and think.  She needed a loving mother to listen to her express how she did feel and think, and without shaming her for having the “wrong” thoughts and feelings.  That she did not get.

She did get tolerance. That was the best I could come up with at the time, but she did not get that tolerance shame-free.  Oh no, there was still plenty of shaming and prodding to do the “right” thing and think the “right” way and feel the “right” things.  Is it any wonder that my daughter’s favorite song to play at the time was “Reflections” from the movie Mulan?

“Look at me

I will never pass for a perfect bride

Or a perfect daughter

Can it be

I'm not meant to play this part?

Now I see

That if I were truly to be myself

I would break my fam'ly's heart.”

(http://www.fpx.de/fp/Disney/Lyrics/Mulan.html#Reflection)

So, she quit talking to me.  Most of the time, she just hid in her room.  We didn’t always fight (disagree, clash, hurt each other), but it was still a daily occurrence.  For reasons I now understand, but did not at the time, we just could not connect.  I tried, in my own fashion, every day.  My daughter tried, in her own fashion, probably just as often.  But I was not really trying to understand her.  I was trying to change her.

I wanted to mold her into what the Christian culture said she should be and it was not taking. She appeared to be something else entirely, much to my dismay. While appearances are not always what they seem, she seemed to be (in my estimation at the time) mean, self-centered, uncooperative, pretty much the opposite of the cheerful, obedient, pleasant Christian girl I was expecting.

I was embarrassed by her, because I knew that we would be judged harshly and rejected by our Christian peers.  But I did not forsake her, as I have watched so many other Christian parents do to their children whom they could not control. I give myself some good parent points for that.

The best I could do, the very best at the time, was stand beside her.  I allowed her to express herself in the ways that she chose, though I was not really happy or supportive about it.  I tolerated it.  Not a best case scenario by far, but really the best I could come up with at the time.  I was willing to bear the shame of being her mom, even though I did not understand her and was incapable of trying, because I knew that God loved and accepted me as I was, without condition. I would love my daughter the same way.

The day came when my daughter became fascinated with Goth culture.  She was already depressed, I reasoned.  No wonder she would fall into a depressing and dark subculture.  I didn’t want a war over everything, so I picked and chose what I could tolerate and what was just too far over the line for even me.  So, when she asked to watch Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” I stuck my nose in the air and agreed to tolerate it.  *I* would never watch such garbage.  I am quite sure I made some comments about not understanding what she saw in such dark entertainment, but I allowed it. 

I thought that was the farthest stretched out limit to the love of God any reasonable Christian parent could reach- to allow her to watch it.  I would not sully my own happy Christian bubble by watching it with her.  I was too pure for that.

Fast forward to this year.  My daughter is now a grown adult. She was home for the holidays, and I asked her and her brother if they wanted to watch a Christmas movie.  “Yes!” came the happy answer.  “Let’s watch ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’!”  Her father and I, being less religious than we were ten years ago, agreed.  Ironically, we are still both infected by Christian culture enough to only agree reluctantly. J

Oh, my dear Lord, why did I not watch this movie earlier? 

This movie is a beautiful fictionalization of my daughter’s experience of life. Like Jack Skellyton, she wanted to belong to the magical world of Christendom (Christmastown).  She was enamored by it, and tried her very hardest to make it work.  But like Jack, she was doomed to be forever on the outside of that to which she so wanted to belong.  Ten years ago, when she asked me to watch this movie, she was trying to get me to understand her heart.  What a religious fool I was to turn my nose up at the opportunity.

There’s a scene in the movie, where Jack is pretending to be Santa Clause and failing miserably. The townspeople are employing anti-aircraft guns to shoot down the imposter.  They don’t understand that Jack has a good and loving heart and wants to be a part of the gift-giving love-fest that is Christmas.    All they know is that his gifts don’t look right, and he doesn’t look right, and when he tries to “ho ho ho” it sounds like the frightening cackle of a Halloween ghoul.  So they take aim and shoot him down.

Jack falls out of his downed aircraft and lands, appropriately, in a cemetery.  Even more poignant, he comes to rest on the outstretched arms of an angelic statuary.  I am tearing up at this point, and I look at my daughter.  Tears stream down her cheeks, and yet she is smiling.  “Yes,” she assents out loud, “because God loves us, too, even the ones who can’t ever fit in.”

My heart broke in that moment and it still hasn’t fully recovered.  I hope it never does.

More thoughts on Home Schooling

This is the very last week of my last year of home schooling.  All that's left is to prep my son for his final shot at the SATs.  I am so proud of him.  He is doing extremely well in his dual-enrolled classes and is well-liked at work.  I love the passion in his heart for justice and love.  He has taught me so much in the past few years about what it really means to be a good person.  <3 <3 <3

I love being a parent, and I loved home schooling.  However, like all human endeavors, home schooling is full of dangers and pit falls that can snag unprepared parents and ruin the lovely life they had planned.  Libby Anne, a home schooled graduate from a Christian home schooling family, has initiated a forum series where she is giving eight graduates of Christian home schools an opportunity to answer questions about their experience.  These Christian home school families adhered to the Quiverfull philosophy.  You can find her blog series here: Raised Quiverfull

This is a wonderful opportunity for other home schooled parents, and those considering home schooling, to see how home schooled graduates feel about their experience.  It's a rare gift, and I for one find it fascinating.  I hope it is widely read.

Here are some of my thoughts after reading the responses to Home Schooling Q.2:

1) No matter how good the intentions of the teaching home school parent at the start, multiple pregnancies and more children mean that the quality of home education will suffer.  In fact, it sounds like the end of academic challenge, at least for the oldest students.  It seems that Sierra, who had no other siblings, got the best education as far as time and attention from the adult in her life. Libby's education sounds more like our family's, with the exception being that while my teens also studied more independently as time went on, when they did, it was not because I was too busy to help.  It was because they didn't want my help!

2) What religious home schooling parents crow about as "socialization" does not appear to be about meeting student's social needs at all.  It's mostly about meeting mom's social needs and reinforcing the family rules (spoken and unspoken) by bringing in other families with very similar rules to underline the boundaries in black ink.

3)  Peer pressure is a horrible foundation for choosing how to raise your children.  I figuratively threw up a little in my mouth when I read the words "Keepers at Home".  Poor Melissa!  I am so sorry.  My heart broke a little as I read Lisa's story too, about how all of her social needs were to be met within the family, and she was not encouraged to dream beyond her mom's dream.  No SATs!  That is just SO WRONG.   All this happens, this religious one-upmanship, because your PARENTS are PEER DEPENDENT! That is the biggest irony of all.  These home schooling parents are all trying to outdo one another in religiosity because the approval of their peer groups is more important to them than the mental/emotional/social/physical well-being of their children.  They sacrifice their children’s lives on the altar of peer approval. 

I was sorely tempted to go there myself.  Who doesn’t want approval and acceptance?  But there were too many things I refused to bend on.  I saw no need for home school specific sports groups, unless it was just for more exercise and fun in addition to the community league sports.  My daughter is so low social needs that I was always pushing her to get out and meet people.  I encouraged her to try Girl Scouts for a year before she was willing to check it out. 

Our Girl Scout troop was all home schooled, but at least it WAS Girl Scouts, not the hideous brainwashing of Keepers at Home.  All I could think about as I looked over that web site, was how heartbroken those girls will be if they don’t marry or can’t have kids.  I thought about the two old women who lived next door to us in our tiny Great Plains town when I was a child.  Beulah spent her whole life caring for her mother.  She was in her sixties, her mom was in her nineties, when the mother died.  Beulah decided to travel for the first time in her life.  Finally, she had the chance to live!  Beulah went to see her brother in far off California.  While there, she became ill.  She discovered she had cancer and died within a year.  When I saw the web site for Keepers at Home, I wondered how many Beulah’s were being asked to give up their whole lives to meet their parents’ needs.  I determined I would not support that cruelty!  I had no kind words for Keepers at Home. 

4) Latebloomer, thanks for sharing your experience at not really knowing anyone at your high school graduation. The truth is that as people grow, they change and develop new interests (they should anyway) and old friendships don't always fit.  So if you have no opportunity to make new friendships, you will become more and more isolated through the years.  That’s why it’s important to join youth groups, clubs, study groups, work part-time, join a sports league, etc.  It’s important for all teens, not just home schooled teens!  If public school is hell for your teen (and it is for some) then work hard to help them find other groups that do accept them. 

That is why when my daughter wanted to go to youth group, I was thrilled.  She needed to get out and expand her social network.  Now as a young adult, she gets what I meant when I told her that, in order to have a good life, a person needs several circles of friends based on different activities and interests.  That way if a friendship goes south, you aren’t devastated.  The BFF of Lifetime movies is fun while it lasts, but in real life, it is EXTREMELY RARE that people can be each other’s only friend for a whole lifetime.  People are too complex for that.

5) Fear is crippling and contagious.  Even as my daughter was attending youth group, I was always choking back my fear.  I had a critical eye towards all the youth my daughter hung out with, and I evaluated their families with suspicion.  Why?   Well, because even though I wasn’t as crazy religious as the Keepers at Home crowd, I was still an evangelical Christian.  Fear was preached to me from the pulpit, from the radio, it came in the mail as requests for money to fight the culture wars, it was shared on the Christian forums I would visit online.  It’s only now, when I am no longer going to church at all, that I can see how all-pervasive fear was in my life. 

I think one of the last Christian books I bought was “And the Bride Wore White” by the Ludys.  I didn’t even read it for myself, I just gave it to my daughter.  I told her that I wasn’t going to read it, as I didn’t want to nag her about anything contained in the book, but that I trusted the Holy Spirit to guide her into what was right.  That was in 2008.  I was only beginning to understand how totally screwed up our family life really was, although I did not yet realize how much of that had to do with religion.  That was my last half-hearted attempt at controlling who my daughter was and what she would choose for her life.  

Fear is crippling and contagious without having anything to do with religion, either.  I do know secular home schooled moms who have shared with me that fear was a big part of other home school support groups: fear of public school, fear of non-organic produce, fear of the medical professions, and the most damaging fear of all:  Fear of abandonment.

I have met home schooled parents who seemed determined to keep their children at home as adults because they (the parents) had some serious abandonment issues.  I am related to one such family.  They brought their children home in late high school, sent them to non-accredited colleges, arranged their marriages and made sure they were all anti-birth control.  Those children, now adults and parents of QF families themselves, have no job prospects and no place they could ever survive financially other than working for dad's "ministry" and living on the grounds.  

On the secular side, many of my son's peers are quite worried about a girl who has dropped off the social radar completely.  Her single mom  was already always at the girl's side, and limited her social activities so she could pile on her own expectations: the girl will be a published author, no college necessary.  The main source of this family's fear is green: raw vegan diet is the only safe way to eat.  The young lady's facebook account is shut down, she won't return calls and no one has seen her for months. Religion may be a big fear producer, but the fear itself is the real danger.  

There you have it, whether you wanted it or not: my thoughts after reading Libby Anne's latest Raised Quiverfull post.  I hope you will all choose to live courageously, love freely, and balance all the bad news the world throws at you with things that make you smile and give you hope.  Oh, and say a prayer for the missing home schooled teen.  Someone must be in contact with her somewhere; pray that person will become the friend she needs to break free of the fear (and mom's control, though it is presumptious of me to write because I am only relating what I have heard from the teens, not personal experience).

Peace and good will, SS

Reckless Procreation

Recently I had a friend contact me about raising money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.  I personally have a chronic respiratory ailment, though it rarely affects my daily life.  The reason that my ailment is not much of a problem in my life is because medical science spent truckloads of money trying to find a cure in recent decades.  Failing that, they sought and succeeded to make the illness manageable.  So, this request to help raise money to cure a respiratory ailment is one for which I have a personal affinity.  Plus my friend has such a good heart.  It should have been a no-brainer for me to open my wallet and hand out a donation.

However, in her attempt to both be honest and move potential donors to compassion, she revealed that the family in whose honor she is raising money has two children with cystic fibrosis.  Two children with cystic fibrosis?  Two?

I know a little about cystic fibrosis.  One of my friends from the past works as a respiratory therapist.  I personally *love* respiratory therapists, as their appearance in the ER when I was a child were a signal to me that I would be able to breathe again soon.  If you know a respiratory therapist IRL, give them a hug for me!

Once when I was telling her how much I appreciated her profession, I followed up with a question about what was the hardest part of her job.  I was expecting an answer like, "when a kid throws up in response to the steroids".  Instead, she said that caring for her CF patients was the hardest part.  It is hard because she is compassionate, kind and loves children.  It is hard because she KNOWS her CF patients will someday die, drowning on their own mucus secretions, and in the end, she can't stop this from happening.

What a horrible death.  At the time, I didn't know what caused CF, mostly because no one in my family has CF and I had no training whatsoever in the medical field.  Since then, I have come to learn that CF is a genetic disorder, and while it is not curable, it IS preventable.  A quick google search turns up this:

Gene that causes CF identified

This was in 1989.  These children my friend loves are now in junior high and high school, so born after 1995.  Plus I am assuming they are more than a year apart, so wouldn't they have known their first child had CF before they conceived their second child?

Since science has known that it takes two recessive genes,  one from each parent, for a child to develop CF, since 1989 and these children were conceived after 1989, what gives?  As a person who has faced the terror of almost dying from a respiratory condition, it seems horrendously cruel to play Russian roulette with the second child's life by conceiving again without genetic testing or IVF to prevent another child from being born with CF.

Which is where my moral dilemma began. You see, I have known more than a few incredibly selfish mothers who were more interested in their own righteousness (as one of God's breeders) than in the health and well-being of their children.  I know a family with three, yes three, Down's Syndrome daughters conceived by a young mother.  They were "trusting God with their wombs" and so even after the first rare genetic abnormality they kept getting pregnant.  When it happened a second time, they still did not stop getting pregnant.  Their third child was also born with Down's, which is really rare in young mothers.  And still they continued to roll the dice and get pregnant! Their fourth child, a son, was normal.   He is a wonderful human being, but what a burden that kid will bear the rest of his life!  His mom developed breast cancer shortly after his birth, so no more children.  She beat it once, but succumbed after it returned a second time.  The care of his three older sisters now rest on her only son's and his father's shoulders.  Once his father dies, it will all be on him. But of course, it is all God's will, right?

Another one of these hypocritically "pro-life" moms posted on facebook a press release heralding the Santorums as heroes for mom's aging eggs* producing a Trisomy-18 child.  There is nothing heroic about continuing to get pregnant after thirty-five when you already have children!  The ONLY reason a woman would do that is in some misguided attempt to "fulfill God's will", i.e. seek her own righteousness and glory in being pregnant- AGAIN.  The more children she has, the holier she can  tell herself that she is.  No matter that she is gambling with someone else's life!  If she has a child with a horrific genetic abnormality, it's God's responsibility, not hers!  (These same people no doubt use seat belts, take antibiotics, and wouldn't skydive without a parachute, trusting that God's will be done.  They won't take those sort of foolish risks with their own life, but with a child's?  No problem.)

Are the Santorums heroes for rushing to the hospital each time their Trisomy 18 child needs to be admitted? Hell NO!  They are goats for cursing her with this disease.  They willfully and knowingly continued to get pregnant when it is clearly proven that older eggs are at much higher risk for producing people with this torturous disease.  They want kudos for this?!?!?!  YES THEY DO!  They think they are heroes for their reckless procreation.

Which is why, when I read that a family has two children with cystic fibrosis, I get angry.  Those parents are not clueless about what causes cystic fibrosis. All high school biology books teach about Punnett squares.  It's easy to see that if you have had one CF child, there is a 25% chance your next child will have it too, and a 50% chance that they will not develop the disease but will themselves be carriers.  There is only a one in four chance they will have a child not affected by the CF gene at all.

Would you put your child on a roller coaster that kills one out of four riders?  How about buy a car that explodes in ball of flame 25% of the time?  Feed your child a snack that causes every fourth child who eats it excruciating pain followed by a slow death?  No? Neither would I.

That's what took me so long to donate.  I don't want to promote a religious culture of reckless procreation.  I can't imagine getting pregnant again with the same father after giving birth to a child with CF, not unless we used IVF to eliminate the possibility of having a child with CF.  And since IVF sounds really creepy to me (Long needles through my abdomen?  I don't think I could do it.), I would probably adopt if I wanted more children.  But maybe I'd just stop, and pour my life into helping my sick child and raising money for CF research.

I went ahead and donated.  My friend loves this family, and that is enough reason for me to give.  These children are already here, and I honestly and sincerely hope a cure is developed in their lifetime. And hey, at least they stopped at two children, right?  If they were QF, they might have gone right on having more and more children.

But still, we need to stop the reckless procreation. We need to stop the people who advocate reckless procreation.  God is not honored by your denial masquerading as faith.  God is not honored when you make stupid choices and take reckless chances and excuse it with some religious dogma.  No outsider is impressed with anything but your disregard for the lives of your children, and that is not a favorable impression.

How can we stop this reckless procreation without shaming the mothers who were duped by the lame religious arguments? Those mothers don't need shamed, they need empowered to do what's right. I don't know.  If you or someone you know fits this description, I do not intend to shame you for having been deceived.

We do need to expose the people who conned you, though.  And we do need to send a clear message that most of America ain't buying what they're selling.

STOP the reckless procreation.  STOP blaming God for the choices people make.  And for God's sake, STOP gambling with other people's lives in a sad attempt to impress the world with your faith.  


No one is applauding.

*"Advanced maternal age is a risk factor for Trisomy 18."  A quote from here: Older mothers have higher risk of genetic birth defects .  How bad is Trisomy 18?  Horrible, a fate no one should choose for any child.

Christianity is Not Imperative to Healing an Abusive Man's Heart

Well, I must respectfully disagree with the comment left by dorcas on my last post about "getting saved" being an imperative for a man learning to live without resorting to abuse. Honestly, if that DID work, the whole world would be turning to Christ.  But not only does "getting saved" NOT heal all the hurts of the past, for many raised in fundamentalism, dogma is used as a weapon to excuse abuse and heap shame on their children. That is how abusive men are created, by abusing little boys.

Nope, enlightenment may indeed by necessary, but Christianity is not the only means to connection with Love.  While as a Christian I believe Jesus is the only way to commune with God, I do not believe He is synonymous with Christianity.

The dogma (pray the sinners prayer, understand God hates you,foul sinner, and would burn you in hell if not for Jesus, you don't deserve mercy but God will pity you IF you become a fundamentalist and toe the line, hate what the religion hates, show up to services, give 10% of your money, read your Bible everyday) is a load of crap.

When Jesus spoke of being "born again" he said it was mysterious, unpredictable, and the rest of the world would only be able to tell it had happened because of the changes in a person's life. It sounds very mystical, akin to the Eastern term "enlightenment".

Fundamentalists have declared being "born again" VERY predictable (bow your head, repeat after me, teh magic spell, er, sinner's prayer, worked- you are now born again!), completely under the control of the person "praying" and (due to Finney's manipulative crowd control techniques) largely under the control of the preacher as well.

Nope, God reveals himself to honest seeker's by whatever means they are able to receive Him.  Jesus is not the errand boy of the fundagelical dogma masters.  The church likes to think it knows and can declare where the Spirit will move and under what conditions that is permissible, but you do not control God.

The fundamentalist, evangelical church makes a mockery of the gracious, loving heart of God.  It teaches its disciples that shame is ever present, and God hates sin (Which you are ALWAYS stepping in, loser! And if you don't agree then you're just full of pride, the stinkiest sin of all!) and the goal of the Christian life is (in practice, not necessarily doctrine) to avoid public shame.  That is the real bottom line.

For my husband to heal, it has meant NOT going to church and NOT reading his Bible. It is not more shaming (You *should* love your wife! The Bible demands it!  Bad Christian!) that is bringing healing to him. This is where Joel and Kathy are an epic fail. It is EMDR, science in action, that is healing my husband's broken heart.

It is not more fake, conditional acceptance for agreeing with all the right doctrines that is revealing real love to him.  It is a wife who will accept him no matter what, even if he becomes a full-on atheist, and a true friend from work who doesn't go to church at all.  Jesus with skin on.

Finding a way to break free of the mountain of shame fundamentalist Christianity laid on his young shoulders, that will end his compulsion to withdraw, sulk and seethe with resentment.  That's where the abuse comes from in his world: the rejection, shame and conditional love of fundamentalist missionary/preacher parents.  Their complete and total lack of interest in his thoughts and feelings is 100% responsible for why he ascribes that hardness of heart to his wife, and responds accordingly.  That they responded with violence to a young child(spanking, slapping, shaming!), abandoned him for religious reasons to boarding school as a young child, and the continual shaming, ugliness of that Christian boarding school, holding up the abusive system and abusive parents as saints of the highest order, THAT is WHY my husband is abusive!

Being born again some kind of magic cure, or even a necessary first step?  Only if by that you meant the mysterious connection with Love that Jesus spoke of and exemplified.  But by your comments, I think you mean praying the sinner's prayer and going regularly to church/reading your Bible daily to be given "marching orders".

Oh no.  That is why my husband is in so much pain buried under so much anger.  I do strongly disagree.

But this is actually good news!  This means wives of atheists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, pagans, Bahia, etc., can all have hope and find healing for their marriages as well!  God is no respecter of persons, and loves us all with an everlasting love, and WILL help you, when you reach out to Him, regardless of your religion.  And THAT God, the One revealed in the life and words of Christ himself, NOT the one Christians have created with their dogmas, is not a thin-skinned hater who won't help you if you don't get His name right.

Jesus is no Rumplestilskin.  His love is much greater than the fundamentalist/evangelicals come close to understanding.

The body of Christ?  If by that you mean organized Christianity, then it is NOT a beautiful thing at all.  It is a heartless, proud, demagogue.  But, if by the body of Christ, you mean those who love, then yes, the body of Christ is a beautiful thing.

God does and will continue to bless me, so thanks for the kind closing.  I wish the same for you, and do honestly hope your husband finds the healing he needs to live a life of love.  Demanding he do so DOES NOT WORK.  EMDR to heal the traumas of the past, learning to reject the inner script of shame and ridicule, finding the courage to share his thoughts and feelings and THEN finding acceptance and love when he does: these things are necessary to healing.  Not ascribing to a religious creed.