Ask the previously 'quiverful' girl

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
141

Not a whole lot that I could tell. Now, the boys were usually a bit older than the girls, anywhere from a year to about 5 years. They were supposed to have a house, and a job, and be ready for the responsibility of supporting a wife immediately, and an infant within a year without help. So we’d have regular pairings where the girl was 17, and the boy was 23 or so. Not anywhere near middle age.

The specific circumstances I referred to actually didn’t happen in our group, but we had talked about it. If a girl was sterile, or had health issues, or something else obvious that would keep her from bearing and caring for lots of kids (severe depression or anxiety) then the idea was to give her as a wife to someone older, who presumably already had a ‘quiver’ with a deceased wife, or who, even if he was just single, at least was more mature than the 20 year old who has been told his entire life that his identity as a God-fearing and upstanding member of the church is based entirely on how many kids his wife can pop out. It was an understandable stretch to expect a young man to understand that his family would be deviating from the party line without taking it out on the poor girl. (Not that that didn’t happen anyway for some women, I’m sure.)

142

Up front, I acknowledge that I have not followed all of the posts nin this thread, so Lasciel may already have answered this one.

Does Lasciel have any children now? Does she actually want any?

143

I must regretfully dispute this claim; I’m living in a city that is teeming with Mennonites, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons now, and their religious ideas aren’t that different from the Quiverfull movement. The Mennonites at least originated in Europe.

Were you being targeted for introducing new genes into a closed system, do you suppose? I’ve heard rumours of Mennonite/Hutterite colonies doing that when inbreeding became a problem (as I say, rumours - I don’t know if this is true or not).

Old joke - “Why don’t Mennonites have sex standing up? Because it might lead to dancing.” :smiley:

144

Nope, mid-thirties and none so far.

I’m not real sold on the idea (more from the pregnancy/childbirth standpoint than the children standpoint), but my husband is slowly tilting me from a solid no to a maybe yes.

It’s hard to say whether the quiverful background is contributing. I think very little, since the childhood and teen obsession with childcare has made me more confident in my eventual parenting abilities, but it didn’t do much to counteract my raging issues with control and with hospitals, and actually may have made those issues worse.

145

My sister was the first person who told me, “You just know that at least one of those kids is going to be gay.” And I’m sure there will eventually be a divorce, too.

146

Dear Lasciel…thank you for your courage. Your thread has been most interesting. Over the years there have been young women in my practice who’ve been part of similar groups- and there were parallels in the fundamentalist Christian and Orthodox Jewish pairs in that some of the young women were so strictly raised to be modest that they had difficulty being sexual after it was sanctioned by marriage. I’ve had a few Muslim young women patients as well, as I was willing to teach a teenage bride how to get pregnant, but they didn’t seem to have the issues of cognitive dissonance with intimacy. Working with them got a lot easier after meeting Talli Rosenbaum, a US born pelvic floor sex therapist who works out of Haifa, Israel. http://tallirosenbaum.com/en/home. I’m thinking your F2 Quiverfulls are going to run into some of that in the stricter groups.

In terms of how you personally feel about hospitals and childbirth…if you decide to have a child, consider a midwife. With backup if needed, of course. (I did that, but ended up with a surgical delivery, and my daughter just had her third child homebirthed in a tub, so it can go either way ;))

“Have all the kids you want- and want all the ones you have”

You are a treasure and a wonderment.

147

This might be getting into tmi territory, but oddly enough, sexual intimacy wasn’t ever a problem. We lived out in the country for a while, and the church was on a farm, so between barn cats and purebred show-dogs and the occasional horse or bull, it was pretty obvious what the physical mechanics were that led to pregnancy and offspring, and the church was pretty sex-positive, in a really opaque, ‘lets use lots of euphemisms and sort of talk around the subject’ sort of way.

Now, I didn’t know any of the names of anything, and couldn’t have identified actual organs (male or female, internal or external) if my life depended on it, but the act of sex (between husband/wife, missionary position, with the hope of children) was considered a positive and pleasurable thing, and I think that’s part of why they wanted us married off so young, so they could continue to foster that attitude.

Besides, as soon as I got to college I fell into the theatre crowd, and they immediately embraced me, loved me, told me I was safe, and introduced me to The Vagina Monologues, RENT, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Once I discovered it was not actually possible to die from blushing and acute embarassment, it was really empowering. Sex is awesome.

My continuing issue is body image. While sex was ok, nudity/immodesty was most certainly not, and I wore long skirts, long hair, and long sleeves from 6-16.

I still feel a lot of panic and shame when I am in situations where I can’t be in clothing that covers me adequately. (Where adequately is interpreted by an ancient prudish nun.) I was 25 before I was brave enough to try to wear a bikini, and I wore it to a close friend’s house, attended only by people I’d known (and most of whom I’d even fooled around with before) and I was so freaked out by all my skin that I wore my towel into the hot tub. :frowning:

It’s not a problem that I can’t work around without too much trouble in most situations, but it does make the doctor/patient situation a lot more complicated and panic-inducing, and I’ve not had a doctor yet who understood and sympathized with my difficulty. Which is fine, I’m not a delicate flower, but it does make those visits excruciatingly uncomfortable, which means that I don’t get the regular ‘feminine mechanics tune-ups’ that I should, because I get panic attacks when I try. That’s why the whole pregnancy/childbirth thing is contraindicated, at least in my opinion now. I’ve been working on it, but I’ve got a long way to go yet, and I have to consider that I may not ever ‘get over it’ to the point that those sorts of visits are not terribly stressful.

148

If anyone ever tells me they LIKE pelvic exams, I’m leaving the room as fast as possible :D. You’ve got a LOT of company. And I comprehend your issues…as probably does someone in your part of the world. Word of mouth—

Warm regards,
THE

149

Thanks – I hadn’t heard of QF and find this interesting, and your responses very insightful.

Good for you. Cherish the happy memories. You loved and were loved in return, had enough food and clothing. You’ve learned to reconcile good people with bad policies. Good for you.

Well, only when you’re doing it right.

Thank goodness for that, eh? No comparison, but as a teen and young adult I was rail thin and almost ghoulishly pale, so I was very self-conscious about my body. But I loved swimming & sailing & beach volleyball and all that and decided to just give it the hell up, and I’ve never regretted it. The first step is to find within yourself the willingness to let go of that baggage. The next zillion steps are to remind oneself of that finding.

150

I’m not sure. Of course, they didn’t come out and explicitly say, and it would have been inappropriate to ask. It might have been primarily DNA related, but it could also have had aspects of trolling for funding (most members were farmers who were making ends meet but weren’t exactly raking in the bucks), or even secularly academically credentialed people. I had more officially recognized education than even the pastor. There were, like, one or two year Bible programs, unaccredited by anyone but themselves, of course, that you could attend, but it almost certainly did not involve serious academic scholarship and criticism. Since homeschooling and private schooling (with many congregations having a “full service” K-12 or at least K-8 school operating in the church building and only marginally independent from the pastor) was such a big thing, I can’t help but suspect that they could have seen me as a means to qualify, or hedge to continue to qualify, a private school under the various legislation that changes every year and varies from place to place. “Yes, our new settlement in Podunk will conform to your state’s educational laws, we have appointed robert_columbia, BS, as the Registered Teacher Supervisor and Town Liaison of the church K-12 classroom system. Under the Truth and Honesty in Podunk Education Act of 1995, any US citizen with a regionally accredited bachelor’s degree qualifies for a two-year temporary private school teaching authorization unless said person has been convicted of a violent felony or has been officially banned by the Podunk Board of Educational Standards for violating the terms of a previously issued license.”

But I wouldn’t really have fit in their world anyway, except possibly as a figurehead who was supposed to shut up and sign the forms. More mainstream “Christian” education acknowledges that Evolution is supported by the findings of Science and that you should explore the matter, study, and pray and see what you find. Those people, no. It’s their world view, or none at all.

151

When I think of it, it makes sense even if you’re sincere. If you’re lusting after a young girl, either you’re an awful sinner controled by satan or it’s god that puts these feelings in you, so that you will help guiding this young soul, and have plenty of sex with her so that she’ll pop up a lot of babies. If you believe the latter, the world is in complete harmony. Your lust is part of god’s plan, and serves a good purpose. And your desires will be satisfied, but that also should be in an harmonious world guided by god. Surely, he couldn’t want anything else than your happiness? He wouldn’t let you being tormented by lust without a good reason? So it’s perfectly normal that the satisfaction of your desire coincidates with god’s will.

I suspect that these men don’t think there’s the slightest bit of hypocrisy involved, and feel pretty good about themselves, about god and about the world.

152

Sure, that’s why the whole thing is broken. Anything I want must be what my favourite deity wants me to do so it’s good. It’s all highly convenient absent third party technique.

Insert “to axe murder prostitutes” in substitution for “after a young girl” in your post and it all works almost as well.

153

In just wanted to add to this that I apologize for some of my previous statements and yes, I just might have known some quiverfull people but in my defense, before reading this thread I never realized it.

At my former church their were some families with alot of kids and who homeschooled that looking back, were probably a part of this. Now they dressed ordinary but the OP said they do that when around others and they did tend to stick together alot.

154

One less than flattering article is at cracked.com: 5 Insane Lessons from My Christian Fundamentalist Childhood.

155

True on both counts IME. Many groups will have preferred “uniforms”, especially for the ladies, but they are enforced more on a social level than a strict doctrinal or policy one. Policy would say that women have to, say, wear ankle-length dresses or longer without going into lots of details on fabric, cut, color, number of pockets, etc. So one group might gravitate toward having women in pink and pastel dresses made from one or two old patterns that the pastor got from his grandma, and conformance to this rule would be enforced socially. You won’t get excommunicated for dressing differently, but you sure will get a lot of disapproving looks. The advantage to this is that they can vary their appearance as needed to blend more in to society when they have a good enough reason to want to. They’ll just end up looking maybe a bit prudish, dowdy, or old fashioned, but not enough to really turn heads. And that, I suppose, is part of the point.

156

Well, my tendancy was to assume hypocrisy, the elder (or whatever) wanting to get into the girl’s pants and deliberatly misleading her to get what he wants. While I know realize that this guy is probably perfectly sincere and don’t think for an instant he’s misleading anybody, or generally did anything wrong, probably at the contrary.

157

By way of fighting ignorance, Bob Jones isn’t an accredited college in the generally accepted sense, though they applied for regional accreditation in 2009, and the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools has given them their flavor of accreditation. They publish a range of textbooks espousing views that lack scientific basis. I don’t consider them a place of higher or even lower learning.

158

I disagree and I’m guessing you’ve never actually looked at a Bob Jones text and are only going off of hearsay.

I’ve seen Bob Jones textbooks and they are as good as any other science text except they mention God. Their have been cases where regular publishing houses have published texts that have been rejected for being either badly written or having false information. Also many textbooks contain bias.

159

This sentence almost has to be an oxymoron. A “good” science text couldn’t mention “God” without containing material that is not scientific and which therefore would have no basis in a science textbook.

Unless it was an anthropology textbook discussing human beliefs in deities, but based on your capitalisation of “God” I’m guessing that wasn’t the nature of the mention.

160

Some of the more interesting claims in BJU textbooks include, the Loch Ness monster is an example of a dinosaur that is alive today. They say it is a plesiosaur. More generally, humans and dinosaurs were definitely on the earth at the same time. Some of the dinosaurs breathed fire (so dragons must have existed). “God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ,” and " The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well." The links have more.

Here we learn about humans crossing the Bering Strait in the Americas - apparently this occurred 101 years after Noah’s flood. Back in reality, the very latest this could have occurred is 12,000 years ago. Details, with real citations. Scientific treatment of the issue.

This goes way beyond an ordinary theistic interpretation of God’s creation. This is crackpot stuff, organized and cataloged. The texts are untethered from science or reality.