crushing daisies - ways in which patriarchal fundamentalism harms its children #4

I've had the privileged opportunity to talk to the kids of some of my old fundy friends recently and hear about some others. Their stories share some common threads and I learned a whole lot from listening to them. Here are some brief notes on that:

• Kids leaving fundamentalism face some special challenges. Unlike most of their fleeing mothers they have no frame of reference to help them build a life in a world filled with ordinary folk. That capacity to harken back to our pre-fundy lives is probably one of the reasons that we as mothers were so slow to realise how damaging sheltering our children was: we understood the world and knew we would be able to re-engage at any time. Some of us lost sight of the fact that this was not true for our kids. 
• All the young people I've spoken to say they continue to struggle relating socially to peers into their late teens and twenties. They say it takes a long time to begin to feel 'normal' and lose that fear of a generalised evil they believe lurks in the world outside their homes. Even once their own experience has shown them that this was not wholly true, vestigial worry remains. Further, the guilt and self-hatred that some of them endure make developing normal relationships difficult. And often they are competent conversing with adults but just don't know how to do small talk with kids their age. These are crippling disabilities for a young adult.
• I'm saddened to hear that more than one of the girls has suffered from eating disorders as my own daughter K has. The lovely young woman I spoke with today told me that restricting her eating was her way of gaining control in a life that was micro-managed by her mother, and in which she suffered dreadful abuse at the hand of her father. When my daughter was being treated for her ED in an adolescent mental health unit, she commented that Pentecostal kids were significantly over-represented on the ward. I'd be interested in looking into that further.
• These girls who have fled fundamentalism with its strict modesty regulations seem to take a very special delight in girly things like glam shoes and pretty dresses. On so many levels patriarchal fundamentalism tells children that the things they think and feel are wrong and must be suppressed. It's a joy, but a little bit sad too, to see these gorgeous gals enjoying indulging their tastes without guilt.
• Growing up is hard anytime you do it but it's extra tough on kids who were kept 'young' and so had to make the journey in late adolescence - and often in a time of significant family upheaval. It's a testament to their resilience that they are growing into such lovely young adults. One young man told me that when he and his family left fundamentalism, they all threw a lot of babies out with the bathwater. He told me that, over time, he realised that he wanted to dust off some of those values and add them to the growing entity that is the adult he is choosing to become. He agreed with me that being a grown up and feeling equipped to make those kinds of decisions all by yourself is a very nice thing to be.

So that's some thoughts on the kids. But growing up is also hard - perhaps harder in some ways - for the middle-aged women who leave marriages and controlling church situations unused to navigating the myriad options available to them once rules are not a given. Some of us enjoy a brief revisiting of our teenage rebellious years. I suppose it's only natural to take some time to try out new freedoms and practice making discriminating choices.

One of the themes I've noted when hearing stories of child survivors of fundamentalism is that not every woman leaves in search of Integrity. I've heard about mothers who have ended their marriages and made moves to build new lives but who haven't really left behind a lot of the fundy baggage that caused them and their kids so much harm. Sadly, I've learned that more than one mother persistently refuses to canvas the possibility that they may be in some ways culpable for their children's suffering. They don't want to discuss it or they argue that things were not the way their child remembers. This causes their children a great deal of grief.

I empathise with the sorrow of those women but I am not able to sympathetise with their self-protective self-centredness. I understand that it is a frightening and distressing prospect to face the dreadful truth that some of your efforts to show your kids you love them more than breathing were misguided and have left them with scars. But our kids' recovery and growth seems to be linked to our own willingness to honestly accept that which is ours to own.

In my view, our children need us to be absolutely truthful in this regard. They need us to do some thinking about our mistakes, to approach them unbidden, to tell them they we understand how our beliefs and actions have harmed them, and to ask their forgiveness. More than once. And we need to be open to our kids approaching us with another bucketful of hurt, and another, and another. They need to know that we love them and we get it and that we are sad too. We need to let them tell the truth about how angry they have been, that even though they love us such a lot, they feel a need to say just how hurt they were by our mistakes.

I don't mean that we all move in to a perpetual Beat Up Mum Camp - we also need to know what is *not* ours to own. And as one of the young men I spoke to told me, 'I'm an adult now. My past has defined me to this point...but now I'm making decisions for myself, growing myself into the person I want to be.' At some point kids need to take responsibility for making the best of what they've been given. I just think that a mother's persistent refusal to allow them to revisit the past or to ask us to validate their feelings about it may actually inhibit their progress toward adulthood. And we don't have the right to do that, no matter how deeply it hurts to revisit our culpability in their suffering.

We mothers need to man up and hear what our kids need us to hear. I sincerely believe that every time we refuse to face a truth, every time we stick our fingers in our ears or manipulate our children into feeling that they should consider our sorrow ahead of their need to address issues from the past, we say 'No'  to growth. And that is a very dangerous thing to do. I believe we shrink a little bit each time we refuse the opportunity to take another baby step toward Integrity. I believe we need to embrace the pain that honesty brings us, to learn to love the agony of growth, to value Truth above all things.

There is no excuse for going easy on ourselves in this. Our children's healthy futures may depend on our opening our hearts to share in the truth as they see it. And the big payout is: every time we squeak open the door to those dark places, a shard of light rushes in and frightens away one of our own demons. And we find that we were wrong: the worst thing that can happen today is *not* that someone will confront us with something dreadful we may have done, but that, when that moment came, we didn't grab it with both hands.

manipulation by any other name

As I've admitted before, I never did do very well in the submission stakes. This is not surprising considering who I am and to whom I was married. Submitting - which in QF circles means to willingly place yourself under the God-given authority your husband in every way - more or less necessitates there being something of a reasonable height to look up to and get under. My former husband, C, although he has some good qualities, was and is a particularly weak and and vacillating man. Trying to submit to C was like trying to squeeze my entire body into a dollshouse and call it comfy.

But call it comfy I did. At least in public. And while I admit I didn't manage to pull submission off very well at all, considering how low I had to crawl to properly locate myself 'under' him, my efforts to submit to my husband were pretty heroic at times. Still I came in for a fair bit of criticism for not looking or not sounding as submissive as I ought.

This brings me to a particularly distressing and frankly, in my view, nauseating aspect of the QF doctrine of submission. While some of the men I knew in QF families were domineering bullies, a good number of them were weak-kneed ninnies like my husband. Except they were the only ones who didn't seem to know it. This was because their clever and seemingly super-submissive wives concealed that inconvenient truth from them. These women managed to run the show while contriving to trick their men into believing that they were in fact in charge.

Consider the following interaction between one sweet wife and her lazy whimp of a husband. J had all the submission boxes ticked: floral frocks, long hair, heaps of kids, homeschooling, husband 'working' from home.... While I suppose she may have considered us friends, she often made her disappointment in my failure at Christian wifely submission plain with disapproving looks and sometimes helpful suggestions for my improvement. 

At the time this particular incident occurred we were enjoying our post-home church afternoon tea on the verandah of J's country acreage (tick, tick). As usual, the men were sitting at one table and the women at another. This was the usual arrangement but I don't recall it was done by explicit rule but rather a general consensus. The women talked about homeschooling and kids, the men about doctrine and work. 

J's children were making themselves unpleasant a short distance away from where we adults were sitting. I could see J was uncomfortable with her kids' behaviour but didn't want to 'usurp' her husband's authority by doing anything about it. At least, she wanted to take the opportunity of making both herself and hubby look good in front of us all. Several times she cast a slightly irritated glance in the direction of her children and then more pointedly at her husband before she hit on the perfect solution. Summoning a sickly tone reminiscent of 50s sit-com housewives, here what she said:

"R, would you mind using your big, strong man's voice and correcting our children? I think they need their Daddy to do that right now."

I almost gagged on my brownie.

This is how submission is done in many QF households. It isn't OK to say, 'Honey, how's about you get off your lazy duff and man up for a change?' but it's fine to 'motivate' your man to do whatever you want by using clever brain-circumventing, ego-massaging manipulation strategies. And if you have a good bucketful of QF cred because of the box-ticking mentioned above, nobody minds a smidge. If she wears a floral frock and talks so sweet she couldn't secretly be (gasp) a manipulative, underhanded bitch, could she?

I have had conversations with QF women about their in-good-conscience use of these techniques many times. I would point out that I was working hard to find ways to respect my husband - and that wasn't easy. Treating him as though he were an idiot would not have been a good strategy for me - even if he liked it a lot. 

And as a young woman, my eyes opening to the power of my own sexuality, I made a decision that I would never, never use tricks of that sort to manipulate a man I cared about - or ones I didn't either. I don't know anyone I despise so greatly that my conscience wouldn't prick me if I patronised them in this way. Manipulation and integrity don't live on the same planet and I don't any longer want to live where we pretend they do. Integrity is too important to trade it off for domestic peace and fundamentalist kudos.

But nonsense like J's is widespread in the QF and patriarchal Christian communities - at least it is in the ones with which I have been associated. In her book "Created to be his Helpmeet", Debi Pearl described several instances when she not only tolerated her husbands infantile tantrums but 'learned how to win', that is, got back into his good books by tempting him with goodies like sex. (I hope I'm remembering this right. I'd go check my copy of Mrs Pearl's book but the kids and I had a Pearl-shredding party a while back. Felt gooood.)

Val Stares, one of the long-time leaders of conservative women's magazine Above Rubies in Australia once told a story at a women's group I attended. Val's husband does not identify himself as a Christian - at least, he didn't then. Val said that once, as she was looking out her kitchen window while he mowed the lawn, she watched as her husband ran over and destroyed a seedling tree that was precious to her. An uncharacteristically unsubmissive ejaculation along the lines of 'Oh, no! Not the ornamental cherry...' escaped Val's lips. Hearing this, her husband pitched a fit stomping and kicking angrily. Poor old him.

While Val is a gorgeous and intelligent woman and while I think the moral of this story was intended to be 'Let him be. Don't criticise' I still don't get it. How could anybody think that anyone benefits from encouraging the man of the house to behave like an three-year-old? That just leads to nowhere good: the women have to put up with and justify a whole heap of moronic behaviours and the kids nearly go mad trying to learn how to be healthy adults while buying in to far-fetched excuses for their father's immaturity. The man himself probably gets the rawest deal - he just stops growing. And what is a life without growth?

Worst of all, bang goes everybody's integrity. The whole family is forced to perform all manner of intellectual and emotional contortions in order to accommodate their own hypocrisy and self-deceit. Trying to live with a growing disparity between your inner and outer identities is a dangerous route. Aye, thar be madness, mateys.

QF patriarchal Christianity such as I have seen it practiced does not value truth and it does not value women. It harms children...and it harms men. It trades integrity for a floral-frocked lie and then tut-tuts at those who don't toe the line as though it has a monopoly on moral high ground. It disgusts me.

My heart breaks for all those women who still believe QF's sales pitch as I once did but I'm saddest for the children growing up inside QF who are unable to develop a healthy, honest sense of self while simultaneously being forced to deny the bleeding obvious and perpetually pretend it is not so. I'm devoting my energies to helping my own darlings walk away from the lie and towards freedom and wholeness. 

she is not tame

 

"So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye
So you think you can love me and leave me to die
Oh, baby, can't do this to me, baby
Just gotta get out, just gotta get right outta here"

A common thread amongst the women I know who have come out of patriarchal fundamentalism is that they revisted their teen rebel stage in one degree or another as they fled. This was certainly true for me. I suppose that's because I willingly gave away my adventurous youth as I entered Christianity when I was 19.

Some of the things I did as I clawed my way to freedom were rather silly, others were more lastingly meaningful. While my ex- and I were still separated under the one roof, I remember going in to a music store and feeling very daring purchasing a Queen album. Playing Bohemian Rhapsody LOUD while I did the vacuuming was a little bit empowering. And I admit I liked the shock value it provided for the X-man. And, if I'm honest, I just enjoyed pissing him off with my 'racket'.

Shortly after that in a fit of giggles my friend L and I had our noses pierced. I've taken mine out now but at the time that little diamante stud was a little symbol of my personhood, a glimmer of the me that 25 years of patriarchal fundamentalism had not been able to tame. I also reinserted the 7 earrings I had worn during my punk days. I've taken most of them out but still wear my helix ring. I haven't gone and got a tattoo but it's feels nice to know that I could if I wanted to.

I gave up so much to become a Christian - much of which was absolutely harmless and did not need to go. I remember burning my Eagles records on a huge bonfire in the grounds of the charismatic church I first attended. One girl 'manifested a demon' as her Madonna LPs went up in smoke further fueling our anti-satanic zeal. Later I gave up all 'secular' music, television and movies and some years later threw away my jeans, jewellery and makeup. It might sound silly but a small part of me died as I relinquished each of those seemingly unimportant preferences.

My 17 year old daughter K tells me that in her darkest hours she found a catharsis in screaming cuss words. That may seem strange to some but I can understand how a girl who felt herself without a voice and full of suppressed rage might discover empowerment in making a lot of angry noise. She wouldn't be the first to have discovered the powerful therapeutic effect of a well-timed obscenity.

Christianity, if it is worth anything at all, is surely not about what believers *don't* do but what they *do*. It is not found in what they turn away from but what they turn towards and pursue with all their hearts. Either Jesus Christ is so intrinsically wonderful that knowing him becomes the foundation and joy of our lives or none of it is worth a tinker's cuss. Whether I drink a glass of wine and whether my kids play with Barbies matters not one jot. When it is all boiled down integrity - who you are and know yourself to be - is all we've got.

I now cannot imagine that a man of any worth would want a tame woman running his errands and sharing his bed. The wildness and power of women allowed to be truly themselves is surely a much more exciting prospect.

are patriarchal fundamentalist churches aspie magnets?

Although my ex-husband has a diagnosis that states otherwise, it is my view that he is probably 'on the spectrum', that is, he has a relatively mild form of Autism called Asperger's Syndrome.

Some of the give-away clues that fuel my conviction are

• his complete lack of normal human empathy - he seems untouched by the suffering of others
• his obsession with his 'special interest' which happens, somewhat fortunately for us, to be work
• his many peculiar habits and rituals
• his increasingly odd gait and facial expression
• his incapacity to read non-verbal language such as facial expressions, body language or tone of voice
• his 'mind blindness' - he cannot imagine that there is anything happening in anyone's head that isn't happening in his own
• his permanent state of high anxiety
• his emotional immaturity and volatility

Being married for 20 years to a man who cannot give or receive love in a normal way was like having my soul scraped out with a rusty spoon. In addition to his coldness he was, as my father had warned me, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Those years of marriage felt like drowning in a vat of treacle while someone slipped a plastic bag over my head and tied it tight. I was being destroyed.

After the kids and I fled, Mr X sent me an email demanding my immediate return. He made what he though was a strong argument by reminding me:

• that I had signed a binding contract before God to stay married to him forever
• that it would be difficult for the children at Christmastime having their parents living apart
• that if I thought I was busy now, just imagine how busy I'd be without him
• that I'd need to get a job

Despite those tempting inducements, I decided to proceed to divorce as have many women married to Aspie men before me. We even have a name: we are Cassandras, named for Cassandra Syndrome which is shrink-speak for what becomes of highly empathetic women (called 'extreme neuro-typicals') when their most intimate relationship is with a brick wall.

I first heard of AS when a Christian woman I hardly knew for some reason told me all about her man. I listened in silence for over an hour before admitting that her husband could be my husband's twin brother. Since that time I have met at least 10 Christian women who have what are very likely Aspie husbands. I encountered several other Christian wives at the Asperger Partner Support Group I visited once or twice.

Suspecting that AS men seem to be significantly over-represented in Christian circles, I asked an international expert at an AS conference if she thought it likely to be so. She replied that that was definitely her view. And it's not surprising. In churches, particularly in fundamentalist ones, AS men find a veritable smorgasbord of women who tick all their boxes. Women who:

• believe in staying with their man no matter what kind of a jerk he turns out to be
• believe in rules such as laid out in the Book, including ones about submitting and obeying...no matter what kind of jerk their man turns out to be
• believe in having children and staying home to look after them
• believe that their body is not their own and will make themselves available for sex on demand
• will allow themselves to be dragged off to the pastor for counselling in submission if they get out of line

Aspies are looking for women who are kindly nurturers, like their mothers, with strong social skills who will care for them and help them manage life in a big scary world full of people they struggle to understand. Churches are full of these gentle, unsuspecting souls and Aspies are expert at tracking them down. An Aspie will go to tremendous lengths to appear normal during the courtship process only to revert to type without ceremony after his target signs the contract.

Christianity may not be responsible for the miserable marriages that ensue but fundamentalist dogma allows an Aspie man to be emotionally uninvolved with his family ('he's a great provider, don't be so ungrateful') so long as he fulfills his duties as leader of family devotions. The fact that there is not the faintest sniff of Christ about the man and each Bible time begins with 'Sit down, shut up and get out your Bibles. You are such disobedient, disrespectful children,' might be a problem if it were generally known but of course it will not be. To complain about your husband is verboten.

Patriarchal fundamentalism also tends always to blame the woman for everything. If he's a useless, she's expecting too much and should lower her standards. If she complains that he never does anything he promises to and is mean to the kids she should go home, shut up and submit more. The 'a good woman can make a great marriage out of a bad one - even if her man does not make one smidge of effort' line damages the hearts of many more women than I'd like to guess at. I was sent away with identical advice each of the 5 or so times I managed to drag my ex to counselling or went alone myself. I'm still mad.

So, yes, I believe patriarchal fundamentalist churches do attract Aspies. And they fail to support and protect AS men's families by letting him get away with being a shit while demanding his wife and children extend his shit-making privileges. Those churches have to accept some responsibility for that.

One of the first steps toward freedom for me was when I told my ex- that from that day on, I would never lie, cover up or excuse his poor behaviour again. If he behaved like a jerk, say, at the table, we were all going to be frank about that. He could own his own immaturity. It was a teensy step in the direction of Integrity for me. And a vital leap forward for my poor children's sanity.

I should add that I'm not down on AS people and am not usually in the habit of throwing people away because they don't suit me. But there are some people, AS and otherwise, who are just not cut out to be husbands or fathers. My former husband is one of those people. And the church supported those characteristics of his that harmed me and my kids. So I'm just saying.