Most fundamentalist Christian parents don’t teach their kids comprehensive sex education, or allow them to be taught it at school, either. I had already had a child when I learned how to notice when I was fertile during my cycle.
I have four beautiful children that I love dearly, but if I could do things over, I would choose to finish college and establish something of a career before having kids that I could fall back on when needed, and be more intentional about when I had children.
Here I am in my 40’s trying to figure out how to listen to and make decisions for myself, as 1) my family needs me to go to work due to financial strain, and 2) existing to support my husband’s goals and career and caretake and homeschool my kids because that’s what I was told was my role as a woman and the only way to please God, has not proven to be as blessed or as satisfying as I was promised. My children are also at normal childhood developmental stages of differentiation. They don’t need or want me in the same ways, and I’m grappling with how our relationships should be as I learn more about child development and emotional health and have discarded Christian fundamentalist parenting methods and have come face to face with religious trauma and abuse from my own childhood.
I didn’t lose my identity when I became a mother. There was not much to lose, because I wasn’t allowed to have a truly autonomous identity before I became a wife and mother. My feelings about things were continuously dismissed and invalidated by my Christian mother. I wasn’t allowed to have and express opinions. I was raised to survive, to do what others wanted me to do, because we lived in poverty and isolation and my dad was mentally ill and abusive. I loved to learn, but could not decide what I should do with my life because I wasn’t allowed to have feelings and opinions about things. So I waited and prayed, and waited and prayed, begging God to show me what his difficult to discern, perfect will and ultimate destiny was for my life. I wasn’t taught I could want things and plan for them, that I could listen to myself and make decisions. Many of my life choices were not intentional choices, they were by default, or by doing what I was told I should do. My husband is a wonderful man, but there was a part of me that in choosing to get married was resigning myself to the idea that if God didn’t divinely reveal to me his hidden plan for my life, that my purpose must be what the church told me: get married, support and submit to my husband, have babies, homeschool, then teach younger women to do the same things. The fruit of those teachings has been bitter, not sweet.
Yep yep yep! And this applies to so many areas of life - marriage, sexuality, careers ...
Sadly, it does.
Most fundamentalist Christian parents don’t teach their kids comprehensive sex education, or allow them to be taught it at school, either. I had already had a child when I learned how to notice when I was fertile during my cycle.
I have four beautiful children that I love dearly, but if I could do things over, I would choose to finish college and establish something of a career before having kids that I could fall back on when needed, and be more intentional about when I had children.
Here I am in my 40’s trying to figure out how to listen to and make decisions for myself, as 1) my family needs me to go to work due to financial strain, and 2) existing to support my husband’s goals and career and caretake and homeschool my kids because that’s what I was told was my role as a woman and the only way to please God, has not proven to be as blessed or as satisfying as I was promised. My children are also at normal childhood developmental stages of differentiation. They don’t need or want me in the same ways, and I’m grappling with how our relationships should be as I learn more about child development and emotional health and have discarded Christian fundamentalist parenting methods and have come face to face with religious trauma and abuse from my own childhood.
I didn’t lose my identity when I became a mother. There was not much to lose, because I wasn’t allowed to have a truly autonomous identity before I became a wife and mother. My feelings about things were continuously dismissed and invalidated by my Christian mother. I wasn’t allowed to have and express opinions. I was raised to survive, to do what others wanted me to do, because we lived in poverty and isolation and my dad was mentally ill and abusive. I loved to learn, but could not decide what I should do with my life because I wasn’t allowed to have feelings and opinions about things. So I waited and prayed, and waited and prayed, begging God to show me what his difficult to discern, perfect will and ultimate destiny was for my life. I wasn’t taught I could want things and plan for them, that I could listen to myself and make decisions. Many of my life choices were not intentional choices, they were by default, or by doing what I was told I should do. My husband is a wonderful man, but there was a part of me that in choosing to get married was resigning myself to the idea that if God didn’t divinely reveal to me his hidden plan for my life, that my purpose must be what the church told me: get married, support and submit to my husband, have babies, homeschool, then teach younger women to do the same things. The fruit of those teachings has been bitter, not sweet.