marriage

The Very Best Wifey in the World

Christianese, Family, Gender Roles, Parenting, Relationships

Yesterday in church, our pastor read this to us:

Good Wife's Guide — The Good Wife’s Guide
Image collected from http://j-walk.com/other/goodwife/images/goodwifeguide.gif

The text reads:

Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they get home and the prospect of a good meal is part of the warm welcome needed.

Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh-looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people.

Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.

Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives. Run a dust cloth over the tables.

During the cooler months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too. After all, catering to his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.

Minimize all noise. At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of the washer, dryer or vacuum. Encourage the children to be quiet.

Be happy to see him.

Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.

Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first – remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.

Don’t greet him with complaints and problems.

Don’t complain if he’s late for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through at work.

Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.

Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.

Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.

A good wife always knows her place.

I get it. I get the point that this is supposed to be humor, and that we’re supposed to realize how far we’ve come in the nearly 60 years since this “article” was published. Leaving aside the fact that this is probably a hoax, the problem I have is that for a lot of Christians, this is how they see men and women. Oh, I don’t mean that anyone really thinks that a woman should follow these steps to the letter. I mean that we have roughly the same expectations, just dressed up a little differently.

When women are challenged to be “godly, Biblical wives,” there is a certain reading of the text that leads some people to conclude that a good wife’s duty is to “manage the home.” To be honest, I’m not even sure that anyone knows what that means. I’ve heard it all—everything from being a stay-at-home mom to keeping things neat and clean to making sure that everyone’s relational needs are met. Time and again, we’re told that these are the things women are good at, because we are “different” from men. Being in possession of a vagina somehow magically makes us better at cooking, cleaning, and applying band-aids to scraped knees.

And never mind working wives and mothers. Work isn’t seen as something women should want to do. We’re not supposed to be powerful or have careers and try to advance them or feel passionate about our jobs. Working is just something some women do because they’re single parents or their families are financially insecure or they need something to pass the time while the kids are at school.

On top of that, we are supposed to be superwomen. We get compared to the Proverbs 31 wife all the time. She’s held up as some kind of ideal, the woman we’re supposed to admire and emulate. She feeds everyone, even the servants! She works! Her kids think she’s awesome! She does it all with a smile, in her pearls and high heels! (Okay, I made that last one up.) Even if we have jobs, even if we do volunteer work in the community (and maybe especially then, since it isn’t “real” work), we’re still supposed to make sure that the house runs smoothly, the kids get to bed on time, and everyone is taken care of. Sure, men can be asked to do some basic chores, or maybe make sure the lawn is mown and the trash is taken out to the curb. But it’s wifey’s job to make sure she stays on top of what needs to be done. After all, we can’t expect her powerful, manly husband to come home from his powerful, manly job and do it. If a woman works, it had better never interfere with her ability to care for her family.

What a lot of people don’t understand is that this isn’t just a problem for women. This hurts men, too. What if a woman is a corporate CEO, and her husband is a stay-at-home dad? What if both parents work, and both enjoy their jobs? What if a man is the one who is better at taking care of little one’s boo-boos and sniffles? What if mom is a slob and dad is a neat freak, so he takes care of the tidying and cleaning? What if the wife is good with power tools and the husband is a master chef? And what if it’s because she’s a mechanic and he’s a cook in a restaurant? Are they supposed to suddenly reverse roles in the home? And do any of those things make him less of a man?

I know that some people will say, “Well, of course there are exceptions. These are general principles.” But when the message we hear, week after week, is that a woman is good at _____ and a man is good at _____, it’s hard not to believe something may be wrong with you if it isn’t true. It’s especially upsetting when it’s treated as though these are things we can find in the Bible regarding proper male/female roles. When we don’t fit those roles, we wonder if it’s some kind of sin in our lives that we need to address.

My husband and I chose to have me stay home with our kids. But the reason we did it this way is that his salary was higher. We believed that one of us should stay home, at least while the kids were little. It could just as easily have been my husband taking care of the kids while I worked. Because I’m home, I tend to do more of the chores, although I certainly don’t do everything. My husband is usually the one to help with homework, partly because he’s a teacher and partly because the help required is usually with math (which I can do just fine, but I struggle to teach it). And he’s certainly the more sympathetic and nurturing parent. (Example: One of our kids falls down. Me: “Are you bleeding? No? Good. Go play.” My husband: “Oh no! Are you okay? Do you need a hug?”) So are we “traditional” or not?

The whole thing stems from the basic idea that our differing biology somehow makes us unequal to each other. Over and over and over we’re taught that we have societal roles to fill and that we should not deviate, because it’s not how we were made. We’re told that the Bible “clearly” says this. In fact, the Bible has far more to say about hospitality, social justice, mercy, brotherly love, forgiveness, kindness, and caring for one another than it does about male and female roles within society or the church. Yet we dwell on the latter rather than the former.

Church, is it any wonder that young people are leaving in droves?

A Human Problem, Not a Woman Problem

Relationships, Women

Found this:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbjT8UKxC_8&w=560&h=315]

When I watched it, my first thought was, “I’m not sure what’s wrong with this.”

I’ve experienced every one of the problems he mentions (sadly, sometimes on the giving end). Gossip disguised as “prayer requests” is one of my pet peeves. And I don’t doubt the truth of our thoughts permeating our actions toward others, or that kids imitate the adults around them.

That’s when it struck me.

What’s wrong with this is that Driscoll has reduced it to a problem for wives and mothers. Backstabbing through “prayer,” badmouthing a spouse to friends, and reaming out a spouse in front of the kids is not a women’s problem. It’s a human problem.

Driscoll delivered a message we all need to hear (and did it with surprisingly more reserve than he usually uses). But he limited the exhortation to married women with children, as though this is a female problem. He effectively ignores unmarried women. He misses the fact that prayer gossip is as much a problem in friendship (both male and female) as in couplehood. He seems unaware that kids imitate fathers, too, and a man who verbally abuses his wife in front of them risks raising children who do the same.

Maybe I’m not angry enough about this message. It doesn’t give me the same creepy feeling that most of Driscoll’s crap does. It certainly doesn’t alarm me as much as the way he’s collected groupies across the country. But I do wish that anyone tuning in to hear what he has to say would listen to what’s underlying his sermons.

What’s in a (last) name?

Women

Our family was playing a game called “Truth Be Told.” The point of the game is for one person to ask a question (pulled out of the card box) and write down his or her answer. Everyone else writes down what they think the reader would say. The reader gives all the answers, and everyone else has to guess the real one.

Dear Husband drew a card that said, “Truth be told, the worst thing about being a girl is…” (Yeah, I know. Just by itself that question is horrible. Don’t get me started.) DH, our son, and I all wrote down things related to feminine beauty. DH wrote “uncomfortable clothes,” I wrote “high heels,” and our son wrote “long hair.” It did strike me as funny that all three of us suggested things that I personally find bothersome. Anyway, our daughter had a different take.

She wrote, “Having to change your name.”

We asked her what she meant. She explained that it was exactly what I suspected, women are expected to give up their maiden names when they marry. Apparently, this is not something our daughter is keen on. I suppose that this doesn’t really surprise me, although I didn’t know that my first grader was considering things so deeply.

Apparently, my daughter is more of a feminist at age six than I am at 36.

It’s taken me a long time to stop viewing feminism as the enemy of Christian faith, at least in some sense. Obviously, I’ve always believed that women should have equal pay for equal work, and I have never had any problem with women serving as elders, leaders, and pastors in the church. I certainly think (and teach my daughter to think) that girls are every bit as good as boys and should have no limits on what they are allowed to do. But my one hold-out has always been the issue of maiden name vs. married name.

A long time ago, I accepted the idea that a woman might keep her maiden name for professional reasons or because she was divorced. But I otherwise couldn’t fathom wanting to keep one’s maiden name just because one wanted to. When my daughter made her statements, I had to examine why I was so averse to the idea. I uncovered two basic reasons.

First, some (not all) of the women I’ve known who kept their maiden names were rather self-righteous about it. They made arguments about how taking her husband’s last name is a sign that he “owns” her, and it’s a barbaric tradition. Which, when you think about it, doesn’t make a lot of sense. After all, whose last name is a woman’s maiden name? Probably her father’s. Does that signal, then, that her father still “owns” her? Not only that, but I fail to see how it’s any indication of the kind of relationship I have with my husband. Considering that, I came to my second realization.

I finally understood why I had wanted to take my husband’s last name—and, consequently, understood why my daughter (and perhaps other women, too) might want to keep their maiden names.

When I got married, I couldn’t wait to shed my last name. It had been, to me, and endless source of grief since childhood. I had spent years having peers taunt me by altering my name into rather rude nicknames. It was embarrassing to have an unusual-ish last name. I might have gotten over it, but once I reached college, our family came apart at the seams. My mother took back her own family name. I, too, wanted all traces of that name wiped clean. The name didn’t bring honor, it brought shame.

So I became part of my husband’s family. I considered it a privilege to share his name, to be part of a family so full of love and faith. I am still honored to be called by that name. I suspect that this is what my daughter feels, too. She sees her last name as part of her, a part that signals to the world that she is a part of us and we are a part of her. I hope that the legacy we leave strengthens her resolve to bear that last name with dignity.

Because in the end, that is what a family name should be. Something which reveals to the rest of the world a little piece of who we are and who we love. I always thought that perhaps I would go back to my maiden name if I ever publish anything. I think now that I won’t, for a host of reasons. Should I choose to write under another name, I will use my mother’s family name. It’s a name that holds deep meaning for me, a name that symbolizes something I aspire to be.

As I came to understand why I did choose to take my husband’s name, I also understood why someone else would not. And, like all things, a woman should not have to defend her choice of last names, no matter what she decides to do. I suspect the reason I felt defensive, and perhaps the reason some women sound self-righteous, is that we’re all so used to defending ourselves—even among each other. We should not have to do that.

My daughter may change her mind when she gets married. Or she may not. It doesn’t really matter. Knowing her, she won’t settle for any man other than one who will respect her choice, no matter what she decides.

I need something good to read…hm…how about my wife’s email?

Women

I’m going to go on record, right here and now, saying that my husband does not read my email unless I ask him to do so. I mean, why would he? I don’t check his either.

Honestly, we’re pretty boring people. The emails I receive are only from a few sources. There are emails from church (newsletter articles, notes about the ministries with which I serve); family; my daughter’s Girl Scout leader; tracking information on things I order online at Christmastime; and spam (which GMail kindly removes for me). That’s it. If my husband were to peruse it, he would soon find himself nodding off, it’s so dull.

Of course, there is the little matter of getting me to play the part of the dutiful wife and keep my mouth shut about my opinions. But I guess my husband has learned by now to keep his place and let me have my say. He’s never concerned himself with preventing me from doing what I do best: Giving my opinion. I mean, he probably won’t find a lot of that in my email anyway, and he already reads my blog. So I guess he’s got his bases covered there.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m very much in favor of husbands and wives sharing things with each other, being honest with each other. I don’t bother to share most of what’s in my emails with my husband because it’s boring and irrelevant to him. But I’m not hiding anything in there. Everything he needs to know, he does. Keeping my email to myself isn’t a matter of secrets and lies. It’s a matter of respect. Just as I would never dream of opening up my husband’s email and just going through it, he wouldn’t do that to me.

I’m not saying there would never be occasion to check a spouse’s email. If I ever needed to, I do have my husband’s password, and he has mine. But doing so on a regular basis smacks of paranoia and control issues.

Recently, a fired Mars Hill pastor and his wife came forward with their story of spiritual abuse at the hands of the church leadership. I highly recommend reading the story as written by Jonna Petry, which can be found here. While nearly everything in there is heartbreaking and disturbing, I was particularly upset by this (emphasis mine):

Shortly after this meeting, in my praying for the church that God’s will would be done in the
upcoming changes, I sent a letter to the elders’ wives inviting them to join me in prayer, along
with Scriptures I had been meditating on. Mark, who reads Grace’s emails, was livid about it and
verbally lambasted the elders at their next meeting for not keeping their wives in line.

Wait…did she just say Mark Driscoll reads his wife’s emails?

Don’t get all uppity about whether or not a husband has a “right” to check up on his wife. No, actually, he doesn’t. He doesn’t have the right to act suspicious to the point of violating the respect spouses should have for each other. He certainly doesn’t have the right to violate the privacy of the people who email his wife. This is especially true when he uses the information to control his wife or attempts to use it to control the others in their circles. In fact, that’s abusive.

Demanding that a wife allow her husband free access to her emails isn’t a sign that they are open and honest in their relationship. It’s a sign that she fears him, or she would just change her password and refuse to tell him. I have to wonder what would happen to Grace if she suddenly denied her husband access. In what other ways would he attempt to control or hurt her?

The idea that we need to continually check to see whether the people we love are doing something naughty is not found in Scripture. There is nothing in there that covers the idea that every aspect of a person’s life belongs to his or her partner. While I understand that we want to be sure that our relationships are honest and that communication remains open, violating someone else’s privacy isn’t the way to accomplish that. It’s not a way to build friendships, either. If someone had a personal problem and wanted to email me about it, it would be incredibly violating for her if my husband—without her permission—read the email.

I suppose it could be argued that people in a church know what they’re getting into, that perhaps everyone knows that the pastors and elders all read their wives’ emails (and, apparently, use it to control them). I know that I would absolutely never email anyone in church leadership about anything under those circumstances. That kind of invasive behavior isn’t good for a church, either.

I’m going to celebrate the fact that my husband loves and trusts me enough that he doesn’t need to read my emails or access my Facebook and Twitter accounts to keep tabs on me. I’m also going to pray for women who aren’t so fortunate. I highly doubt that reading emails is the only form of abuse going on in many of those relationships. If that describes you, know that you are not alone and there are places you can go for help.

The Very Best Wifey in the World

A Human Problem, Not a Woman Problem

What’s in a (last) name?

I need something good to read…hm…how about my wife’s email?

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