:Naiahdot

Note: I originally published this for just a few minutes right after I wrote it, but then I took it down and sent it in email to select group of my closest friends and confidants. I have decided to go ahead and make it public now.

I can’t speak as to how legally defensible it is, and judging by the recent treatment of the members of the FLDS church, it isn’t, but I would like to claim for myself, and for others who choose it, the right to opt out.

I have written recently that my mind has been weighed down by what feels to me to be the very wrong nature of this paradigm of suburban life. In many ways, I have already rejected much to do with this. As a family, we have chosen to do away with tv. We have been tv-free for over 4 years now. On several occasions, upon mentioning such, I have been met with uncertain or nervious laughter as people try to figure out whether I am kidding or not. It’s just too weird for them, too outside the norm wherein the average American watches something like 5 hours of tv a day. I just want to ask these tv-watchers when the last time was that they really looked at what they were watching. In the ever-vicious war for ‘ratings,’ or ‘viewers,’ television writers are forever pushing the proverbial envelope, offering up fare that is further and further outside the accepted norms of moral social behavior. The only trouble is that society is now an addict, feeding into a wretched cycle in which the envelope is pushed, and what was once outside the norm is slowly absorbed by those who watch it, and then, in order to keep those viewers, they have to push it a little further, only then the viewers soak that up, too. It’s a desperately dangerous slipperly slope, and all for what? Entertainment? There are far more valuable, more fulfilling ways to wile away one’s brief hours upon this planet (now is the time for men to perform their labors). Instead, like the junkie who needs his fix, society digs itself ever deeper into the hole that Hollywood digs. It’s a perniciuos evil, and I have chosen to opt out. Poeple think that’s weird, like way too weird, but I just can’t, in good conscience, allow that influence into my home and therefore into my children’s hearts and minds.

Though I have always been quick to say that “we’re not freaky homeschoolers,” I also homeschool my children. In doing so, though it was nto my initial intention, I find that I have saved them from a level of moral corruption that is present, yes, in even the earliest years of elementary school. The level of sexual language that I hear from friends of theirs from church or at our taekwondo school is just wrong, and yet, once those children are exposed to such things, never can it be expunged from their minds. Innocence lost is gone forver; never can the shadow of that stain be removed. While I sympathize greatly with friends of mine who consciously choose to keep their children in the public schools, putting them forth as examples to the world, I do not feel that it is in keeping with my stewardship to my Heavenly Father for the care and well-being of my children that I subject them to such things. I have no false notions that I can keep such influences out of their lives forever, but I do hope to raise them apart from it enough to see it for the corruption and perversion it is.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, may the feminists hang me, but I love being a mother and a housewife. I love nurturing, caring for, teaching, guiding, and just plain enjoying my children. I love working to have a sweet place for my family to provide a place of rest. Few things give me more satisfaction than having my husband arrive home from work to plasant children whose needs are met in a home that is orderly enough to offer no offense to the presence of the Spirit, with a nourishing tasty meal for us all to share.

Society has gone astray; there’s no two ways about it. I feel so trapped in it, for all that I opt out in the ways that I can. I wish I could do as some have done, and seek a better paradigm elsewhere, but somehow, I do not feel like that is possible for me. I have a friend who sold his house in Seattle and bought 83 acres off the grid in another country and is seeking to build a better way of life there, better for the people, better for the earth. Only God is missing. My friend might argue that he is god, and I’m never quite sure how serious he is about it. For me, though, there is only one God, our Father in Heaven, to be worshipped in the name of Jesus Christ through communion with the Holy Ghost.

That’s really what it’s about for me in the end, freedom of religion. I’m not talking legal freedom; I’m talking social freedom. The freedom to live in full harmony with the scriptures–uncompromised, with no ‘lesser laws.’ The freedom to unrestrainedly feel and live by full charity for all your brothers and sisters. The freedom to be modest and feminine. The freedom to turn one’s back on the ever-darkening gray areas of society and pitch one’s tent facing the white, giving the black NO sway at all. The freedom to choose the right–the right way of life, with healthy influences and passtimes, spending days in satisfying honest work and selfless service.

Much of the entertainment and lesiure of modern suburban life I find less and less to be luxuries and more taints to be endured. Even the computer on my lap, I often wish I did not have to deal with–if you can believe it. Perhaps I have painted myself into the corner of cliche, that inescapable reflection of modern scientific progress, the longing for a simpler life.

I want to serve God. I want to serve my family. I want to serve my fellow-men. BUT, I don’t want to be seen as a ‘weirdo’ for so doing. Neither do I want to go to the mall and spend outrageous amounts of money for clothing I wouldn’t be caught dead in a season or two later (not that I do). I want to be free from the societal laws of fashion, fads, trends, and all those other unspoken distractions and diversions from the godly. Clothing is on my mind, after I read an article in USA Today belittling the looks & style of dress of the FLDS women, which left me somewhat incensed. I love how they dress, how they do their hair. It is beautiful, modest, and feminine, and if I could get away with it in everyday life, I would look quite similar–but I can’t, not if I want to be taken seriously.

Every time I find myself thinking of what so-and-so would think of what I wanted to wear that day, I find myself so bothered by these constraints. What nonsensical and pointless trouble we cause each other along these lines! To be covered modestly, to dress sweetly by ones own feelings should be enough, and yet, we all feel a need to ‘dress to impress’ which drives us to cast aside whole garments for being outdated, to spend money that could do much good in the world on something more ‘current.’ I hate that, that if I want to be taken seriuosly by other women that I have to dress in a way that says so–in a way that is at odds with my conscience. I am so tired of compromising my values on this score, and yet, if I am to function in and be any influence for good in this world, I find again and again that I need to ‘look the part.’

Our modern life is tearing me apart. I want to be an influence for good, but you can’t be too white in a gray area or you will be discounted and cast aside, ineffectual. So, the whole point of being in the world is undone by trying not to be of the world. We live a paradox, saints in the world, and some days I just lose the thread and can’t wrap my head around it any longer.

I long for a simpler life, a godlier life. I long to opt out of the whole suburban paradigm. I will not be of this world. I cannot. I know that I am of a different one, a holier one, one to which I long to return. I can only hope and pray that the taint and stain of my mortal compromises made in the name of not being ‘too’ peculiar does not preclude that homecoming. How can one be a saint seeking perfection as long as one chooses to remain in a lifetyle driven by the adversary?

4 Comments