Kinds of Families

I have often written about the things that were missing from my childhood due to us sacrificing them for God.  Joy-things like music and TV and movies and dancing and alcohol and so on.  Also Christmas, Halloween and Easter.  

   But there's a whole other angle on that that I haven't really written about before.  I'm having a look at it by identifying three kinds of Brethren families.

(Of course every family is utterly unique and doesn't appreciate being put into a category.  But how you going to learn about families in general without generalizing?  Huh?  How? And who knew there was more than one kind?)

Family Style #1: Ours

Sure, our family and the other Brethren families in our area were all editing out these joy-things together, to varying degrees.  But there were these other, special Brethren families of which mine was not one.  We lived on a hobby farm, and my Dad believed that all the free time we had, due to the no socializing, television-watching, sports and going to see live entertainment?  He felt, as did some other families (many with bigger, more actual farms) that free time should all be filled with "work." Because there was "work" to do, and what kind of person didn't do it? 

   My dad grew up on a farm and clearly thought, as did many of his relatives and neighbours, that a boy who was useless on a farm was a useless person who should shut up.  It's pretty rural around here.  My father had no respect for a man who didn't change his own oil and filters.  Or who couldn't toss firewood or haybales in the July heat for a day without complaint.  Or for a woman who didn't know how to make a loaf of bread, starting from flour.  Or for kids who didn't work about as hard as their parents.

   On a hobby farm, almost as much as on a real farm, there's always something one can be doing outside at all times. "Work." There's always heavy stuff to move from one place to another place. There is always animal feed and water, for instance, to attend to.  There is always hay.  Dealing with keeping the house stocked with firewood for the winter was a year-round, never-ending job, too.  (And I never got to use the chainsaw.  I did split my share of wood in my time, first with an axe when I was big enough, and then with a hydraulic thingie when we got one of those.)

  Most importantly, on a farm of any size, it goes without saying, there is crap.  Always lots and lots of crap.  It needs to be moved from one place to another.  And there is endless lawn to mow and hay to see to and a giant garden to pick weeds and rocks out of, to spray for bugs and water if it gets dry.  Work.  In all the decades I've known my parents, there has never not been more work than any five people could do, at which they're never making any headway, but at which they are reluctant to accept any help.  It's just there, calling to all good, useful people to step up and do their duty.  It can be very, very mindless.
    My parents followed our cultural leading and removed almost every bit of joy or fun from our lives, and they filled in the empty space with "work."  This does not appear to have been a recipe for happiness for any of us. 

Family Style #2: Active Families

But there were these other Brethren families.  I didn't really like them.  They had a bit of money, compared to us.  Dressed all preppy.  Had nice cars.  And they were active.  They were outside a whole lot, and they never worked, most of them.  Not that I saw, anyway.  Other people cut their lawns for them, often.  The neighbour kid got paid a few bucks to shovel their walks, too.   They didn't change their own oil or filters.  They had a cottage or something like that. Some of them had a pool table, air hockey, basketball courts, hockey rinks in the back yard, ski boats and waterskis, cross country or snow skis and all manner of that stuff.  It helped to have a bit of money.  It helped to have parents who didn't mind you playing with other kids, even if they didn't go to our church.  It helped if you had a whole lot of siblings to play with.

    Well, our family didn't really go in for all of that.  I don't really know why.  I had the one sister and we didn't play together.  Can't imagine being our own little kid's club with rec facilities.  Would have been quite different.  I surmise that, even if Mom won't let you watch TV, if she often takes you out cross-country skiing or hiking or swimming, or to hockey or basketball, then probably you don't sit around thinking too much, unenriched.  You probably thrive more.  You probably introspect less.  You probably don't mind the rules nearly as much, because there's other stuff you do instead.  

    But our family didn't do things, generally.  Each of us was alone, most of the time.  Mom puttered away, ostensibly cleaning and cooking, to no apparent effect, for no particular purpose or event.  And after twelve, I insisted on cooking my own food and doing my own laundry anyway.  Dad worked outside, getting dirty and sweaty and oftentimes bloody, serving purposes known only to himself.  Increasingly, the two of them conspired to avoid having any "company" whatsoever over to disrupt their careful routines, which (not too coincidentally) didn't require them to be anywhere near each other.  Invitations for me to go to other people's houses or for family meals increasingly got turned down for increasingly odd reasons.  We were, all of us, very alone most of the time, yet just within shouting distance of one another.  And the prospect of going out into crowded social settings, or letting people flood into our sterile, silent setting?  Seemed pretty daunting.

   My memories of childhood involve my mother, seemingly always in the kitchen and/or vacuuming and dusting things, and my father seemingly always outside "fixing" and building and tearing down stuff.  My memories involve knowing that the other kids from Active Families with a bit more money were no doubt playing hockey or volleyball or waterskiing or something.  And knowing that I didn't know anything about all that stuff, and wasn't remotely interested in doing it or hanging out with them either.  And trying to stay inside so I could read or something, yet inevitably being made to go outside, always to go off by myself and do some utterly pointless work that involved getting a sunburn and having every allergy I possessed get tripped, for nothing that seemed terribly vital.  

   And my dad was a gym teacher.  What that meant, in case you never thought about it, was that every single time I had a day off school, he always had that whole day off too.  So he was always there, trying to make me stop being "useless on a farm" by sending me off to do things, hoping I wouldn't need any direction from him.  When I finally got my allergies tested to see what exactly it was that made my head leak so badly, I ended up being allergic to (cutting) grass, (tossing) hay, (carrying and stacking bits of) trees, (cleaning up to get rid of) dust and dust mites and mold and fungus.  And nothing else.

    It was like I developed an allergy to everything my father wanted me to do, to such a degree that the nurse doing the test needed no background knowledge at all in order to basically label me "allergic to what Dad does."  And the thing is?  I think I get those allergies from him.  I think he's allergic to all of those things too and just "works" right through it, hawking up phlegm and having a running nose and eyes like me while he does it, coughing and wheezing.  I think he just accepts it as part of how work works.  He's tough like that.

   I think it's safe to say that my summer and Christmas and spring vacations were about my father desperately fighting me, head-to-head, to make me stop being "useless on a farm," and me fighting to be useless enough that he'd give up and let me read things and play with computer programming and electronic and music and recording stuff.  He, quite naturally, feared all this was evidence I was gay.  (And he wouldn't let me help him with his spelling or what bible words meant.  And he needed some help with all of that. Years later, he's learned a lot.  On his own.)

   And I think I'd get no argument at all that, after a long hard battle, by the time I got my first job at age 16, I had won.  I was and am, useless on a farm.  I know very well exactly how to change my own oil and filters, and yet I let the ten year old girls at Mr. Lube do it for me. The only skills I come out of the experience with are animals liking me and me liking them, being able to split firewood with an axe, and being able to also use the axe to cut the heads off protesting chickens and turkeys.  Nowadays, I seldom have need of an axe.  I make a point of not having one in my classroom.  But no doubt that head-to-head struggle to try to force children not to be useless (in reading and writing) is something my students would recognize.  But they only have to deal with me for an hour a day.  And not on holidays, evenings and weekends.

Family Style #3 Activist Families

But I eventually learned there was a whole third type of Brethren family too.  I didn't quite believe they existed or were really true for the longest time.  We didn't have that kind of family around here, really.  Often they moved to remote parts of the planet.  Their parents tended to be missionaries or similar.  They edited out all the joy-stuff just like we did, but they filled it in with actually trying to do good for the world.  "Charity work."  Some of them got medals for it.
   But most of us didn't do it at all.   Thing is, we'd all been raised to believe that the world was evil and dangerous and beyond saving.  It was going to burn.  Any day now. Spontaneous global warming/combustion.  Trying to help was condescendingly called "painting deck chairs on the Titanic."

    If people came to our door asking for money, we often gave them a bit, though we didn't have a lot.  But we certainly never fundraised or did charities.  We let other people do all that.  After all, we could just donate money and old clothes to other churches like the Salvation Army so they could go and do it for us.
   But we ourselves didn't go do that stuff.   We wouldn't have known where to begin.  Might have involved actually learning who the needy people in our town were, and who under heaven thought that would be a good idea? So we never got to look someone in the eye and give them stuff that they needed.  So as a kid, my old clothes and a bit of our family money here and there just...disappeared.  And that was that.  Charity without feeling charitable.

   This summer I proof-read a doctoral thesis which makes the point that this "the world's soon gonna burn!" attitude goes hand in hand with a "why not throw your trash all over it and rip it the frack up to get whatever we want out of it as fast as we can?" one.  I wonder a whole lot right now what my emotional and spiritual development would have been like if my church and my family had given me the experience of helping actual people with actual stuff they needed help with.

   But as it is, we viewed with suspicion any work that brought one into too much contact with "the children of this world."  We needed to remember the blessed truth of separation.  Heads were shaken and tuts were tutted over people who had neighbour kids into their house in an attempt to try to get them to come to church, and ended up with neighbour kids dating their daughters.  How foolish!  (more than one neighbourhood kid ended up at church because they thought the Brethren girls were hot.  And they were. They had to look good even without makeup and sexy clothes.)

The doctoral thesis that I edited also spoke of:

a) Christians who try to make the world better only by preaching at it and giving out pamphlets (which soon become litter in a landfill), 

b) Christians who at least pretend to be doing charity work, but are mainly using it as a cover story while they REALLY are simply planning to evangelise, 

and 

c) Christians who actually want to make a difference and care and therefore do the charity work so hard that it works, rather than just to be seen doing it, and get a "gospel message" in.

Most of the folks in our area churches did none of those three things.  Our family certainly didn't, and we didn't really know anyone who was much different.  Mostly, people who want to do stuff soon left our church.  Our church had a way of filtering them out.  Or they were on the other side of the globe.  We sent a few odd, old guys to go do our preaching for us, mostly as far away from our area as we could afford to send them.   We had guys in African and Indian and Brazilian and Columbian metropolises the likes of which our country knew nothing, trying to hand out our gospel pamphlets to Catholics, Methodists and Baptists there.

   But I never tried to achieve any sectual reproduction on the sidewalk.  I never played on a team.  I was never part of cubs or boyscouts.  I never took lessons.  I never raised money for charity.  I never felt like I was helping.  And I think I would be a better person today if I had done more of those things.  As it is, I don't play well with others.

   This is important: you can show your kids that they can help solve problems, or you can show your kids that you think they are a problem, and little else.  I think that all those rules and all of that pious sacrificing of joy-stuff wouldn't have hurt many of us so much if we'd actually done some good for the world while we were busy not doing all of that fun stuff.  I really do.