A Rant About the Church on Marriage and Divorce, Etc.

Maybe I'm bitter - but I can't stop thinking about this, the bill of goods we've been sold as women. I just finished reading Vinegar Hill and the priest describes to the young woman about to be married her role as the "hearth" and the "home". What if the hearth has no one to stoke the fires? What if the home is more of a house, empty and fractured? What then?
I have been told throughout the years by well-meaning (and much loved) Christian friends that they couldn't condone divorce. They would support me through a separation - hold my hand, help me financially, even give the kids and I a place to live - but that divorce was never going to be an option. I have been in circles before where women who were divorced were whispered about when they left the room, tongue in cheek as one person would lean over and say, "this is her second marriage". Like I needed to know, be warned.
I am in a crisis so perhaps I will look back on this years later and come down on a completely different side of the issue - but for right now I am really struggling. Please filter whatever you read here through that fact. Right now I am angry. The "church" as an institution that would hold to this belief that I am less of a woman if I divorce my husband, that even through all of the hell I've lived and how I've tried to love in spite of it, I have failed. That I am a failure.
God hates divorce. It is true - but I know He sees what my kids and I have endured, and hates it as well.

A Monday Morning Rant About Freedom

Last night the kids and I watched the movie "Martian Child". It was the story of an eccentric little boy in the foster care system who thought he was from Mars. It was a very neat story, and I won't share it all, but one quote - the moment the adoptive father, who is a writer gets how the boy feels all the time when his publisher tells him, "Why can't you be who we want you to be!?" This left me thinking.....
People are so intimidated by freedom, especially when you give it to your kids. So many people don't want children to have a say on anything in their lives. It seems the whole world is convinced that when left to themselves, they will all go down the wrong path. I have to assert that isn't so. In fact, I've seen far too many kids sprung from the restrictions of their parents home, and do more damage in the first year or two away from that rule oriented, authoritarian environment than they could've done in all the other years collectively. It seems to me, if they understood that this life was their own, and not something they were being forced to live to the standards and approval of others aside from God, would they not perhaps being given this freedom, guard that life, and care about their future all the more? Then, even if they make mistakes or do things we don't wish them to do, they can claim them as their own and not look at them as "disappointing the folks".
I know I have a long way to go here, and it isn't as if there aren't things, boundaries of mutual respect, and safety issues in our home, there are. Just yesterday one of my kids walked to a restaurant on the highway to get some change without letting me know - and I went ballistic, because it scared me. I am not saying"it's all good" or being morally relative. I am saying that kids need some breathing room. Don't set them up with so many rules that they are destined to mess up.
Why does allowing children freedom upset some people so much? I can't tell you how many times at a church potluck I've had people come to tell me that my middle daughter was only having dessert, or any of a number of other things that are trivial to me when it comes to raising my kids. I want them to be honest, loving, kind, compassionate - eating cake and playing with sticks are areas where we throw caution to the wind.
Childhood is only once people. Let your children out of the cage.

A Wee Confession

If somebody is handing out the bad mommy award, I earned it today. Slap it right down here and leave it for a while. I made a complete and total spectacle of myself in front of my children. I won't make excuses. I won't say how very very much I HATE the mall (yet another thing I have in common with my new dear friend, fatty), but I will suffice to say that it was an exhausting day. I think that perhaps there is something testosterone driven about shopping that I don't have - as what we did today bore a keen resemblance to hunting. We walked back and forth across the mall several times , and I was wearing sandals that were rubbing some painful spots on my feet, as the girls tried on the same dresses for the ump-teenth time. I was trying so hard to be patient, when finally, one of them made a decision. The dress was purchased and we finally went to get Chinese for lunch. It was upon returning to the mall to resume the hunt for the indecisive sister that it happened. The fit. I threw one and threw it badly. Not out loud in the mall, but when we went to the car to look for the purse that the daughter that conquered her dress (I'll never tell who is who) noticed she no longer had, I screamed in utter frustration. I feel so badly about it now - but it is the second major loss of a purse in the last 6 months (between the girls - not the same one), and we have just finally replaced some valuable items that went missing the last time around. We did retrace our steps to the dressing room - and realized it was in the excitement of the procurement of THE "perfect dress" that caused her to completely forget about her purse. Thankfully another customer had found it and returned it to the clerk, who gave it to us. However, not long after the recovery we noticed that while her cell phone was in her purse, her iPod Nano that she got for Christmas was not. I was tired, I was grouchy, I was frustrated and behaved badly. I have apologized to all three of my children who had to listen to me rant. Now it's out - I'm not perfect - in fact hopelessly flawed. Don't you hate it when you make it so obvious?
I will hopefully be able to post some pictures of our shopping trip tomorrow, minus pictures of ranting mama - you'll just have to mentally insert a picture of a PMSing Roseanne. Of course the chosen dresses cannot be revealed until the formal so you'll all just have to wait.