This post is for me as much as for you all.

I would love to lose my internal bias towards women as "okay" not working and men not.

It is so knee-jerk in me this jerk being myself.

And boy do Mormons hold this bias up as holier than many of their other sacred cows.

The "funny" thing is that there are acceptable jobs women can have but there is no such thing as an acceptable stay at home father.

You can be a wife, mother, and teacher, nurse, or other traditional female job but you can't have a better job their your husband and he sure as Outer Darkness can't stay at home and do the chores.

I find myself returning to our neighbors time an again since they revel in their traditional family life. The mother thought that maybe to help her kids with college she might want a job but her husband told her that she had kids at home still (in high school) and she shouldn't even think about getting a job with that situation.


Really?


But when I've heard about a person in my wife's ward where the husband lost his job and they are relying on the wife's income it is a debacle. And I've been a part to judging him. Thank goodness I can come to my senses quickly but that damned knee of mine.


How much different is him doing the laundry and carting the kids around than my neighbor doing it?


There is no difference. She tries to be productive in gardening, canning, home remodeling and repair but often these traditional male projects get finished by her husband. So what makes her situation (pretty much able to do whatever she wants with her days) different from a man being able to do this? Nothing. Nada. Zilch.


Do I judge her? I do. I confess. The reason she said she wanted a job was to help her eldest daughter got to school who didn't want to do what she and her husband wanted - stay at home and go to school to become a nurse. Her daughter got married after high school graduation and is now pregnant hawking multi-level marketing products online and also working for a temp agency until her time for delivering their first grandchild. Said daughter has no real plans to go to school and is thrilled that her (daughter) husband will have a good job after completing his engineering school and that she can help their new little family with her home businesses.


I judge her(my neighbor) because her desire to help her daughter seemed to me half hearted. Like her husband telling her she can't get a job was it. Matter closed.


Was that really what she wanted?


God, the Mormon programing runs deep in me but seeing it play out next door is good for my recovery.

This is a very complex issue. I don’t want to get into the first part of your post.

I’ll answer your last question “was that really what she wanted?”

Most likely yes. As a girl, who grew up in the lds church, I was told that my goal in life should be being a wife, mother and a homemaker. Many girls grow up with this dream. They want to have large families and a husband, who will take care of them. I went to the Business school at BYU. So many of my classmates switch their majors after they got married (girls). The bus school is challenging and hard to get into. Once they were married, they felt their education wasn’t important anymore, and they could do something more fun - like art. I felt bad for them. I also have a friend, who has her husband in medical school. She could be working and bringing income to their home. Nope, she’s married. She’s not going to work. She waits for her husband to finish school and residency (so like 7 more years to go).

What scares me the most is that these women are convinced that their husbands will stay married to them, or that their husbands will become doctors one day. They don’t ever want to admit that plans don’t always work out.

goldrose Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What scares me the most is that these women are
> convinced that their husbands will stay married to
> them, or that their husbands will become doctors
> one day. They don’t ever want to admit that
> plans don’t always work out.


I wish I knew some probabilities on it working out.


From my perspective their daughter is pregnant in a small apartment working part time doing office work and part time hawking overpriced product for a couple of MLM companies. Her husband is in the last couple of years of school.


My guess is her risking her life and that of another person (her child) in being an impoverished single mother is not that high? Support from her parents and grandparents would be difficult but would probably happen. She has a safety net. But I know she was sold a dream which dovetailed perfectly with her obsession with boys. She still has told my kids post marriage how there are some guys in the office she works at who seem interested in her.

I really don’t get Mormons anymore. And I officially left only a year ago. My coworkers in NYC are worried about getting married and making it financially. They make good $$$. Sure, life in NYC isn’t cheap, but they have their priorities straight. Mormons very often don’t think. They jump into it

I was raised and groomed to live my mother's life. The trouble was, she was from another generation. My parents encouraged me to get a college education, because they knew I would be more on the level of the type of Mormon male I was supposed to marry. Of course, being TBM's, I had to go to BYU. I had to struggle against the stereotype of being a future "Temple CK Priestess" VS someone who really loved books and learning.

When my life circumstances left me abandoned by my husband, with zero child support or alimony, no income, no home, and children to support, I cried for about two weeks! Then, one morning, I woke up and saw reality. I wasn't missing my husband. That love vanished in the two minutes it took him to tell me that he didn't want a family, he didn't want children, and he didn't want to even visit them, and he wasn't going to give us any money. I could not love a man who would completely abandon his children.

I was crying, and feeling sorry for myself, because I would have to become that dreaded single-divorced-working-mother! My Mormon friends told me to get married to someone else. That was no reason to get married! I realized that I had been raised that being divorced, and having to work, were two of the biggest curses--the biggest failures--for a Mormon woman. My mother used to treat workers and service people like DIRT--and now, I was part of that "working class."

Like the rest of my life, my major source of unhappiness was usually Mormon-related. I jumped into a career suddenly, because I was literally out of money, and that need, and probably fear, motivated me to work hard, learn all I could, as fast as I could, and try to be smart. And be honest and genuine with people. I believed people were basically good, and I sincerely liked all my clients, and served them the best I could. I also was grateful to my mentor who hired me, in the first place, and I wanted the company to be successful. I was even more passionate about my children! Had I not worked under pressure, I wouldn't have felt that much passion, wouldn't have met the great people I met, wouldn't have had the interesting experiences. I certainly wouldn't have developed that dreaded confidence that a woman is not allowed to have in the Mormon world. I became strong enough to question, and stand up to the Mormon leaders who were abusing my children--as soon as my kids finally told me the things that had happened to them.

The Mormon cult likes to keep the women home, under subjugation to the males, depressed, lonely, unloved (no unconditional love in Mormonism), underappreciated, uneducated. Mormon value "humility", and they have their own definition of the word.

Being "the breadwinner" gave me confidence, and power! My children admired me. The respected what I was doing for them, and they wanted to help me, to please me, so they didn't give me any trouble. In fact, they got jobs to help out, from early babysitting jobs and paper routes, to after school jobs when they were old enough. They put themselves through college, and some grad school, with my help. I admit, though, that I was home with my children for the first 7-12 years of their lives.

I bought my own house, which gave me the courage to throw Mormon abusers out of my house! I even told one large, scary Mormon man, who was shoving and picking up my son to carry him off to a church function, "I am the head of this household, and I'm telling you to leave my son alone, and get out! You are trespassing, and I'm calling the police!" No, the Mormons don't want their women to do things like that.

As for stay-at-home fathers, there seemed to be a lot of men in the Mormon singles who were looking for that. Several of them married divorced and women who lived in our area. Four of the women ended up losing their houses, because they mortgaged them to help their new husband start a business, or pay off his debts. One new husband said they were going to remodel the house, and he refinanced it under his name. When he divorced her, she had to sell her home, to pay him off. My nephew, who is a con-man, is a "house-husband." My ex-husband who beat me went to a few classes each day, while I worked full-time to put him through school. Because of these and other experiences, I would be very suspicious of "stay-at-home fathers."