Religious Groups

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Eleven

HA Editorial Team1 Comment

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on September 12, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Ten

Part Eleven: The Good Girl Who Couldn’t be Good

The first few years we were a part of the LaQuiere cult, it was fairly easy to meet expectations.

Everyone viewed me as one of the “good” kids…I was a rule-follower by nature, and that made me a perfect fit for Joe LaQuiere’s legalism!

I got in some small difficulties over the rule to “never argue”, because my dad had taught me from an early age the delights of debate.  He gave me books on detecting logical fallacies, and my favorite game (though maybe not his) was to debate issues with him, and, if possible, win my point through rock-solid logic.  If I could use logic to prove to my dad that I was right, then he would concede, and I would get my small victory!  I’m not sure Joe LaQuiere knew my dad allowed this…if he did, he would have been very disapproving (as he was already very disapproving of my dad for trying to debate with him).  When I disagreed with my dad, it was called debating, and we both understood the rules and appreciated the game.  With my mom, it was called “arguing”, and she expected (understandably) not to have to logically defend every instruction she gave me!  So I was often in trouble with my mom, but that was pretty much the only crack in my “goodness”.

My sister R, by contrast, had plenty of trouble until she was about twelve.  She was very stubborn…she liked to contradict…and she did not like to follow rules!  Joe LaQuiere believed she just needed strong enough motivation and she would “snap to”.  He was right.  Turns out, what she needed was a strong enough personality to win her allegiance, and Joe succeeded at this around the time she turned twelve.  I’m not sure what he said or did that caused her to change, but she did an astonishing about-face, and from then on, Joe LaQuiere had her complete loyalty.  She was now his biggest fan: she started scrupulously following rules, and was determined to live up to his expectations and please him.  When we eventually left a few years later, she went to bat as Joe LaQuiere’s model pupil–she begged and pleaded and argued with my dad to no avail to convince him to let us stay in the group.  Both she and my mom had extremely strong ties of loyalty to Joe, and it was very difficult for them to let go when we left.

To this day, both of them (but especially my sister R) have a difficult time hearing Joe LaQuiere spoken of poorly.

They don’t like to hear his following called “a cult”, and my sister will still talk about his “wisdom” and how much of what he taught was “really good”.  She raises her children using many of his training methods.

Meanwhile, I didn’t have my sister’s advantage of a flattering conversion story to endear Joe LaQuiere to me, but he still seemed to approve of me for being the small rule-follower that I was, and I eagerly lapped up the crumbs of his approval like a starving puppy.  As one of the younger children, I would vie for the coveted opportunity to sit on his lap while he taught – the ultimate place of privilege.  It made me feel special and noticed. On one very special occasion, I was sitting at Joe LaQuiere’s feet while he was talking to the adults, just quietly listening to him, while Mrs. LaQuiere was getting ready for dinner, setting the table, and handing out related small chores.  My sister R was enlisted to help from whatever she was doing, and after a minute, she or perhaps my mom tried to pull me away to come help too.  Joe intervened, comparing me to Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, and my sister to Martha.  He said he wasn’t going to send me away.  I had chosen “the better thing” by sitting at his feet listening to him, and that was where I could stay.  I couldn’t believe it: it was one of the huge moments in my young life where I felt of value.  I never forgot that moment.  Occasionally Joe LaQuiere would also use me as an example of a “good child”, or say to someone, “S would never think to do that, would you?  She’s a good girl.”  And I would duck my head shyly, but inside I was beaming.  It felt so incredibly good to earn his approval!  I lived for those moments.

Like my sister, I too had found in Joe LaQuiere someone to hero-worship: someone to fill the yawning hole left in my heart by my shamed failure to make my own father proud of me.

Years later, when we left the cult, I joined with my sister and mom in trying to convince my dad to change his mind.  I didn’t want to leave behind the only source of approval I had.

Even though I was a veteran rule-follower, it was still more difficult than you’d imagine to earn an “A” in Mr. LaQuiere’s class.

He taught us that God had given all of us “everything we need for life and godliness” – which meant everything we needed to be perfect.

In fact, we were called to “be perfect” – it was right there in black-and-white in Mr. LaQuiere’s King James Bible: Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.  Joe reasoned that God would never call us to do something that we weren’t perfectly (ha, see what I did there?) capable of doing!  Therefore, we could be perfect: we could live our lives and never sin, not even so much as one bad attitude or snarky look.  It’s pretty clear that if you can be perfect, and yet, you’re not perfect, it’s because you are choosing not to be.  Because of this, we were berated for any and every misstep, because our goal was to live perfect lives, and so win God’s pleasure and approval of us.

As a part of these impossibly-high standards, our parents used a system of public praise/shame to encourage all the children to work harder at correcting character flaws.

Every week, all the parents in the group would announce what character fault each child needed to work on, and then the following week, our “scores” would be publicly announced.  Those who did well…90%…93%…held their heads high!  Those who squeaked by with something in the high 80s could at least heave a sigh of relief and jump off the figurative hot seat until next week.  But those with bad scores had nothing but public shame to look forward to.  They would be reminded that not only were they required to please their parents and God in everything in all their outward actions, but to be perfectly obedient inside as well, in their every attitude.  Nothing less would satisfy a holy God.

As a champion rule-follower, (with no small amount of pride in the fact, I may add!) nothing less than a perfect score satisfied me.  But it was surprisingly difficult to achieve, even for someone like me.  I did get a perfect 100% the first few weeks…but as Mr. LaQuiere would have said, pride goeth before a fall.  The very next week I was supposed to work on “not arguing”…and on “doing everything I was asked without question, with a good attitude”.  Not only did I scrupulously avoid arguing with my mom, giving ingratiating smiles and being sickeningly cheerful while I followed out every instruction she could think up, but I even swore off debating with my dad!  Finally Wednesday night came around, and before we left for our weekly meeting at Joe’s house, my dad tallied up our scores and averaged out percentages.  He told us what we had earned, and I waited eagerly to hear that coveted “100%”.  I knew I hadn’t argued even once – I didn’t trip up a single time all week – I had been perfect!  Then my dad gave me my score…99%.  I gulped at the unfairness of it, and had to stop myself from arguing with him (talk about pouring salt in the wound!), which would have been punished by my dad lowering my score even more.  I carefully asked him why I only got 99%, and what I had done wrong.  He informed me, my mom nodding in agreement, that the 99% was because he wanted me to learn that I was not perfect, and that I could not be perfect, and that a 100% would be puffing me up with sinful pride.  And that was that.  I never got 100% again, even though plenty of other parents gave their children perfect grades.  I gritted my teeth every time another child got what I was sure in my youthful arrogance was an undeserved perfect score, while my own dad refused to give me the scores I felt I earned.

I’m not sure how I was supposed to reconcile Joe’s teaching that we could be and must be perfect to earn God’s approval with my dad’s insistence that I could never reach perfection.

Of course, I now realize that my dad was closer to the mark than Joe was.  We can never reach perfection on our own – but we don’t need to, because we have Jesus’ perfect score applied to us every day!  I wish I had been taught that as a child, instead of being pushed further and further into harsh perfectionism that exhausted my soul and set me up for a life of spiritual defeat.

In my quest to reach perfection, and finally feel God was pleased with me, my failures loomed far larger than my small triumphs.

There was the time that I said something wrong while working construction together with the rest of the families…I can’t even remember what it was I said.  I have a feeling I gave an adult a sarcastic answer (my gift of sarcasm was definitely not appreciated!) and I remember my parents, Joe LaQuiere, and my Aunt C discussing my crime while I sat unnoticed or ignored beside them on the floor in Joe’s office (a place I hated because it was always associated with shame and punishment).  I wasn’t spanked for being disrespectful, but Joe LaQuiere told me he was very disappointed in me, and that I had lost his respect, and my Aunt C said, not to me, but meant for me to overhear, “If I knew she was like that, I would rather have seen her dropped in the foundation we’ve been digging, and buried up to her neck.”  I’ve never forgotten those words.  I’m not entirely sure why she came up with that theoretical punishment, exactly…but she was quite fond of hyperbolic half-serious threats of things she’d “rather see” or “would do” if the occasion warranted.  She once told my sister R that if she ever caught her painting her toe-nails like worldly girls (what shameless harlotry!), she would rip her nails out by the roots!  And then she laughed, so we would know it was (at least partly) a joke.

My other failure that haunted me for a long time was of “carelessness”.  My mom’s best friend, Mrs. W, had a proof-reading business where she would scan and then proof manuscripts or articles for spelling errors.  She had the bright idea to include my sister R and me in her business.  She would send us some of the work to proof and would pay us a small amount per hour that we worked.  It was exciting!  I got to sit at a computer and read for hours – my ideal job!  I was about 12 at the time, and R was 14.  We finished our work, corrected all the spelling errors we found, and sent it back, delighted that we got to do real, grown-up work!

A few days later, Mrs. W called us in to talk to her in private.  She was frowning, and I didn’t know why.  She said she was seriously disappointed in us.  We hadn’t done a good job – they had sent the work back with spelling errors that we had missed, and she had to redo it all herself.  She told us she would pay us for what we had already done, but she was firing us for being careless.  She thought she could trust us, but she couldn’t.  She was sorry, but she no longer wanted our help.  I walked around all that day in a haze of shame and humiliation.  I felt that everyone’s eyes were on me, knowing what a disappointment and failure I was.  When we got home that night, I found a private place to go and cried there for a long time.  These moments still loom large in my memory…I can still feel the crush of humiliation, the painful knowledge that despite my constant efforts, I was a failure.

Each ugly incident seared itself into my little soul, pushing me deeper into the abyss of perfectionism and reinforcing my deep inner conviction that, hard as I tried, God would not accept me.

Part Twelve>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Ten

HA Editorial Team7 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 29, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Nine

Part Ten: Wives, Children and Dogs

After we had settled into the routine of belonging to “the group”, as we called it, it was relatively easy to know what was expected of us, as children.  I knew I needed to obey anything and everything my parents (or other adults) told me, with no questions.  I knew I wasn’t allowed to complain about things I didn’t want to do or argue with my parents about anything.

As a child, I was inherently inferior to adults.

I was not their equal.  I learned this through watching Mr. LaQuiere, my parents, and the other adults routinely put down children.  We were taught we were all full of “foolishness”.  We “needed our wills broken”.  We needed to be taught our place.  We needed to learn absolute obedience and submission to authority.

I still remember the exact place I was when Mr. LaQuiere told my parents explicitly what “complete submission” meant.

“If I told my 15-year-old daughter to take off all her clothes, and get down on her hands and knees and bark like a dog, she should obey me instantly,” he said. “That is the kind of obedience children must give their parents.

Absolute obedience, without questioning.”  This level of humiliation had never even occurred to me.  To know that it was possible was a very distressing thought.  Would my parents or Mr. LaQuiere ever order me to humiliate myself like this?  I silently decided that if my dad ever told me to strip naked and bark like a dog, I wouldn’t, no matter how much I was punished.

I didn’t mind the idea of obeying, because I was naturally obedient.  But I hated the “without question” part.  I liked to ask questions.  I liked to know the reasons behind things.  I liked to know the ‘why’, not because I wanted to “challenge my parents’ authority”, as Mr. LaQuiere called it, but because I genuinely wanted to know.  I had an active mind, and it was always probing to get to the bottom of things, to know why they worked the way they did.  I was told this was disrespectful to my authorities, and that they should never be questioned.  I didn’t need to know the reasons.  I was only a child.

I had no right to know.

This absolute, unquestioning obedience did not just apply to small children.  It applied to all children (a label determined not by maturity, but by parentage), regardless of age.  Mr. LaQuiere expected his adult sons and daughters to snap to attention and instantly obey with the same cheerful alacrity that he expected from a 5-year-old.

This system was put in place by God himself, and it was God who said that any child who did not obey was rebellious, and should be stoned to death by his parents, his siblings, his friends, and everyone else as a lesson in how seriously He viewed disobedience.

Obedience was a universally-praised virtue, with the exception of men.  Men didn’t need to obey anybody (except God, that is).  But wives, children, and dogs were all expected to obey.

Dogs and children were often trained with similar methods.

We had a small, fluffy, Maltese puppy named Sasha.  She was friendly and happy, and eager to please.  But just as my parents were told they didn’t know how to train us the right way, Mr. LaQuiere told them they were failing in training our puppy as well.  She needed to learn absolute obedience as well.  She needed to instantly come every time she was called.  She needed to be punished severely for every infraction, whether it was not coming right away, or making an accident on the rug during the process of house-training her.  Any time we found a mess she made, Mr. LaQuiere said, we needed to drag her over to it, rub her nose in the excrement, and tell her “BAD DOG!” in stern, disappointed tones.  He demonstrated this for us multiple times.  I felt bad for her…she looked so forlorn and sad, being reprimanded for making a mistake.  But Mr. LaQuiere said it was the only way to train a dog.  If she didn’t come when she was called, he demonstrated the proper punishment technique – sometimes he would drag her by her collar or the scruff of her neck.  Sometimes he would hit her, not with a rolled-up-newspaper, which he said was useless, but with his hand.  One time when he was correcting her for something, and dangling her in the air by the scruff of her neck, she yipped at him.  I imagine it hurt to be hung in the air by her skin like that.  He responded by throwing her against the wall.  Never allow a dog to challenge your authority like that, he told us.  I still remember how she yelped, and what she looked like in a frightened heap on the floor, her sides heaving in and out.  After Mr. LaQuiere “trained” her in obedience, she did learn to come when called…her tail between her legs, often slinking along the floor, looking guilty and anxious, never knowing if she was going to be smacked across the room, or welcomed.  Poor little Sasha.  She wanted so badly to please us.  I honestly think she didn’t know what she was being punished for most of the time.  My parents might have thought his techniques were more cruel, if it weren’t for the fact that there wasn’t a single one that he didn’t also use on children.

Children, dogs, and wives were taught absolute obedience. In wives, however, it was called “submission”.  Wives were to submit absolutely to their husbands, who were the heads of the family, and their authorities.

This was true not only if the husband was right in what he asked, or if was kind, but also if he was cruel or wrong.

Mr. LaQuiere said God instructed wives to submit, and men to love their wives: and one way to love wives was to teach them to submit.  One Wednesday night, he described how he taught his own wife absolute submission.  He called it “The Story of 11 Mile”.  He and Mrs. LaQuiere were driving somewhere one day, and it was a place they hadn’t been before, so Mrs. LaQuiere was trying to help him find the way there.  They needed to turn on 11 Mile, so as they were driving, she saw it, too late, and said, “Dear, we’ve passed 11 Mile!”  He said she was wrong, he was sure they hadn’t passed it yet.  She disagreed.  He was displeased by her lack of submission.  As they drove on, it quickly became clear to him that they had, in fact, passed 11 Mile.  But this was not important compared to the fact that Mrs. LaQuiere had insisted on contradicting him, showing him disrespect, and refusing to submit to him and agree that he was right.  So to teach her a lesson, he refused to turn around, until she showed submission by saying “You’re right, dear, we didn’t pass 11 Mile.”  Apparently she didn’t want to do this for a while, and he kept right on driving.  Finally she told him, “You’re right, dear.  We haven’t passed 11 Mile.”  Once she submitted to him by accepting that he was right, no matter what, he turned the car around, and they drove on to their destination.

Today I think of this, and I HAVE. NO. WORDS.  What the heck?!  He was wrong, and she merely pointed out that he passed a street, but he couldn’t even allow her to think he might have made a mistake.  His pride, his sense of absolute authority and need for submission was so great that he actually forced his wife to lie to him and tell him he was right, before he would make a simple U-turn.  Poor Mrs. LaQuiere.  I sometimes wonder how she stood it.

Mr. LaQuiere’s worldview was simple: wives, children and dogs were all divinely ordained to be submissive and obedient to him.  He wasn’t being revolutionary – he was just following God’s plan.  It wasn’t his fault that God had made him male, human, and given him offspring.

He knew his place in God’s design, and no one was going to shove him out of his rightful position of superiority.

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Nine

HA Editorial Team4 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 21, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Eight

Part Nine: Smile

I was reading an article about the Duggars this morning.  People were commenting about how “happy” the children were and how that was evidence of a healthy, well-balanced upbringing.  It reminded me of my own upbringing and how “happy” we always looked…to outsiders.

This was because we followed one of the cardinal rules of Godly Christians (as defined by Mr. LaQuiere).  You may not know this rule, because, poor you, you probably grew up without the benefit of Mr. LaQuiere’s Super-Christianity, so I’ll just tell you right now what it is: ALWAYS SMILE!  This is because the only godly facial expression is a smile.  It’s true that there are multiple godly emotions… happiness… gratefulness… sorrow over your sin… but they can pretty much be covered with the one facial expression (some lenience can be given for the “sorrow” category, but only if it’s the right kind of sorrow).

Not only is a smile important because it portrays our proper gratefulness to God for all our blessings, and because it provides a “good witness” for God, and our parents, and godly large families, and homeschoolers, all of whom we represent…but it’s a way to change how you feel on the inside!

I’ll show you what I mean.  The following was written by the mom of the K family I mentioned earlier, who has her own website (www.raisinggodlytomatoes.com) and book about raising godly children (it’s not a gardening book, though gardening can also be a godly activity, if done correctly):

THE OUTSIDE REFLECTS THE INSIDE

One cherished, but highly erroneous belief is that a parent should not correct a child for displaying a wrong emotion, because the child will “suppress” the emotion rather than change it. Experience convinces me otherwise. Require young children to display the right emotions outwardly and their hearts will change, producing the right attitudes and emotions inwardly as well.

Of course you can’t simply order your children to “be happy”. If the child is small, it works much better to tell him to “smile” or “straighten up your face.” If the child is very young, I’ll cheerfully say, “Let’s see a smile now”, or “Where is your smile?”

The child may initially resist, but when he finally obeys, the resulting smile will often break into a radiant grin, accompanied by sincere laughter and other expressions of genuine joy. It is hard for a small child to hide his true feelings. It is equally difficult for him to display an emotion that he does not really feel. Get him to smile on the outside and invariably he will smile on the inside.

A joyful heart makes a cheerful face, but when the heart is sad, the spirit is broken.  Proverbs 15:13

(excerpt from http://www.raisinggodlytomatoes.com/ch09.php)

So, to recap, in order to avoid showing the “wrong” emotions, if you require your small children (and the rest of them too) to “smile on the outside”, you will change their hearts and get them to have the “right” emotions and attitudes instead.  Also notice the verse at the bottom, which clinches it: if you have a joyful heart, you’ll have a joyful face! (This may sound somewhat different from the lesson “if you have a joyful face, you’ll have a joyful heart”, but that’s just semantics.  Don’t be so nit-picky, for gosh sakes!)

You can easily see that smiling is the first line of defense against all attitude problems.

Smiling will change your heart – smiling will make you happy – smiling will help you be godly!

This necessity to smile was tacked on to most requirements: instant obedience…with a smile!  Do your chores… with a smile!  Finish being spanked… now smile!

You can see how “smiling” and “looking happy” becomes the necessary mask that all children raised in this belief system must wear.  (The Duggars also follow this, by the way – read up on Bill Gothard’s ATI character-training program, which they are a part of, and you’ll find plenty about having a “bright countenance”, and how looking unhappy is publicly shaming your parents/authorities.)  It’s not a choice, and it has nothing to do with how ‘happy’ they really are or aren’t.

The main problem I have with this type of training is that it not only separates all emotion into two categories of “good” or “bad” – but it also teaches children from the earliest possible ages to stuff their emotions.

This happened to me (to be fair, it was already happening to me to some extent before I met Mr. LaQuiere, because my dad was very anti-emotion…but it was reinforced and drilled home by the training I received from Mr. LaQuiere all through my formative years).  I learned that not only should I not ever express negative emotions like anger, or disappointment, or unhappiness, because they were sinful (unless it was, say, “righteous anger” – but somehow only our dads ever managed to feel this one, while disciplining us, go figure), but I learned how not to feel those negative emotions, disassociating myself from them for years.  This latter part wasn’t expressly taught to me, but being a smart kid, I figured it out on my own.  I taught myself to “think my way out of feeling”.  Any bad feeling I had, I thought through logically, analyzing it, until the feeling faded, and only the analysis remained.  I also discovered that if I held my breath, the overwhelming emotion would fade.  I trained myself to stay calm and not cry, or get angry this way.  I got so good at this that it became second-nature. 

Anytime something bad happened that would trigger a negative emotion, part of me would just “shut down” all by itself, and I felt…nothing.

Not happiness, not sadness, not anger…nothing at all.  It was like being in an alternate reality where no emotions existed.

I’ll touch more on this later, specifically on the journey God had to bring me through to learn to feel things again, but I’ll just say now that living emotion-free is not healthy for anyone, and especially for a child.  Emotions are sign-posts of what is going on beneath the surface.  Emotions tell us to look deeper and see what need is being missed.  Telling a child who you’ve just severely punished to smile…as tears stream down his face…does not teach him to have a joyful heart.

It teaches him to hide, even from himself, what he really feels, and who he really is.

If you don’t know what you really feel anymore, you lose your God-given signposts meant to alert you to danger.  Instead of a built-in-warning-system for unmet needs, or dangers to be avoided, you learn rigid control over your outward expressions, and you start to live on the surface only, without even realizing it.  But it makes it easier for parents to avoid difficult situations with their children…to avoid dealing with difficult emotions their children are experiencing…it makes parenting easy, because you only have to enforce a one-size-fits-all set of rules, not deal with the complexities of childhood and individual needs.  This is why I was told there was “nothing to be sad about” when I watched my brother being severely beaten, and told not to cry when Baby J was being suffocated in couch cushions.  I was taught to ignore my strong emotions that told me this was bad and wrong, and to put blind trust in my authorities instead, who told me it was right and good.  In retrospect, it’s little wonder I learned it was safer to divorce myself from emotions entirely.

I don’t smile as much today as I did back then, but when I do, at least it’s genuine!  And my children?  They cry, or feel grumpy, or are happy, without having their emotions prescribed for them and enforced through threats and punishment.

We’re working on learning parenting techniques together that affirm them for who they are, and address their needs, instead of placing their only value in being a “happy” advertisement for me or God.

I love when they smile!  But I will never tell them to.

Part Ten>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Eight

HA Editorial Team10 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 19, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Seven

Trigger Warning: Depictions of physical abuse and gaslighting

Part 8: A Whip for the Horse, a Bridle for the Donkey, and a Rod for the Back of a Child!

From the beginning, my little brother B was a happy-go-lucky troublemaker, more interested in exploring and trying new things than in whatever rules he might be breaking!  Like most small boys, he was often getting into things he shouldn’t, being loud, engaging in rough boy-play, and sometimes careless with the truth.  Nothing too unusual for a small boy (or girl!).  These small misdemeanors brought scoldings from my parents, after which he’d continue on his happy-go-lucky little way.  He wasn’t a bad kid.  He was just a kid.

His personality did not sit well at all with Joe LaQuiere and his philosophy of parenting.  Everyone had the responsibility to be self-controlled and model godly behavior at all times, he said, and children were absolutely no exception.  The reason everyone around Mr. LaQuiere had bad results (bad children) while his were good was that he recognized that it was a misconception that children needed to act and be treated as children.  They should absolutely not be held to a lower standard than anyone else – that was insulting them and their Creator.

They were subject to the same expectations as adults.

And if they violated the rules, stern discipline was the key to correcting the problem.  “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree”, said Mr. LaQuiere.  If you want to correct the wrong bent in a twig, you must exert as much force as necessary to force it to stay in a straight position and maintain that force until the new position becomes permanent.  Children are malleable.  If they are expected to act like adults, they will learn to act like adults.  They will rise to the level of expectation placed on them – and if they don’t, it is the responsibility of their parents to forcibly hold them to those expectations.

From the first, Joe LaQuiere zeroed in on my brother B as a “bad seed” in need of a strong hand of correction.  He didn’t like his attitude, his carelessness about rules, his little-boy jokes, or his tendency to be found in the middle of any mischief.  These were all characteristics of a fool, he said.  Mr. LaQuiere despised anyone who was a fool.

Because B was a fool, Joe decided he needed to make an example of him whenever possible, to teach him (and the rest of us watching) a lesson about how God feels about fools.  This started when B was five years old.

One of the character flaws Mr. LaQuiere hated most in B was a tendency to lie to avoid getting in trouble.  As B was always getting scolded for getting into mischief, he’d often lie about things to avoid being punished for his little crimes.  Mr. LaQuiere decided this was one thing he would not stand for, and he intended to stamp it out quickly and forcibly. He informed everyone in the group that my brother B was “a liar”, and nothing he said was to be trusted at any time.  Unless there was independent verification from someone else “trustworthy”, any statement B made was jumped on and accused of being a lie.  Mr. LaQuiere encouraged all the men in the group to join in on “helping” to correct B in this way.  One time, the husband of my mom’s best friend, Mr. W, decided he would give B an object lesson.  He pointed to a green ball on the grass and asked him, “What color is that ball?”  B said it was green.  Then this man turned to me, and asked me, “What color is that ball?  Tell me it’s yellow.”  I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to respect and obey all adults, so I squirmed a little, and said it was yellow.  He turned to B and said, “See?  You’re a liar.  I trust your sister because she tells the truth.  You…you’re a liar.  It doesn’t matter what you say: everything you say is a lie.”  That scene impressed itself deeply on my memory and my conscience.  It was just one of many conflicts that raged in my heart from then on.

I knew B hadn’t lied, but I was told that adults were infallible, not-to-be-questioned, and God’s direct representatives to us.  How does a child reconcile those two things?

Punishments (though they were never called that–Mr. LaQuiere made it clear that this was “discipline”, never punishment) were many and varied.  B was often made to stand in the middle of the floor for some misdemeanor or other, and stay there all day, missing meals, until Mr. LaQuiere said he could move.  He wouldn’t be allowed to work with the other boys and men (“that is reserved for boys with good character who we can trust”) and was made to help Mrs. LaQuiere with laundry and other “women chores” as a mark of shame.  He had all privileges revoked, even the privilege of speaking sometimes, or having anyone speak to him for days at a time.  He was “tomato-staked”, which meant he was to be within twelve inches of Mr. LaQuiere or my dad at all times, and not allowed to interact with anyone, because he “couldn’t be trusted” out of their sight.  But those were the mild punishments.

“The rod is for the back of a fool,” Mr. LaQuiere would say, and he didn’t mean it figuratively.  In the bottom drawer of a tall chiffonier in his living-room he kept The Paddle.  About 2 1/2 feet long, and 1/4 inch thick, the Paddle was made of wood and had finger-grips carved into it, to make spanking easier for Mr. LaQuiere.  It was an instrument of fear to all of us and used to “correct” children for anything from minor rule infractions to major “sins of rebellion”.  The offending child would be sent to fetch their own instrument of punishment and bring it back to Mr. LaQuiere.

In our own homes, our parents would inflict corporal punishment: in Mr. LaQuiere’s home, he always carried it out personally, no matter whose child it was.

B was sent to get the Paddle more than any other child in our group.

Being “paddled” involved telling the child to bend over and hold his ankles.  They were not to let go under any circumstances until Mr. LaQuiere finished the punishment and said they could move.  They were also only allowed to cry silently, or as silently as possible.  Wails or screams were punished with further beating.  Any infraction of the rules resulted in starting the punishment over again.  The minimum number of “paddles” was 5, but that was reserved for extremely minor infractions, or for very young children, maybe 3 – 5 years old.  For most of us, the average beginning number was 10, but this was quickly increased for any breaking of form while being paddled: if you let go of your ankles, Mr. LaQuiere started counting again from the beginning.  If you put your hands behind you and they got hit with the Paddle, Mr. LaQuiere started again from the beginning.  If you cried loudly, he started over.  If your crying sounded angry, he started over, and sometimes tacked on extra paddles for showing “rebellion”.  It was common for my brother B to be struck upwards of 20 times during one “paddling”.

Each “paddle” was accomplished by Mr. LaQuiere taking a full-bodied swing and hitting the exposed rear end of the child with the full force of an adult male (this was modified for the small children, but it still hurt good and proper, as it was intended to).

For the children that were considered “good”, like me, spankings were rarely experienced first-hand.  Instead, Mr. LaQuiere told my parents that I was a child “who learned best by watching”.  Meaning that I wasn’t actually committing offenses deserving of being spanked, but I was forced to watch all my siblings and friends get spanked, because that would teach me to be “afraid of sinning” and I would be even less likely to sin myself.  I was forced to watch a lot of these spanking as a young child.

What made it the most traumatic for me, even more than seeing my terrified brother or cousins being hurt, their wide eyes streaming tears as they fought to hold back the cries that would earn them further punishment, was the fact that Joe LaQuiere treated it like it was funny.

He would smile, laugh, and even joke with the other adults while he was carrying out these beatings.  This was to show that he wasn’t punishing “in anger”, but out of love and genuine care for us.

Once when I was 9 or 10, during a public “paddling” of my brother B, I ran into the dark front room and hid under the piano, my tears mixing with my panic.  I sat there in the dark, hugging my knees, until Mr. LaQuiere’s oldest daughter came and found me and coaxed me out, telling me “everything was fine”, and “there was nothing to be sad about”.  I dried my tears and went with her, but the fear remained.  Maybe these kinds of experiences – watching my siblings be hurt by other adults while my parents watched and joined in laughter – are why I can’t remember ever being afraid.

I live with fear every day of my life since then, and it took me well over a decade after we left to realize that it is really not normal for a child to live life in constant fear.

The thought of how I’d feel if my own children were forced to endure or watch the things I was made to, makes me want to vomit.

When my brother B was 10, he developed a nervous tic – an involuntary twitch in his eye. I’m personally surprised it didn’t start sooner. It started off happening every time an adult made eye contact with him but increased until it was nearly a constant thing.  It was nearly impossible for him to look anyone in the eye.  To correct this “misbehavior”, Mr. LaQuiere told my parents to put rubber bands on his wrist, and snap him every time he did it.  His wrists were red from then on; even so, it was a long time before he could learn to control the eye twitching.

“Paddlings” were not the only punishments my brother B endured.  As he got older, it seemed like any and every expression of anger, contempt, disgust and violence was fair game.  The most violent of the treatment took place during the times we were working construction with the rest of the families.  My memories of this time are somewhat hazy, maybe because my subconscious is protecting me, but I easily recall him being called “lazy” “foolish” “ignoble” “idiot” “knucklehead” “stupid”, and other names — not by other children, but by the adults.  In addition to the regular beatings he received in public, or behind closed doors in Mr. LaQuiere’s home office, he was often dragged places by his hair.  He was thrown against walls.  He was held up against the wall by his throat, high enough that his feet dangled off the ground.  These things were mostly done by Mr. LaQuiere and the other men in the group, but eventually they were also done by my father in the privacy of our own home, as he fought to control an increasingly-troubled B who was getting older and older, and still a “problem” to his authorities.

Other children were considered “hardened” and “problem children”, but none received as much time and attention at the hands of Joe LaQuiere as my brother.

B was targeted for verbal, emotional and physical abuse from the age of 5 until we left the group when he was 13 (though the pattern continued at home for many years after that).

Years later, my dad would express regret over this treatment of B, but his most recent comments on the situation to me were that “he doesn’t have much sympathy for B and J, because they weren’t ‘innocent’, and also, it’s hard to feel too bad for them when they’ve gone on to make bad life choices as young adults”.

I’d like to ask my dad why he considers my brothers “not innocent” for acting like children, but seems to carry no lasting guilt for himself for letting other full-grown men physically abuse his sons and joining in on it himself.

I’d like to ask him how he can see the devastation and depression in my brother B that followed and that has plagued him through his adult years, and not feel responsible.  How he can’t see the link between the abuse and the high level of control they grew up under and their tendency to make “bad choices” later on.

But I also feel guilt myself.  Guilt that I didn’t stand up for my brother.  That I didn’t tell somebody who could have stopped it, though we were strongly ingrained with fear of Child Protective Services, and heard horror stories of older children who “informed” on their parents, and had CPS come snatch all the children away.

So calling CPS would never have entered my mind as a possibility, even if I hadn’t been too afraid to take action.  Though my adult logic can admit that I couldn’t have done much, if anything, to stop the abuse, I still feel guilt and grief over what was done to my brothers, and my own inability to stop it.

Part Nine>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex- Good Girl: Part Seven

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 3, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Six

Part 7: Families That Play Together…Should be Working Instead

One of the ways the LaQuiere family was different was their focus on family-integration.  They did everything as a family, or no one did it at all.  Kids didn’t do “kid activities”, especially not with other kids; they did only whatever their parents were doing.

Viewing children as “just kids” in need of their own specialized activities, or menu, or bedtimes, or anything similar was frowned on as a post-modern perversion of family dynamics.

The idea of playtime was definitely not in favor.  It wasn’t completely outlawed, but it was definitely viewed as an unproductive use of time and not something children ought to be encouraged to do.  Children could learn more from watching adults than by playing, and the primary responsibility of children was to learn to be adults, so why should they waste time on play? In this lifestyle, families were meant to do things together, or not at all, and since the children needed to be integrated into the activities of their parents, that meant mostly work!  For this reason, family businesses were considered the ideal.  The LaQuieres had a family business in real estate, and they all participated.  They built office buildings together, poured concrete together, snowplowed together, and basically did everything else together.

This was Mr. LaQuiere’s ideal family dynamic: not only was he able to keep his children where he could supervise them at all times, but he felt that it taught them responsibility, and most vital of all, avoided the twin dangers of individualism and independence.

The LaQuiere children didn’t need friends: they had their family!  They didn’t need time to themselves, or the space to develop into independent thinkers and persons: their value came from being a cog in the family machine, and providing necessary benefits to the family and their parents.

Mr. LaQuiere stressed to us that anything that placed the needs or wants of the children above those of the parents and the family was not only morally wrong, but would train children to be selfish and irresponsible.  He taught us that we needed to do whatever was necessary to protect our families against a world determined to pull us apart and lure us into spiritual death with its age-segregated “youth groups” and “child entitlement”, and other thin excuses for children to get into trouble, or think they were “owed” anything from their parents or the world.

On the contrary, children owed everything to their parents, and a childhood spent serving their parents was not only a way to pay back a little of the debt, but a spiritual benefit to them as well, which would teach them to develop humility and self-sacrifice.

The responsibility of parents was to provide training to their children; the responsibility of children was to respond with instant obedience and submission at all times.  This was the God-ordained family structure.  Children were “arrows in the hand of a mighty warrior”, Mr. LaQuiere said, and we should never forget that arrows that try to leave the mighty warrior and the bow are nothing more than useless sticks.  Joe LaQuiere raised his own children to know that their needs came secondary to the needs of their parents, and the family, and he taught us to do the same.

Often this meant that all the families spent a lot of time together doing work projects, which was actually quite fun!  We only met officially on Wednesday nights but spent a lot of the week meeting at various home improvement projects, not only to help, but to be around Joe LaQuiere as much as possible so we could absorb his wisdom on daily life situations.  One summer we built additions on three different houses.  My brother B learned how to drive a backhoe.  I learned how to line up shingles on a roof and how to handle a nail gun.  We didn’t exactly raise barns together, but there are pictures of us raising walls for the new additions, looking like a bunch of renegade Amish: boys in high-waisted carpenter jeans with side-parted hair plastered down, and girls in flowered dresses or mom jeans and baggy t-shirts.  The Amish probably wouldn’t have wanted to claim us, but the neighborhood clearly thought that’s where we belonged!  All the men and boys, and a few of the girls worked on the construction.  The other girls (who either didn’t want to or weren’t allowed to help) worked with the women to prepare huge lunches and dinners for dozens of hungry men and kids.

These times working together as a family had a positive side–I think it did teach considerable responsibility, and strengthened family bonds (and let me escape dresses and “girl work” temporarily!)–but it had a darker side.  This “construction phase” was the backdrop to some of my worst memories.  They centered around my younger brother B, whose irreverent joie de vivre had caught the critical eye of our leader-in-chief.  Mr. LaQuiere’s next “training” project was underway.

Part Eight>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Six

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 3, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

<Part Five

Part Six: Modesty- Because SKIN is a Four-Letter Word

I remember the first time I heard the word “modesty”.  I was eight.  We were all gathered together on a Wednesday night, listening to Joe LaQuiere talk.  We were dressed up somewhat nicely, because it was our version of church, and I was wearing a dress.  The adults were sitting on the couch, and the kids were sitting on kitchen chairs or sprawled on the floor.  I remember I was lying on my back, propped up on a pillow, listening to Mr. LaQuiere and thinking that he was the most godly man I’d ever meet!  I was more than a little in awe of him.  He commanded attention and respect with his voice and his self-proclaimed exclusive knowledge of How We Ought to Live.  Out of nowhere, he turned to me and asked if he could use me as an object lesson.  I was completely thrilled to be noticed, because I was so quiet and shy that I was used to people forgetting I was even there.  I shyly agreed.  He turned to one of his older sons (the dark-eyed one all the girls had secret crushes on) and asked him, “What color are her panties?”  His son looked and said they were blue.  I was mortified.  Worse than mortified.  Humiliated.  I was already painfully shy and shrunk from public attention.  To be put on display in front of everyone I knew–all of them snickering at me–it was the worst thing I had ever felt.  I wanted the floor to swallow me.  Mr. LaQuiere proceeded to say that the reason he and his son, and now everyone, knew what color my panties were, was because I was displaying them by how I was lying.  Modesty – that was it.

I was lacking modesty, and it was worth the small price of one little girl’s feelings to bring it to the attention of his flock.

From now on, we needed to be careful about what we were wearing, and how we were sitting, standing, or lying down in our clothes.  No one wanted to make the fatal mistake I did and open themselves to the same ridicule.  That was my introduction to modesty.

Modesty: it’s the topic near and dear to many a home-schooled heart.  No one was concerned about the “braiding of hair” or “the adornment of jewels” that Paul actually talks about (we all wore our hair french-braided most of the time, or at least, all the girls who had long enough hair did: be still, my envious heart!).  But everyone was very concerned about the feminine figure and especially with the question of whether or not the girls nearing puberty were “showing” inappropriately through their turtlenecks and jean jumpers.  Mr. A had seen some evidence of this and had stern discussions with the parents of the offending girls, who passed the scolding on to their embarrassed daughters.  Our mothers were worried.  Was it time for “those” conversations and the mandating of bras?  Whispered reprimands were given, and sometimes girls were sent in disgrace to grab a sweater.  Some of the older girls were banned from wearing turtlenecks altogether.  I was a little bit jealous of them.  No one would ban me from wearing a turtleneck.  At least they had something to hide!  Puberty and budding little-girl breasts also brought up the issue of hugging, and all girls, whether they had “bumps” to hide or not, were strictly ordered to avoid giving any hugs that could result in their chests brushing the other person.  Most of us chose to avoid hugging altogether, rather than engage in obligatory, awkward, arms-length hugs with anyone.

This was so foreign to what my life was like before I met the LaQuieres.  In earlier times, I would wake up, scurry to grab some clean play-clothes, and head out to play.  I couldn’t have cared less what I was wearing while I was playing, as long as it didn’t get in my way.  I had a favorite outfit: my yellow-and-pink shorts with little cherries on them, and a pink t-shirt with ruffled sleeves.  They matched my white tennis shoes with the hot pink laces that I wore proudly crisscrossed around my ankles three times (they were really long laces!).  My sense of fashion may have left something to be desired, but hey, I was only eight!  When it was cold, I wore long pants and sweaters.  When it was hot, I wore shorts.  When we played in the sprinkler, I wore a bathing suit with little yellow ducks on it.  Dresses were reserved for Sundays and church, and holidays.  I spent my days practicing cartwheels and climbing trees, so it seemed logical that I’d end up in pants most of the time.  Those days were now over.

The new attire was to be modest and gender-specific.  It was an abomination to the Lord for girls to look like boys, or boys to look like girls, we were told.

From now on, girls were to wear dresses, all the time (unless very special circumstances warranted pants for the sake of modesty).  Of course you could ride a bike and roller-blade in a dress, if you really found it necessary to engage in those activities.  Why couldn’t you?  As for climbing trees, that wasn’t really lady-like anyway.  Did I want boys to try to look up my dress?  Well then.  Maybe I should find something better to do with my time.  Swimsuits became a hot topic.  A serious discussion was held by the grown-ups, led by Joe LaQuiere, who pointedly said that wearing swimsuits was essentially parading around in your underwear in public.  When did that become appropriate?  Goodbye swimsuit with the little yellow ducks on it.  Hello, big oversize t-shirts and knee-length shorts!  I found my new swim clothes to be annoying and hampering.  How was I supposed to learn to stand on my hands underwater when I was constantly being chided by my mom for letting my huge t-shirt float up in the water, letting people catch apparently-tantalizing glimpses of my one-piece swimsuit underneath?  This was too much for my practical 8-year-old self, and I tried, mostly in vain, to argue my way out of wearing at least the huge t-shirts, pleading their impracticality.  When we were swimming by ourselves at home, I sometimes even won my case!

Later on, swimming became even more restricted.  Mixed-gender swimming was strongly frowned upon, if not outright prohibited.  We avoided beaches and swimming in public places more and more.  Public pools became off-limits, because they wouldn’t allow girls to wear shorts and shirts over a swimsuit (which for some bizarre reason they insisted on classifying as “clothing”, not appropriate pool attire).

Even dresses were not modest enough by themselves.

The more crafty of the mothers sewed dreadful lacy white “culottes” for all the girls, so that if we were so immodest as to allow a glimpse of something, that something would only be old-fashioned grandma shorts, which hopefully wouldn’t turn anybody on.  The other creative solution to the problem of female modesty was to buy all our clothes in women’s sizes, thereby ensuring that they would be at least three sizes too big.  Thus the dangers of accidentally displaying a curve or bit of skin were averted, causing all mothers to heave a collective sigh of relief.  They had done their jobs.  Of course, this meant necklines that were far too big or low for most of us, which required the extra step of sewing custom inserts into all the dresses.  But that was a small price to pay for the moral safety of their offspring!  When I look back at pictures of myself during this stage, I was invariably wearing long flowery dresses that hung off me like a scarecrow, complete with big lace collars and huge shoulder pads that stuck out 4 inches further than my shoulders.  I actually liked the shoulder pads, because they gave me a sort of shape, which was more than nature let me have.  I looked like an inverted triangle, but it was a real, recognizable shape, and I was pleased about it!

When I was 12, I was wearing dresses and sometimes (only at home, shh!) jeans that were a women’s size 6.  Today, seventeen years later, and a few sizes bigger, I can’t fit into anything larger than a women’s size 2.  Usually I can’t even fit into women’s sizes at all, and have to shop in the Junior section.  Yes, it’s a little embarrassing, but nothing could make me go back to the days when I wore flowering tents with linebacker-shoulder pads!

Part Seven>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Five

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 2, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

< Part Four

Part Five: A Brave New World

This marked the end of my childhood proper; from this point on, I felt, and was expected to be, more like a small adult than a child.

It was also the end of thinking the world was a friendly and safe place.

My sense of security and my unconscious trust in adults as havens of reliability was replaced by uncertainty and an ever-increasing tendency to withdraw into the safety of my own thought life.

Outwardly, a period of relative peace settled in, with weekly meetings at what was to become not merely a resource for child-training, but our new “homechurch” family.  Sometime around this point we stopped attending the Baptist church that we had been attending since I was a baby.  It used to be pastored by Pastor Chase, a fine old preacher, who I adored and respected enormously, as much as you can adore and respect anyone when you are 4 years old.  The times I got to skip Sunday School and sit in the adult service to hear him preach were my favorite!  Then Pastor Chase either retired or died, I forget which, and was replaced by Pastor Boymook.

I despised Pastor Boymook with all the fierceness my 4-year-old self could muster, not just because he wasn’t Pastor Chase, but because I instinctively felt with the intuition of a child that he wasn’t completely genuine.  He was a smooth talker, and I didn’t trust him.  Pastor Chase always talked to me like a person; Pastor B talked to me in the condescending way some adults use with children because they think they aren’t smart enough to know the difference.  I hated that.  My opinion of him was just reinforced when I went through a class he taught as a prerequisite to being baptized, when I was 6.  The other members of the class were two adults, and when we finished the class, we were all given books as presents.  I was thrilled!  Being precocious, and a child of parents who valued books as a self-education, I regularly read all sorts of books that were “too old” for me, and understood most of them.  I read all of my dad’s books that I could get my hands on, and I was excited to have a new “grown-up” book of my very own!  Pastor B handed the adults thick, leatherette copies of some classic Christian theology book.  Then…he handed me a children’s board book, with colorful pictures and simplified stories about Jesus.  I hated it.  I was insulted.  Even my copy of the NIV Bible, which I used to look up Bible verses and follow along during the sermons, was more advanced than this.  Pastor B had sealed his fate: he was officially persona non grata to me from that day on.

I wasn’t sorry to leave Pastor Boymook behind for our new Wednesday night “church” – at least Mr. LaQuiere talked to children like they were adults too, and I found that very gratifying.

Little by little, Mr. LaQuiere became the final word in all matters of our daily lives, whether the issues were theological, familial, financial, or even regarding the kinds of food we were allowed to eat.

Traditional church was bad.  Public school (even private school) was bad. Letting your children play with other children was bad.  Eating pork and seafood was bad.  Christmas trees were pagan, and therefore, bad.  So we started a new way of life.  We cut out all pork products from our diet and replaced them with things like turkey bacon.  There was no substitute for marshmallows, which I was sad about.  Who knew they were made from pork by-products?  We shunned the neighbor kids for their “corrupting influence”.  We banned Christmas trees from our home.  I hated this one the most. I missed the Christmases of old, with the twinkling lights of our tree glowing through our frosty front window when we came home on dark winter nights.  I missed falling asleep to the lights of the Christmas tree, shining in the dark and promising the wonder of Christmas mornings and presents as-yet unwrapped!  But we all had to sacrifice for the sake of godliness, so that was that.

Joe LaQuiere had an obsession with the Jews and Jewish traditions (hence the “no pork” rule).  He explained to us that the Jews were God’s “favorite people”, and we should be following their example.  If your father had a favorite son and gave him special rules, wouldn’t you try to follow the same special rules so you could gain the approval of your father as well?  If we wanted God to be pleased with us maybe it wasn’t absolutely written in stone that we must act like the Jews, but certainly it was going the extra mile, and aren’t we told to go the extra mile?  If we loved God with our whole hearts we would do everything we could to please Him.  So we replaced traditional Sunday church-time with Saturday Sabbath.  The Sabbath was the day God instructed all of us (not just the Jews) to rest and not to do any work.  It was treated very seriously.  This meant not only no physical work but also no playing games, no reading books- except for the Bible (or maybe very spiritual books, if approved by a parent…cue ‘Elsie Dinsmore’), no buying anything at a store (causing others to work) from sundown Friday night until sundown Saturday night, and in general being quite solemn, as befitting a day in which we are to honor God.  It was also the day we took “the Lord’s Supper” (not “communion” – that sounded too much like what those people in regular church did).  All the women wore head coverings during the Lord’s Supper and worship time and sometimes the whole day long.  My sister and I and the other girls were exempt until we were about 12, then we were considered adult enough and required to wear them as well.  The men would pour out red grape juice (wine was alcoholic, and being definitely warned against in the bible, was not an acceptable substitute) in crystal glasses, one per adult, and after reading the new testament portions about “this cup is the new covenant in my blood; drink it in remembrance of me”, we would solemnly drink it, after first being warned that not taking it seriously, or worse, “partaking with unconfessed sin on your conscience” could result in getting seriously sick, or even dying, because it says so right there in the bible.

Once I was old enough to take part, I always worried that there would be some sin I had forgotten about and secretly wondered if this would be the time that it caught up with me.  I didn’t know if dying in this manner would invalidate my salvation or not, so it was especially nerve-wracking not knowing if my final destination hung in the balance!  It seems like a silly worry when I look back on it today, but it was taken very seriously and was just one of the things that contributed to my believing that being constantly guilt-ridden was a normal state of being!

Sin of any sort was a serious matter, and we were constantly reminded that not only was our sin the reason that Jesus had to die, but also that God specifically demanded that sinful, rebellious children be stoned to death (the process was described quite graphically to us), and though we somehow were able to escape this fate by the skin of our teeth, it is what a holy God said we deserved.

With this new solemn knowledge of sin came the reassurance that we could be accepted by God if we lived “godly” enough lives.  It was hard to give up Christmas trees, and bacon, and our friends, but we had been given the Rulebook for Eternal Life, and we were going to live by the rules!

It was a brave new world.

Part Six>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Four

HA Editorial Team9 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 2, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

Trigger warning: graphic depictions of infant abuse

< Part Three

Part Four: Rebellion is as the Sin of Witchcraft

Later on, in that first year of Wednesday night meetings, I remember the child-training starting in earnest.  My youngest brother at the time, J, was a year old, and I remember him being an exceptionally happy baby.  He had reddish curls and an infectious grin, and he laughed all the time!  We have pictures of him playing in the grass, or being bounced by my sister or mom, and playing in the sand at the beach, and he was smiling in all of them.  That all changed.  Mr. LaQuiere decided it was time to teach his parents-in-training how to properly train obedience in children.  The only way to get good obedience in was to get bad rebellion out, starting as young as possible (which in our case was already too far behind us he said–if he had known us sooner he could have started training J when he was only a few months old and still a fresh slate; but as J was already a year old and set in his ways, we had better not lose any more time!)  So the process was started of teaching a wiggly toddler to sit quietly and obediently on his parents’ laps.  Refusing to sit still, whining, or worst of all, arching the back in protest, were all signs of rebelliousness in a baby (we were directed to the verses of how “foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child” and assured that babies are born with this sinful rebellion that starts to show itself practically the moment they arrive home from the hospital).

This rebellion needed to be corrected, because rebellion was the most serious and evil of all childish sins – “like unto the sin of witchcraft”, as the King James Bible says.

This correction was accomplished in various ways.  Mostly it was through repeated swats and slaps on J’s leg or bare bottom, hard enough to sting, every time J tried to get down or refused to sit still.  They worked with him on this for longer and longer periods of time, but instead of turning docile he fought it harder and harder.  He cried a lot, and these “training sessions” dragged on, and on, often into the wee hours of the morning.  Mr. LaQuiere assured my parents that though J was clearly a very rebellious little boy, they could break his will and train it out of him, if they would be firm and not give up!  So they kept at it, day after day.  Little J would cry himself hoarse, but he wasn’t allowed to get down, or fall asleep, or even nurse, until he submitted and obeyed by sitting still and not crying.

Often times Mr. LaQuiere would insist that J had to be trained only by my dad, because it was clear he wanted his mommy, and he shouldn’t get his way because that would reinforce his rebellion.  At least once, when they were fighting him (training him) all night and couldn’t get him to stop crying, they took turns, at Mr. LaQuiere’s direction, holding him with his face stuffed into the sofa cushions until he stopped crying, when they’d let him up to breathe. Then he’d catch his breath, cry some more (“disobedient, rebellious cries”), and they would stuff his face back into the cushions.  This was bewildering and terrifying to me as a young child.

My world was suddenly confusing and no longer safe.

I was intensely distressed at my baby brother’s crying and at how much he had to be punished.  At the red marks on his legs.  At Mr. LaQuiere’s insistence that they pull down his little diaper to spank him because it “didn’t hurt enough” being spanked through a thick diaper.  Confusingly, my parents seemed all right with this and assured me in whispers that everything was fine – this was for Baby J’s own good, and he was only crying because he didn’t want to be good.  It was in his power to stop it and be obedient at any time.

Over the course of the next few months, 1-year-old J eventually gave in and stopped fighting.  He also stopped smiling.

He became a sullen, withdrawn baby, and this change in temperament was permanent.  He never went back to being the bouncing, bubbly baby I remembered.  His sullenness was further evidence of his rebellious nature, we were told.  His laughter wasn’t the only thing that was silenced: he didn’t speak his first word until he was nearly 4.

This was the beginning of the “secret” child-training methods that my parents were to learn from Mr. LaQuiere and use over the next eight years that we were a part of his group.

Part Five>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Three

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

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HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 2, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

 

< Part Two

Part Three: Ice-Cream and Dr. Seuss

We met a lot of new families that first year.  There was the K family, with five kids and counting (they ended up with ten, I think), who were already good friends of the LaQuiere family and had been for a long time, so either they were already good at the secret training method, or they were mostly exempt from it because they were best friends.  Then the R family, with two kids, who were best friends with the K family, and also mostly exempt from the secret methods, for reasons unknown.  Then came the regular families: the T family, who had mostly girls, all pretty, with long, curly black hair down their backs that I envied intensely, being myself a plain child with super-fine, straight hair that my mom kept cutting short to my chin despite all my protests.  The N family, who had girls my age, a teenage son, and a baby.  Then the J family, who had a bit of a stigma attached to them because Mr. J was divorced, and this was his second wife.

We all knew this was considered a mark of shame, in the secret way that children know something without ever actually hearing it said or being allowed to talk about it. 

My mom’s best friend from high-school, Mrs. W, also came with her second husband (they were both divorced and remarried – Mr. LaQuiere spoke at their wedding), each bringing one child of their own. Needless to say, this was also considered one of the Lesser Families by the unspoken rules, and they were always fighting about each other’s children too.  (He thought she babied her son too much, and she thought he played favorites.)  They were probably the most unhappy family starting out, but we all knew we had our own issues, so we weren’t (openly) judging.  Last but not least, came my aunts and uncles and assorted cousins, the A’s and the S’s, who became a very large part of the story later, in two very different ways.

I don’t remember too much about those early days – it seemed like a lot of fun and games at first!  We were young enough not to pay too much attention to the adult conversation, though that changed pretty quickly, and mostly we just read books on those Wednesday nights: great quantities of approved-for-kids books, of which an oddly high number were about Amish children.  The best ones were Dr. Seuss, which they kept around because they provided valuable object lessons for the trainee-parents, but we didn’t know that at the time.  All we knew was, for voracious readers like ourselves (our parents actually made rules about where we weren’t allowed to read books – not in the car, not in the bathroom, not in bed, not at our friends’ houses, not on the way home from the library…) it was book heaven!  Also—and this was, to be honest, the major lure of Wednesday nights–there was ice-cream.  Not just ice-cream.  ICE-CREAM!  In over a dozen flavors and dished out generously in huge bowls: more ice-cream than our excited little eyes had ever seen before!  The LaQuiere family bought Breyer’s ice-cream in bulk from Sam’s Club and stored it in a huge chest freezer in their basement filled with nothing but gallons and gallons of ice-cream!  We knew, because occasionally we’d get sent down there by Mrs. LaQuiere to grab a refill, and it was a sight that made our gluttonous eyes gleam with avarice!  I’m not sure I can entirely blame my love-affair with ice-cream on this weekly ice-cream orgy, but it was definitely a factor, believe me.  Anyway, except for the ice-cream and the books, I don’t remember too much of that first year.

We were already homeschooling because my older sister R was a very bright child and bored with kindergarten at the Christian school my parents sent her to, so they figured what the heck, they could surely do better at home.  So they took her out of school, and that one year of kindergarten was the only public schooling any of us ever had.

It turned out, though, that homeschooling was the ONLY godly option, so it was lucky we were already doing it!

The LaQuiere family had started homeschooling back in the days when it was illegal and dangerous to do so.  They drove their children around in dark vans and kept them away from windows in case someone saw them and called the cops.  But they were determined to do what was RIGHT for their children and avoid the sinful lies (I think this meant “the theory of evolution”) being taught in the public schools. My parents also agreed that this was a worthy goal, and so our future as homeschoolers was settled and sealed.  I only vaguely remember those early days of being homeschooled, but I know we had little desks, and my mom made us chant the Pledge of Allegiance with our hand over our heart at the start of every school day. Aside from that it’s all a foggy blur.  I definitely learned to read and write and generally thought school was great fun, so my mom must have been a good teacher!

Part Four>

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part Two

HA Editorial Team6 Comments

Barn

HA Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Exgoodgirl’s blog The Travels and Travails of an Ex-Good Girl. It was originally published on August 2, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

 < Part One

Part Two: Welcome to the Secret Club

Though I don’t know this for certain, I think my parents started going to Mr. and Mrs. LaQuiere for advice on how to handle my handful-of-a-sister.

They were at their wit’s end at that point and desperately needed to find “The Answer” to how to have a well-behaved child.

Such a stroke of luck it was for them that someone recommended Joe LaQuiere, who had a beautiful family of five perfectly-behaved children, all with names starting with J (Mr. LaQuiere’s first name started with J).  I always felt sorry for Mrs. LaQuiere because her name did not start with J and sympathetically felt that she must feel bad about being the outsider in her family.  They were a wonderful and happy family, and their child-raising-methods clearly worked because they had grown children, as old as twenty, and not one of them had ever rebelled or gone through “difficult” teenage years (they didn’t believe in the word “teenager”, because it was steeped in worldly rebellion).  Not even as little toddlers did they ever so much as go through the horrible misnomer of the “Terrible Twos”! Their toddlers (and children, and young adults, and grown adults) all were as sweet and obedient as any proud parent could wish for, and it was all through a secret method of training that Mr. LaQuiere would share with us, if we wanted.  (I mean, if our parents wanted.  Children’s wants don’t matter, haha!)

Naturally my parents were very excited, and so were we!  Here were these very cool kids (they were older than us – older kids are cool just by virtue of being older!) and something that sounded tantalizingly like an adventure!  We would get to start coming to Mr. and Mrs. LaQuiere’s home to observe them, and they would visit us at our home to observe us, and we would get to see first-hand how this magical method of child-training worked!  Most importantly, in my mind, they had a miniature barn in the backyard and ducks! And the kids got to gather and eat the duck eggs, and how often do you get to do that as a suburban child?  Never, that’s how often.  But now we were lucky and got to gather and eat duck eggs too; which, for the record, are quite strong-tasting, and I wouldn’t recommend them at all.  But still, the novelty was the thing.

So we went to their house to observe them, and they came to our house to observe us – actually, as it turns out, they were observing us the whole time at both houses, which was rather unfair, I thought — and they sat us down and gave us their observations, which wasn’t nearly as fun as I had initially thought it would be.

It turned out that we were doing all sorts of things wrong.

A lot of them were things I didn’t even realize were wrong, and I was rather crestfallen to realize that while I thought I was being especially good, I was actually being bad. I had thought that I would know the difference at least, but here was the bona fide list of crimes we had committed, things like “talking back to parents” instead of instantly and cheerfully obeying.  Or acting disappointed (“having a fallen countenance” they called it) when we were called away from something fun and told we had to go home.

I don’t really remember the other things on the list, but I left the initial diagnosis feeling quite ashamed and shown-up in front of the cool LaQuiere kids, and I wished their parents wouldn’t have paraded our faults out when they were right there listening because now they wouldn’t like us. Actually I don’t recall them really liking OR disliking us – they were just dutifully cheerful and happy with everyone and treated us all the same.

It turned out that we were not the only family seeking Mr. and Mrs. LaQuiere’s help (I’m just going say “Mr. LaQuiere” from now on, because while Mrs. LaQuiere was a most dutiful wife and supported everything her husband said, she really didn’t add anything of her own to the discussion). Lots of other families needed their help too, and they would all meet together on Wednesday nights for training times with the LaQuiere family, and now, we were invited too!

It was like being invited to join a special club!

Definitely exciting enough to forget my initial embarrassment over my list of character deficiencies!  We started attending on Wednesday nights, and so did my mom’s brother and sister and their families. (I think that one of them was actually the connection that encouraged us to meet Mr. LaQuiere in the first place.)  So not only did we get to join a special club, but our cousins were all a part of it too!  Life couldn’t get much better for a 7-year-old!

Part Three >

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc