Ex-Good Girl

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

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 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

The Story of an Ex-Good Girl: Part One

HA Editorial Team8 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: The Day I Turned Bad

My earliest childhood memories are all good. Playing “cave spelunking” in our basement with my dad and siblings, the big climbing tree in our backyard, playing Indians with shell-face-paint at the beach with my cousins, going fishing with my dad, capturing fishflies and keeping them as pets: a collection of small childhood pleasures like those most of us have stored away in memory somewhere. I liked my early childhood. It was good. I liked my family. My life was safe and happy, and I don’t take those two things lightly!  By some odd quirk of personality, I was one of those kids that lived to please.  I was not only happy to do my own chores but other people’s as well, and I used to get scolded for using up whole boxes of Kleenex to wrap miscellaneous small things to give as gifts to all and sundry (no laughing, Kleenex is the imaginative child’s wrapping paper!)  My mom would call me “her little sunshine”, and I think in many ways I was my parent’s golden child. My older sister, R, was a free spirit, quite mischievous, with just enormous quantities of energy that she had to expend every waking moment!  She was in constant motion for at least 8 straight years.  With such an energetic first child, having a second-born who was quiet and lived-to-please must have seemed like a godsend to my parents! My little brother B, who arrived two years after I did, took after my older sister.  So that made it two to one and probably wore my parents out good and proper, while making my halo glow even brighter by comparison!

I was probably about 6 when I came to the dawning revelation that my eagerness to please and do things for everyone was leaving me with quite the unequal work load.

I would make my own twin bed in the morning…then my sister’s…then my brother’s…then my parent’s big double-bed, which was quite a feat for a small 6-year-old!  I was also a budding perfectionist, so sometimes I just re-did everyone else’s work after they did it, just so it could be done better, to my own strict and exacting standards.  In retrospect I sound rather obnoxious, even to myself!  In any case, I noticed that I was the one always getting asked to help with everything, while my sister and brother got out of work by virtue of complaining.  My good nature was being taken advantage of!  This unpleasant discovery rankled in my small soul.  I decided it was unfair, and from now on, I was just going to do my own work and no-one else’s.

I always looked at this decision as the moment when I started to “go bad”.  I don’t know if I remember the exact moment or not, but it was kept fresh in my memory, because my mom was always asking me about it, for years and years afterwards. “Do you remember the day you decided to stop being sweet and helpful?” she’d ask, sighing a little.  “You used to be such a sweet little girl.”

She would heave another sigh, and then ask, “Do you remember why you decided to stop being sweet and good? Did Satan talk to you, and put that idea in your head?  That was when you turned into a selfish girl.”

I think this was just my mom’s way of complaining for the good ol’ days when she had at least ONE easy child to deal with. But at the time it instilled all sorts of guilt in me and left me wondering if I had, indeed, made a pact with Satan that day, because certainly I didn’t act as nice afterwards.  This actually became a major point of doubting my own salvation for me, because I had “said the sinner’s prayer” at the ripe old age of 3, and wasn’t I supposed to keep getting better and better after I was saved? But here I was, turning selfish and bad at the age of 6, when I should instead have been comfortably far down the road of righteousness!  These doubts and guilt plagued me for years; I’m sorry to say.  I always think one should explain salvation a little better, even to young children, so they don’t fall into these sorts of theological pitfalls. Over-simplistic theology definitely never helped me as a child, and I bet I’m not the only one.  Anyway, after I “turned bad” at the age of 6, I went on still enjoying my life despite being the selfish little sinner that I now knew I was.  Then, when I was about 7, we met Joe and Mary LaQuiere.

photo credit: Joel Dinda via photopin cc

Part Two>