Resident Alien

This is a picture of one of my GGF's brothers and his wife. It is illustrative of the ideal of beauty I grew up viewing.
I was reared to be weird. I was a teen in the 80s. When my companions at school were humming "Material Girl", I was humming "I Can't Feel At Home In This World Anymore" (we listened only to Southern Gospel, with a little classical and pre-1970 oldies allowed). They bought outfits for our 8th grade PE fashion show at the malls, while my Mom made mine (a red flannel suit with a cropped jacket and a calf-length circle skirt). I walked like I was in a cornfield no matter how hard I tried to be feminine, because we lived on a dying farm, and we spent a lot of time in pastures cutting wood. My house was full of old books, home-sewn dolls and pictures of fully dressed women, not fashion magazines and minimally clothed plastic dolls and Entertainment Programs of gossip about Hollywood. I had a few Barbies given by family friends, but I tried to make them clothes with more coverage than they had in the package. I was raised by parents with definite beliefs, clearly communicated.

It made a huge difference. It is dreadfully fashionable these days for people not to be "dogmatic" in raising their children, not to insist that their way is right, but rather to let their kids find their own path. "Dogmatic" means "characteristic of a doctrine or code of beliefs accepted as authoritative", and that's where the trouble lies. Authority outside the self, obedience, submission, joy found within boundaries, all of these things have become bad somehow in modern culture. Parents are no longer authorities, but friends. I was SUPPOSED to rebel as a teen. All mom's friends told her I would, that she was too strict. It was more fun to rebel against them (and sometimes even my own emotions, which taught the priceless lesson that emotions are not a dependable guide) than to violate the family rules. 

Did I do some things differently as an adult? Yes. Do we see eye to eye on  everything? No. Did everything go smoothly all the time? No. But I can tell you that raising your kids WITH CLEAR BOUNDARIES and FAITH (and a deeply thought-out, Bible-based rationale for why we believe) is better than the alternative.