According to Bill Gothard, I Failed My Calling

Because I was born a girl, my life was supposed to go like this:

I would be raised and homeschooled by my parents, sheltered from the world by following their guidance and submitting to my father’s authority.

My mother would teach me the skills needed to be a homemaker and helpmeet for my future husband. I would live at home with my family until I the day I got married.

I would save my heart for my future husband, never nursing a crush or doing anything to lead boys on. When I was old enough to get married, my parents would help me find an eligible Christian man to enter into a courtship with–a parent-sanctioned relationship pursued with the intention of marriage, always chaperoned so we wouldn’t succumb to sin by kissing before our wedding day…or worse. Dating was considered worldly–courting was the holy alternative.

If the courtship went well, my future husband would get my father’s blessing to marry me and then at the altar would transfer ownership authority from himself to my husband. That’s right: I would always be under the authority of a man, even when I was an adult.

Once married, I became my husband’s helpmeet, existing to care for his home, encourage him in his career, and bear his children. Then I would raise our children the way my parents raised me, and the next generational cycle would begin again.

This was my lot in life because I was born female. My brothers, on the other hand, had a different God-given calling.

They would be raised to be leaders, get educated if they wanted, pursue careers, get involved in politics, run for president even. The Evangelical Right is hell-bent on infiltrating American politics to make American great Christian again, so the more power their sons obtain, the better their chances.

In other words, my brothers were raised to fill roles as powerful as they wanted. I was raised to serve another man.

For my parents to succeed in raising me this way, well…they had their work cut out for them. For starters, I grew up with brothers, and I was close with my dad, who loved involving his kids in the things he loved doing: fishing, camping, building, and fixing stuff up with the tools in his shop. This made it very difficult to raise a girly daughter. To make matters worse, my relationship with my mom was strained from the beginning: I didn’t enjoy her same interests and we struggled to see eye-to-eye. She criticized my interests, appearance, and the people I chose as friends. Doubling down on this strain was the fact that she was not just my parent, but also my teacher.

I was allowed to play with my brothers and their friends until I hit puberty, then things got…weird. Obviously I could still spend time with my brothers, but my mom began impressing upon me the need to be feminine. With puberty came the confusing pressures of modesty. Suddenly it was my problem if boys fantasized about my body and I had to modify the way I dressed to protect them from sinning.

My dad began reading Before You Meet Prince Charming to me before bed and we’d talk about my future husband. I made lists of the things that I wanted my husband to be. We prayed for him. I was warned against the dangers of crushes and how they’d cause me to give away pieces of my heart willy-nilly. I became stressed about boys accidentally giving pieces of their hearts to me and becoming responsible for their future wives receiving less love someday as a result. My dad left it up to my mom to give me The Talk and she never did.

To their credit, people in my community did ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and when I answered things like, “I want to be a writer” or “a fashion designer” or “a chef” they all smiled and nodded with interest. It wasn’t that a career for me was discouraged…but it was clear that everyone’s underlying assumption of me was that my ultimate goal would be motherhood and homemaking. That if I did go to work, it would be for the short time between high school graduation and getting pregnant after my honeymoon. Mine would be an inconsequential, short-lived career. Cute and small, like women ought to be.

Actually, my mom often commented that I should be a lawyer, though I don’t think she was serious. I think a pursuit of law would confuse the people around me. “But…don’t you think that’s a lot of school and time just to be a lawyer for a year or two? You know, until you have kids?” Would be the question running through everyone’s minds, even my own, at that age. It didn’t occur to me for years after that some women don’t want kids, and furthermore, that that’s an okay choice to make. It was so ingrained in me that marriage and motherhood were God’s fundamental calling for women that I couldn’t fathom anything different.

For the record, my mom had a career before she had kids and became a stay-at-home-mom, and my parents are reasonable enough to admit that successfully supporting a family on a single income is a privilege. They wouldn’t condone a mother for getting a job alongside her husband to make ends meet. But IBLP taught that a woman’s place was at home, not only because she bore the responsibility of keeping the house and homeschooling and raising the children, but because women were dangerous in the workplace.

IBLP stressed that women in the workplace caused husbands to cheat on their wives. If women would just stay home, there wouldn’t be any affectionate female coworkers causing men to stumble! Therefore, a woman who wanted a career was flirting with sin; if you were a girl who wanted to do more with your life than push out babies and pack your hubby’s lunch every morning, Satan was messing with your head. Or maybe your dream of a career was a stronghold in your life, distracting you from what you should really be focusing on: dating Jesus until Prince Charming comes along. The point was, you didn’t want to be a homewrecker, did you? Please, just let men go to work in peace.

…But I did want a career. I couldn’t imagine just staying home forever–I already felt like I’d spent my whole life at home.

As I grew older the mold that I was supposed to fit into grew more obvious and less attractive to me. I noticed that the mold my brothers were destined for was bigger and looser, and I felt the unfairness of the situation. Sometimes I wished I’d been born a boy; it simply wasn’t fair that my role in life was assigned at birth and I had no control over it. Hell, I hadn’t even asked to be here. This struggle to stretch out my mold or stand outside of it further strained my relationship with my mom. I made comments about not wanting to grow up a lot. My parents thought this was wholesome and innocent, and even now hark back to when I would say things like that on my birthdays. But those birthdays were trail markers telling me that as time marched on, my freedom from responsibility was running out.

Looking back I see that I didn’t know what I wanted. On the one hand, I’d been raised to believe that my full potential would only be realized once I was married. I was told to suppress my sexuality, suppress my romantic interest in boys, to stay pure and wait until I was grown up. I dreamed and prayed for my future husband every day. Only once I’d married him would my life truly begin.

But…I also looked to my mom and noted how unhappy she was, how tired. Her marriage was always struggling, despite her and my dad’s status as marriage counselors in the various Christian organizations they were part of. I knew my mom didn’t like homeschooling but felt that it was what God called her to do. It was obvious to everyone in the family that homeschooling put a strain on her ability to parent us. She didn’t like cleaning and she would frequently complain about how annoying cooking was. If she didn’t like any of the elements of her adult life, would I? Was something wrong with her for not liking it? Or was this just the way life was for housewives?

On the other hand, it was hard living at home. Being raised in an Evangelical household felt like I had to fight for breath. I had no privacy and no power to make choices; I faced criticism every day for what felt like anything that I did. I lacked autonomy. I feared hell and the rapture and the Mark of the Beast. I wanted desperately to grow old enough to break free of the four walls of my bedroom, the only place in the house where I could be away from my mom’s disapproval and the tangible tension felt in our house.

Nowhere in God’s plan for women is there room for independence. We weren’t supposed to leave our parents’ house, and we were hardly supposed to work. Without work there isn’t money to afford to leave. I know girls whose parents held their legal documents hostage, wouldn’t teach them to drive, wouldn’t allow them to get any kind of job–because they had vaginas. Fortunately, my parents weren’t as strict as that. They held fast to their beliefs, but they also wanted their children to succeed. I was allowed to have odd-jobs, and I got a car and my drivers license after graduating high school.

I didn’t move out of my parents’ house until I was 22 because the cost of living is so high; even then, I had to move out of state to afford rent. Courtship became an unfathomable option by the time I graduated high school. Instead, I began dating and stopped wearing my Purity Ring. I attended community college and started a career that I am still pursuing full time. I dated for years before getting married, and am still childless and working full time in my late-twenties.

I did everything I wasn’t supposed to do. And yet I can’t imagine living the adult life that Bill Gothard laid out for me and all the girls in IBLP. I might have been married with five children by now to someone who doesn’t accept the questions I’ve begun asking about my faith. At this stage of my life, I’m still trying to get to know me, and am hardly equipped to raise and homeschool a tribe of children with my own piecemeal education. I’m grateful for the choices I made to allow me the life that I have now. I’m a failure according to Bill’s doctrine, but I feel nauseated at the thought of almost being his poster-housewife.