Communities of Care, Pt. 1

Many months ago, I had a conversation with a man in his seventies—a father and grandfather—about what it is like to raise a family. This man was not from the Mennonite world. And although he loved his family, he told me forthrightly: “Having kids is an active destruction of yourself.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Part of what he was referring to, he told me, was the transformation that takes place as you become a parent, a transformation that (hopefully) results in more patience, more kindness, more gentleness, more selflessness, as you learn to sacrifice your comfort for the needs of dependent infants and children. “Like how Jesus said—a seed must be buried in the ground and die before it comes to life,” he said.

But he was also referring to the deep discouragement that bleeds from parents who are not supported. “The nuclear family is corrosive,” he said abruptly, sharply. He and his wife’s endeavor to raise, train, and provide for their children all on their own seemed impossible. Their own parents were in ill health and they took on their care, as well. Meanwhile, they felt unmoored, strained, and exhausted.

When I told him that I could name five or six people off the top of my head who I can rely on to care for my children when I need a babysitter, his eyes widened. “Wow. You are lightyears ahead of where my wife and I were at, at your age.”

I may be wrong about this, but I suspect our Mennonite culture and background has a lot to do with the way my husband and I raise our family, and the way we are supported in raising a family. The man I spoke with was completely correct about how difficult it is to function as the “traditional” nuclear family. The Western, industrial ideal of the nuclear, self-sufficient family is actually far from traditional, and can often be quite unhealthy. But the Mennonite culture fights against this: Plain communities have formed multi-faceted support structures which sustain families and prevent isolation.

After this man shared his frustrations with me, I began to think about these support structures.

I thought of the many women who fed my husband and me in the first weeks after our children’s births. I thought of how a group of older mothers brought us meals once again when I was suffering with postpartum depression. I thought of my mother-in-law tending to my infant son on a near-daily basis while I finished up college. Over time, our connections have branched out like roots from a tree, and now many friends and neighbors help care for and love our children. One friend began teaching my son how to swim last summer. Another held my daughter on her lap as she homeschooled her own children.

Not a week goes by that I do not connect with other families (and this is very intentional on my part). I love being a parent in the presence of supportive friends; I don’t love being a lonely parent stuck in my home twenty-four seven, gulping for sanity.

But my thinking roamed further, beyond my own life and to the lives of the women who have been pushed outside the sharp lines of their Plain church community.

What’s available to me as a mother of young children who enjoys a healthy marriage and who is accepted by her church community, and whose husband has a job that supports the family fully so that I don’t have to work outside the home,1 and so therefore I have time to invest in reciprocal relationships and help the people who will help me when I need it, and with the same husband being a present and involved parent who shares the load of childcare and housework—none of what is available to me with the advantages I have is available to a conservative Mennonite or Amish woman who has left her home and husband in order to escape emotional, spiritual, or physical abuse.2

That woman often shoulders the bulk of childcare, childcare for children who are hurt and traumatized and throwing words and sometimes throwing fists at the one person they can trust to not hit them back, the person who in their minds, often, tragically, becomes responsible for the chaos happening to them. That woman must also find a safe place to live, and she must figure out how to solve or work around problems like faulty wiring and leaking toilets and dysfunctional dryers. She will have to do this with little or no money at her disposal. At the same time, she will have to find a job and cobble up a resume since she hasn’t had a paying job since she was a young adult, probably, and she must learn to navigate a world of forced productivity that is disorienting, relentless, and depleting. She has to puzzle over paperwork that creates ditches all around her (if there’s an open divorce case or ongoing custody issues, those ditches gape wider, take longer and longer to cross). She still has to do all the regular work, too, that she has been doing for her entire life: laundry, cleaning, cooking meals, organizing the home, making sure her children have clothes and shoes that fit, tending to their emotional and physical wellbeing . . . and on and on and on.

She has to do all this when her body and mind are wrung out, limp, begging and pleading for rest.3 She has to do all this when her dreams—for a good marriage, a socially typical life, carefree children—have been cast to the dirt and ground to dust, ground into oblivion, by a heavy heel. She needs restoration. She needs recovery. She needs rest. Instead she has to work, and work, and work. She has to work until her eyes burn with fatigue and she feels like a puppet at the end of a string, obeying whatever shreds of willpower she has left in order to create a new life and home for herself and her children.

And if she has lost her church community, if they have cast her out or gradually pulled away from her because they don’t understand what marital abuse looks like or how a man who seems so pleasant or repentant can be so destructive, she has to do all of this alone.

When someone’s family member dies, or a family is experiencing serious illness, or a new baby is born, meals show up at the door. Someone says, “Hey, I can watch your kids for a morning,” or “Hey, I’m praying over you this afternoon,” or “Let me know if you need something”—and they mean it. I know this because I’ve experienced it, again and again. I’ve had women make my bed, empty the dishwasher, take the children for a walk so I have a few minutes of quiet. A couple months ago, when my neck and shoulder pain flared up and my husband had just left on a work trip, I texted the ladies at my church and said, “I need help.” Within a few hours, all the meals for the day were covered, and I had someone I trusted to care for my kids while I visited a massage therapist.

No one can tell me that the Plain church isn’t capable of being supportive, because I know they are, and I know what an incredible rarity it is in this world to have people you can fall back in your moments of need, people who will hold your hands high like Aaron and Hur lifted Moses’ hands in the battle against the Amalekites (Exodus 17). But I know, I know, the limits of that community, limits like barbed-wire fences. If you reach those limits, if you are thrust through to the other side, your heart and your soul get torn to shreds. You won’t even recognize yourself anymore.

With all my heart, I wish our best support, our strongest sense of compassion, consistently wrapped its arms around the people who need it most. I wish this kind of support showed up even if church members struggle to understand what’s going on or grapple with the choices a woman is making for herself. 4I wish this kind of support never looked away from or neglected the women I know who are navigating the most difficult, lonely, exhausting, and catastrophic years of their entire lives.

Kristen LaValley, author of Even if He Doesn’t and Growing Up Saved, recently wrote about the “greater things” Jesus calls his disciples to do, and posits that we are meant to tackle the work of inner healing—“the hard, messy, painful work.” As she says: “There are some things that take time to heal.”

They require patience from the people whose lives brush up against those who suffer. Time and patience aren’t something church bodies have endurance for. We want someone to get past their pain quickly because it affects us. If they have a broken leg, we’ll bring them a casserole and help pick their kids up from school. But if their suffering falls into any of the [more complicated] categories, we’re much more likely to gossip, tsk-tsk, get impatient, grow weary, dismiss their pain, question their spiritual integrity, push them out of community. We want our people to be reasonably broken, not extraordinarily so.5

Experiencing extraordinary suffering from a marriage relationship, I have observed, is enough for women to be pushed straight into the barbed wire fence of Plain community limits.

For the second part of this piece, I will be sharing insights from four women who are survivors of spousal abuse. Stay tuned!

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