The Legend Of The Sister Slave

I posted The End of Not Me from Raising Homemakers a few days ago with a link to read the article in full. Today I found this follow-up. This second article was written as a response to the comment you will find in the box below (comment was posted by an anonymous reader of the Raising Homemakers blog). As a mother of 9 who has raised my children to love, and to serve, one another, I read the comment with sadness. I applaud Bailey, the young writer of these articles, for her loving servant heart. May God raise up more young ladies like her. ~Anna (the Mama)

First...the comment:

I think that this is beautifully written, and certainly God will bless this young lady for her serving heart.

But I have a huge problem with it. This post would be beautiful if written by a mother, but it wasn’t - it was written by a 16-year-old girl, who has never (yet) chosen to have children of her own. Yet she is taught to believe (by the parents who benefit from the teaching) that it is her “calling” to “play mommy” to her younger siblings.

Yes, I believe in family. I believe strongly in family. But I don’t believe for a second that my younger children are in any way, shape or form the responsibility of my older children. My oldest is expected to help, to read to her younger siblings, and yes, sometimes to get up and pour apple juice. But I can’t imagine her ever writing a post like the one above, because she is still a child (at 15 she might cringe to hear me say that but it’s true), and I respect her time, her space, and her childhood, and I don’t expect her to raise my children for me.

And here is Bailey's gracious response:

Well, I could say, “Not true! I’m as lazy and independent and self-seeking as the best of them!” My first thought was to produce a chronicle of my days—the hours texting, emailing, blogging and fiddling around on the internet as much as the most shamefully teenagery teenager out there. But that would be embarrassing, and it’s nice to be considered self-sacrificial enough to be thought manipulated. 

While thinking those thoughts and reading through the comment, my soon-to-be-off mother came down with instructions to put cheese on the thawed casserole, bake it for 30 minutes at 350 and pop in some crescent rolls while the oven was hot. I answered a question posed to me on child-training (which I deferred to my mother’s example because goodness knows I’m no expert). Daniel Franklyn interrupted thirty minutes later to inform me of his accident, and while running upstairs to find the Kid-N-Pet stain cleaner (which squirted on my wrist because I’m that clumsy), the casserole timer went off. Then, sitting down again to work on this post, I heard the baby scream.

My life is incriminating. I cannot hide the fact. I am not normal. 

Neither am I abused. Now and then I come across pitying diatribes against the shackling of older sisters to their younger siblings—“I think it’s shameful what the parents are doing to them”—“They need a chance to be children”—“There should be only one mommy in the house.” The concerned ignorance, which lacks no sincerity but only good timing, I do not know what to do with. 

I think this arises from two points modern and fashionably selfish people do not understand. (I say “fashionably” because the Me-First Society of Selfishness made it so. And I’m no exception, by the way, but by God’s grace.) Firstly, when “large” in regards to household size comes to a grand total of three or four, there is going to be a disconnect of understanding how to run that household in comparison to, say, our shocking number of nine. The disconnect happens because common sense knows only pocket-sized families of one boy, one girl and then leaps to the Duggars. Everything goes back to the Duggars. Anything else between is roundly misunderstood, attacked for lacking the privileges of small families and attacked for being too similar to a family of twenty. 



To read in full, please go to http://bighouseinthelittlewoodsblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/legend-of-sister-slave.html