Don't Breed Rupunzels

This is the story of a woman I know. Let’s call her Sarah.

Sarah was sheltered her entire existence. Homeschooled through high school in a strange hybrid of patriarchal IBLP Quiverfull ideology, she was trained from infancy to believe her entire purpose in this world was to become a wife and mother. That’s what women are good for. That’s why God made us.

By the time she hit her mid 20s, Sarah’s prince had still not come. She lived with her parents and took on the occasional nannying job here and there, still waiting for her husband to rescue her so her life could begin.

To pass the time, she filled her sketchbook with mediocre charcoal drawings such as you might find in a 7th grade art show, but, having never been exposed to much outside her four walls, she believed they were great and decided to try to earn some money by selling them online. If you asked her, she would tell you her fallback financial plan was to make a living selling art. Her client base was small and mostly limited to friends and family.

Birthdays came and birthdays went, but still no sign of her knight in shining armor. As the ticking of her fertility clock increased its volume, she finally decided to join an online dating site for Christians. And there, a few pages in, was a handsome rugged man whose profile indicated that he loved Jesus.

It was a whirlwind romance- engaged in a month or two, married a few months later. They moved to a new state in a new town with a new church and started the baby making as quickly as possible. The vision and identity are not complete without the babies.

At some point during the pregnancy, the honeymoon phase abruptly ended, initiated by his out-of-control drinking and embarrassing drunken online rants complete with racist pejoratives and political conspiracy theories, but Sarah was taught to always honor her husband and to never speak poorly of him to anyone, so she kept her private suffering, well, private. And when an observant woman in her life group approached her to invite a much-needed discussion, Sarah took offense and insisted there was nothing wrong, firmly reiterating that additional such conversation attempts were completely unwelcome.

Before long, the drunken tirades became physically dangerous to Sarah and her unborn child, to the degree that she required male escorts from her church group to help extract her from the home. And it seemed like maybe it was a severe mercy- the proverbial sh*t had hit the fan, and finally there was no denying it, so her husband was forced to admit his obvious problem and get help. Embarrassed, he initially made grand overtures to the people at church about his commitment to sobriety. The dust settled. Sarah returned home. They had a baby, and a short time later, her husband was seen in the local bar throwing back beers and pretending nothing ever happened.

But still, she played the dutiful wife. When her church friends tried to offer accountability, the husband insisted it was time to switch churches, and she agreed. They could use a clean slate. Their baby became a toddler in the midst of the secret storm, and she was too busy surviving to acknowledge his obvious autism, let alone seek help for it or for the chronic instability and chaos of her husband’s undiagnosed narcissism. She got pregnant again, convinced that this time it will be better even though her husband’s demons are rearing their ugly heads again and it’s increasingly difficult to hide their dysfunction.

They move halfway across the country to a new town and a new church and a new home, and that’s where they are today—the parents of neglected children in a co-dependent marriage marked by addiction and shame and secrecy. But hey, at least she’s finally living up to her calling, right? She’s a wife and mom, so her sense of self is secure.

Guys, this is a super depressing story, and I find myself a bit jaded as I tell it. It’s a very painful thing to watch people you care about self-destruct because they were brainwashed from infancy to adopt identities that do not serve them. Unless the good Lord intervenes, where do you suppose this story goes? What happens in this marriage? How do the kids turn out? What will the kids come to believe is normal about marriage and gender relations?

I don’t share this story to be fatalistic; I share it because I think it so perfectly encapsulates a number of the topics I am most passionate about addressing.

When people ask questions like, “Why didn’t she leave” in the context of domestic violence, we’re often invited to remember how scary and how dangerous it is to leave domestic abusers. And it’s true. It is scary. It is dangerous. And it’s not just a physical fear that’s in play; in the cases of spiritually indoctrinated women, the threat of hell also plays heavily into the equation. Women are told, “Your kids will fail if you divorce your husband, and it will be all your fault. Their souls hang in the balance of your willingness to endure his terrible behavior.” It’s a really powerful spiritual manipulation.

But what I don’t hear people discussing quite as frequently is the reality that to leave a marriage like the one I just described is to untether a woman from her very sense of self. Her entire identity is wrapped up in her status as a wife and mother, so to lose one of those titles would be to lose her deepest sense of who she is. And where does anyone go from there? Even on a practical level, where would she go? She has no lucrative life skills. She was never encouraged to cultivate any. And what happens to women like this who never find someone to marry them? What happens to women like this who marry only to be plagued by infertility? Holy identity crisis!

There’s a real danger in raising girls to find their entire sense of worth in their capacity to marry, breed, comply, and stay sweet. All these creepy but prominent theological systems where girls are passed like a prize trophy between their fathers and husbands with absolutely ZERO equipping for navigating the real world on their own are setting countless girls up for failure. Literally NO ONE involved in these equations becomes their best selves in the presence of women who are operating at such a small percentage of their actual capacity. These are real lives and real souls at stake. Our daughters must be taught to raise their voices and cultivate their passions and identify their gifts both inside and outside the home. Their lives have to have purpose and worth long before Prince Charming comes along and, God forbid, long after he rides off into the sunset with the babysitter.

It’s 2023; no one should be waiting in a tower for her prince to come and give her life purpose; there’s entirely too much work to be done in the meantime.