Not like the girls noticed they were ever alive, except maybe Claire when she was very, very young. But at least Cal no longer has them shoved into every single thing he does. Well, physically at least. I have no doubt when he gets married that Gwen will write a long post about how tragic it is that the potatoes didn't live to force Cal out of the spotlight at his own wedding.
I wouldn't put it past Gwennie to photoshop the spuds into Cal's wedding photos, maybe as "wee little angels" watching over the living -- and she will most definitely use any children he may have as an excuse to wax on about her literally brainless permainfants* "taken from her arms too soon but forever in the family's hearts". Cal better be ready to name a daughter Claire or Lola, or one of each of he has two.
Entirely accurate. I spent my teenage years in a conservative evangelical church, and a bunch of the kids I knew went off the rails as soon as they graduated high school and got out into the real world, and I saw even more of that when I was in college. My favorite was this one girl who came into her freshman year at our school as a total fundie lunatic: she wore ankle-length skirts and modest tops, kept her hair in a bun, and told the religion profs that they were wrong about everything because her grandpa was a prophet and God spoke to him. Then a year later I went to the pool to swim some laps and she was there wearing a string bikini and sucking face with her boyfriend, and I heard later that she'd apparently turned into a total sex maniac. The tighter these people try to hold onto their kids, the worse the snapback is going to be when those kids inevitably slip from their grasp.
Yeah and my friend that went to Pensacola Christian College said that most of the girls she knew ended up with a bunch of kids at young ages. She said basically the same thing, they go nuts after years of crazy restrictive fundie shit but don't have the life skills or sex ed to know how to be safe.
It's always blown my mind that fundies don't seem to want to prepare their kids for the ugly realities of reproduction, or just the realities of life in general. But then they tend to try and keep themselves isolated from culture in general, since to them it's irreparably corrupt and depraved. They also try to paper over the cracks in their life philosophy with Jesus, which doesn't work if your kid doesn't actually believe in any of what you're trying to teach them, and it works even less when you're screaming about "Abortion is murder and you're spitting on God's handiwork!" to people who don't believe either of those things. Honestly, watching fundamentalist Christians trying to communicate with nonbelievers is hilarious, because it's like watching someone shouting at people in Esperanto and then getting mad and blaming the other person for not being able to understand them.
There's a poster on another board who said she lives in Pensacola, and they have a family friend who is a plumber, and they pretty much have a standing order to clear the plumbing in the dorms every weekend, because so many kids flush condoms.
Extreme sheltering doesn’t have to have any fundie parts to it, just want to put that out there.
Really seems like she did and the disorder she has "Treacher Collin's Syndrome" (Facial differences, jaw issues that may require tracheastomy, most are deaf due to physical ear issues) is pretty much a guarantee for the child to have as well.
Well, I'm not looking like the elephant ma'm myself, so I realise I have no experience of any similar situation to this, but I do think that having a genetic disorder that is, to some extent, physically and socially crippling should at least make one think a few extra times on whether it's a good idea to conceive or not... Sure, she might have a good quality of life despite her condition, but are the odds of that really that high? And having children just out of spite, no matter the cause, is incredibly fucking selfish and gross.
