A Well-Trained Wife Partial Review
My fingers and brain aren't sleeping until I write how this book has haunted me with names and places I never thought I'd be seeing on paper. Tear them all down, Tia.
Dear Tia,
It’s 9:45 PM Mountain Time in Missoula, Montana, as I write. My daughters, now 11 and 13, are curled up in their own AirBnB beds, cozy and safe, while a late autumn rain pounds on the roof. Tomorrow, we’ll wake up to witness an entire nation swaying under the grip of a Patriarchal Oligarchy, desperately hoping that she, for once, votes her way to freedom, even in the face of retaliatory acts of civil violence.
And I can’t sleep. Your book, A Well Trained Wife, has a chokehold on me right now. Pardon the verbiage.
My promise of “staying off SubStack through the election” has faded. Damnit. But it was either write this or suffer more lucid dreams about people I haven’t seen in eons. Back to logging off after I hit post.
I just set it down after reading these words so I could grab my laptop and type, from page 157:
"Young Christian wives trusted the voices of older women mentors, even when the advice they gave led to more pain and abuse. I knew because I was one."
Tonight, Tia, I’ve come to a crossroads. My journey has paralleled yours in so many ways. I keep gasping, hand to mouth, as my daughters look over at me, concerned, while I pat their legs, kiss their heads, and tell them I’m okay.
But, dear, brave, and bold lady—who I’ve never met but have wept for as I poured over your heart-wrenching recounting—I’m not okay. Mostly, just in the sense that your words have ripped open wounds I pretended were healed long ago.
You see, on Wednesday, I will kiss and hug my daughters goodbye again (as I’ve done dozens of times now). I’ll watch them march back up to their dad in their long denim skirts, their waist-length hair swaying, tender hearts heading home, while I fly back to California, leaving them to continue attending weekly services at the CREC Sister Church to Doug Wilson’s in Moscow, ID, while being homeschooled and living an ultra-rural, humble, holy lifestyle that mimics the exact one I grew up with.
I chose divorce and single motherhood without a clear action plan or family support. My heretical move lost me all standing in Christ Church, shut all the doors of communication—EX-communicado, just like John Wick (get it?). My husband had spent all of our money, we had sold every available resource, and my credit was shot to hell. I buckled and let him "help care for the kids for a little while." That turned into a long while. It ended in a coerced signature on a parenting plan granting him full responsibility until they are 18, or until he ends up on the wrong side of the law (again), or he passes away.
You might guess this hasn’t brought about peaceful co-parenting over the last decade.
My struggle is this: I’ve been hurting and deconstructing for a long time, without always having the words or emotional tools to name the pain. Writing has been a therapeutic lifeline, but it’s also meant having to cleave myself open in therapy, cutting away the fog, and confronting the emotional, financial, and spiritual abuse that gaslit me into becoming a copy-paste version of Christian Purity, which you describe with breathtaking horror.
I “saved” my virginity for a random stranger that my mom literally met on the internet, thanks to her blog exhortations to all Christian women to live the Godly, Stay-at-home, Submissive Wife lifestyle. Her outspoken anti-feminist stances garnered her much attention in the Fundamentalist world.
You’ve stunned me with your recounting of names, publications, and churches that I thought no one in my new life would ever know.
R.C. Sproul Jr. came and stayed with us at our remote California childhood home because my mom was such a fan of his work, and invited him, with my dad’s blessing. She struck up a long-continued correspondence, championed his ideologies, and he even guest-preached once at our little local chapel. That was one of multiple interactions we had with him and his (now deceased) wife, Denise both in California, and at their church and home in Virginia.
Doug Phillips responded warmly to my mom’s offer to edit his Vision Forum posts (for free, of course!) and we donated thousands of dollars to their cause, bought all their merchandise, and attended a majority of his conferences. I’ve even been to his and his former wife Beall’s San Antonio home more than once. I took photos (for free, of course!) as an unmarried young woman attending his first—and only?—Baby Conference, which was centered around decrying the evils of birth control and embracing dominionism through Quiverfull families. My mom even spoke on a panel with Michelle Duggar, despite only having 10 kids compared to Michelle’s 19.
And Doug Wilson... well, as I read with horror the impressions his and his wife Nancy’s books left on your ex-husband, I’m flooded with memories of reading them myself. Doug Wilson holds a particularly significant place in my story because I was matched with a young man all the way in Montana who passed his vetting with gold stars because he attended a Doug Wilson-planted church here in Missoula (and still does). For our marriage counseling, before I said “I do” to the perfect man I’d only met six times in person, I had to read Her Hand in Marriage and Reforming Marriage.
The turmoil in my heart and mind over my relationship with her still hasn’t settled. I don’t know if it ever will. She has, in large part, left the more egregious parts of that world behind and asked for forgiveness but remains quiet as to the role she played in sensationalizing the term “Prairie Muffin,” even going so far as to write a manifesto in faithful Lutheran and Calvinist fashion, exhorting other Women to adhere to it if they wanted to retain their Godly Wife card. She has now recanted that, but the bomb detonated in many lives, mine included.
Words carry weight and make people change their lives in permanent ways.
Part of me wants to lay the blame for all of the wreckage of my life on her, only I’m 35 and know better than that. She is waiting for me to let her re-enter my life while the shards of the old one she orchestrated work deeper into my heart, and I battle to find the balance.
Still.
As I kiss my two sweethearts goodbye each time and head back to my state of origin, to the life I’ve built from dust and formed much better than God did with Adam, it’s hard not to taste the bitter tang of resentment. Dragging my soul back toward a modicum of amnesty for the fallout of the role assigned to me since I was a little girl—younger than my own daughters are now—is grating.
But I know that continuing to blame a woman, who was, in her own right, a victim of the machinations of men, is not aiding my part in dismantling those very evils that seeped into your chronicled personal history, and took root in my life early on.
We can direct the full force of our justified outrage onto the decaying, bloated, age-spotted giant of the Patriarchy. Your words inspire me to continue speaking up, even in the face of my own personal retributions from my ex-husband—the continued snipping away at my access to my daughters, as I scrape together the time and finances to see them regularly, 1,000 miles away.
But in the meantime, your writing has also brought me one gleaming nugget of profound, succinct wisdom:
When women stop telling other women how to exist more seamlessly within the framework of a patriarchal society, that old society crumbles, making way for a long-awaited, thawed-out blooming. The Patriarchy relies on women to keep other women in line, and I’ve experienced it firsthand.
I hope tomorrow marks the start of a nation of women freeing themselves, reaching down with empathy to lift others up and out of the chains of Christian Fundamentalism. As we open our hearts, minds, and eyes to the damage it has done to so many, you and me included, it’s my sincerest hope that through speaking up, other victims of the Patriarchal systems we worship in our religion and politics can also be emboldened to recognize the abuse and leave.
I haven’t finished your book yet, Tia. When I do, I’ll give it the proper standing ovation and review it deserves. Thank you for your voice and for not letting your story fade into obscurity.
With gratitude,
Anna
Also, I was first introduced to your work through Tori Dunlap’s Podcast with you on Financial Feminist. I’ve spent years collecting the shards of my financial health post-divorce, and needed to hear your advice.
