The True Confessions of an Ex-Almost-Quiverfuller

I haven’t talked a lot about Quiverfull. Partly that’s because I don’t really like labels. It’s the same reason I don’t openly call myself a conservative or an anti-feminist except around people who know me well enough not to put me in a box based on those labels. But I think the biggest reason I haven’t talked about Quiverfull is because it’s embarrassing. It’s sort of like one of those high school yearbook pictures that you look at 30 years later and think, I can’t believe I thought my hair looked good like that. Right now, when I think about Quiverfull, I think, I can’t believe I was so into that.

I’m still not going to bash QF for the reasons a lot of people do. I still don’t think it oppresses women or is contributing to overpopulation. I don’t see anything wrong with Quiverfullers homeschooling their kids or believing that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Do I think I saved myself at the last second from a horrible future? Not really. Quiverfull works for some people, so I’m not going to condemn it as some sort of horrible cult. And anyway, I can only provide a limited perspective because I was never in the movement. I only read about it and adopted the parts of it that I could on my own.

The name Quiverfull comes from Psalm 127, which says that children are “like arrows in the hands of a warrior…happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.” In these very basic terms, the movement is made up of families who believe that God will decide the number of children they should have, and therefore they should not use birth control. But Quiverfullers come in as many different varieties as everyone else. Common practices, however, include traditional gender roles, homeschooling, and limiting contact with people not of their faith. Quiverfullers tend to be most criticized for being anti-feminist, for supposedly causing/contributing to overpopulation, and for trying to take over the government by out breeding the rest of the population (which is a goal/belief of some Quiverfullers, but by no means all).

I discovered Quiverfull by watching the Duggars, the Arkansas family with 19 kids and a TLC reality show. One day in the fall of 2008 I was checking my email and one of those “news” stories that always come up on my email homepage was about their oldest son’s recent wedding. I had watched their show on TV a few times, and I was mildly interested, so I clicked on it. The story described how he and his wife had “courted” rather than dated and had saved their first kiss for their wedding day. Oh, how I envied that girl, only a year older than me and already married. And she got to have the “old-fashioned” type of relationship that I longed for.

In early 2009 I clicked on another Duggar article. This one was about the birth of their 18th child. It contained a link to a message board, dating back to 2006, just after their 17th child was born, where people could leave comments. This message board was by far the most critical of the Duggars and the entire Quiverfull movement (which the Duggars have denied being a part of) that I have ever read.

I spent several days reading all 200 pages of this message board. By the time I was finished I was desperate for more information. Reading that board was the first time I heard the word “Quiverfull,” and despite the fact that the vast majority of posters had not one nice thing to say about it, I thought it sounded lovely. But I wanted to know more, so I started Googling. This led me to Ladies Against Feminism, which is an interesting site, but so over the top it’s almost comical, and also likely to make the vast majority of people angry enough to stab their computers. That website contained numerous links which I clicked on for hours. I read blogs, online magazines, and message boards, all the while becoming more and more attracted to a lifestyle that seemed made for me.

Now I need to provide a bit of context. I had just dropped out of college and was spending my days sitting at home with nothing to do. I was lost, I was angry at the world, and I was hurting. I would probably have fallen hard for any movement, no matter how strange or controversial, that helped me justify that decision. One common belief among Quiverfullers is that people (but especially girls) shouldn’t go to college. So see, I told myself, I had done exactly the right thing. I didn’t have a job, but that was all right because women shouldn’t work outside the home, ever. Even if they were done with school they should stay at home until they got married, helping their parents, and learning how to be wives and mothers.

Beyond justification for my current situation, Quiverfull provided me with a religious base for a lot of things I already believed. Many followers advocate living a simple, frugal, “old-fashioned” lifestyle. They tend to be (selectively) critical of technology, science, modern medicine, the media, and society in general. How could anyone who had spent six years trying to live in the past without leaving the 21st Century not be drawn to that like a magnet?

And then there were the skirts. Many (but again, not all) Quiverfullers believe that women and girls should only wear skirts and dresses. This is based on some Bible verse that says a woman should not wear a man’s garment, or something like that. And they don’t just wear any skirts, they typically wear long skirts, often those long denim skirts that were in style some years ago and can now be found in abundance at thrift stores. I think I latched onto this because it is one of the most visible signs of being a Quiverfuller, and it was something I could do all on my own, for relatively little money. Plus, I just liked the way the long skirts looked (I still do) and it gave me an excuse to say, “Screw fashion,” which, to some extent, I’d already been doing for years, anyway.

There were things I didn’t like, of course. Most Quiverfullers’ attitude towards music is that anything besides Christian music (and then only certain kinds of Christian music) is evil/wrong/whatever. This tends to hold true for any kind of media: TV shows, movies, books, etc. And as much as I liked Quiverfull, I wasn’t about to give up my Clancy Brothers or my new NCIS obsession. And so I would put on my long skirt, read blogs about teenage girls learning to be homemakers, and then go to the library to hunt for books about pirates. I was certainly a strange almost-Quiverfuller.

A friend of mine described what I did during this time, in a nutshell, as “clamming up and making pies,” which is a pretty accurate assessment, actually. After overpopulation, oppression of women, and trying to take over the government, one of the most common criticisms of Quiverfull is that followers try to shield themselves and/or their children from the “real world.” To me, the world that most modern people live in is anything but real. I felt like I was trying to find the real world, not hide from it. But I see where the critics are coming from, I really do.

There were times during my “semester off” when I would go somewhere like the mall or the movies or even the bookstore. These were places where I would have felt perfectly comfortable only a few months before, but now I felt so out of place, like I didn’t belong and I should just leave and get out of the way of people who hadn’t dropped out of the modern world (sometimes I couldn’t help but think of it as the real world, although I tried not to). I hated that feeling. I hated feeling like I had to choose between feeling awkward and out of place everywhere I went or selling my soul to a lifestyle I have no interest in. So I increasingly stayed away from these places or told myself that I felt uncomfortable because this world was fake. My world was real.

And then, after eight months of thrift stores and message boards and fantasizing about getting married and having babies, I went back to school. I went to my first day of classes at the local university wearing a long kaki skirt, determined to stick to my convictions no matter what. But even then I didn’t expect QF to last. I didn’t ever expect it to last, really, but once I went back to school I knew that was more or less the beginning of the end. And I was right.

That semester wasn’t easy. At first I hated school. I hated the idiots who acted like they were still in high school. I hated the people in my sociology class who spouted off all kinds of liberal, secular nonsense. I hated that my art history professor told us that a good way to stay awake during class was to imagine really good sex. I hated that I had to be there every day even though I believed it was wrong and every day I worried more and more that I would never survive without losing myself. I would have given anything to somehow escape back into my world, my real world.

But things started changing, and for once, the change was for the better. I learned to tolerate school, although I still hated it. Pants and shorter skirts started creeping their way back into my wardrobe, albeit very slowly, in a one step forward and two steps back sort of way. I became obsessed with a collection of medieval poetry called the Carmina Burana, which reminded me what it was like to really be interested in something, to want to find out more about it, but not necessarily because I wanted to build my life around it. And then one day I realized I was happy. For the first time in so long I had forgotten what it felt like, I was really, really happy. That was my first clue that maybe I was actually doing something right and maybe I wasn’t selling my soul to the 21st Century after all.

Then Christmas came. As I walked across the snowy campus to my car after my last class before Christmas break, I felt a little sad. I would miss that class, I realized. It had sort of been fun and I had sort of, well, liked it. I will never forget that moment. That was when I knew things had changed for the better. When I knew I was doing something right.

Today I would hardly recognize that girl in the long kaki skirt who went to her first day of school last August. I wear pants now (it helps that I’m also about 20 pounds thinner). I stay out till midnight with friends who make dirty jokes. I listen to some modern music (I absolutely love Green Day’s recent album 21st Century Breakdown). I don’t feel so awkward when I go out. I’m still not really sure that the world most people live in is all that real, but that’s okay. I recently read something about Christians striving to be in the world but not of the world. I think that’s what I want. And I’ll tell you a secret. In a strange odd sort of way, I really like school.

Did I ever really believe in the (common) Quiverfull theology, which tends to be what I would call neo-Puritan (a more well known term might be neo-Calvinist)? No. The truth is (and this is hard for me to admit), beyond the basics of Christianity, I’m not really sure what I believe. But try as I might, I can’t get into the whole personal-relationship-with-Jesus-Christ-ask-God-what-you-should-eat-for-breakfast-today sort of religion. I tend to describe my beliefs as “old world,” which probably isn’t exactly the best term, but that’s how I think of it. Yes, God is there and God is wonderful, but for heaven’s sake, do we need to spend every minute of the day thinking about Him? I think God probably understands that most of us have more important things to do. A few months ago, however, I realized there is one thing that I do believe beyond any shadow of doubt and when I realized that, it was like everything made sense.

I believe, above and beyond everything else, in history. I believe all the answers we could ever possibly need have been provided to us, most likely many times over, by those who came before. Now, that doesn’t mean that everything that ever happened in the past is right. I like to use the analogy of a multiple-choice test. You have all the right answers there in front of you, but you also have a lot of wrong answers, too. Your task is to sort out the right ones from the wrong ones. And sometimes the answer is “e, none of the above.” We’re still a part of history. There are problems our ancestors never had to solve, questions they never had to answer. When we come to one of those, we just have to do the best we can and know that at least we’re writing the answer key for the future.

I know it’s not that simple. Every possible answer for every possible question has someone to support it, to claim it’s the best. My belief system isn’t going to get people to agree anymore than any other belief system. But this is why I think history is so important. I think that most of the time, if we all just stopped what we were doing and thought about it for a minute we would realize that someone else already solved this problem or answered this question and they did a pretty good job of it. And even if we do decide that the answer is “e, none of the above” we still have to know about the other choices in order to rule them out. We will never know where we are going if we don’t know where we came from.

I was drawn to Quiverfull because I believed they had more of the right answers than the rest of the world. And in many ways, I still do. I think they do have some universally good ideas which, for the most part, don’t really have anything to do with their religion. I still like their emphasis on a simple, unflashy lifestyle. I like the idea of marrying someone based purely on their character and personality, rather than physical attraction or lust. I like the idea of having a big family. I always have. But Quiverfull most definitely doesn’t have all the right answers (and I think most Quiverfullers would be willing to admit this). Neither do I. In fact, I have a lot fewer answers now than I did before I discovered Quiverfull. But that’s okay. I don’t need all the answers to be happy.

I also realized what I think I already knew: I’m a strange kind of hybrid, and I always have been. Once upon a time I was the girl who listened to punk rock and read books about the Tudors. Then I became the 1950’s Facebooker. A year ago I was the Quiverfuller who Netflixed NCIS. And now…I don’t really know what I am now. I think the answer might be “e, all of the above.” I can’t put myself in a box. I can’t put a label on myself and say, this is who I am. That’s why I don’t like labels. Because no matter how hard I try, there isn’t just one word, one category to describe what I think and believe. There’s always a but. There’s always an exception. I think most people are like that. People, real people, are so much more complex than the labels we put on them.

There are days when I wish I could make Quiverfull go away, when I want to pretend it never happened. But I can’t. Just like the bad yearbook picture, it will always be there. There will always be a part of me that is almost Quiverfull, although maybe not as big a part of me as I thought. I used to imagine that I would look back on my QF adventure and long to have just one more day like that, but it hasn’t happened yet. I love the way my life is now. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

There’s a quote that says, “There are times when all of us are frustrated and angry, but it’s usually not a good idea to make it a way of life.” I think that sums up my experience with QF nicely. Rather than simply letting myself be frustrated and angry until I sorted things out, I sought to turn my frustration and anger into a philosophy, a religion, a lifestyle. If I could go back and do it a gain, would I? I don’t know if I will ever be able to answer that. I don’t think it was a good idea, but I’ve come so far in such a short time. I’m stronger now than ever before. Without Quiverfull, I might still just be frustrated and angry.

Sometimes I regret spending my precious time off reading message boards and searching thrift stores for long denim skirts. I’ll probably be eighty before I have that kind of spare time again. But one thing I taught myself, long before I’d ever heard of Quivefull, is to never look back. I believe in looking to the past for answers, but not to fuss and fret about what might have been or should have been. What happened, happened, and there is no going back now.

What I've Been Doing Lately

I went back to school last August, after taking a semester off (eight months, really, including the summer). Last semester, I started out with a full load, but starting school again after so long was tough and I just couldn’t deal with it, so I dropped a class. This semester, I have 15 credits (12 is considered full-time). I thought that was going to kill me, but it hasn’t. Not really, anyway. I never get all my homework done, and I’m always dealing with at least one “fiasco,” but I’m doing reasonably well in all my classes. Three of my friends and I all have an art history class together, which is just too much fun (especially since the class would be dead boring if we weren’t all in it together). I’m having a great time.

Outside of school, it’s pretty much business as usual. I’m still in my church choir and still having a blast there. I’ve also been taking voice lessons again. And of course, I’m working on my trilogy. Over Christmas I wrote a whole new ending for the first book, which I think made it a lot stronger. I’m in a great critique group, which meets once a month.

Everything in my life is so amazingly good right now. Never in a million years did I dream it would be this good again. Getting here wasn’t easy and I still fight every day to stay where I am and to move forward when I can. But life’s an adventure, and it just keeps getting better.

If Anyone Is Reading This...

I am a terrible blogger. I started this blog thinking that I would post all the time, that I would have so much to say, and that it would be interesting enough to get followers. Obviously, none of that has happened. But in a few days (hopefully) I'm going to post something that I think is really important. It's also very, very personal, so I don't know how long exactly it will take me to get up the courage to actually post it (sometimes I wonder if airing our personal lives all over the internet is really a good idea). So, if anyone is reading this, stay tuned. Good stuff is coming.