No Longer Quivering

 

Here is a blog about a woman who journals her escape from the cult "The Quiverfull" and away from her Armstrongite husband who physically abused her.

Three weeks into the marriage, my new husband and I got into a disagreement and he ended the argument by choking me. We had left our hometown the day after we married on a round-the-world tour by bicycle and we were in the New England states at the time. I was shocked because I had never experienced such actions in my home. The same thing happened a month and a half later when we got into another argument. I was a fast learner and I realized that if I didn’t argue with my husband, I wouldn’t get choked.

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My husband, despite a profession of faith in Christ, never really showed any fruit of salvation. My attempts to go out in the evening for my Bible study were impeded by him. He refused to do anything with our children that would put him out in any way so I would have to have the children fed, bathed and in bed in order to be allowed to go anywhere. Additionally, he got involved with Herbert W. Armstrong’s World Wide Church of God and became a real legalist with regard to Christmas, Easter, observing OT holy days and not eating unclean meats. I remember at one point he was following me around the house with a book quoting stuff to me out of it til I finally couldn’t take it any more and I grabbed the book and pitched it out of the nearest window. His involvement with the WWCG meant that I was attending a “synagogue of Satan” and so he had his excuse ready made as to why he could never attend church with me.

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 It was a spacious and gracious home, or should have been.  In the seventeen years that we lived there, it never was finished.  My husband reached a point where, as long as supper could be made and sex could be had, so what.  It didn’t matter that I was cooking for a very large family and that this was my workspace.  In fact, on the rare occasion when I would bring up the idea of finishing the kitchen, he would tell me that he would deliberately NOT do anything about it just to teach me to keep my mouth shut.  So the materials for building the cupboards, as well as the expensive tools he had acquired to do the work, sat in the basement untouched and unused by him the whole time we lived there.

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We were living a fairly comfortable life and I was beginning to develop something of a network through my local church when my husband decided it was time to move our family. I was five months pregnant with our fourth child at the time he announced this, and forgetting past lessons, I took exception to having to move away from all my friends and having to start all over in building a support network. He punched me out in front of my daughters who were three and four at the time. He threw me on the bed and sat on my pregnant belly and gave it to me. I had a severely split and swollen lip, a black eye, and bruises on my arms from that encounter. The next day a floral arrangement arrived on our doorstep as his way of saying sorry. My first desire was to pitch it as far and as hard as I could. But I didn’t, fearing that my lack of forgiveness would only bring more wrath and recriminations down on my head.

No Longer Quivering