Which is why I've been scarce around here; too busy trying to maintain what's left of my sanity while we pack, move, and take care of a bazillion details that I'm quite likely to forget.
However, I just now read that the scary, android Duggar family is going to have their 19th child. Nineteen children. Jiminy fucking Cricket. I can barely manage the one. Nineteen? How do you remember their names, or their individual personality traits? How do you possibly spend any quality time with any one child?
Look, normally I try not to judge other people. (Unless they play or coach for opposing football teams.) But in this case, I'm hard-pressed not to because these people are not having children because they love kids Just That Much. They're doing it because they belong to the Quiverfull Movement, the primary purpose of which is to have as many fucking children as you can and raise them all to be the kind of Christian that might intimidate even a fundamentalist. Their goal is to populate the world with people who think like they do. Overpopulation issues? Screw it. Diminishing resources? Up yours. Far too many children living in orphanages overseas? Eh, they're heathens anyway. We're going to have our own, and we're going to raise 'em up right. Which includes, sickeningly, raising the girls to take care of their younger siblings because By God, all they're good for are their reproductive organs, anyway. These girls won't go to college, they'll be living their lives in the kitchen and the maternity ward. (Or, thanks to the media, on television.)
I think out of all of this inherent insanity, the treatment of the girls is the one that enrages me the most. Believe what you want, do what you want, but don't sentence your children to a fate that they'll accept blindly because they've never been exposed to anything else. You want to be a walking baby machine? By all means, it's your rabidly abused uterus. But think about your daughters instead of yourself, just for once.
And on that note, the oldest son is married and his wife is expecting (at 20!) their first next month. When I read that several months ago, my immediate reaction was, "And when's Ma Duggar going to remind her that she is the Queen in this litter?" I wish I'd been disappointed by the result. But I wasn't.
Last item: It looks (according to Wikipedia, at least) as though the movement is promulgated by women. Which is scary and absolutely incomprehensible, at least to me. But then I think about the Duggar girls, who have never known any option than this one, and it all makes sense. Well, as much sense as anything about this can.
