mynextmistake

Wow, take my life from "good" to "really good?" Just try to hold me back.

If you hit the arrow on the picture, you'll see a full size photo. It is indeed Jinger in the shoes.

Jinger is wearing pants, a retro Nike t-shirt (possibly a snarky shoutout to the girls being forced to cover the TV and shout Nike! so the boys would look at their shoes whenever anything scandalous, like a woman in pants, was shown), and basketball shoes. No more flip flops for this girl!

Regarding the quote about Jeremy wanting a meek wife, I just wanted to point out something I haven't already seen discussed here. The term "meek" has a very specific biblical meaning that is different from the secular meaning most people associate with the term. It means being humble and completely subservient to God, not to your fellow man. Many modern Christian sources point out the difference and explain that being "meek" in a biblical sense does not mean being a doormat, even to one's spouse. It's possible Jeremy was using the term in its secular sense, but based on the overall tone of his statement I think it's more likely he meant it in the biblical sense. I'm sure he does have some antiquated notions of gender roles, but I haven't seen anything that makes me believe he is abusive or tyrannical or even particularly controlling. Jinger seems to have much more freedom now than she ever did at home. She looks happy enough to me. I wouldn't want to marry Jeremy, but compared to a child molester, creepy-looking wannabe missionary, or unemployed teenager? I think she got pretty lucky.

I'm going to guess that's their living room. They said they have a master bedroom, guest room, study for Jeremy and a storage room. Let's assume the bedrooms average around 12 by 12, leaving 900 square feet for the kitchen, dining, baths, living room, and necessary dead space (hallways, closets, etc.). This can't be the guest room, because there's no room for a bed. It's awfully feminine to be Jeremy's study. I doubt Jessa and Ben would be reading in the master. I suppose it could be the storage room, but why decorate it? So if it's in Jeremy and Jinger's house I think it has to be the living room. I guess it could be a hotel, but sweet lord in heaven, why would anyone ever stay there with that wallpaper? Motel 6 has better decor these days.

I don't know. I think Derrick might be crazy like a fox. Let's face it. "Counting On" is boring. In fact, if you give me a choice between watching Jill hand out banana bread and watching paint dry, I'm going to take the paint. Jill, Jessa, Jinger, and Joy are simply not interesting people. They are young and undereducated and programmed to want nothing more than husbands and babies. Nothing they do is engaging enough to sustain a tv show. People were willing to watch for couple of seasons to catch the end of the Josh drama and the novelty of the missionary stuff, but once that's over there's nothing left. Jill and Jessa are played out. Jeremy and Jinger have some spark but it's not enough to carry the show. Joy and Austin? Come on. If I wanted to watch a (undoubtedly soon-to-be) pregnant teenager stroll through Walmart looking at baby clothes, I'd just go to Walmart and do it in person. This show has a limited shelf life and it's getting stale. Enter Derrick and his controversy. People are talking about the show again. It's getting media attention. People who would otherwise have tuned out are going to be watching either because Derrick champions their beliefs or because they want to see if he's as big of an asshole on TV as he is on Twitter. There's no such thing as bad publicity, right? And frankly, in a country where Donald Trump is president, I have a hard time believing that people offended by Derrick's behavior are going to boycott TLC in such numbers as to require them to end the show or take Derrick off. I'm sure Derrick actually believes what he said about Jazz, but the timing of the comments makes me wonder if he isn't a bit smarter than we give him credit for being. Or maybe he's just a moronic dickhead. That could be true also.

I'm a nurse, and in my experience it's a lot harder than this. Very few women have clockwork cycles. Timing of ovulation can vary depending on a number of factors (stress being among them) so charting your cycle only gets you so far. OPKs can help in conceiving, but they aren't a lot of help in preventing pregnancy because sperm can live in a woman's reproductive tract for up to 5 days. This means that refraining from sex after an OPK detects the lutein surge (meaning ovulation will occur in 12-36 hours) is of limited utility; any woman who has had sex within 48 hours prior to the surge might already have sperm in her Fallopian tubes waiting to meet the egg. To really do NFP "right," you need to be charting your cycle, logging your basal body temperature, and checking your cervical mucus daily to detect the time your CM becomes "fertile" so you can refrain from sex until much later in your cycle. It's this last step that a lot of women ignore, and frankly I can't see any of the Duggar girls doing it. A family who equates masturbation with SIN to the point they don't let their daughters have their own beds isn't going to educate them about how to collect and analyze a sample of their CM, and I don't see most of the girls having the initiative to learn it on their own. And it's also important to note that even with CM checks, NFP is far from infallible.

Jessa is probably wishing she had Derrick in the prayer closet so she could use that Bible to beat him with.

Or maybe they believe God is choosing their family, just not in the way the Duggars usually mean it. I live in an area with a lot of evangelical churches, and I haven't heard of any that forbid the families in their congregation from using birth control. My cousin, who attends one of these churches, explained that their pastor preaches that birth control is a tool given to man by God for his use and it is up to each family to decide whether they are comfortable using it. It really seems to be only Duggar-level zealots who completely prohibit birth control. I could see Jeremy, who seems a bit less conservative than most of the Duggar entourage, and Jinger, who has always seemed to have an independent streak the other girls lack, deciding that waiting a few years for kids isn't inconsistent with their beliefs. I actually like what I have seen of this couple compared to the Jill/Jesse/Joyanna pairings. They actually seem to like and respect each other. They go places and have fun. Jinger has more freedom to express herself (wearing pants and heels!) and doesn't seem to have morphed into a babymaking automaton. Plus, they got the hell out of Arkansas. Laredo, Texas may not appeal to a lot of us, but it must feel like heaven compared to Duggarville. I mean, it makes me sad to be thinking in 2017 that a woman is "lucky" to marry a man who lets her wear pants and take the pill, but compared to her sisters she seems very lucky indeed.

No. In fact, any instance of major depression occurring within a year of childbirth is considered to be PPD. Normally I'm all about a good Duggar snark session, but I can't bring myself to snark on Jill if she has PPD. I had it, badly, after my kid was born last summer and I'm still recovering. And I had the benefit of a supportive partner and family, a real therapist and psychiatrist, and a support network of other moms who knew what I was going through. Even with all that, I had days when I could barely get out of bed, and it took me a good six months before I felt bonded to my child. To be Jill, and have it, and be told to pray it away while being more or less forbidden from ever publicly talking about motherhood as anything other than a blessing... God, I can't even imagine.

If she's pregnant again already, she's an even bigger idiot than I thought. I had a baby via emergency C-section two months ago (baby and I both came out of it fine, thankfully) and my OB told me that I should plan on waiting for at least a year, preferably two, before conceiving again to make sure that my uterus has time to heal completely. And that timeline assumes that any subsequent births will be managed by a trained practitioner in a hospital. If Jill tries to do a VBAC with a lay midwife in the prayer closet at the TTH after waiting all of three months after Izzy's birth to conceive #2, both she and the baby are at huge risk of complications. And you know it's not like she cleared this with a medical professional first. She and Derrick probably prayed over it and sought advice from Michelle, who reassured her that everything would be fine because things always worked out for Michelle (except when they didn't). I'm sorry, I can make a lot of excuses for Jill given her lack of education and her crazypants upbringing, but I don't understand why she would take such a risk with her life and her baby's. Is she that desperate to break Michelle's record? What is wrong with these people?

Speaking only for myself, I think people who have done forgave Josh Duggar to the point that they are demanding TLC keep him on their TV screens are a) a few ants short of a picnic and b) few and far between. Except on the Duggars' social media accounts, which can be expected to be pro-Duggar because the Duggars get to edit them, very few of the comments I've seen on this story are pro-Josh.

My favorite quote from along these lines: "put your faith in God, but mind to keep your powder dry." God gave me free will. I can use it to help others or not. I neither praise him when I choose to help or blame him when I don't. I think Michelle really has a problem of some kind. It's not just that she eschews birth control and has popped out 19 kids. It's that she really, truly seems to think giving birth to those kids, as opposed to raising them, is the only important thing she's ever done.

I've had Mormons come to the door a few times and they have always been very polite and not at all pushy. I usually just say I'm comfortable with my faith and as it is and then ask them where they're from and whether they like my town and we have a nice chat. On the other hand, we have a non-denominational Christian church in the area that frequently sends people door-to-door. If I don't answer the door, they leave angry pamphlets about Hell and abortion in my mailbox.

When I was a child I would walk in my sleep, but I would be so fast asleep that I wouldn't even wake up when a parent interceded. My mom tells a scary story about the time we were staying with my aunt and I sleepwalked out of the bedroom I was in onto my aunt's non-railed deck. Fortunately they saw me before I walked off the deck and landed on the sidewalk two stories below, but my dad actually had to run out and grab me and carry me back in. I had no memory of any of it in the morning. Another time, I woke up with a black eye and no idea where I had gotten it until my mother noticed that I had apparently walked into the wall of my bedroom hard enough to dent the Sheetrock, again without waking up. So I can actually see sleeping through being touched. That said, we know that at least two of the girls were awake for their molestation. And even if the others were asleep, who cares? That doesn't make Josh's behavior ok in the least.

If the article comments on the letter, it's fair use.

Yeah, this. It's almost impossible to tell most of the time what has caused a miscarriage. My guess would be an already angsty Jim Bob or Michelle asked the doctor if it could have been the pill and s/he said something about not being able to totally rule that out and they seized on it and were like "OMG BIRTH CONTROL KILLS BABIES!!!!!!"

He's a pretty cute baby.

You're interpreting the statistic correctly, I think. 63% of women who are abused by family later report a rape. Nowhere does it say that 63% of women are abused by family.

You know, I'm not all that concerned about Josh. I don't mean that I'm not concerned because I want bad things to happen to him or anything like that. I mean that I'm not concerned because I don't think he's capable of the level of introspection that would lead to the kind of breakdown you're describing. He's been raised as the "precious" oldest son of a highly patriarchal family in a highly patriarchal system. Basically, it seems like his whole life he's been brought up to believe that he's the second (only to JimBob) most important member of the family and that everyone else is, to an extent, there to serve him. To me, his smugness is a sign that he's internalized that message and, at some level, really believes it. I could see him being angry about this, and maybe even embarrassed. But I just don't think he's self-aware enough to be ashamed or depressed about it.

Well, huh. I won't make any substantive comments about Jill or Jessa's interview because I respect Jill and Jessa as survivors and support their right to their own experiences. Two things about the broader issues raised by the interviews, though. First, I wonder how they will be received by the general public? And second, I'm not sure who advised the family to go after In Touch, but I don't know if it was the best move. They have more money and a MUCH bigger pulpit than the Duggars, and now they have no reason to keep the gloves on. At the very least, I expect an article that outlines every single inconsistency between these interviews and the police report. I can't imagine that was what the Duggars or their handlers wanted.

I think it's more than that. Everything I've learned about Gothardism suggests it is an aggressively male-dominated, patriarchial society. I think that prioritizing Josh's well-being over the girls' well-being is because he's not only a boy, but the oldest boy. He was supposed to be the future leader of the family; all the Duggar's hopes for a lasting Christian army were pinned on him. I think this is why we've seen the political grooming, the carefully arranged marriage with a fellow Gothardite, the upset and angst when he left the fold for DC, etc. He was their torchbearer. Of course they're going to do everything they can to save him. Which is all kinds of messed up, in my opinion, for all kinds of reasons. But I do think it plays a role in their behavior.

qSadly, none of the Catholic churches in my town have an open-door policy anymore because of concerns about theft or vandalism. They set hours for confession and you go in during those hours, or you can make a special appointment. I remember when I was much younger the churches were always open and they were a nice quiet place to sit and think.

In rural Arkansas? It's official, the man has taken leave of what little sense he originally had.

Good point. If they really thought an appropriate safeguard to prevent further abuse was locking someone in their room, why wasn't it Josh instead of the girls?