Escape

I decided I wasn't done blogging for the night. I simply must tell you about this book I'm reading, entitled Escape (no, not my escape, someone else's) by a woman named Carolyn Jessop who is currently in her late thirties, I believe. It's a biogrophy about her life growing up and living in a "radical polygamist cult." Carolyn Blackmore was a mere eighteen when she became the fourth wife to a fifty-year old man named Merril Jessop. And over the next fifteen years, she bore him eight children.

This book absolutely blows my MIND! Can you imagine?! This community is one where the men controlled everything, their wives, their children, and their lives and were always right about everything? These women, and these wives were (and unfortunately, still are) living in slavery "in the name of God." In being a good wife (being entirely submissive to their husband, raising lots of children, conducting their household with utmost decorum, and being considerate toward their husband's other wives and their children who sometimes lived in the same house), these women either died silently under the unbearable pressure of being "the perfect wife" and couldn't breathe a word (even when their husband beat them, because the men were never seen at fault) or rebelled and paid for it. In humiliation and/or physical or mental agony.

It is a RIVETING book. Scary, sure, but positively mind-blowing! WOW! I would be terrified out of my mind to find out that I would be marrying not only a man I hardly knew and knew only enough to know that he was not one of the kinder husbands in the community, but a man thirty-two years my senior!! Goodness! I've got it extraordinarily good! And apparently, Carolyn Jessop wasn't even lucky enough to get used to the idea either (not that that would have been any better, I suppose) since she was arranged to marry him with only two day's warning.

I am hardly a third of the way through this book and cannot believe how page-turning it is already...I will probably be writing more about this in the posts to come. But I had to share my incredulity at reading this far.

In further explanation, this polygamist cult is run by a "prophet," a man who has "been called to do the work of God" in leading the people of the community in the will of the Lord and shielding them from the "evil outsiders of the world." It's positively maddening to me that these powerful men got away with TERRIBLE things, all in the name of God, you understand. Beat your wives, it will teach them obedience and submission, for they must have sinned against you to deserve such a thing -- it is not uncommon. Marry off your daughters to whomever the prophet assigns them to, whether they love them or not, whether they know them or not -- it is God's will for them and the only way they will get to heaven to follow the prophet's command. Marry more than one wife, for the more you have, the more powerful you appear in the society of men in the community. And for goodness sake, silence any woman who questions your authority or threatens to overthrow your control over your family, for she is dangerous and rebellious.

I'm left completely speechless at times, reading this book (which isn't saying very much, since I read silently). But holy GOODNESS!! I would die in a society like that! Wow...I'm more grateful than ever for the ways in which I was raised, for the wonderful parents who have worked so hard to preserve and nurture the good and innocence every child is born with as I've grown up, and for my family and my childhood. I'm so blessed to not only be hopelessly in love with the man I am promised to marry, but blessed that he found me, that he is my perfectly complimentary better half, and finally and most miraculously, that he loves me more dearly than I will ever know. I am SO blessed....wow. I just pity any woman more than ever who is forced into an arranged marriage...

So that's my schpiel of the day! And it's nearly November (in seven minutes), so I'll close with that.

Cheers!

Natalie