Anyone Know What Happened to Maranatha and Matthew?

[browngrl]

I just read through her new blog. It seems very fundie lite. Her picture shows her in a blouse that would be normal in mainstream society (scoop neck, no sleeves) and even in her posts she seems to be aiming more for literary than Godly and only two children. Overall it looks much like a mainstream blog. I wonder what happened (if anything - it could all be whitewash).

As an aside: "babies born to such young girls tend to have lower birth weights and tend to be premature"

I think that a big reason this is true is socioeconomic and not physiologic*. Teen mothers tend on average to have far fewer financial resources, education and support systems than many older mothers. Sometimes I have been surprised/appalled at how precarious the living situation/lack of education of these girls is. I once came upon a situation where several pregnant teens started smoking when they found they were pregnant. It seems that they had all been counselled to do so by their friends as this way the baby would be smaller and easier to deliver.

*edited to add: I'm talking about older teen mothers e.g. 16 - 19 the extremely young teens e.g. 12/13 are another situation

[LilMissMetaphor]

M&M are quiverfull, patriarchal, the whole nine yards. In a recent family pic with Lauren and Nathan and their kids they are all fairly fashionably dressed. They may have been frumperific in earlier years.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfem ... story.html

Here's a quote from Lauren's blog, referring to her mother: "I know the immense pain that labor brings and the long, hard road of complicated pregnancies." So they have both had problems? Maybe, hmm, two generations of child brides wasn't such a great idea after all?

ETA: She miscarried at least once between Caleb and Livi.

http://www.heartunhindered.com/uncurled-fingers/

[Walking Cat Bed]

You know, when I was 15 (until I was 19 or so), I was hopelessly infatuated with someone at church. He was, when I was 15, 22. I didn't breathe a word of it to anyone but very close friends (sworn to secrecy, of course) until I finished high school.

Of course, being a very naive teenager, my attempts to "subtly show interest" weren't all that subtle. Gazes across the room, shy-blushing-looking-away, hanging around and not saying much, giggling a lot. Typical crush behavior.

His reaction to all of this? Friendliness but much more older-brother friendly. By the time I figured out that he treated me the same as his sisters and other teenage girls, I was in the military. I wasn't alone with him until a Christmas visit, when I got a ride with him to lunch after church, and he was brotherly.

On one hand, it would have been nice to have known from the beginning that we would never have a romantic relationship, but he reacted exactly as he SHOULD. Which is why we're still occasional-chat buddies. Because I have no doubt that the other girls who swooned over him were treated the same -- with friendliness and kindness and just enough distance to keep emotions at bay. And if they were more forward than I, his response would have been more direct.

THAT IS HOW MEN IN THEIR TWENTIES ARE SUPPOSED TO REACT TO TEENAGE GIRLS WITH CRUSHES ON THEM. Not going to their fathers so they can marry said teenage girl (or acting like a non-fundamentalist pedophile and seducing said teenage girl).

[NachosFlandersStyle]

I sometimes think back to this story and worry about Lauren's younger sisters. Were they allowed to be normal teenagers?

Edit: typo

[ILoveJellybeans]

I found this picture from around 2009, when Lauren would have been married about a year, probably aged 16 or 17 at the time:

She's the one on the left, and she looks like a BABY. :ew: Her parents suck.

She had been married a year :( But she is just a child :( What kind of man would look at this little girl and find her sexually attractive, she looks about 13. Disgusting, perverted men. How is that even legal anyway, he should have been locked up, and Matthew should have been locked up too. Child marriage is wrong.

[JillyO]

The fuck did I just read!?!?!?!?

[roddma]

It irks me too when peopl say they married young 50 yrs ago or their so and so married young. Two or three generation ago, women had few options. Life expectancy was short and they needed large families for economic reasons.Infant and maternal rates was higher. Women often stayed din abusive marriages just so they could have a roof over their heads.The world operated on a different dynamic. Even in the 1970s you could quit school, marry young and be fine financially in most cases. It just hasnt been true in quite a while. Just becasue our grandparents did something isnt meaning it works today.

[chaotic life]

My maternal grandmother was 14 when she first started dating my grandfather. However, he was 16 and they did not marry until she was 18 and he 20.

I was in Brazil the summer I turned 15 and dated a guy 24. I concealed his age from my parents and we broke up because we had next to nothing in common. I would flip if some grown adult was showing interest in my teen daughter.

[DGayle]

"It happened when my grandparents were kids, so it's okay!"

Yeah, when my grandparents were kids, the Holocaust was going on. So let's kill all the Jews? And blacks had to use separate facilities, so let's segregate? Gays didn't have any rights. There are so many things that were done that ARE NOT DONE now, for good reason. Encouraging young married and breeding is among them. People who say, "It's what was done when my grandparents were young" are extreme idiots. Look at WHY it happened.

[nokidsmom]

My maternal grandmother was 14 when she first started dating my grandfather. However, he was 16 and they did not marry until she was 18 and he 20.

I was in Brazil the summer I turned 15 and dated a guy 24. I concealed his age from my parents and we broke up because we had next to nothing in common. I would flip if some grown adult was showing interest in my teen daughter.

When my youngest sister was a teen, a friend of hers was dating a guy ten years older. IIRC, she was 15 and he was 25. His mother was relieved when they finally broke up and was trying her darndest to get him interested in someone closer to his age, one of them was me, as I was 22. Was not interested namely because of this prior relationship, I had already ditched one messed up ex fiance and thought something was wrong that an adult would be interested in a teen, and believe me, she was a very young looking 15. Fast forward a couple of years, he had married a college classmate of mine and what do I hear afterward? He took up with his old former girlfriend whose not a teen anymore but obviously he couldn't quit her.

[Full enough quiver]

That low both weight thing? I freaking wish. My daughter was born a few weeks before I turned 15, and weighed over 10 pounds. Nature was not kind to me in that regard. I never was able to have any more children. Maybe only having two kids is because of scar tissue. I know I'm pretty badly scarred, there's nowhere to implant.

[salex]

Meanwhile, My grandparents (both sets) were much older than I was when they married. Paternal grandparents were both out of college, Maternal grandparents 1) owned his own business and 2) had been to business school and was working for a large company secretarial/typing type work and did this for some time. So, grandmothers were 23 and 27 when they married. In the 50s, people were marrying younger for a variety of reasons. so after HS and while working, my mom married a couple of monts before her 18th birthdya, and my dad turned 20 within days of the wedding. Yet they were shocked that I wanted to marry at 20....

[anniebgood]

My mom was 27 and my dad was 52 when they got married. He was a widower. She was busy being an OB/GYN nurse full time and he was a deputy county sheriff. Her best friend in the ER introduced them. I don't think they planned on kids. He was 54 when i was born and 56 when my brother was born. He died when I was 11. The only thing that was insisted on in our house was that one of them had to be off Sundays and we went to the local Lutheran church. They were a mutual couple, everything was talked out and there was no patriarchy in our house.

OT: My best memory of my dad was this big guy (6') with a tiny chihuahua on a leash walking to each corner of our back yard and telling her that this was a far as she could go. :)

[Deist woman]

Was it on FJ that I read of another teenager married off to a much older man? She was like 16, and he was like 33, and had two children already. He was doing some work on her parents' mobile home, and she was not into him at all at first, until encouraged to pray a lot about it, and God led her to see that he was her intended husband. Well, God, and also the fact that her mother had seen her journal with the list of all the things she would want in a husband, and by glory, the older man just happened to wow her with the fact that he was all those things. I have tried to find the story, and can't, so if anyone can refresh my memory on the matter, I'd appreciate it.

[NachosFlandersStyle]

Was it on FJ that I read of another teenager married off to a much older man? She was like 16, and he was like 33, and had two children already. He was doing some work on her parents' mobile home, and she was not into him at all at first, until encouraged to pray a lot about it, and God led her to see that he was her intended husband. Well, God, and also the fact that her mother had seen her journal with the list of all the things she would want in a husband, and by glory, the older man just happened to wow her with the fact that he was all those things. I have tried to find the story, and can't, so if anyone can refresh my memory on the matter, I'd appreciate it.

That was Jessiqua Wittman.

[Deist woman]

That story was absolutely horrifying.

[ExCatholic]

Oh my gaaaaawd I have never heard of Jessiqua. What in the world...where are all these freakish men coming from??? Her author bio where she details meeting her husband is horrifying. Her MOM pushed the relationship between a 17 and 36-year-old?

Ugh, more comments later after the rage subsides. Lauren's story was bad enough, I've been trying to tell myself it was an isolated case.

[Georgiana]

What I find particularly appalling about the Jessiqua story is that I always got the feeling like her mother pushed her to marry this man so that they could get the work on their home done for free/cheap. It always felt to me like they bartered their daughter.

[Lissa1481]

I remember being 25 and being nervous about telling my parents that my boyfriend (now husband) was 31. Now I just have to laugh.

Nineteen years is crazy. He was an adult when she was born!

[Deist woman]

On the Jessiqua story: The very first time she saw her future husband was when, at some kind of church camp, he approached Jessiqua and her friend (same age, I believe) to talk, and within minutes the friend's mother swooped over to shoo him away, and tell the girls not to speak to suspicious strangers. Turns out, earlier in the day, he had seen the friend and the friend's brother walking beside the road, and stopped to offer them a ride. Like well raised kids, they refused to get into a car with a stranger. That he gravitated back to them in the meeting that evening doesn't surprise me. That he centered on Jessiqua, rather than the girl with the vigilant mother, doesn't surprise me. The friend's mother did what a mother should to protect her daughter; she chased away the creepy older stranger, and warned her kids against him. Jessiqua's parents invited him into the house, and pushed her right into his arms. Pushed her even when she was less than impressed with him at first, or actually disliked him at first.

[ExCatholic]

Augh augh the husband had an 11-year-old daughter when Jessiqua was 17. Gaaaaaaah

[ExCatholic]

On the Jessiqua story: The very first time she saw her future husband was when, at some kind of church camp, he approached Jessiqua and her friend (same age, I believe) to talk, and within minutes the friend's mother swooped over to shoo him away, and tell the girls not to speak to suspicious strangers. Turns out, earlier in the day, he had seen the friend and the friend's brother walking beside the road, and stopped to offer them a ride. Like well raised kids, they refused to get into a car with a stranger. That he gravitated back to them in the meeting that evening doesn't surprise me. That he centered on Jessiqua, rather than the girl with the vigilant mother, doesn't surprise me. The friend's mother did what a mother should to protect her daughter; she chased away the creepy older stranger, and warned her kids against him. Jessiqua's parents invited him into the house, and pushed her right into his arms. Pushed her even when she was less than impressed with him at first, or actually disliked him at first.

Looks like not just a church camp - a Sukkot camp. That's right folks, more Messianic Jews.

[DGayle]

That story about Jessiqua is sickening. It's outright nasty. How fucking sick in the head does a person have to be to get excited to marry and fuck a kid? The age of consent being under 18 in anywhere is meant to keep kids from having relationships become illegal the second the older turns 18. Under-18-consent wasn't meant for parents to trade their children to older men for housework.

www.jessiquawrites.blogspot.com/2014/01 ... enage.html

[nelliebelle1197]

Looks like not just a church camp - a Sukkot camp. That's right folks, more Messianic Jews.

The wedding photos were bizarre!

And there is some fuzziness about the husband's older children.It really seems like he was calling them nephew and niece but they are really his kids.

In addition to the housework, Jessiqua's parents (who seemed to have had a child marriage all their own- except both were children) simply couldn't afford all their children. They were living two hacked together broken down trailers with !!!eleventy!! children.Jessiqua was the oldest and the first to be sacrificed.

[DGayle]

I recapped her story "chapter" by "chapter" from her blog here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=24869&start=60