Lori Alexander 58: A Family Holiday on the Toilet

[louisa05]

7 minutes ago, ViolaSebastian said:

I've noticed more and more that people are choosing to not wear black or dark colors to funerals. It's not how I personally roll, but it does seem to be something of a trend. The only time I've worn something with colors/designs/styles out of the ordinary is when a family asked everyone attending to wear a plaid flannel shirt in honor of the deceased. 

All that said, Lori still sucks donkey balls. 

I agree that wearing black is not required anymore and hasn't been in the U.S. for a long time. But that looks like an Easter picture. I've found people still stay with rather muted colors and prints at a funeral. The outfits in that photo seriously look like it was taken Easter morning not the day of a funeral. Easter in many Protestant churches especially is a time for bright colors and floral or "loud" prints. 

[wallysmommy]

The good old days -- 1939 when my grandfather died after suffering 3 years with a brain tumor and he could't work in the coal mines any longer.  My grandmother lived in podunk, West Virginia, with 6 kids under the age of 15.  One of her children had rickets and wasn't expected to live (my father, who not only survived, but lived to be a very strong man before passing away at 85 years old).  She had a 6th grade education, and had to find a way to support herself and her kids.  Then WW2 breaks out and the oldest sons who were helping have to go to war.  I'm sure my grandmother, if she were still alive today, would not say those were the "good old days" when she was a SAHM living in a coal mining town shack with not enough food to eat, and freezing in the winter. 

My cousin is a Lori Leghumper and she conveniently forgets these stories although her father was second youngest (2 years younger than my dad, so he was 7 when their dad died) and lived through this.  Instead, let's convict women who work today and praise the "good old days" with their visual of women sitting on the verandah, sipping mint juleps, and fanning themselves with a lace fan, as they watch their well-dressed perfect blonde haired, blue eyed off spring play calmly across the expansive, well-manicured lawn of the estate.

PS.  You have no idea how fast my fingers were flying typing this because this irks me to my very core.

[louisa05]

@wallysmommy One of my great grandmothers was widowed in the 1920s at around 32 with 8 children. She defied her father's orders that she send the oldest six kids to state orphanages and move in with him with the youngest two. She pulled her oldest out of school to help run the farm (he was not quite 14); invested in enough chickens to start a huge egg business to make year round cash, and taught my then 9 year old grandmother to run the house so she could help with the farm and run the egg business to support the family. 

I suppose the good and godly thing to do  according to Lori would have been to do what her father said. SMDH. 

[wallysmommy]

@louisa05 My dad was the first of his 10 siblings to finish high school.  He made sure the other two behind him finished also.  The youngest went on to become a minister with hours toward a doctorate.  My grandmother moved them around several times from house to house, and she worked in the school cafeteria.  She was a touch, old mountain woman who lived to be 97 years old and never remarried.  Oh, yeah, and her first two kids were illegitimate.  I guess that makes her a true sinful woman.

[louisa05]

7 minutes ago, wallysmommy said:

@louisa05 My dad was the first of his 10 siblings to finish high school.  He made sure the other two behind him finished also.  The youngest went on to become a minister with hours toward a doctorate.  My grandmother moved them around several times from house to house, and she worked in the school cafeteria.  She was a touch, old mountain woman who lived to be 97 years old and never remarried.  Oh, yeah, and her first two kids were illegitimate.  I guess that makes her a true sinful woman.

My great grandmother died 8 years after her husband. The story of those kids then surviving on their own in the depression is kind of magnificent. I come from strong women. 

My grandmother would have eviscerated Lori if given the chance. 

[feministxtian]

3 hours ago, Hisey said:

You don't know me, but you've actually helped me a lot. Whenever I feel like defaulting to being a doormat, I think of you and try to say what I am really feeling. So thanks!

::::::::blushing::::::

Maybe this is my calling in life...to teach other women to be a proper bitch. F-bombs are good, "the look" is good, and if nothing else, looking at someone and asking them "have you lost your damn mind?" usually causes slack jaws and a hasty retreat. 

[refugee]

1 hour ago, louisa05 said:

My great grandmother died 8 years after her husband. The story of those kids then surviving on their own in the depression is kind of magnificent. I come from strong women. 

My grandmother would have eviscerated Lori if given the chance. 

Now there’s a book I would like to read... would probably give it way more Amazon stars than Lori’s.

[ViolaSebastian]

My contribution? My grandmother only had a sixth-grade education because of the schools stopping due to bombing during WWII. She met and married young, at 17, as Lori extorts women to do. She moved from her home country in Europe to the United States to be with my grandfather. She has a bunch of little boys in five years, just as Lori suggests. She stayed home, took care of my father and uncles, and went to church. And then my grandfather had a massive coronary and passed away at a very young age. 

Literally overnight, my 22-year-old grandmother had become a single mother. With no education, no job, and bills that were still due even though she was now a widow. She didn't have family she could turn to, being an immigrant and wanting to keep the kids in the country in which they'd grown up so far, and there certainly wasn't aid from the church beyond women who brought meals over and offered to watch the kids. There sure as hell wasn't a multi-million dollar house to sell. She received $55 from the branch of the Armed Forces my grandfather was in and that was it. From that point on, she worked minimum wage, low-skill jobs to keep her kids fed. It was rough and lonely and the way my father told the stories, incredibly stressful, which sometimes resulted in abuse and neglect. 

My grandmother has been one of my biggest supporters over the years when I was getting my college education, because she lived through what it meant to have no skills, no husband, and no help. She definitely wouldn't call that period of time 'the good old days,' and she'd definitely tell Lori off for suggesting women don't need to be educated.

[louisa05]

3 minutes ago, refugee said:

Now there’s a book I would like to read... would probably give it way more Amazon stars than Lori’s.

I did research on The Dust Bowl in Nebraska for my undergraduate senior history thesis. I interviewed my grandmother and some of her siblings for it and included their story. My professor's response was that he would like to meet them all. They were incredible people. They decided they were staying together and staying on the farm and they did it on their own. The older ones gradually got married and moved off but the youngest four were with each other on their own until the war. After all of that, three of the brothers ended up seeing fighting in World War 2. 

[EmiGirl]

Meh. I don't snark on funeral clothes. I wore a pink top with black polka dots and did my nails with daisy Jamberry for my dad's funeral. 

My great grandmother used to say, "the only thing good about the gold old days is that they're gone."

She lost a son to diarrhea because the doctor told her no food or liquids would make it stop. She had to walk several miles to work at the mill and stopped to pick up all the other women on the way. This was in the 20s so no ww2 excuses, lori. She was also a big proponent of voting and would proudly and loudly vote the opposite of her husband to "cancel his vote."

[Liza]

5 hours ago, delphinium65 said:

There wasn’t this option before birth control so everyone knew that once a couple got married, they would most likely have children if the wife wasn’t infertile.'  Is she not aware that men can also be incapable of reproduction?  Or does she believe that only women can be infertile? Republic of Gilead, anyone? 

In 40% of cases of infertility it is the man.  In the rest it is either the man and woman (both) or the women.  I doubt very much that Lori is aware of things like this.  She is not well-read and, in any case, if it doesn't fit in with her narrative, she ignores it. 

I think she knows, deep down, that she could never make it in the outside world so she treats women who work with disdain.  I may be wrong, but I think this disdain she has is a very insecure (yet unaware) Lori who is trying to control other women as a way of justifying her life.   When her kids left home and her husband said the marriage was not working, Lori looked for an answer.  She found it in the Pearl book "Created to Be a Help meet" and her role, with no children in the home, had to be redefined ... thus, she is a Godly older woman mentoring younger women.   It is all self-serving.   It really makes no sense to stay at home once your children have left, or even when they are in high school ... do they really need you 24/7 at that point?  Makes no sense to me.

 

[louisa05]

Just now, EmiGirl said:

Meh. I don't snark on funeral clothes. I wore a pink top with black polka dots and did my nails with daisy Jamberry for my dad's funeral. 

My great grandmother used to say, "the only thing good about the gold old days is that they're gone."

She lost a son to diarrhea because the doctor told her no food or liquids would make it stop. She had to walk several miles to work at the mill and stopped to pick up all the other women on the way. This was in the 20s so no ww2 excuses, lori. She was also a big proponent of voting and would proudly and loudly vote the opposite of her husband to "cancel his vote."

Forgive me for not wearing my brightest cheeriest floral print and posing for pictures like it was a happy family gathering when I lost a parent. 

I have yet to know anyone who has done that. But obviously, Lori has this one right. 

[EmiGirl]

7 minutes ago, Liza said:

In 40% of cases of infertility it is the man.  In the rest it is either the man and woman (both) or the women.  I doubt very much that Lori is aware of things like this.  She is not well-read and, in any case, if it doesn't fit in with her narrative, she ignores it

Lori lives in Gilead works where the men cannot be infertile. It's always the woman.

6 minutes ago, louisa05 said:

Forgive me for not wearing my brightest cheeriest floral print and posing for pictures like it was a happy family gathering when I lost a parent. 

I have yet to know anyone who has done that. But obviously, Lori has this one right. 

I guess it depends on the family. Mine is so large and spread out that sometimes the only time you see people is at funerals and weddings and the funeral does turn into a large family gathering. When Dad died everyone came to mom's house and there were tears, yes, but there was also laughter while we shared stories and looked at pictures and got to see people we hadn't seen in a long time. 

 

That being said, I've never claimed my family is normal. We got stares as we sat in the ccu waiting room and visited and talked and laughed together while dad had his heart surgery.

[louisa05]

7 minutes ago, EmiGirl said:

Lori lives in Gilead works where the men cannot be infertile. It's always the woman.

I guess it depends on the family. Mine is so large and spread out that sometimes the only time you see people is at funerals and weddings and the funeral does turn into a large family gathering. When Dad died everyone came to mom's house and there were tears, yes, but there was also laughter while we shared stories and looked at pictures and got to see people we hadn't seen in a long time. 

 

That being said, I've never claimed my family is normal. We got stares as we sat in the ccu waiting room and visited and talked and laughed together while dad had his heart surgery.

We had people we hadn't seen in years there, too. Still wasn't my bright cheery pose for pictures in Easter clothing day. Sorry. But long live,Lori! May she have a champagne toast when her father dies and set off fireworks when Ken goes. It's only appropriate. 

I never said you couldn't laugh or share stories. I just don't understand the tone of that post. Burying your parent is not usually something people think of as a "very special day" . If you do, more power to you.  But I don't get it. I guess I'm some sort of weak overly emotional person or something. 

[SuperNova]

15 minutes ago, EmiGirl said:

I guess it depends on the family. Mine is so large and spread out that sometimes the only time you see people is at funerals and weddings and the funeral does turn into a large family gathering. When Dad died everyone came to mom's house and there were tears, yes, but there was also laughter while we shared stories and looked at pictures and got to see people we hadn't seen in a long time. 

Same. Before she died, my Nana asked that her funeral didn't look like a funeral. We all wore bright happy colors. Like you, my family is vast and spread out. Sometimes its decades before we're all together again. It becomes a celebration of life with lots of joking and laughing and food! Everyone was appropriately solemn during mass and the funeral itself but afterwards was more like a family reunion. To each their own.

[AlwaysDiscerning]

Lori is deleting scripture today. Twice she deleted proverbs 31. Its all up with shots at the things godly women say Facebook page.

[Briefly]

I usually wear something muted to a funeral, black or navy blue for example. But for my mom's funeral, it was a light colored dress with a black jacket because she had always told me that was one of her favorites of my clothes.  There was an older lady at the United Methodist Church we belonged to in Tulsa who loved bright colors, especially red.  When she died, her entire extended family wore red to her funeral and her daughter wore the mother's favorite red dress.  It was actually nice to see, it showed how much their mother meant to them.

[SuperNova]

Debby in Kansas left a comment on Lori's blog about women being happy in the home. She says that a friend of hers was never maternal and sites a large tumor as the culprit. This comment is everything that's wrong with forcing women into "their god given roles". Poor Debby has been taught to have babies regardless of what her personal desires are. Debby envies her friend's tumor. Or am I misunderstanding? I hope so.

"At 36, she had an 8 lb. tumor removed in/with her uterus. Her doctor told her she would’ve never been able to carry a pregnancy or maybe even conceive. I’ve often wondered if that total lack of maternal desire was His way of sparing her the suffering of being barren. I could’ve used that….."

 

[ViolaSebastian]

I sort of love Lori's attempts at history-based posts, because they're just so, so dumb.

Quote

Before feminism and birth control, children were valued in America.

Suuure, Lori! Ask African-American children how much *they* were valued...and by whom. Because it made a big difference whether it was their parents or their owners doing the valuing. Ask how much Native American children were valued, or orphans with no parents, or disabled children.

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Most today, even Christians, don’t value children and think that having only a few children is all couples should have.

I mean, most people I speak to value their children quite highly, and that is why they don't have tons of them when they only have the resources to provide for one or two. They're also reluctant to receive benefits due to the "can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em" stigma. Believe it or not, the American general public is always going on and on about having to pay high taxes for things like schools, various types of welfare, and Medicaid--which indicates to me that those people don't value children very highly. Oh wait, didn't you say something about you and Ken hating the high taxes in California? Interesting.

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This mindset is from feminism and birth control (Margaret Sanger – an agent of Satan) which influenced women to believe that it was their right to be liberated from the “tyranny” of reproduction and domesticity.

Yeah, it was definitely that mean old Margaret Sanger and all those mean feminists that influenced women to liberated from their drunken, abusive husbands and having kids until their uteri fall out. Mean old feminists, thinking women would like to be treated decently and live long, pain free lives without being beaten up....it was a good thing that those mean old feminists started two world wars that required women's labor outside the home and developed the birth control pill...oh wait. That was men. Oops.

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Women weren’t dissatisfied in their homes up until and through the 19th century, because this was all they knew

Citation, please. Because the journals and interviews I've come across indicate that there was no shortage of unhappy women in the 19th century. There were also plenty of career women who knew life as something other than a wife and mother. 

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 Divorce was low.

It was also socially and economically devastating and frequently meant that mothers would never, ever see their children again.

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Children were plentiful and were being raised by their mothers from intact homes.

LOL, intact homes. You know what the 18th, 19th, and the first half of the 20th century had a lot of? Death. Like, so much death, and death at relatively young ages, too. Do you think widowed men and women just hung out and took care of their kids and didn't remarry? It's absurd to pretend that there weren't many, many families with Brady-bunch setups. A large number of children were raised by step-mothers or step-fathers and with step-siblings. And those are just the ones with a living parent--there were also many, many orphans raised by orphanages or who raised themselves on the streets.

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I am not trying to romanticize this time in history since I know full well that sin existed and was alive and well but simply pointing out a time in American history when roles were clearly defined and culture at large was better and safer since families were much stronger than they are today.)

Well, you failed. It wasn't safer and it sure as hell wasn't "better"--just ask any minority group. We're living in one of the safest times in history, and to think, we're not all living in clearly defined roles. 

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Women will now continually ask about being able to afford having many children and being able to be home full time even though we live in the wealthiest country that has ever existed. 

Debatable. I'm certainly not seeing much of that wealth, and the people I serve aren't seeing much of it either. We're not all living in multi-million dollar homes in Southern California and driving gold Mercedes as our "back up car," Lori.

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This is almost every single man’s and woman’s calling.
This is what families should look like.

You disgusting old bat; there are a lot of families that look a lot of ways. It's not always a man, a woman, and more kids than could fit comfortably on a city bus. The nuclear family, as a concept, it a very, very recent occurrence. And if having babies is my and apparently every other woman's calling, then why did your God make me and other people disabled and/or infertile?

 

[Hane]

Back in the ‘70s, my ob-gyn told me he’d never test a woman for infertility before her husband had a sperm count. Come to think of it, my mom’s ob-gyn told her the exact same thing in the ‘40s.

[SuperNova]

@ViolaSebastian not to worry! Lori has further clarified what she meant about the good ol days. It's just like toothpaste. If there was only one brand to choose from, you wouldn't even know that you didn't like it because it's your only choice. Women were happier in their homes when they didn't have the choice could leave it. See? Easy peasy.

Spoiler

I used the word “dissatisfied” for a reason because it’s all they knew. One is satisfied with Crest toothpaste if this is the only toothpaste there is but when there are many toothpastes to choose from, one might choose one and become dissatisfied with it because they know there are probably better ones. Without the knowledge of birth control, higher education, and careers, women were satisfied becoming wives, mothers, and being home full time since this is all they knew. Yes, some of them were most likely discontent with the spouse they were married to and their children’s behavior and maybe how dirty their homes got but they weren’t dissatisfied with being wives and mothers since this was all they knew. It wasn’t until after the wars when women were practically forced to be out of their homes that they became dissatisfied being home because there was something better “out there.”

 

[sleepy_doggos]

I usually wear something muted to a funeral, black or navy blue for example. But for my mom's funeral, it was a light colored dress with a black jacket because she had always told me that was one of her favorites of my clothes.  There was an older lady at the United Methodist Church we belonged to in Tulsa who loved bright colors, especially red.  When she died, her entire extended family wore red to her funeral and her daughter wore the mother's favorite red dress.  It was actually nice to see, it showed how much their mother meant to them.

I had a similar experience. A mentor/professor who loved pink died too young from lung cancer (she never smoked). They asked everyone to wear pink to her funeral and we did. It was still solemn and sorrowful, but it was what she would have wanted.

[Lgirlrocks]

just going to leave this one here. 

[Koala]

7 hours ago, Liza said:

It really makes no sense to stay at home once your children have left, or even when they are in high school ... do they really need you 24/7 at that point?  Makes no sense to me.

It makes perfect sense if that's what a couple wants/what works best for their family.

What doesn't make sense is presuming to know what "makes sense" for any family other than your own.  That's the problem with Lori- she is too dim to realize that not all people want the same thing/should have to do the same thing/have the same circumstances.

As a side note- for some families, highschoolers can require just as much attention as younger kids.  Sure, it's different, but believe me, they don't quit needing you once they are teenagers.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with a parent choosing to stay home.

6 hours ago, AlwaysDiscerning said:

Lori is deleting scripture today. Twice she deleted proverbs 31. Its all up with shots at the things godly women say Facebook page.

She won't stand for scripture contradicting her message!  She's been very clear that anyone who disagrees with her will be deleted- apparently, that includes God. 

[Hisey]

13 minutes ago, Koala said:

As a side note- for some families, highschoolers can require just as much attention as younger kids.  Sure, it's different, but believe me, they don't quit needing you once they are teenagers.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with a parent choosing to stay home.

Of course not! It's a good thing. We see so many semi-abandoned teenagers in our town. These are kids whose parents are hardly ever home because, well, their kids are teenagers and supposedly don't need supervision. Parents even go off on vacation and leave their teens alone for a week or more! I feel sorry for these kids, so many of them are lonely.

Teens definitely benefit from supervision and support, even if they don't admit it. Young teens still need rides here and there. If both parents work full-time, their kids often have to get a ride wherever they can (often from their friends' older siblings, who may or may not be good drivers or even good people).

New drivers need a lot of supervision. Often they are extremely overconfident about what they can handle. We let our oldest gradually expand the area that she was allowed to drive. 

Teens can get into a lot of trouble if they feel they are alone and no one is watching. They often lack the brain development to make a good choices. I saw this when my very bright 16-year old wanted to make rash, irrational decisions. I'm glad I was there to talk her out of some things and downright forbid others. 

With that said, I'm finding that with my youngest in high school I have more time on my hands than I'd like. So I'm looking to re-enter the job market on a part-time basis. But that is a personal decision. I wouldn't judge anyone who makes (or has to make) a different choice.