Kelly Havens from Ohio

[Cults-r-us]

13 hours ago, dramallama said:

I seem to remember a kerfuffleon Reddit over her collaborating with a neo-Nazi panderer (in the vein of Mrs. Midwest) but I don't remember their name and I don't remember any other details because I'm not really interested in Kelly and usually ignore posts about her (except right now, I guess).

How is Mrs. Midwest these days?

[NQJasmine]

10 hours ago, Cults-r-us said:

How is Mrs. Midwest these days?

She gave birth to her second kid, less than a year after the first iirc. She looks tired. 

[JermajestyDuggar]

11 hours ago, NQJasmine said:

She gave birth to her second kid, less than a year after the first iirc. She looks tired. 

I bet! Remember how she seemed to do nothing all day long after she got married? Going from doing nothing all day long to caring for two babies 24/7 would be insanely exhausting and a hard adjustment. 

[Cults-r-us]

2 hours ago, JermajestyDuggar said:

I bet! Remember how she seemed to do nothing all day long after she got married? Going from doing nothing all day long to caring for two babies 24/7 would be insanely exhausting and a hard adjustment. 

Wonder how the Husbear is holding up?

[JermajestyDuggar]

15 minutes ago, Cults-r-us said:

Wonder how the Husbear is holding up?

I bet he’s fine. He has 2 sons and Caitlin probably does everything. 

[Hane]

On 2/19/2022 at 9:30 AM, Cults-r-us said:

How is Mrs. Midwest these days?

Being raked over the coals over on the YouTubes by the likes of Jimmy Snow (Dear Mr. Atheist) et al.

[danvillebelle]

I went and took a peek at this gal.  

Maybe I've become really cynical in my middle age, but I simply cannot take someone who writes like that on social media seriously.  It's sickeningly overblown and pretentious.  She is a legend in her own mind, trying to be a fundie/Christian Tasha Tudor.  Hard pass.

[MamaJunebug]

2 hours ago, danvillebelle said:

I went and took a peek at this gal.  

Maybe I've become really cynical in my middle age, but I simply cannot take someone who writes like that on social media seriously.  It's sickeningly overblown and pretentious.  She is a legend in her own mind, trying to be a fundie/Christian Tasha Tudor.  Hard pass.

Oh, Tasha!!! How much did I enjoy finding her, especially since she’d been venerated by some fundies who had no idea what she really was all about.  

[danvillebelle]

6 minutes ago, MamaJunebug said:

Oh, Tasha!!! How much did I enjoy finding her, especially since she’d been venerated by some fundies who had no idea what she really was all about.  

She's a complicated one for me.  I absolutely adore her books and her dedication to her way of life, but she lost a lot of respect from me when I read an interview years ago with one of her kids.  Apparently, she was a pretty shitty mother; so busy with her fantasy life that her parenting was benign neglect at best.  Also, she played favorites with Seth (the one who built her house and barn).  

[The Mother Dust]

On 2/11/2022 at 9:09 AM, anachronistic said:

Wow. She puts *so* much effort into hiding the fact that they don’t actually live in 1890. I admit that I do like her decorating taste - I’d love a Hoosier cabinet though I’m very content with my Amazon IKEA knockoff kitchen shelves - and the knitting and wool and costumes look wonderful. But we don’t live in that world and she doesn’t either. She obviously has electricity and one picture showed an ordinary fridge. They drive and have internet and those boys of hers aren’t wearing 1890s diapers when modern cloth and disposable ones are so much better. They bathe more than weekly and probably use drugstore toiletries like everyone else. 
 

I don’t understand who is taking all the pictures of her. If it’s her husband, why doesn’t she talk more about him? And why isn’t he at work, providing for her and the kids? She’s so perfect looking, like she just stepped out of a catalog. But you can’t cosplay American Girl as an adult. At some point you need to live in the real world not your dream one. I wonder what caused her to be so afraid of regular life that she retreated so far into fantasy? 

<---not a doctor). Her kids are very young.  Maybe untreated post-partum?

[MamaJunebug]

3 hours ago, danvillebelle said:

She's a complicated one for me.  I absolutely adore her books and her dedication to her way of life, but she lost a lot of respect from me when I read an interview years ago with one of her kids.  Apparently, she was a pretty shitty mother; so busy with her fantasy life that her parenting was benign neglect at best.  Also, she played favorites with Seth (the one who built her house and barn).  

Yep - imagine the swooning that went on when the former fundy fans found out she was divorced (she filed) and sent her children to school on the bus every day.  As to giving the kids less than they needed, attention-wise:  She wrote once of how her artwork was far from the bucolic pastime people imagined it to be - it was her source of income, her job, and she worked on it from the time the kids left 'til they returned.

I give her a pass on her spinning and weaving and other adherence to really old times.  Less than a fantasy - at least as I've read - it was her obsession, her artistry along with her commercial art and books.

The fairly famous illustrator Mary Engelbreit loved her children dearly but as a visual artist, would get so into her work that she pretty much zoned out.  While her family lived in a friendly neighborhood of SAHMs, with Mary's studio on the top floor, her kids were more or less expected in the homes of all the families, all day, up and down the street.  Yes, very sadly one of her children ended his own life in his early adult years.  Mary, by then wealthy enough that she didn't need to produce every single day, is raising (raised?) her son's child. TTBOMK neither of her surviving children speak ill of her.

I like to doodle and draw and paint, but I've never had the drive or talent enough to be passionate about it.  I admire professional artists greatly, but in retrospect, I'm glad I didn't pursue it as my career.

Edited February 21, 2022 by MamaJunebug

[BlondeAgent007]

Does she not understand how this might come off as really ironic?  Does she think there is anything in her home NOT intended for display?  Every corner of her house is on instagram, every room decorated as though she lives in a house in Williamsburg, even the pictures of her boys just so happens to have a stray bright red robe and a swatch of yellow flowers on the table for artistic measure.  

I think I understand the gist of her message, but I don't see why having a historical looking home makes it more Godly.  All my wall art is either made by us, gifted from artist friends, bought from local artists in places we visit, or pictures of my family, nuclear and extended.  Everything has a picture and a story.  I get that.  Don't buy shit just to buy it.  It doesn't make me better or more Godly than anyone.  I just like my house to surround me with good memories.

[anachronistic]

I can’t stand people who have such ridiculously romantic views of the past. I have been told I’m from another century, that I’m not from the modern age, and I always say NO! I most certainly am! Because if I lived 100 years ago, I’d be dead.

Kelly seems to think that all people in the past were content to lead their happy, slow lives, centered around the seasons and family and homemaking. I’m sure this was true for some people, but I think for the majority they ate the simple food because that’s all they could afford, and many jumped at the chance to travel and learn. How do you think migrations happened? Their brains were just as intelligent and imaginative as ours. They didn’t have time to be still because they were working from sunup to sundown trying to stay alive.

There was a wonderful song I saw on YouTube once, performed by 2-3 women, about how the good old days were pretty bad. The line I remember is ‘our flag was flying, high as an eagle, in the good old days when child labor was legal!’ I can’t find it now but it exemplified how humans are, overall, better off now. 
 

Last October, as I’ve shared elsewhere on FJ, I had something called cauda equina syndrome, which will affect me the rest of my life by causing me pain and limiting my mobility. But I am not dead, as I’d be in any other time in history (or in many other places today.) I had emergency surgery so I’m not bedbound and I’m incredibly, incredibly grateful to those who weren’t satisfied by the simple life but who questioned how the body works, who developed the techniques, who founded the hospitals and trained the surgeons and nurses. If women all followed Kelly’s advice then I’d be up a creek because so many of my medical professionals were women. 
 

And if one of her kids was sick? Heaven forbid, if she or her husband had a serious ailment? They’d go to the hospital. They wouldn’t treat a broken leg themselves. That’s what annoys me about fundies: they are so incredibly hypocritical. ‘I can’t let a female surgeon operate on me’ is not a principle they stick to. ‘I can’t take that drug because women, working outside the home, developed it’. Nope. Being content at home and embracing simplicity didn’t bring us scientific advances, curiosity and ambition did. 

[SusanAtTheLastBattle]

So much need to be better than everyone else. YOUR home decor expresses the brokenness of the world but MY home has plates that show love. YOUR home is beautiful like a museum but MY home is beautiful like the view from a sweet gum tree. YOU picked paint colors because you liked them but I pinked paint colors that POSITIVELY AFFECT MY CHILDREN’S SOULS.

How can this possibly be the attitude of a contented person?

[MamaJunebug]

Haven’t read it really closely, but at this point I’m not perceiving anything particularly judgey or smug.  Yeah, she has her way she endorses, but as long as she isn’t whaling on sluttish uncaring  women who live in highrise apartments with (gasp!) drywall and only battery-operated candles … eh! Let her hsve her little corner of self-expression, say I. 
 

And give me a head start, but her photography in the kids’ breakfast episode (?) is getting pretty good, as still life photography goes.   (I’m old! Don’t throw anything that would break a bone!)  

[BlondeAgent007]

13 hours ago, MamaJunebug said:

Haven’t read it really closely, but at this point I’m not perceiving anything particularly judgey or smug.  Yeah, she has her way she endorses, but as long as she isn’t whaling on sluttish uncaring  women who live in highrise apartments with (gasp!) drywall and only battery-operated candles … eh! Let her hsve her little corner of self-expression, say I. 
 

And give me a head start, but her photography in the kids’ breakfast episode (?) is getting pretty good, as still life photography goes.   (I’m old! Don’t throw anything that would break a bone!)  

I just find her complete lack of self awareness to be borderline astonishing.  I do find her writing to imply some kind of moral high ground, as she is never really one to talk about areas she finds herself weak in or working on.  But I always value your opinions MamaJune, and I don't find her malicious in particular.  I kind of like to watch her with the same eyerolling members in the past did with Miss Raquel (whatever happened to her?), Olivia from Fresh Modesty and the like.  She has a blurb where she compares the joy her children feel eating breakfast in the kitchen she decorated to the joy she felt as a younger woman staring at the wonders of nature.  I'm not sure if she realizes she comes off as comparing her decorating skills to that of God, but that's how it reads.

Her photography is very good, she has a good eye for color.  I just think its a little odd to title the post "A Home for More than Display", while staging photographs of her home to display on the internet.  Photos that capture the moment, while the kids ate that particular breakfast, that the beauty of the kitchen inspired wonder in their hearts such as that of the natural world.  Here I go rolling my eyes again.

Edited April 15, 2022 by BlondeAgent007

[MamaJunebug]

51 minutes ago, BlondeAgent007 said:

I always value your opinions MamaJune,

Thank you!  Can I adopt you??? ❤️ 

52 minutes ago, BlondeAgent007 said:

I'm not sure if she realizes she comes off as comparing her decorating skills to that of God, but that's how it reads.

Hadn’t thought if that, but, yeah, that’s some ego! 
 

53 minutes ago, BlondeAgent007 said:

Her photography is very good, she has a good eye for color. 

Again with the thanks!  Not on FJ, but on Reddit, I got tired of people critiquing the photos with little (IMO) apparent appreciation for the quality of the work. 

56 minutes ago, BlondeAgent007 said:

just think its a little odd to title the post "A Home for More than Display", while staging photographs of her home to display on the internet

Oh funny!  Yes, I love the irony! 
 

57 minutes ago, BlondeAgent007 said:

while the kids ate that particular breakfast, that the beauty of the kitchen inspired wonder in their hearts such as that of the natural world.  Here I go rolling my eyes again.

Yeah … quite a stretch to think that toddlers appreciate the finer points of lighting, etc. 

Eye-rolling can be good for your vision, done properly.  I’ll be enjoying the mild absurdity of Kelly a lot more now that you’ve shared your measured, but accurate, observations.  Thank you!  

[danvillebelle]

21 hours ago, anachronistic said:

Kelly seems to think that all people in the past were content to lead their happy, slow lives, centered around the seasons and family and homemaking.

Seriously.  For the vast majority of people, it was hard physical work from the moment they woke till they collapsed in bed.  Women at home were busy making everything and keeping a constant eye on the fire so it could be used properly for whatever came next.  You don't tend the fire, you don't EAT.

I wonder if it ever occurs to her that if she lived 100-200 years ago, those two little boys would most likely already be dead.  I clean at our town cemetery and I can't tell you how many plots I care for where a couple lost one, two, three babies right in a row, sometimes in 5 years or less.  Premature birth, diphtheria, tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever...ah yes, the wonder of childhood in the olden days.

Edited April 15, 2022 by danvillebelle

[JermajestyDuggar]

I’ve never once in my life had the urge to live in the past. I remember being a kid and hearing my parents only had 3 channels on tv when they were a kid. I was so glad I was born when there were 25 channels! I remember reading little house books and being so glad I wasn’t born back then. I enjoy reading about the past. But that’s it. 

[anjulibai]

I'd like to visit the past, but I'd want to come back. 

[danvillebelle]

5 minutes ago, anjulibai said:

I'd like to visit the past,

Me too...while secretly carrying a small case filled with ibuprofen, amoxicillin, neosporin, benadryl and antiseptic cleaner.

I had a great-grandmother who lived to be 98.  I have a recorded conversation that she had with my mom in 1981, when she was 95.  My mom pressed her with lots of questions and one thing that comes across clear as day is how much she did NOT enjoy housework in the pre-electricity days.  She goes so far as to say "that's why I haven't got any back (muscles) left."

I have the iron, the *cast-iron IRON*, a chunk of iron with a handle on it, that her mother used to iron clothing in the late 1800's.  It was the doorstop at my grandmother's the whole time I was growing up, now it sits by my fireplace.  Every once in awhile I look at it and thank the universe I did not grow up having to use it!

 

Edited April 15, 2022 by danvillebelle

[anachronistic]

Does anyone remember that old Muppet song?

The song doesn’t mention the past but the same principle applies. Visiting would be cool but I don’t want to live there. I have a deep, abiding love and appreciation for indoor plumbing.

[BensAllergies]

The thing about Kelly is that I don’t think she is professing that she is an excellent housewife or homemaker. She enjoys doing things in an old-fashioned way because of the way it makes her feel, and yes, sometimes she comes off as a moral superior. But Reddit seems to believe that if you are going to post your homemade meal on Instagram, then it should look perfectly amazing. So they snark on her slightly charred meal that she or her husband made over a fire in their backyard. She wasn’t posting to praise its taste or look, but she was pleased that she used her hands to build a fire and cook a meal that would have been more efficient on a stove or in an oven. If she had more self-awareness then she could have thrown in a joke about needing to practice this new skill. But overall I think Reddit misses the mark on her.

Her selfies in the prairie dresses using what looks like an iPhone are hilarious though. It is so jarring to see that modern device amidst the old-fashioned clothes and decor.

[JermajestyDuggar]

8 minutes ago, BensAllergies said:

The thing about Kelly is that I don’t think she is professing that she is an excellent housewife or homemaker. She enjoys doing things in an old-fashioned way because of the way it makes her feel, and yes, sometimes she comes off as a moral superior. But Reddit seems to believe that if you are going to post your homemade meal on Instagram, then it should look perfectly amazing. So they snark on her slightly charred meal that she or her husband made over a fire in their backyard. She wasn’t posting to praise its taste or look, but she was pleased that she used her hands to build a fire and cook a meal that would have been more efficient on a stove or in an oven. If she had more self-awareness then she could have thrown in a joke about needing to practice this new skill. But overall I think Reddit misses the mark on her.

Her selfies in the prairie dresses using what looks like an iPhone are hilarious though. It is so jarring to see that modern device amidst the old-fashioned clothes and decor.

I like slightly charred chicken. I know it’s weird but I’ve always liked that little bit of char. I guess it adds a bit of zip. 

[MamaJunebug]

3 hours ago, danvillebelle said:

3 hours ago, anjulibai said:

I'd like to visit the past,

Me too...while secretly carrying a small case filled with ibuprofen, amoxicillin, neosporin, benadryl and antiseptic cleaner.

Preach! 
 

In my own lifetime, for my grandmother (1880-1975), her cousin and whichever daughter was around, this was laundry day:

Descend steep, narrow stairs into the dirt-floored, rock-walled basement.. 
 

Dirty laundry into an agitator washer (at least it was electric powered)

Sopping wet laundry sent manually through wringers as many times as it took to get them to just damp  

Carry Heavy, wet laundry up the same stairs, through the kitchen and down 8 steps to hang everything on the line  

Ironing. 
 
Schlep cleaned items upstairs. 
 

No wonder they tried to keep their clothes clean!

i, OTOH, pour dirty laundry into the machine on my first floor, add detergent, press 3 buttons and wait til a cheery tune lets me know: “Time to transfer the stuff to the dryer, press 3 buttons and wait for the next cheery tune!”  
 

Yeah, I have to schlep stuff upstairs, but in contrast? Pfft. I only wonder that Grandma’s physical  body lasted as long as it did.    She had to be so tired  

My clumsiness caused my recent ETA to disappear into the ether. 
 

Suffice to say: I had to bail from Reddit posts about Kelly long ago, and I recently went to dark on Facebook’s “Fundie Fun Snark” or something like that, because of the plain viciousness over there towards  Kelly.
 

 And that annoys me, because I enjoyed the Jill posts therein!
 

I’m so glad I have my FJ  folks to come to and discuss without extreme amounts of rancor. I don’t think Kelly deserves that.

She’s odd, she’s probably pretty lonely, and she’s an artist trying to make some kind of statement. She never seems extremely proselytizing if at all, and she expresses her opinions But not really judge mentally to my mind..

I guess I just don’t get the hatred.

Edited April 15, 2022 by MamaJunebug