Barefoot and Pregnant

I met the future ex at age sixteen in typing class. He was a gamer, intellectual and not religious. 

He would ultimately prove to be openly hostile towards Christianity, though I don't know when exactly that became clear to me. I was extremely surprised, shocked even, to learn his family was a stereotypical extremely religious Southern family that attended church twice a week every week. 

He read the Bible cover to cover three times as a child and at age twelve he had questions no one could answer for him to his satisfaction. At age twelve, his extremely religious family accepted that this wasn't his cup of tea and just let me opt out while they continued attending church twice a week. 

To my knowledge, no one hassled him about it. No one bullied him or harassed him about it being a stage or don't you miss it or whatever. 

I thought his family was remarkably enlightened and this explained a lot about what a high-minded intellectual he was and assorted other pretty delusions. I would have never married him had I realized beforehand what a bunch of backwards, misogynistic, barefoot-and-pregnant troglodytes they were.

His grandfather -- Poppy -- dropped out of the fourth grade and began working full time at age nine during The Great Depression to support three brothers and his mother after his dad died. My father-in-law never could really stand up to Poppy.

So I get secretly married at nineteen and I'm expecting my husband to quickly get into the military and he lets the Air Force jerk him around for a year. He finally goes in the Army and while he's in Basic Training, Poppy dies. 

Right after Basic Training, we move to Texas and my father-in-law retires. And before the year is up, with Poppy out if the picture, my spineless father-in-law finally divorces his wife whom he hasn't lived with in years to move back home to his longtime girlfriend. 

So much for my husband's perfect family. 

In the aftermath, his sister drops out of school, her mom sabotages her goal of moving in with her dad and right after her eighteenth birthday, my mother-in-law effectively kidnaps her and transports her across state lines.

It probably isn't technically a violation of The Mann Act because it probably wasn't with intent to prostitute her but:

Thanks to her mother, she had three children out of wedlock by an alcoholic incapable of supporting them. So she refused to marry him so she could get food stamps etc. as her only means to provide for her children, one of whom was almost certainly the product of rape.

While her bitch mother acted like she was an immoral little whore. 

Her mom ruined her life and then acted like the consequences of her own actions were evidence of her daughter's lack of morality. 

It might as well be in violation of The Mann Act, but I'm no lawyer. Just a pissed off and outraged relative by marriage. Former relative, actually. 

It took me a long, long time to realize that my 1950s style marriage that drove me crazy because I had good grades etc. and expected a two-career lifestyle was partly due to this barefoot-and-pregnant crap invading my marriage in spite of my husband claiming to be pro women's lib etc.

I thought long and hard about all this and chose to provide as much material support as I could via hand-me-down clothes etc. to both my sisters-in-law as the least worst answer I could come up with given how thoroughly victimized they were in a way that left both of them with children they didn't really want and had tried to avoid having and were now trying hard to do right by those kids that this bizarre abusive culture had forced on them in the name of morality aka religion. 

I made special effort to arrange to put a computer and educational software in their home so the children wouldn't be left out of the coming computer-based world so grandma was less likely to succeed in hamstringing her grandchildren the way she had her own daughters. 

To her credit, the oldest certainly made the most of my generosity. I had two boys. Her oldest was a boy followed by two girls and her boy was a little younger than mine.

She made friends with someone with an older girl and younger boy and traded clothes with her so the younger kids had free clothes.

One of the reasons I made this choice is because I contemplated all possible scenarios and concluded that if the children were removed from the home and put in foster care, there was no guarantee this would improve their lives. The least worst answer in the absence of evidence of abuse was to help these girls succeed in raising their children so at a minimum the children had hope of a decent life in spite of grandma being pukeworthy and some aspects of Southern culture being stomach turning.

Sometimes, there are no answers that look like good answers and at such times the perfect is the enemy of the good and may be thoroughly inhumane.