God - 3/4 - CoupleDumb

purity rings God does not want your cherry

The third ring's for the divine cock blocker

Remember going to school on Valentine’s Day with a bag of cards and candies for your friends? You would hope and pray that your crush would bring one for you. At the end of the day you had a bag full of cards from whomever to you, a molar full of sugar from little boxes of candies and a broken heart. Oh romance!

Recently, a dear friend sent us a series of YouTube videos of a man discussing a Jesus Action Figure. He thought it would be a good blog topic. Our reaction was “meh” but it got Lee looking at the associated videos which led to some pretty messed up information.

You have heard of how Christian kids are taking vows of chastity and wearing purity rings. As most of you would expect, these kids have discovered a way around that whole virginity loss – Saddlebacking. What is this you ask? Since “barebacking” was taken by gay men, pure Christian kids call unprotected anal sex the natural answer to avoiding the breaking of the hymen.

We will remind everyone that we are the parents of a 16 year old girl and the last thing we would want is for her to be sexually active, contract a STD or have an unwanted pregnancy.

In the spirit of full disclosure, as good Catholic School survivors, we did save ourselves. Stop laughing and pay attention because it’s true. Both of us were virgins when we began our relationship. No, we didn’t wait until the wedding night but we were engaged and finally “pinned the tail on the donkey” only a few months before the wedding. However, we would still discourage our children from making a pledge of chastity.

Why you ask? Because it is unreasonable, crazy, stupid and hypocritical since most of the parents encouraging these vows of celibacy had multiple partners and would not have considered this when they were their kids ages. Abstinence is healthier for our kids. The STD’s of today are like the sharpie pens of the sex world. PERMANENT! More and more people are taking Valtrex on a daily basis to maintain their genital herpes in remission. Don’t click away parents, pay attention! HIV and HPV are still around and going strong.

Also you are shirking your responsibility by making God the sex police. Since the child promises their cherry to God, failing Him becomes just another source of shame that acts as a wedge in their relationship. It’s hard enough to be a good person let alone to know that you have failed God at such a young age. And, since these same people who encourage their children to take these asinine vows believe in smiting, these kids will avoid church or any kind of communion with the Lord for fear of a lightening bolt. God does not want your child’s virginity, so you deal with it.

Take some responsibility and teach your kids about sex. Be honest with them. Man up or put on your big girl panties and tackle the scary subjects now, while you can. Open the channels of communication and develop a relationship with your kids that would encourage them to come to you when the possibility of sex comes up. Don’t let the only thing saving them from a lifelong mistake be a stupid ring and a vow.

sharebookmarx God does not want your cherry

angel butt Angels and (personal) demons.

This week’s topic is therapy but before we continue, we need to issue a warning. If you are not accepting of Jungian, hippy, out of body, experiential , subconscious-talking kind of shit or if you are one of our fundamentalist readers who believe that God is a perennial grouch who giveth and taketh in direct proportion to our blind obedience then you might want to stop reading now and check back in tomorrow. We’ll write something funny on Saturday.

Paul says: Now that I know that our dear readers are safe, that no one’s sense of reality is going to be crushed, I can continue. Well, this weekend I found out that I was an angel. With eyes closed, encircled by friends, I tapped in to that conversation with God that I had that infinitesimally long moment before conception. I saw, in Biblical vernacular, leagues of angels standing before me and, as I asked for understanding, they said in one soft voice, ‘you are one of us’.

Before you worry that I am going to don a robe and go strolling through the streets announcing that I am the herald of the Lord, rest assured that that is not going to happen. This is my divinity that I was able to tap into, a divinity that we all have. So I am, paradoxically, singularly special and totally common.

I am not going to bore you with every nuance of my experience. Realize it was an hour and a half of oscillatory laughing and crying that, at some times, cycled so quickly that they became one emotional outburst. My daughter calls it craughing (Crying/Laughing). This process came at the end of two days (or a lifetime, depending on how you look at it) of me preparing and searching for a remembrance of that defining conversance.

But I’ll give you one of the big pieces. The therapist asked me what my agreement with God was. I said that I was to bring safety and, of course, I began to cry; overwhelmed. ‘Wow,’ the therapist said, all loving, ‘that’s a lot of responsibility’. This brought about a renewed wave of weeping. Understand that, in the therapeutic milieu, divinely inspired, grandiose responsibilities are generally frowned upon. Being charged by God is usually not good on the psyche. But that was my message so I went back to The Source for explanation.

Here is the climatic reveal: I misunderstood. I was not to bring safety but to be safety. I know it seems like I’m splitting hairs but in the world of divine messages this is a huge difference. Bringing safety is a lot of work. There are a lot of unsafe people out there and being the Santa Clause of security, without even the benefit of elves, is kind of overwhelming. But, being safety just means that I sit my ass down, trust that God’s got my back, and simply be. Easy, peasy. (Honestly, one of the reasons that I am in therapy and had the experience that I did was because I have problems trusting God…but I’m working on it.)

Since I was the demonstration, I had the opportunity of sitting back and watching as everyone else in the group did the same process and I was struck with some clarity of the human condition. As one person danced to the music of grief filled sobbing, her eyes closed as she danced herself into the person she wants to be, I saw us as the same. As the group lent lyrics to the music, words like ‘thank you’, ‘I hate you’, and ‘why did you abandon me’, it became clear to me that we all wanted one thing, to be lifted from the pain of a lifelong birth and be placed in the awaiting arms of love.

And that embrace is waiting for you. Trust me, I’m an angel.

Lee says: I recently wrote that therapy is like finding your lost luggage and realizing you didn’t really need it. In the case of my wonderful husband, it was remembering that he was loved. He knows I love him; that is never in question. But its kind of messed up when you feel that your Father didn’t love you. Not his parents, but his Father (wink, wink- get it). Now that that is handled, I wonder if Mr. Angel will continue to take out the trash.

sharebookmarx Angels and (personal) demons.

god The Big Dysaffirmation

We have been talking about Dysaffirmations all week; how we use them with our kids, our significant others, and how much chaos they bring to us. But each of those little dysaffirmations is a symptom of what we consider to be our big dysaffirmation, our core dysfunctional belief that serve as the queen to all of our other little crazies.

Paul says: I have a penchant for the dramatic; not big hysterics but more of a silent lone tear and fade to black type. I’m one of those people that have a constant running dialogue of doom and gloom in my head. As an example, if Lee doesn’t answer the telephone, the conclusion that I jump to is that she is dead, that she is lying in a ditch with the requisite puddle of blood and her ringing cell phone just out of reach. To add to the drama, in the scenario of my mind, two out of three children die with her. This way I am deprived of the Batman-like melancholia because I still need to raise our surviving and now total messed up child. See, I told you I had a tendency to drama.

My big dysaffirmations sound something like, ‘when everything is good, something bad is about to happen’ or, if you just want to get down to the root of my dysfunctional belief system, I dysaffirm that ‘God is out to get me’. For those of you that are reading this and do not get it, that is OK. You have other big dysaffirmations. But be assured that there are others reading this and thinking that we need to get our voices in our heads together for a nice little tea party because they would get along so well.

When we wrote Dysaffirmations: Because this kind of stupid takes work! We realized that creating the word Dysaffirmation was clever but that the second part, ‘this kind of stupid takes word’, was profound. Seeing God as a hunter, like something from Running Man, drove me to doing all kinds of stupid things and working very, very hard at maintaining them. Because I didn’t trust God, I decided to work at a Catholic Church, looking for His kindness all the way, and eventually getting screwed real hard. Please understand, I got reamed not because God is bad but because I was committed. Nothing short of a burning bush was going to change my mind.

That is the nature of the dysaffirmation. Like any affirmation, if you do not whole heartedly buy into it then it does not work. ‘It’s better to be fucked up than wrong’. Obviously, at some point I was enlightened with a small piece of insight or I could not write about it. With that insight, I have started a little war of affirmation versus dysaffirmation. Slowly but surely I am chipping away at my dysfunctional beliefs. Now, if Lee doesn’t answer the cell phone, I do not assume that she is dead. Instead I assume that she is having an affair. See, I’m getting better.

Lee says: Ring, Ring. I’m not answering. Paul’s big dysaffirmation not only ruled his life but it affected mine as well. How’s a girl to get her swerve on if her man is calling every five minutes? I kid. Paul’s silent anxiety was ever present in our marriage. I couldn’t say something like ‘Oh, I need to tell you something,’ and be distracted without my husband pining until I told him my little story or nugget of insight.

The weirder part is that we shared big dysaffirmations. In my case, mine sounds like ‘the other shoe will drop soon’; same concept but more fashionable. My thoughts were that I was happy and Paul was too perfect to be true. As a mother, these thoughts extended to my children. When I had a miscarriage (this occurred between Bobby 5 and Ricky 2), I knew it was God resetting the balance to the universe. He was punishing me for wanting more happiness. How dare I?! I remember clearly this was the point where Paul’s big dysaffirmation met mine and… oh the thrills! He said he was pissed at God and I said, ‘Oh shit, here comes the lightening!’ I was afraid He would take away the happiness I already had, namely Paul, Jeannie and Bobby. But, some good therapy helped us get pregnant again and Ricky joined our family. Now we’re happy. But not too happy…

God does not want your cherry

Angels and (personal) demons.

The Big Dysaffirmation

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