Chewymom

Part 3 of my series on GFI
for parts 1 & 2, please see:
How I Got Involved with GFI
Why I Loved GFI

It must have been 1996. I received my contact mom application and went through it quickly. I was concerned about my pastor’s reference letter because we had recently changed churches, and the pastor did not know me well. I decided, on my own initiative, to ask the area coordinators to also do a pastor’s reference for me. “L” (married to “S”) was a pastor at another church, and I had gotten to know S fairly well through these “the-only-five-women-in-this-city-who-are-serious-about-Ezzo” meetings.

Time went by, and eventually L and S called us and said they needed to talk to us about some things. We invited them over for dinner, and they came. They had a little list–five things they needed to confront us about. Now, I know the verse, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” And I’ll confess right here that I have a VERY hard time seeing those wounds as “faithful” while they’re being administered. But in this situation, I was really struggling to see both the “faithful” and the “friend” part. I definitely felt the wound, though! I can’t remember now what three of the things were, but two of the issues were that my dh and I tended to interrupt (especially each other), and that we had corrected our son (DS14) in public. They had seen this second thing happen once at church during the break between church and Sunday school, when he would not quit eating cookies.

I think the bothersome thing was that first, these things seemed so petty. I mean, if we were really being offensive, we definitely needed to be spoken to. But the whole reason for even telling us these issues was because they were having trouble recommending me as a contact mom. They weren’t sure I met up to the strict standards set by the Ezzos because of these concerns. I promise you that although I can’t remember the other three items, they were similar in nature. And the thing is, if my sins are serious enough to confront me over, then confront me whether or not I’m applying to be a contact mom. But if they are not issues worth addressing from one Christian to another–between faithful friends–then why should the standards to be a contact mom be higher than those to be a godly Christian?

Well, this had all been a huge blow to my ego. I wasn’t perceived as perfect any more. Nonetheless, I received a call from Anne Marie herself a few weeks later. She told me that I had been recommended “with reservations,” but that it shouldn’t be a problem since I wouldn’t be taking the regular phone calls. She was enthusiastic about my help both on the forum and in taking calls from special needs parents.

On-line, I became quite active. I tended to avoid the baby questions and gravitated toward the old kid questions (with all of my expertise) [eyeball roll]. But my absolute favorite thing was helping with forum moderation. I, along with two other ladies, had moderator status, and we could put people on “probation” (I can’t remember the term we used) and even lock them out. We would frequently email and even telephone back and forth between ourselves about posts and people we were keeping an eye on. If a mom came on who was sincerely asking questions and struggling, we and the other contact moms took compassion on her and tried to help her along. But our compassion only went so far, and as soon as it appeared that she was starting to lose her love of the Ezzos, we would really watch her posts. I was also active (still am!) on the Parents Place Ezzo Debate Forum. We would read posts over there and even learn a person’s style, and then we could spot them when they snuck onto the GFI forum. We would lock out anybody who appeared to be a trouble-maker and especially those who were posting under false pretenses (posting fake questions to try to force us to see the folly of Ezzo parenting).

I loved the on-line community. There, my family could appear perfect. In real life, things were still humming along pretty well, but I was beginning to be excluded from my little group of women. There was a homeschool convention in another town, and I discovered that all five of the “serious women” but me were riding together. When I asked to ride with them, I was told that there was no room because the driver, who normally drove a Suburban, would be in her husband’s smaller car in order to save on gas. (And no, gas prices were NOT well over $2 per gallon–this was in 1996 or 1997!) I would have gladly paid for the difference in gas, but apparently my little interrupting faux pas along with my public correction were enough to get me blacklisted from this little group.

I’ll tell you what really was at work here. God was crumbling my world. My fake, phony world where I tried to be perfect and have perfect children. More crumbling was to follow, but I had no idea what God had in store for me.

For parts 1 and 2 of this blog, please see:
How I Got Involved with GFI
Why I Loved GFI

Stay tuned for:
Red flags
Disassociating from the Ezzos
How I parent now

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 7:15 pm and is filed under GFI/Ezzo/Babywise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.