I do not believe that women should be rank and file police officers. As I stated in another thread, I understand that as long as there are female criminals and police departments needing support staff, there will be a need for female officers in some capacity. The problem is, obviously, that times have changed and women are being recruited, trained and employed in the same capacity as male police officers. In addition to that there's the whole element of the filth that pervades society and who among us would want our daughters in and around drug dealers, prostitutes, thieves, murderers and rapists?
I also want to say that it was never my intention that my daughter pursue something like this and I tried all the years of her teenage-hood to influence her to find other interests.
I do not ask for advice, because at this point, most of this is out of my hands. All I think I can do now is to pray and continue to nurture and grow the friendship that I have been working on with my daughter for last 5 years or so.
Also, D is devoutly Catholic and has not been involved in dating anyone. We pray together every evening, every meal, we attend Mass every Sunday and Holy Days. She wears two medals around her neck.
Here are the ways in which I have personally failed, or how our circuмstances prevented my daughter from growing up differently:
1) Bonding with older brother (who has been interested in military / police type stuff all his life)
2) No traditional Mass parish within driving distance of our home. We attend only a novus ordo parish. Not by choice. We cannot move. I have not had and don't foresee being able to have friendships with the women of this parish. They all work and they are very feminist in how they've raised their daughters.
3) Never met another girl who was traditionally feminine - all she ever saw was either boyish girls or immodest / immoral girls (and foolish, unintelligent in manner)
4) I became a traditional Catholic around the time my daughter was 8. From that time onward I became increasingly self-righteous, fearful, judgmental ... further drew back and isolated myself and my children from interacting with the "evil world." I became very controlling and constantly talked about the sins of the world and the wickedness in movies and t.v. When something would come up on t.v. I'd make a big reaction verbally and with disgusted expressions, and shut it down.
(I'm not suggesting I shouldn't have prevented or shut it off, just that I shouldn't have reacted that way as I believe that it very possibly added to a negative impression about being a woman)
5) I have experienced a huge battle internally and externally over the years with how I was raised and how that conflicts with traditional Catholicism. Because of the culture and more importantly because of problems in my non-Christian upbringing, I have been a very controlling (unhappy) woman. THIS, I think is the biggest reason for my daughter's rejection of more traditional feminine interests and behavior. I have been a very strong willed wife. My H has a strong will of his own, but is not forceful. He is the type to just not do something rather than be direct and say he will not do something. Probably "passive-aggressive" if you had to find a label. He would mostly avoid confrontation or dig in his heels if he didn't agree with me on something.
He also was raised in his family to be people of the world. His sisters did all kinds of things and were not raised to embrace a more traditional way of being. So, H got a little dirt bike for our son when was 8, and one for our daughter who was 6. He has treated her and included her in multiple things over the years in complete emulation of her brother and father. She grew up being physical and not being particularly treated like a girl.
6. I made mistakes early on by doing things like giving her her brother's hand me down clothes to wear when playing outside. Or not spending a lot of one-on-one time with her during her formative years.
7. While I did buy her dolls and other girl type toys ... playing with her brother meant that those dolls were either ignored or set up in some kind of destruction, not care-giving. She spent her time with her brother riding bikes, playing in the dirt with army men.
8. I was a tomboy when I was little but not to the extent that my daughter was. I didn't have a brother and mostly my thing was about trying to get my absent father's attention.
9. While I have been a homemaker for nearly 20 years and I home-schooled the children ... I wasn't raised to be such. So I had to learn on the job to do basic things properly like clean the house and cook and bake. I do not know how to sew or do crafts. Because of homemaking and homeschooling in this particular community, I have been without friendships with other women since we moved here 15 years ago. My daughter has not seen an example that being at home is interesting, rewarding or socially connecting.
I have and do enjoy being at home. But I know I am not accomplishing the many things I could be and I feel and have felt very blocked in figuring out how to make something more out of the time I am at home.
10. You may have discerned that we are not a large family. This is another area of HUGE FAILURE on my part. To model the virtues of self sacrifice and love of motherhood when one has failed in this area (having come to Catholicism and traditional Catholicism after the damage had been done) is extremely difficult. If my daughter had a bunch of younger siblings that she learned to care for...that would have been a ready made lesson right there. It would have also kept me busy for years to come, fulfilled and content...rather than being only in early middle age now with decades of isolation and meaninglessness possibly ahead of me.
Again we live in a small place, we cannot move, there is only the novus ordo parish, the people of the parish are contented, worldly, N.O.'s ... and even if I accepted that aspect they are in higher income brackets with kids in expensive universities. We don't speak the same language or come from similar place.
This affects how we live and my lack of direct involvement in the parish other than anonymous donations for the St. Vincent de Paul.
11. I have not modeled traditional womanhood to my daughter. I have not lived the Faith in a joyful way (until recently, by the grace of God, where I realized I was damaging others' perceptions of God through my fearful behavior). I have not had friends. I have not modeled a wifely relationship of humility and submission. And therefore, my H has not behaved as a true, strong leader of this family.
12. And then to top it all off you have her brother's example and her connection to him. Plus after we shut off the t.v. a number of years ago, we got Netflix and watched movies and old t.v. shows. We ended up watching a lot of crime dramas and shows like "Adam-12." On the positive side, D is drawn to concepts of law and order, right and wrong, good and bad. She wants to be on the side of "good" (whether or not the modern day police embody that or not), and she's attracted to men who are clean cut and law abiding. We've talked about the fact that many of those same men are not "good" men in the moral sense .. that divorce is rampant in the police force and the military. But while she acknowledges that as being obvious in a fallen world...she remains adamant in her interest in the law enforcement.
So, I can only hope that she loses interest in this (she's currently taking classes at the local community college in administration of justice) as a possible career. She has said in the last few months that she wasn't interested in being a beat cop (thank God for small favors), but she has talked about being a 911 operator ...Or, maybe she's going to meet a Catholic young man who wants to be a police officer. I really don't know.
I'm only offering this as a kind of testimony to bolster all of you who know better and have done better than me. I so wish that I had heard God's call before the many bad choices I made and have to live with now and that my children have to live with.
Wow, I really feel for you.
I have a sister that is going into law enforcement too. She was only one concert away from having a piano performance degree. Because of the liberal education she endured, she lost her faith, and is now an agnostic. It's all very sad. She was homeschooled from grade school on, and had a very good formation, seemingly, but went off the deep end when going off to school. My mother did the best she could. It's not just your failings. She needs to take some accountability for herself too, dear.
I do think that attending the novus ordo imperils your soul, and that was not a good idea to continue to go to that, considering how absolutely man centered that abomination is. It probably would have been better for you to just stay home, or try to attend a traditional Mass once a month if you possibly could, rather than subject your children to the non-catholic-ness that is the novus ordo.
Yes, companions are a big part of what a child would turn into in adulthood. When surrounded by such worldly influences, it's no wonder girls are venturing into the realm of the man.
Children shouldn't be subjected to television and filth, and you did the right thing in that regard. Don't beat yourself up about that. However, I feel that the companions she was around might have contributed more than your rightful censorship of what your children viewed on television.
Your husband was just being a man. That was good of him, but on the other hand, women are generally not even taught how to be real women these days, and it's a struggle, especially if you weren't raised by a truly feminine, non feminist woman. The culture is shot, and I wouldn't be too hard on yourself in that regard. It's -very- hard to break free from the way the world impresses women as to how they should behave.
Fathers tend to think, sometimes, that they have a disconnect between their daughters, and so they try to include them, however unfeminine, in their male activities nowdays. It's the way of the feminist culture.
One way girls can become more feminine is if they have a good example from their mothers or sisters. But in this case, yes, dressing her in boy clothes probably wasn't helpful at all.
I understand your feelings regarding homeschooling. It's only been within the last few years that I've interacted with other homeschooling families, and the contact is very limited. I felt kind of isolated for a long time, considering I live in the city, and everyone from Church lived on the outskirts or in the country, and so I didn't have much interaction with other families. Not to say it's very important, but it has helped in the last couple of years especially. Being that I'm a hard person to become friends with (generally because I'm afraid of getting hurt by people, and because there's not a fake bone in my body) I could have been in the situation you ended up in, but for a few totally non fake people I allowed myself to trust. The children love this interaction. I personally wish I'd been able to have this sooner.
Forgive me for assuming, but if you used NFP, or other "natural" methods, time and again, I've heard people lament about they wished they'd never allowed that deception into their lives. The communists have been very successful in allowing the Catholic population to dwindle, with the satanic argument that the children they should have are entitled to the "good life" and other such nonsense, and that having a large family does a "disservice" to the children that end up "having not" because of the unnecessary sacrifices of the parents. I am so sorry for your situation. I can only assume that's what you mean.
My mother in law tried sending me the NFP stuff right when I got married. Only by the grace of God was I not deceived by it, and it went right into the trash can. Believe it or not, she continued to have this stuff sent to me by having them mail it to her, and re-mail it to me from her address (!). I finally had to call the "Couple to Couple" league and tell them that they were sending literature to a septuagenarian, and that she was sending it to me after I'd asked them to stop sending it to me.
I even have other friends that are using it now, and only after they grow to be in your age range, will they see the devastating effects. You might take this opportunity and warn young traditional catholic, or even novus ordo women, how horrible the after effects of these choices are.
Don't worry about not getting "socially involved" in charitable things outside of Church. "Charity begins at home," as the old saying goes. If you can even get to that Traditional Mass once a month, you might ask how you can help if you are so inclined, or find a bigger family to befriend and even find out what you could do for them, however small you think it is, especially the mother with lots of responsibility. Even tiny amounts of help are such a blessing, whether it's cooking a meal, or buying a package of diapers, or dusting, washing windows, scrubbing floors or washing walls... things that homeschooling mothers with lots of kids have a hard time crunching into their schedules.
Don't beat yourself over the head about your relationship with your husband. SOME OF US ARE HAVING THESE SAME ISSUES. You are not alone. My heart really goes out to you. As much as I want to be submissive, sometimes I don't even realize how entirely non-submissive I'm being until after the damage has already been done.
I'll pray for you. Please pray for me.
My sister gave me this book.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0971725403/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0971725403&linkCode=as2&tag=httpwwwchanco-20 I've read a little of it, but it makes sense why there's lots of divorce and problems in relationships with people in law enforcement. This is bittersweet, but my sister says she doesn't want children. On the other hand, could you imagine being a child of an agnostic woman in law enforcement? Would be horrible, methinks.
I've learned a lot from what you posted here, and thank you for it.
I will pray for you, and your daughter. Storm heaven with prayers for her, to help her listen to the angel given to her to fulfill her destiny in this life.
Topic: Daughter Wants to Work in Law Enforcement (Read 1745 times)