My Husband is Forgetting Our Family – A Tumor is Eating His Brain by J. Herz – Problems for Christian Gender Complementarianism and “Pro Nuclear Family, Marriage” Conservatives
I’m sorry for this lady and her spouse.
This article serves as a couple of examples.
First of all, as a conservative who is NOT anti-Nuclear Family, nor am I anti-Marriage, I want this to serve as yet another course correction on the hyper-marriage and excessive, false Nuclear Family propaganda other conservatives pump out continually about marriage and the Nuclear Family,
which is, contrary to conservative talking points,
marriage (and the nuclear family) will not only not always and continually make a person happy, healthy, more responsible, godly, mature, ethical, but forming one’s own nuclear family or being married will not necessarily make a person content, bring lasting safety, and a better all around life.
Furthermore, marriage and the nuclear family will not save a society.
You have a married couple here where one spouse has a deteriorating brain, so he’s losing his functionality and his memories. Being married didn’t keep him from developing health problems. Being married to him is not going to cut his wife any slack.
Secondly, this also presents problems for American Christian gender complementarians (and I’d imagine complementarians in other parts of the world as well), because realistically, for their sexist, gross view of the genders and marriage to work, it can only work, and work well, in or with a certain set of very narrow circumstances:
In order for complementarianism and complementarian male headship to work the way complementarians say it should or will, the woman will have to be married to a normal, healthy, caring, considerate, responsible, psychologically healthy, relatively intelligent, non-abusive man who holds a steady job.
If a complementarian woman is married to an abusive, unemployed, negligent, unempathetic, or disabled, permanently injured, or very stupid or very irresponsible husband, her life and her health will suffer, and the couple in question will most likely have a terrible, abusive, or toxic marriage.
I have a similar, older post on this blog about a married man who entered early dementia (in his 40s, I think), he lost the ability to speak, think or communicate clearly, and his wife became his care-taker.
Her husband became her ward to care for, not a life partner. She is more like his mother now, and not a wife.
All decision-making came down to her and her alone, because her husband was physically unable to do anything. Every day, professional health assistants come to this woman’s home to bathe and dress her husband, prop him up in a chair, and he basically sits in silence staring at a wall and drooling all day. He is unable to converse with his wife.
That is his life day in, day out, and his wife has to deal with that and work around it. She is responsible for everything now. There is no “male headship” in their marriage.
In some of these marriages, it is necessary or vital that the wife have vocational or a college education and a steady job, so that she can continue to pay whatever bills the couple has.
Complementarianism cannot and does not work in such marriages.
It is incapable of working in such situations, and when I was in complementarianism myself until my mid-30s, and even afterwards, when I’d periodically visit comp sites (such as CBMW), I never saw these situations addressed.
The one lone article I saw discussing it at a pro-complementarian site pulled a cop-out, where the article said that that wife who was caring for the brain-injured, quasi-vegetative spouse was honoring his “male headship.”
But by their own admission, the spouse in that story, who came back from a tour of duty, quasi-mentally impaired (he cannot think or communicate) and in a wheelchair forever, is incapable of carrying out complementarian male headship: the wife had to take over his and her “roles.”
Complementarianism and its adherents fail to take into account men who are abusive, incompetent, irresponsible, drug addicts, who have personality disorders, who are permanently physically or mentally incapacitated, etc.
And no, merely saying that women married to such failures at “male headship” are not, in your opinion, allowed to “biblically” divorce such a man, is not an actual answer or explanation. It still does not address the substance of the problem. That is one of a few huge gaping holes and failings in their sexist, false, un-biblical, horrid gender theology.
(Link): My husband is forgetting our family — a tumor is eating his brain
March 15, 2023
by Jane Herz
A British father of two, who may only have three months left to live, is beginning to forget his family — and any memory of his wedding day.
Kirsty Chorlton, a 34-year-old from Wales, says time is running out for her 37-year-old husband, Wayne.
He was reportedly diagnosed with a butterfly glioma, a rare type of brain tumor that is slowly eating away at his brain. Memory loss is just one symptom of the tragic illness.
“We’ve been left completely devastated as a family, as his memory has gone really bad, and he can’t remember much of his daily routine or big life moments,” Chorlton told Jam Press.
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