Growing Up Amish

I grew up in a plain Amish/Mennonite hybrid community called Charity Christian Fellowship. Healthy sexual behavior was demonized and sex was confined to within a semi-arranged marriage approved by the parents. Impure thoughts or sexual desires were pinned on women and girls resulting in the need for us to wear long flowing dresses and veils to avoid causing a man or boy to sin. Due to healthy sexual feelings being demonized, men and boys would refocus their desires to the most depraved and horrific sexual situations in mainstream society.  Men and boys in our community fucked goats and pigs. Two boys who were the sons of one of the (two) church elders fucked their pigs. They also invited one of my brothers and another boy whose family was part of the church to watch and do as well.  One of my other brothers was sent out to work for another church member in their window shop. He told me about how the father would confess to him that he was very aroused by the sheep and in times...

 Think about your circle of friends. Does every woman you know want to have 10 children and spend the majority of their time pregnant or breastfeeding for decades? Why do the Amish have such large families? Is there something in the food that just makes every Amish or Plain woman want to have a large family?  This is a question I find very difficult considering the national conversation right now in regards to the recent SCOTUS overturn of Roe vs. Wade (which I disagree with - legal is better for human life despite personally being against having an abortion in regards to my bodily anatomy). The tragic truth is that Amish and those in plain religious communities don’t have the option of delaying or limiting the number of children they have after marriage. They also don’t have the luxury of medically assisted births or support during pregnancy.  Most Amish and Plain girls are NOT taught about sex before marriage. In the case of my older sister, our Mother told her the mor...

Amish children and those raised in Mennonite and plain communities have a lot of rules to follow and high expectations. For example, a 4-year-old is expected to sit quietly through a 2 to 3-hour church service without fussing or entertainment. If the child is wiggling or starts being disruptive one of the parents will take them out for a spanking. This will repeat without deviation until the child stops being a child and sits perfectly still for the duration of the long Sunday services.  These spankings would be with a 2" by 1" wooden 3 foot rod or larger depending on the day. Some days I was struck with thick pointy tree branches, or a toilet-bowl brush, or wire hanger.  Corporal punishment is not only the golden standard for child raising in these communities but is viewed as a command from God. They interpret Proverbs 23: 13 - 14 literally "Do not with- hold discipline from your son; if you beat him with a rod, he will not die".   It was a common experience grow...

Growing up Amish there are a lot of daily chores to be done. However, there is also a lot of joy when it comes to games. Traditional games for mainstream American children such as baseball or basketball are not generally played. This is interesting considering the wide acceptance of other games that incorporate balls and running in connection to other games.  A common game my siblings played in the summer months growing up in Michigan was called “kick ball”. This game was similar to baseball except you kicked the ball vs swing at with a bat. Another common game played also by mainstream children, was capture the flag or red rover.   We also had homemade swing sets, tire swings, and other similar toys in addition to a playhouse where my sisters and I played house with our dolls. In these aspects, our childhood was charmed. In addition to living on an 18-acre farm with gorgeous woods and a pond. Unlike today’s helicopter parents, we were given almost total freedom to explor...

Most children growing up in plain communities like the Amish, Mennonite, or plain communities have no access to the outside world. It is so isolated it is almost difficult to put into words. Yet also complex to answer. For example, if you perchance heard police sirens, it was attributed to a bad task force part of “ Sodom and Gomorrah ”. the place of the heathens and sinners worshiping the devil. I was told these people were evil and wanted to hurt our community. Consequently, there was no teaching about 911 or that you could call emergency services during childhood. This was something I only discovered was common practice after my friends started having children and interacted with families in mainstream society .  From infanthood, every individual in this community is patterned through corporal punishment to obey the authority within the community without question. So you might ask what happens if someone says steals or rapes another? The answer is nothing. If a complainant happ...

 Yes, it is true. Amish children can’t have toys with faces. This is because they think it is idolatry. Now, this is easy to hear and go “wow that is crazy” and then slip through the other ear. Yet, what is the more profound psychological impact of growing up with faceless dolls? A world where when you “make believe” to care for another human, that human was faceless?   A lack of identity is fundamental to the Amish and plain communities. A person in these communities is never an individual. They are a human that has been patterned through corporal punishment (starting in infanthood - 6 months) to be uniform and reflect who they were told to be to avoid enteral damnation.    My family was Charity which is a cross between Amish and Mennonite churches. We were allowed to have dolls with faces. However, numerous families within our network of plain churches were either still Amish or formally Amish and still maintained it was idolatry for dolls to have faces. ...

 I grew up in an Amish/Mennonite/Anabaptist isolated religious community called Charity in Northern Michigan. The best part of my childhood however was the abundance of healthy food. It took a lot of hard work, but the taste is unbeatable when homemade and fresh. Us kids (I’m the true middle child of 11) had to work hard growing up spending hours a day in the summer caring for the garden and animals. Yet, to this day no tomato sauce is truly good when compared to my Mom’s growing up.    Everything was homemade. If we wanted a sweet treat for breakfast like cinnamon kuchen (recipe in next post!), a sweet treat made of raised bread dough poked down before baking and in the final 10 minutes filled with a sweet sauce made of cream, brown sugar, or maple syrup, butter, and cinnamon, we’d have to scoop out whole wheat grain berries from the 25-pound sack and grind in the grain meal by hand till we had enough flour.  Grain mill we had growing up  When we used Maple syr...