Marian's Legacy--Part 4

In one more post about Marian, I want to introduce you to tidbits about her home life as an adult.

When Marian was still in her twenties, she and her oldest sister, Rosa, who was twelve years older, moved into a house a short walk down the road from where they had grown up.  At some point, their parents moved a house right next door to where Marian and Rosa lived and settled there for their old age, and their brother Joe and his new family moved into the original farm house.  Their father had purchased the house Rosa and Marian moved into from John D. Yoder, the kindly Old Order Amish bishop who presided over the reorganization which resulted in a Beachy church in Kansas.  It was a very modest house.

Around the same time they moved into their own house, Marian and Rosa became licensed providers of foster care.  Because regulations specify, however, that some other income is provided, Marian kept working outside their home, doing house cleaning for others several days a week.  Before long, they added two bedrooms onto one side of the house.  This space was needed for the children who were placed in their care through social services.

They kept babies and grade-school-aged children, all of whom were in distressing circumstances before they came.  Some were handicapped.  I remember one child who required total care because of cerebral palsy.  Another robust and bright-looking little boy was nearly school age and did not speak.  They came with a variety of skin tones.  Some were scarred emotionally;  others' behavior was difficult to control. Lovable though, every one of the 70--that's how Marian and Rosa saw them.

One day Marian shared with me their hope that they could adopt one of the newborns who had come to them.  Because they were excited, I was excited with them.  Marian and I talked about how the child's need for a father could be met, even if both Rosa and Marian were single.  We knew that fatherless children come with a guarantee of the Heavenly Father's care, but they would need loving and interested men to help also.  Rosa and Marian's brothers might be able to fill that place, to some extent.
Although adoption looked like a big hurdle, they believed, and I agreed, that if God was calling them to do this, He would provide.  If they did not welcome the child into their own home, for keeps, the future for the child looked bleak, for reasons I won't elaborate on.  So Rosa became an adoptive mother, and Marian became an aunt to Rosa's adopted daughter.  A few years later, the adopted daughter had a birth sister, whom Rosa also adopted.  The daughters both came to Marian and Rosa's house straight from the hospital.

For the first number of years after the adoptions, foster children came and went, but eventually asking the daughters to deal with the constant changes of others coming and going in their household made Marian and Rosa decide to discontinue foster care.

Life with their daughters proved challenging as they grew older, but, while affirming the challenges, Marian told me once that, without the children's presence in their home, the hard work of daily life would be "so vennich devowaht" (so lacking in purpose).  

For a period of time during the girls' childhood, Marian became disillusioned to the point of despair.  Never given to sugarcoating anything, Marian saw clearly what was wrong in her little world, and she found it hard to cling to hope that things would work out well.  She needed understanding and help from others, and she did not always find it.  Although she was always willing to work hard to help make things better, hard work often wasn't enough, and things did not get better.  Finally though, she climbed out of that dark place in her thoughts, and faced life again with renewed hope and deepened faith.  Some of the Christian people who helped the girls helped Marian also.  From that time on, her strength grew.

For a period of years, she met regularly with others to pray.  I was often there.  When she was at home, and feeling particularly overwhelmed, she loved to take prayer walks.  Bit by bit, she learned to shift her burdens onto Jesus, and instead of a dark place inside, others could see peace and light in her.   That's surely why people who learned to know her later in life saw her as a saint.

Rosa and Marian had very different interests and different ways of working.  Division of household labor happened quite naturally.  Marian did the sewing, laundry, decorating, flower beds, and deep cleaning.  Rosa did the cooking, gardening, financial records, and daily housekeeping chores.  Overlap happened too, of course, when necessary.  I never learned how they worked things out with finances.  I'm sure they didn't fight over it, since I never knew them to fight over anything else.  Peace reigned between them, and they were generous in granting each other special favors.

I can't help contrasting Marian and Rosa's family and living arrangement with what is often staunchly defended in our time when same-gender parents rear children.

I may be guilty of stereotyping, but here's what I see in the gay rights rhetoric:

1.  Pretense that nothing essential is missing when both parents are the same gender.

2.  Adoption of children for the fulfillment of parents' needs.

3.  Demands for acceptance of "deviance" as normal behavior.

Marian and Rosa bypassed all that rhetoric and simply lived as a very non-traditional family, without pretending that it was ideal, without selfish agendas, without demanding that others affirm their choices, and certainly without deviant behavior.

In living their lives as they did, Marian and Rosa accomplished what Mr. Schrock referenced recently in a talk about living and dying.  He said that whether he lives or dies, he wants people to be able to look on and say either "That's the way to live" or "That's the way to die."

Now, finally, it's the perfect time to say of Marian both of the following:  "That was the way to live" and "That was the way to die."

Thank you, Marian, for showing us how to live and die.