Episode #54: Ruth Chapter 2 - Submission

Jan,16 2026

<-#53: Ruth Chapter 1 - Background#55: Ruth Chapter 3 - Money ->

People often come to me with the same page already folded in their hands. They quote my mother's words from the second book, the ones she spoke before she ever met my father:

"Every man wants to catch me, and I do not wish to be caught."

Then they look at the life she later lived and ask, almost triumphantly, Is this not a contradiction?

I understand why they ask. From the outside, my mother appeared to become a traditional wife. She cooked, she taught children, she pushed my father's wheelchair through mud and snow, and she listened when he spoke. To eyes that measure everything with rulers of power, that looks like submission.

But the men who wished to catch her did not want what my father wanted.

They wanted to take her out of her own life and put her into theirs. They spoke of protection, but meant ownership. Likewise, they spoke of guidance, but meant control. My mother recognized that scent the way a farmer recognizes rot in stored grain. She refused it long before she could explain it.

My father was different, perhaps because he came to her already incomplete in the world's terms. He had no legs that could chase her, no strong hands that could seize her future. He arrived needing help, not offering to rule. My father saw her as an equal first because he had no choice but to see her that way. From that beginning grew a partnership neither of them had planned.

To call what existed between them "submission" is to mistake the shape of love.

My mother was a wife in an era when wives were expected to listen to their husbands. It was also an era when women could not open bank accounts in their own names, though my parents had no accounts at all, just food reserves. The world around them used words that no longer fit us, and people now read those words as if they were the whole story.

They were not.

My mother had her own wisdom. She grew without shame under Christopher's teaching and under her own mother's steady understanding. No one bent her neck. She chose where to place her strength the way a river chooses its channel.

Her love for my father was service, yes-service freely given. She assisted him, not because she was smaller, but because he needed assistance and she loved him. She worked at the school all day and still found joy in pushing his chair home along the dusty road. We never complained that he wrote late into the night, that the typewriter rattled like a stubborn tractor. We children learned to sleep through that sound the way other families learn to sleep through trains.

Do not mistake this for weakness. My father was no idle man being carried by a dutiful woman. He worked the fields from his chair until his hands blistered. He argued with officials, organized the town, and wrote pages that still trouble people who have never lifted a shovel. My mother's service met his effort; it did not replace it.

It is easy to confuse service with submission, deference with obedience. The posture can look the same from a distance, but the heart is different. I know this because I live with a partner who is my absolute equal. Eleanor and I serve one another daily without contracts or speeches. She brings water when my back aches; I mend the fence when her hands are raw. No one submits, yet both of us bend.

Christopher, I must say plainly, did speak of submission. Those who claim otherwise did not listen carefully. But he did not mean what the eager men in pressed suits mean when they use the word. He wanted everyone, men, women, and himself most of all, to submit to the fields, to the seasons, to God, to the common good that stands higher than any single will.

If a wife freed her husband from worries so that he could serve the town, Christopher saw that as one thread in a larger cloth. If a husband freed his wife to teach children, that was another thread. He measured submission by fruit, not by posture.

The trouble began when people turned a living arrangement into a rule. They looked at my mother and decided they understood her, though she would have laughed at their certainty. They forgot that she had once refused every suitor in the county and only opened her heart when she met a man who did not wish to catch her at all.

So no, there is no contradiction.

There is only the difference between being taken and choosing to stay.

<-#53: Ruth Chapter 1 - Background#55: Ruth Chapter 3 - Money ->