Word: joys
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Tears well up in Joy's eyes as she stands at the pulpit one Sunday evening offering testimony to all that God has done for her family. David sits in the pew behind Nancy, combing his sister's curly blond hair, inattentive to his mother's preaching. Nancy blows bubbles with thick pink gum. Stephen lies across a nearby pew, asleep. "Boring," Nancy says. Only David stands with his father to sing the final hymn...
After Larry was laid off last winter, he began cooking, cleaning and putting the three children to bed. To help out with expenses, Joy took a job selling + coupons for photographs door to door. She drives to distant hollows, logging nearly 1,800 miles during the five or six days she works each week. She takes in about $240 a week before taxes and expenses, barely breaking even after car repairs and other costs. Now Larry thinks about heading north to look for work in a factory...
...good for them to see me doin' housework, so they don't keep believin' that outside work belongs only to the man and inside is the woman." This is quite a change in attitude for a man who insisted his wife quit nursing school after he and Joy married...
Larry and Joy Nelson's Fundamentalist Christian faith imposes strict rules on their children. What they watch on television is strictly monitored: no soap operas, no shows with a hint of sex. The children will not be allowed to date until 16, even though many girls in Nancy's seventh grade already wear boys' rings...
...Sometimes when me and Joy come by the high school, the kids be like white on rice wrapped around one another," says Larry disapprovingly. "Several gotten pregnant. I think America as a whole has dropped her values. Now it seems all right to have premarital sex. Mothers goin' along with it. I believe it is our responsibility to teach our children the values when they are much younger...