Second Day!
Jellia ran into school. Not because she was late but because this was her second day and, unlike yesterday, she wasn’t nearly as nervous. Yesterday had went fantastically… way better than she had feared! And ska-drek had said to put off dinner until seven this evening, and that she had kesh liberty until time to make it, so she was going going to do some more exploration of the city! Maybe one of the kesh-u would come with her.
She went down the hall to art class. It was so much nicer knowing where everything was! She pushed open the door… they had funny doors here, which just pushed open both ways… and started over toward her bench.
“Hey, Jellia,” she heard, and Farsten got up from his desk, came over, clasped her wrist, and kissed her.
“Umm, hey Farsten,” she said, and kissed him back. But her heart was so pounding! There was no one else here and a cute male her age had just come up and kissed her and she had kissed him back but it was OK, that was the greeting here, and he wasn’t even looking at her just going back to his bench.
She managed to get over to her own bench and hung her pack on the back of it… a funny system they had here where you kept everything in your pack all day… when she heard steps behind her and she braced herself and turned… oh, good, it was Leah!
“Leah,” she said, and went over and exchanged kisses. Oh, this was so much more comfortable kissing a female and with someone else there. “How are you?”
“Oh, tired! We went on the longest walk last night, my whole family. Oh, hey Caleb.”
Leah kissed Caleb first and by the time it was Jellia’s turn she was hardly even at all nervous about it. Although she still didn’t have the motion quite right and she kind of bumped him a bit hard and sort of bit her lip or whatever against his teeth. But he just grinned and rubbed his lip. Oh, how nice of him.
“Your whole family?” she said, turning back to Leah.
“There are an even dozen of us,” Leah said. “It makes for interesting walks, especially when ska-drek insists we ‘keep together’ because he wants to lecture us on the plants or whatever. We went down beachward…
Issues
As this is kind of a short section, not really fully fleshed out, I thought I would take a minute to talk about some of the issues in this story.
Marriage
The most obvious (see the title) issue I am addressing in Contract Marriage is the issue of marriage. Our society is all over the map as far as what marriage is, how you get married, how long you stay married, what your promise in marriage… all of it.
Jellia, our young heroine, is having to adapt to having a man in the home. Coming from a culture where men just come by for sex and then leave, she is finding it very odd that there is a man in her life who not only beds her mother (she’s used to that) but also has taken authority over their lives! He cares what she does!!
Clothing and Food
If you go overseas you are bound to run into some things that surprise you. Few of them are more dramatically challenging then dress code and food. I remember wandering around Belgium and wondering why things seemed so depressing, until my wife told me that the colour scheme on their clothes was really different.
And then I, and others, had to go to the doctor and beach and some kids went to school and found out that the ‘dress code’ in various areas was very different than we were used to. Oh, and on TV.
And food! Who hasn’t traveled, even to another state, and found some food popular that you haven’t even heard of! And now you’re expected to try it, or even cook it!
Greetings
On a purely cultural level greetings can be very different. What can also be different is how important they are. On both her old planet and her new, Jellia’s cultures involve a lot more complex, and a lot more important greetings than your standard American.
Authority, Liberty, and Responsibility
An area where our society is destroying their young people goes by the name of ‘helicopter parenting’. I owe a great deal to the Liaden series, specifically the trials of the young woman Theo Waitley, who was almost drugged for life because the planet she grew up on was unable to handle her high energy.
Our society is moving more and more in the same direction. How many millions of our boys are drugged because they supposedly suffer from ADHD or some similar ‘disease’? Jellia is being faced with the idea that *even at her age* she is expected to cook, to call and ride in her own taxi, to go out without telling anyone, to make sure she gets herself to school on time… shocking stuff.
Conclusion
I am having a lot of fun, as a former missionary, throwing issues of culture into the mix. But I am hoping that the serious issues are coming to the fore. Western Civilisation is not reproducing itself… literally. Our birthrates are well below replacement throughout. I believe that a large part of that is because we have no idea what marriage is supposed to be, or how to go about it.
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Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von