WELCOME TO PLATHVILLE: Tradition Vs. Modernity

Does freedom lie in the internet, or in the loving arms of Jesus Christ?

It’s harder than I thought it would be to get this newsletter out once a week! But not due to lack of drama…….

Of course, there’s been the Taylor Swift/Sophie Turner drama this week but I’m not gonna talk about that because everyone is and also because I think Taylor might just be deflecting from the Olivia Rodrigo narrative that she betrayed a young female artist’s trust for capitalistic gain, by being like “SEE?! I SUPPORT OTHER WOMEN!”

Also - I liked the Travis Kelce/Taylor match at first… BUT (and I’m not just saying this because I once asked someone to show Travis Kelce a thirst trap of me and never received a follow-up)… Travis’s charm is FADING. He’s the type of guy who’s good looking enough that just a little bit of goofiness makes him seem way more funny and interesting than he actually is. Like, if you went to high school with him and he did one Zoolander impression in your general direction, you’d fall in love. But as an adult, the “LET’S FUCKING GO” stuff would give you a migraine. Make no mistake, though — if Travis ever did follow up on the thirst trap, I would immediately scrub this entire substack and start practicing my fake laugh.

OK so I’m not talking about all of that, instead I’m going to talk about the phenomenon that has taken over my life this past week… TLC’s Welcome to Plathville.

TLC’s description of the show reads: “The Plaths are a blonde, blue-eyed family of 11 in southeastern Georgia. They share a passion for music, religion, family life and traditional roles.”

Blonde hair IS an overwhelming feature of the show, as are sunburns and men lifting and swinging children around constantly for some reason…

But the real meat of the show is that - due to trauma in their own pasts - the parents Barry and Kim Plath homeschooled their kids, gave them 0 access to TV or the internet and indoctrinated them with a Jesus vs. Satan ideology and now their oldest children are coming to terms with their upbringing and… it’s DRAMA.

I was totally ready to hate on the Plaths. I thought they were like the Duggars meets Jon & Kate Gosselin meets Children of the Damned.

I was looking down from the superior throne of having grown up with TV and The Sims 2 Pets Expansion Pack, secular holiday movies and Costco sized boxes of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies. I TURNED OUT JUST FINE! DIDN’T I?!?! Yet now, in Season 4, I find myself in a position I never thought I’d be…

Rooting for Jesus… to lead Kim Plath out of her new dance studio/apartment and back home to the farm to spend some time reflecting in the prayer room!

SOOOO much happens between season 1 and season 4 of Welcome to Plathville. In season 1, Kim and Barry and all of their kids aside from two of the oldest, Ethan and Moriah, are content with their farm life. They love feeding birds and chasing cows and building clocks and waltzing in the grass to gospel music.

By Season 4, however — mother Kim is taking shots with her now-LA-based professional model son Micah, talking about how the love Jesus prescribes in the Bible doesn’t make sense in real life and now that she’s saved it’s OK for her to have a little fun!

I was surprised to find myself siding with Christ here, because my parents raised me without organized religion. When I developed an OCD ritual at age 11 that involved reading three bible passages six times every night, I horrified my mother by running downstairs crying “I LOST MY BIBLE! I LOST MY BIBLE!” She had no idea how I’d even received one in the first place, let alone how I became convinced if I didn’t read it, she would die and my dad would die and my favorite babysitter would also die and it would all be my fault.

The point is - I’ve always been grateful that my parents didn’t push religion on me, but watching the trajectory of the Plaths, I really found myself believing in Lord Our God’s righteous path, and the simpler days of yore.

These Plath children are all younger than me, yet capable of so much more wisdom and empathy. They all seem able to listen to each other and hold capacity for each other’s feelings. Even when they confront Kim and Barry about what was wrong with their upbringing, the parents remain calm, validate their children’s experiences and acknowledge that although their motivations were loving, they can see where they went too far.

Moriah, the most rebellious sister, and Lydia, the most pious, are particularly heartwarming to me. They are so different and yet love each other and accept each others’ chosen life paths wholeheartedly. It’s only when I let myself look at Lydia’s instagram too closely that it becomes evident she may not believe I have the right to make choices about my own body….

Lydia’s insta………

And it’s not just the forgiveness and the strapping young men that draw me to the Plath’s traditional lifestyle, it’s a woman named Olivia.

The wife of the oldest Plath son Ethan (21 in season 1), REJECTS the Plath family because they consider her a bad influence. And she IS a bad influence. On me. Bad is an understatement, actually. She’s influenced me against my own kind… white women who go to therapy.

Olivia considers herself a real CHANGE MAKER because she convinced her husband to drink a beer for the first time. She treated getting her belly button pierced like she was throwing the first brick at Stonewall. She is CONSTANTLY ruining Plath family events (birthday parties, graduations, the yearly remembrance of the death of their son!!!) with confrontations about her boundaries and how they’ve been violated and how her PAST TRAUMAS ARE GETTING TRIGGERED! At many points, she is asked to describe what her trauma with the Plath family is… and all she seems to say is that Kim used to make her feel special and now she doesn’t, and that Barry hurt her feelings when he said she “had some blind spots” in reference to her self-proclaimed desire to uncover truths about the family.

Olivia in season 2

Olivia in season 4

It’s like… I totally understand not liking your partner’s family. Under Olivia’s logic, I could argue I was traumatized when I had to stay at a SeaWorld themed Holiday Inn in Orlando for an ex’s family vacation…. But with in-laws, I think you just have to suck it up a lot of the time! And yes, we all uncover truths about our partner’s families, we all look at facebook albums from 2010, check political campaign donations, or pay for background checks on people’s step brothers… but you keep those discoveries to yourself until it comes up naturally in conversation! And I don’t even think Olivia has uncovered anything besides an MLM that both her husband and his mom willingly participated in. Am I proud of defending both Jesus Christ’s word and Multi-Level Marketing schemes in one newsletter? NO. But that’s how angry Olivia and her “trauma responses” make me.

But you know, they say the things you don’t like in others are often things you recognize in yourself…

I have spent the last year & change in intense talk therapy, reading nonstop about attachment styles and shame and my inner child and obsessing about WHY I am the way I am, why I’ve done the things I’ve done, why I’ve loved the people I’ve loved and why the hell I’m still so SAD all the time!

I struggle a LOT with still not having a direct answer for how to fix myself or what’s even broken and the reality that I may never know. So I think when I was watching Welcome to Plathville, and screaming “YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TRAUMA GROW UP AND GET OVER YOURSELF” at Olivia through my TV, I was probably screaming at myself. But Olivia is also very annoying, and it can be exhausting to be a member of the generation of “boundaries” and “gaslighting” and “canceling plans due to feeling overstimulated”.

My anti-millennial sentiments came to a head the other day, a classic New York day, when I had a job interview in Greenpoint, then a gynecologist appointment in the Financial District and then plans to meet a friend in Prospect Park. There wasn’t room to go home in between, so by the time I was on my way to Prospect Park, I was so hungry that I was a danger to myself and others. Luckily, I happened upon an Italian place I know and love so I stopped in for a quick Cacio e Pepe, and they only had bar seating available.

I’ve actually never once sat at a bar by myself before this, but it felt kind of fancy and cool and with the Plaths heavy on my mind, I decided - I’m not even gonna take out my phone. I’m just gonna sit here and be present and enjoy the food and the ambiance like they used to. Who’s they? When did they used to? I don’t know but it must have been better than KIDS THESE DAYS.

And then, I heard her.

“What did you order?”

I looked to my right to see an elderly woman sitting alone at the bar drinking a white wine spritzer.

My muscles immediately tensed. Human interaction. Raw and unfiltered…

But remember the Plaths? They never had cell phones! They just had each other and the cows to talk to! They learned the simple pleasures of communication! That’s how they ended up so well rounded and strapping and blonde and—

“The Cacio e Pepe!” I said, as I was immediately reminded that it’s the most humiliating pasta name to have to utter out loud.

I smiled and looked back down to where my phone normally would be, but it wasn’t there, it was in my bag, I had nothing to rest my eyes on, nothing to make clear that I am NOT OPEN TO FURTHER DISCUSSION and then—

“That sounds delicious! Everything here looks SO good, but my husband’s cooking me dinner tonight. He’d kill me if I came home full!”

Come on Devin, care! Engage! Respond! I told myself. Remember the King Lord Jesus God, who is not moved by the things of this world! What would he do!? But my jaw clenched up and before I could say anything a bartender approached and the elderly woman feasted her dialogue on this poor unassuming young man whose entire life story seemed to be wrenched from him in the time it took for me to retrieve my phone and open instagram.

Ahhhhh, sweet relief. My old faithful. A wonderland of pink and yellow circles and perfect squares containing all the moments in my peers’ lives that make me feel awful about myself. My best friend, my enemy, my armor against the conversation-seeking masses.

Then, the pasta arrived. I put my phone down momentarily to take my first bite of creamy, cheesy pepe-y noodles and—

“How is it?”

Jesus Christ, woman! I am not here for your entertainment! I am my own individual person with BOUNDARIES AND RIGHTS!!!!

“Really good!” I managed to force through gritted teeth.

“Oh, it looks SO delicious. I really would love to have some if my husband wasn’t cooking. But he made me promise I wouldn’t come home full!”

“WE GET IT! YOU’RE MARRIED!” I tried to nonverbally communicate through my clenched smile as I looked at her and then back down at my phone.

I ingested the rest of my entree with my face mere inches from my phone, my head unmoving, like a cart horse with blinders on… knowing if I even glanced slightly in her direction she would LEAP at the opportunity to tell me more about her husband and all the ways he’d ravage her for not leaving room in her intestines for his elaborate culinary fixings.

I left that dinner more convinced than ever that the internet is a gift and that BOUNDARIES MATTER! Now, excuse me while I go write a think piece about the challenges of being a single childless adult with autoimmune inflammation and undiagnosed ADHD :/.