The Continual Drip: What Control Is Costing Your Marriage, with Serene Allison (Ep 18)

Two and a half months before the wedding, the house was a frame on a trailer. No electrical. No plumbing. No toilet. No shower. In Part 2, Daniel and Allison finish the conversation with their oldest son, Ethan, and his bride, Savannah. Ethan was nineteen with about $100,000 saved, a fencing business, and no debt. He could have built a $150,000 house. He chose a $30,000 tiny house instead so they could stay out of debt and have more to show for it. He had never wired a house or plumbed one. A general contractor friend, David Cross, could have done it all for him. He didn't. He told Ethan what to do first and let him do it. By the end, Ethan could go build another one. Savannah came into the marriage with no debt and her own car. They paid for the wedding and the honeymoon in cash. They talk about life as newlyweds on family land, with nieces and nephews knocking on the door. Savannah's goal is to be the favorite aunt, and she has the toys to prove it. They pray and read the Bible together every day, or try to. They have someone over almost every week. One night they fed eighteen people in an 8x34 tiny house. Homemade lasagna, bread, and dessert. Savannah shares how she started baking sourdough at nineteen so she could fail at it before she had children, and how that turned into a monthly snail mail with recipes, photos, stickers, and homestead updates. Ethan shares how he runs his fencing business: honest work, worship music only on the job site, four employees, and a goal to leave every property better than he found it. When he wanted to get better, he asked other fence contractors what they would do. Their answer: do good work. Then Allison asks the hard question. Did we go too hard on you? "Honestly no. I felt bad for all the people who had their moms doing the laundry for them." They close with what they would do the same with their own children, why Savannah says the Hartmans work hard and play hard, and why Ethan believes you judge a tree by its fruit. Missed Part 1? Start with EP 28.

Ethan grew up with three older sisters. Four moms, really. They told him what to wear, how to do his hair, which bedding he was allowed to use. They dressed him up. They painted his fingernails. He did not roll over and take it. In Part 1, Daniel and Allison sit down with their oldest son, Ethan, and his new bride, Savannah. First, the business. Ethan started selling moringa trees at twelve, with pots he asked people for and soil he mixed from Daniel's recipe. He sold $800 worth of trees on his first market day. He had been saving since he was eight, not for a car, but to build a house. At seventeen he worked one fence job with his brother-in-law Cedar in 110 degree July heat and loved it. His first fence on his own took about fifty hours. He can build that same fence today in five and a half. Around 200 fences later, he sometimes has enough work to run two crews, and when work is slow he knocks doors. Sometimes seventy doors for three jobs. No school taught him fencing. No school taught him business. Then, Savannah. They first crossed paths at a volleyball event in Tennessee, but only in passing. Then she came to family camp as a single with another family, and the Hartmans loved her right away. Ethan did not. She tattled on him to his mom and sisters. He called her arrogant. "No love, just hate." Until the April retreat. Ethan had never dated anyone before her. He wrote his own relationship guidelines, called a few people for advice, and shared them with Savannah as soon as he could so they could hold each other accountable. They saved their first kiss for the wedding. They almost never drove anywhere alone. And Savannah explains why the sibling in the back seat was never just a chaperone to her. "Now I have ten siblings who actually enjoy me and have been around me and know who I am because we were intentional about having them, rather than it just being the third person in the back row to make sure we don't hold hands." Part 2 is coming next week.

Josiah lived in a camper in their backyard. He was also their employee. And their tenant. And the young man trying to marry their oldest daughter. Every other day Daniel and I changed our minds about what the rules were. You can't go into that room. Wait, no. You can go in that room, but not that one. It was our first time walking a child through courtship. We did not have it figured out. In Part 2, MaKenna and Josiah finish the story. The setup that brought Josiah from the bus to the backyard. Why Daniel liked him from day one, even when I didn't understand it. The five dates they had alone in a year and a half of courtship. The friend who sat MaKenna down and told her what she was about to settle for. The first kiss they saved for the wedding. Then what they built. An Airstream on family land, bought with swim money. A pole barn that was their wedding venue and then their first home. A house going up debt-free, now worth around $600,000, with about $300,000 into it. Josiah doing most of the work himself, trading cabinet-building skills for crane time, calling in the family for the days the load was too heavy. And what MaKenna says now about the childhood people told her she was robbed of. "I'm going to do the same thing with my children. So I don't think my childhood was robbed in any way. That was the number one thing people told me. And it was a lie I believed for a long time."

Meet our oldest daughter. MaKenna was four or five when she ran a gumball machine at the studio. She was sixteen when she drove herself to the largest farmers market in Pensacola with healthy chocolate she had stayed up until 3 in the morning making. She was eighteen when she talked her way into ISR infant swim instructor training, a program that didn't take anyone under twenty-one, and paid the eight to ten thousand dollars herself. It wasn't even half of what she had saved from chocolate and flipping furniture. She never worked a normal job. She was also our test pilot. Everything we figured out as parents, we figured out on her first. In Part 1, MaKenna and her husband Josiah sit down with us and tell the truth about what that was like. Being the oldest of eleven and being called "the second mom." The teen years when she didn't want all these siblings. Why family camp turned it around for her. Walking away from college. The swim business she built instead. Then Josiah's side. He grew up fifth of twelve in the Crevier family, whose ministry, Champions Forever, juggles, unicycles, and spins basketballs to share the gospel everywhere from prisons to NBA Finals halftime shows. We met his family at a national volleyball tournament in Dayton, Tennessee. His father looked at Allison and said, "I have a son you need to meet." That son was in South Korea at the time. Married almost six years, expecting their third baby, living on our family land, and building their home without a loan. We made all our mistakes on her. She still turned out amazing.

She had eleven children. Two of her oldest had already walked away from everything she raised them for. And she was calling because she could see her third headed the same direction. When I told her what I was observing, she finally broke down and said it: "I am a mother of fear." Fear in motherhood does not always look like panic. It looks like controlling everything your child touches. Rescuing them before the consequence has time to land. Parenting so the moms at co-op think you have it together. Making every decision around "what if I lose them?" instead of "what has God asked of me today?" In this episode, Allison walks through the contrasts between the fearful woman and the courageous woman — pulling from her own confessions (yes, the matching monogrammed outfits were her), real stories from the farmers market, and how God answered every single fear she had about her daughters. The fearful mom tries to keep the arrow. The courageous mom prepares it to fly. Psalm 127 says children are arrows in the hands of a warrior. You do not spend years shaping an arrow because you plan to hold onto it forever. "God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." — 2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV Come build with us. 🌿🏹