Previous: My life ... and how JWD came to be - Part 1
How many times have people said ?If I knew then what I know now?? What a difference that would have made to my life. Hindsight is a useless luxury though.
I know I was brought up with the doctrines and beliefs and had never known anything else. I know I was pressured and coerced into it. I know it was the expected thing to do because he was disfellowshipped.
It didn?t make it any easier or stop if hurting when it happened.
One day I tearfully managed to tell my dad that I was not allowed to speak to him anymore and listened to him tell me he loved me and then watched him drive away. I would see him only very occasionally after that for many years.
Of course I got a lot of support off my family ? not !
Before I severed ties with my dad I would have ?Apostate? scrawled across my old car at the Kingdom Hall. This was my younger sister. Now a zealous little bitch married to a self-righteous little prick of a ministerial-servant elder-wannabe. He was so ?righteous? that he would take offence at anything and once walked out of a wedding reception where an older brother from a nearby hall was doing a comedy magic show (ala Tommy Cooper) or, as he put it, ?practising magic and welcoming Satan?s demons?!
My older sister was equally obnoxious and they were both proud to have cut my father off, my older sister refusing to allow him to attend her wedding to another elder-wannabe.
I?ve always been very quiet and introverted and now found myself very alone, not close to the family I still had over here and without any really close friends at the KH. I guess I learnt to rely on myself and no one else.
And things got worse.
I was told that my dad was ill, very ill. He ended up having quintuple heart bypass surgery and I remember lying in bed with a soaking pillow clinging to the memories I could recall of him as ?my dad? when I was little and imagining that I would never see him again. To go through the worry and the heartache of something like that is bad enough but to have everyone acting as though he was already dead and that he didn?t matter was unbearable. He mattered to me!
All this time I was living alone and though I?d had girlfriends I hadn?t met anyone special enough or, if I did, didn?t have the courage or self-confidence to make an impression.
I felt terribly alone but was happy with my own company. I had my own house and a cat and was on the treadmill of the WTS that kept you busy, stopped you thinking ? kept you anaesthetised to your pain.
I went to the meetings alone and to the assemblies. I don?t know why. Maybe I was hoping to meet someone but I wasn?t the self-confident type who found it easy.
At a district assembly at Maine Road (Manchester City FC?s ground) I was walking alone back to the car-park with a couple of sisters in front of me. I found myself asking one of them if she wanted me to carry the heavy bag for her that she was struggling with.
We talked and awkwardly introduced ourselves when we got to the car-park. I didn?t quite catch her name because she was very quiet and, well ? it was a weird name I'd never heard ? Angharad.
The next day, out of sixteen thousand people, she sat in front of me! (I think it was a setup but she still claims it wasn?t)
We walked around the ground and talked and agreed to meet the next (and last) day where we talked some more and finally swapped telephone numbers / addresses and agreed to keep in touch.
And we did.
I went down to visit her and she terrified me by taking me for a day out on Conwy castle walls. She was everything I needed and is my soul mate.
Eventually, I popped the question (even down on one knee) and she said yes. We got married on a blistering day in Llandudno. I didn?t invite my dad and didn?t see him but I have since found out that he actually came over and got a copy of some photographs from the photographer.
We did everything that married JWs do ? went to meetings, went out on service, got pregnant. We were the typical model JW family.
Before Angharad was due to give birth, I had to go on a business trip to San Diego with a work colleague at a new company I?d just started at. While we were over there, walking through an open air mall, we saw a bunch of Jehovah?s Witnesses sat on deck-chairs in the sun with their literature on a table. I was a bit ?stumbled? ? we had to walk round pretty rough council estates on the ministry, rain or shine, and this bunch ? well, they didn?t seem to be putting much effort in at all.
More importantly though, my colleague knew something about them !
?They are a weird bunch? he said after we?d passed them, ?they believe they knew the star that God lives on!?
JW mode kicked in.
?Excuse me! But I happen to be a Jehovah?s Witness and we don?t believe anything like that!? I proudly huffed.
We didn?t really speak about JW issues much but after we?d got back to work, he came and apologised to me and said he must have misunderstood the beliefs ? based on these things he?d read. He handed me a slip of paper with some book and WT references on. He studied religions and had many books on different sects and cults. His approach was perfect - provide the information with no judgement on it, show things using the organisations own literature.
What the hell was going on? I went home determined to prove how ridiculous it was and looked up the references on the CD-ROM and in some of the old books in the KH library.
There it was. The WTS had believed that they knew where God lived, in the Plaides.
While it made me think, a bit, it didn?t make me do anything. You may think when you give information to friends and relatives about the truth that what you say has no effect but it does. It just may not have an immediate effect. Things build up though.
A month later Angharad gave birth to our first child, a boy. It was the happiest day of my life.
We would go to meetings of course and everything looked perfect but cracks started to appear in my JW world and I did the unthinkable ? I started to think!
Becoming a father had really made me think about my relationship with my own father. No doubt he'd held me like I held my son. I imagined how painful it would be to have my son grow up and not talk to me. My god, what had i done?!
Next: Scandals & corruption at the KH, doubts and arguments and JWD begins.