Mom's baby book

by Sulla 5 Replies latest jw experiences

  • Sulla
    Sulla

    My mother gave to me the baby book she kept in the first years after I was born. It is fairly typical example in many ways: lists of various milestones like walking and talking, height and weight, that sort of thing. One section has space to record the first seven years of Christmas.

    Years 1-4 are recorded in some detail: I got so many new outfits, was/was not waiting up for Santa, did/did not cry when I got my picture made with Santa, lists of toys, all the stuff a mother would record when tracking the growth of her first son. Full, rich, detailed paragraphs.

    Year five simply reads: "This year we did not celebrate Christmas because we have learned the truth about Jehovah God." No subsequent entries.

    Turn to the section on birthdays, find similar entries for four years: who came to the party, what grandma bought, how well I behaved myself, how much cake I ate. Year five: "We spent the day at home."

    It's quite shocking to see a family go from normal to profoundly strange in such a stark fashion.

  • Scully
    Scully

    Nice that you still have the baby books to remember those occasions.

    Those memories were destroyed for me.... photographs of birthday parties and Christmases and Easter parades, all gone.

    I have a few memories of them up until about the age of 6 or 7, but after that my parents converted to the JWs and all of that was gone, as if it never happened, just like the Memory Holes in Orwell's 1984.

  • FlyingHighNow
    FlyingHighNow

    How is your mother now? Is she happy? I filled in other parties and celebrations in the birthday and christmas part of the books.

    Those memories were destroyed for me.... photographs of birthday parties and Christmases and Easter parades, all gone.

    Wow, they destroyed photographs. That is extreme. The GB has stolen so much from all of us.

  • Sulla
    Sulla

    How is your mother now? Is she happy? I filled in other parties and celebrations in the birthday and christmas part of the books.

    We are barely on speaking terms, so it is difficult for me to say. When they discovered my wife and I were celebrating Christmas, they declared we were no longer welcome in their home and we have hardly spoken since. There was a death in the family some months back, I suspect that has caused some level of reflection about the past (nearly) 40 years.

  • FlyingHighNow
    FlyingHighNow

    I bet she is anything but happy.

  • White Dove
    White Dove

    I remember my efforts at being a hard liner.

    They came in spurts of guilt, and angry efforts to do more, be more.

    Those spurts of attempted self-righteousness and perfect obedience were not happy times.

    They were times of struggle to measure up and be the best.

    There was no happiness in that.

    Well, now I don't allow anyone into my life that has the goal of mucking it up.

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