SW,
This is an excellent thread and one that represents this forum more as it should be. Your story was touching, heartfelt and written extremely well. I think this thread has helped a few think about what lead them to making one of the biggest decisions in their life and being able to put it into written form is a great exercise in reconfirmation of our own sanity.
Here is my addition to this thread.
I was never what you would call a zealous JW. I was raised in the religion from age four. Growing up as a child with eight other siblings my mother constantly told all of us kids that the most important thing in life was to stay in the truth. I loved my mom and at a young age could never think about hurting her. But, also at a young age, I struggled with the concept of living my life by the rules of this religion. As much has I didn't like being a JW I still believed it to be the truth.
At age 28 I had worked myself up to the point of owning three small companies and running the marketing divisions of two other intentional companies, all in the commercial art industry. I was traveling constantly and had a wife and two sons. My business travels tended to make me miss a lot of meetings. In an effort to try and make me spiritually stronger the elders in my congregation told me that if I could get my service hours up they would love to make me a ministerial servant. I was told that I was appointed as the magazine servant even though I was not a ministerial servant. They considered this a great responsibility, I considered it a small inconvenience.
My wife and I had been married for six years and had never really gotten along. To be precise she treated me like an older brother who she was always in competition with. She was very jealous of my business and how much time I spent on it. As I look back now, I think that I wasn't as good of a husband as I could have been. There was little love between the two of us but we loved our sons more than life. I had left her several times for weeks at a time only to find myself missing my sons and going back home. I had grown tired over the years having her put me down in front of people and staring at her back in bed night after night in bed and knowing I couldn't touch her. She was a master at using sex as a manipulative weapon. It was beginning to drive me a little crazy.
The watchtower society had started buying some of the art material products my company manufactured and one day called my company to see if they could buy direct. The call was forward to my office and I spoke with the elder from the purchasing department for about a half hour. In the conversation he revealed to him that I was a JW and that I would be happy to give the products to the society for free. That elder had later gone to the head of the art department and he, along with several members of his department knew who I was. They had read many of the articles I had written for several of the national art publications as well as seen a lot of my illustration work in those magazines. They decided that I might be able to help them out with some consultation and a few art classes. I received a call from one of the elders in the publications department and they asked me if I would fly back for a couple of weeks and help them with a few problem's they were having in their art, photography, and graphics departments. I agreed to do it.
A few weeks later I was at Bethel. I remember thinking to myself that this would be a turning point in my life. I would see how great it was being in the most holy of all JW places and I would finally gain that feeling of love for Jehovah that I felt I had been missing my whole life. This was the spiritual boost that would save my families life as well as my own. I told myself that after spending two weeks at Bethel and helping them solve a few problems that I would get the encouragement to put the religion first in my life and be the person my mom always wanted me to be. It had always been her dream to have me work in the art department at Bethel. Her dream was about to become her nightmare.
After being picked up at Kennedy airport by one of the elders who had called me the first thing he told me was that I could not ware blue jeans while at Bethel. I had always been a blue jeans kind'a guy so this bugged me just a little. That was just the first of many new rules I was about to learn. I was told that I needed to have an escort when traveling back and forth from my VIP brownstone apartment where they put me and the administration building where the art department was. They treated me like a king and gave me the honor of having my escort be the same brother Fred Franz's had as an escort and body guard. Early the next morning I was picked up at my room and lead down to the underground tunnels. We came up where Fred was waiting to join us. I introduced myself and he gave me that "nice to meet you brother" had shake I had grown very familiar with. As we walked the few blocks to the administration building I noticed that Fred stared at the ground and talked to himself while walking. At first I thought he was talking to me, but later the escort told me he just did that and he wasn't talking to anyone. After a few days of this I figured he had lost his marbles and was looking for them every morning as he walked to work.
To tell the whole story of what I had seen and how I felt listening and observing many of the people who I was asked to talk to would take pages of writing. I will try to condense it all by telling you what I told Dean Songer the head of the publications department after being there for a little over a week. I told him that if this was a company many heads would roll. First of all the department heads of the all three departments didn't have a clue what they were doing. There was a sister in the art department who everyone hated but she was married to one of the elders in charge of another department so they just put up with her rudeness. This lady was extremely rude, obnoxious and tried to make me feel like I was an intruder in her little kingdom. I was told at least fifteen times by fifteen different individuals not to tall anyone what they were going to tell me because it could not get out how they really felt. These people were afraid of their own shadows but not one single one of them had the guts to tell anyone. I couldn't believe the thing I heard.
I went on to tell him that members of each of the three departments didn't like most of the members of the other departments and they all hated working with the elder in charge of the photography department. I worked with him on a photo shoot for an Awake magazine and found him to be a crass and totally unapt asshole. I told Dean many other things but the one that got me dismissed three days early was when I told him I went to visit with a brother from my old hall and he was now Leo Greelees (GB member) room mate. When I asked him how he got to be the room mate of a GB member so quickly he told me that Leo's last room mate was kicked out of Bethel for inviting young Bethel brothers to his room, getting them drunk and having sex with them. I later found out that Leo himself was gay and he was later quietly hidden away somewhere in New Orleans to finished out his life.
What I thought was going to turn my life around and make me the JW my mom always wanted me to be did the exact opposite. After I came home it was very hard for me to go to a meeting. I could not tell anyone how I felt because I did not want to loose my family for being disfellowshipped for apostasy. The next several months were very hard and confusing for me.
Several mounts later I had just gotten back from a trip to Atlanta the night before and a friend of mine whom I had hooked up with at my ten year class reunion stopped by my house. Sitting at the dining room table with Kurt my new found worldly friend and my wife I started doing a little witnessing as an automatic thing without even thinking. I had done it so many times out of instinct I didn't even think about it. Kurt and I had started to be great friends after the reunion a few months before and started hanging out a lot together. As I started with my brain dead witnessing he stopped me in mid sentence. He asked me what I was trying to do, convince him of something that I didn't sound convinced of myself? He then asked me something that made me think clearly about all this stuff for the first time in my life. He asked, "Do you really think we are all in this huge pile of shit because a talking snake, told a naked lady, to eat a piece of fruit?"
Hearing that question put to me in that way just made me sit back and contemplate pure logic and reasoning for the first time in my life. I looked up at him and said "no, I don't believe that." Until he said it just that way I never realized how stupid and childish the whole concept was. Kurt and I stayed up late into the night talking. My wife left the table right after I gave Kurt my answer.
The next morning I woke up from the couch where I had spent the last six months sleeping and made myself some breakfast. For the past six years I had always made my own meals, ironed my own clothes, and spent more time sleeping on the couch than I did in bed with my wife. Since I had been gone for a week working fifteen hour long days seven days in a row I just wanted to take the Saturday off and relax. My wife came in and told me to turn off the TV and go out and mow the lawn. Not having the energy to get into another argument with her I just went out side and did it. I had a big house and it had a huge lawn both in the front and back yard. My wife did not have a secular job but stayed home to take care of the kids. She took care of the inside of the house and I took care of the outside. She did not take care of me as most husbands may think a wife should but I had learned to live with it. I went outside and began to mow the lawn. It was a very hot day and within an hour I was done mowing both front and back lawns. I came into the house and sat down on the couch. I was dripping with sweat and got a towel to try and dry off. My wife was in the kitchen and I asked her if she could get me a glass of ice water while she was in there. She gave me a very familiar come back that I decided at that moment, I had heard for the very last time. She said "I'm not your slave, get it yourself."
I walked into the big kitchen where she was arranging some flowers in a vase and I just looked at her. All the things I had saw at Bethel ran through my head like a freight train. Kurt's question rang in my ears and my answer seemed to be echoing in my head like a blow horn in the fog. I looked at her,... and in a very calm voice said, "Your right, your not my slave,... your not my anything."
I went into my oldest son's room, he was about five at the time, and picked him up and put him on my lap. I I told him that daddy was moving out and I was never moving back in again. I told him how much I loved him and that I would see him every weekend and I would always be his dad. He didn't cry, he just looked up at me and said "dad, I understand," he was a very wise and a very observant five year old. That was all I needed. I hugged him, picked up his little brother and gave him a kiss, packed a bag, and left. I drove down to the river front and leased a condo on the river, I signed a year lease. I moved in a week later. As I walked in I dropped my few things on the floor and walked out on my back balcony and quietly looked at the river. I opened a package that I had picked up at my house that morning, it was from my mom. My wife had called her and told her I left home and said I was never coming back home and never going to another meeting again. I told her before when I had left that I wasn't coming back but I always did. Adding the statement about never going to another meeting made her realize that I was dead serious this time.
In the package was a watchtower tape and a letter from my mom saying she was crying while she wrote it and I should listen to the tape and not give up on the truth. She said she loved me and that I had just broke her heart. She added that I was always the special one to her out of all the kids and she shouldn't say this but she loved me the most out of all the kids. She also closed her letter by saying that I had also hurt her more than any of the kids by leaving my family and the truth.
I thought about how appropriate and symbolic it might be if I walked down to the river and threw the tape in. I looked at the tape and saw that oh-so familiar ugly brick tower logo along with the words Watchtower Bible and Tract Society printed on it. I stared at it for a minute and thought about my life and how unhappy I had been through out most of it. I thought to myself that the tape didn't have anything on it that I hadn't heard a hundred times before. I decided throwing it in the river was a little too dramatic so I folded my mom's letter up and put it in a box full of papers for me to file later. I took the tape and simply tossed it in the trash bag. No drama, no fanfare, no symbolic burial at sea of a past dead life by tossing the tape in the flowing river, just a simple task of dropping it in the garbage ending my past life and starting a new one. The river was way to beautiful to add anymore pollution to it.
I knew at that moment that I was alone in the world. I would probably only see or talk to my mom on very rare occasions. I felt my heart break as I realized that I would not see my sons everyday. I thought about never having to stare at my beautiful wife's naked back and feeling like I was a piece of shit that she was tormenting with her beauty. I thought about never having to fill out a time slip or knock on any more doors of people who didn't want me at their house. I thought about not having people judge me or tell me how to live my life while they continually failed at running their own. I felt free for the first time in my life.
I was free to try and figure out who in the hell I really was instead trying to be someone who others told me I should be. Good, bad, right, wrong, it all didn't matter. All that mattered was that I was free. The air smelled a little fresher that night, and I slept better than I had in many years. I was no longer a JW, I was for the first time in my life, just me.
Dave