I sort of sneaked in and thought maybe I should do an intro. I'll try to keep this short...
I'm was a 4th generation Witness. My great-grandparents were Witnesses before there were Witnesses. Never really learned too much of the history, but I assume they were followers of Russell.
My Grandmother married a Lutheran and so my Mom and her brother (an elder) are Witnesses but the rest of my aunts and my uncle were Lutheran.
When you get to my generation, the cousins are an assortment of "In" and "Out". Non of my siblings are Witnesses (anymore) and my younger sister is disfellowshipped (for shoplifting less than $10 worth of merchandise at a drugstore.)
My mother and father were Witnesses when I was really little. My father died suddenly when I was five. My mother was disfellowshipped shortly after for celebrating Christmas. My Mom started having problems with anxiety and depression (she had lost my older sister-5yo-to a brain tumor before I was born so combined with the death of my father I suppose this was understandable..)
She decided that she needed to "find God" and decided to look in the Lutheran Church that all the rest of the relatives attended. My sister and I were baptized as Lutherans when I was maybe 7.
She then entered into a completely disastrous second marriage (physical and mental abuse, sexual abuse of my sister, etc. ad nauseum.) My Mom then decided that she needed to "get back to Jehovah." She was reinstated when I was 9.
I was grateful to Jehovah (read The Organization) for helping my mother get her head together (sort of) and I was baptized at 13. I was very devout, very good and followed all the rules. I still have problems with this one. That baptism was my idea-I felt at the time that I "owed" Jehovah for keeping my fragile family together (my mom had threatened to give my baby brother up for adoption and put us girls in foster care many times prior to her reinstatement.)
But, the baptism was a promise I couldn't keep without losing myself. When I was a teen, I started getting these little niggling doubts that I'd push down. When I was 18 I was "marked" for going to college-though at this point I knew I was going to have to support my mother and sister and brother for awhile. In college I realized what REAL friends were like and those niggling doubts wouldn't be pushed down anymore.
I got a job at the college I attended and quickly moved into administration. Two years after I had graduated, elders would still occasionally come up to me (the only ones at meetings that would talk to me-I was marked for going to college, remember) and ask how classes were going...they didn't have a CLUE about my life. I would tell them classes were going just fine. I knew by now that this was not the truth, but my Mom was still fragile and my younger siblings needed somebody to hold things together. I was supporting the family financially and living at home and still didn't want to rock our shaky little boat.
A couple of years after this, I met my husband. He was not religious-he taught at the college where I was working. Now I was being marked for the college thing AND the worldly boyfriend thing.
I had helped Mom apply for some funding from my father's union and she was getting enough to get by. My brother was in high school and my sister was married. I decided that I needed to start living a life for me and I planned my marriage.
None of the elders (even my uncle) would perform the ceremony-they said that they would be putting their blessing on a marriage that wouldn't last. I don't suppose that I need to mention that of the three Witness weddings that took place in the KH the month I was married all have ended in divorce. My husband and I will be married 18 years in a couple of weeks. So much for the powers of prophecy. I ended up finding a wonderful Unitarian minister to officiate. I lied to my mother and told her the lady was a Justice of the Peace or she wouldn't have come to my wedding. A "sister" worked at the hotel where my hus. family stayed when they came to the wedding and reported to the elders that we had had a Unitarian minister. The elders called my Mom on the carpet-couldn't call me because I was on my honeymoon-and she didn't have a clue as to what they were talking about. I just remembered-hadn't thought of this in years-that they sent another sister out to talk to me THE DAY OF MY WEDDING to try to talk me out of it. All very weird, and looking back on it, sort of surreal. When we watched Dateline, my husband's first comment was that he was VERY glad we had not been married by an elder.
In the end, I just drifted out. I'm not df'd, not da'd-just hard for them to label. This makes it easier for my mother and other than that is immaterial to me.
I'm married, have three kids. We homeschool the kids and when I tell people this I always want to say, "But not because we're fundamentalists!" The homeschooling community has sort of this continuum from super fundamentalists (the ones you hear about the most) to latter day flower children raising their kids naked in the woods. We're actually pretty middle of the road-in most every way.
Gosh-didn't mean to write so much. The wonderful thing about this board is that you will understand this all in a different way than somebody who has never been a Witness. My husband is an ex-Methodist and he thinks that is pretty much the same thing...chuckle. He is a great guy, but in this, no matter how he tries to understand, there is no way to understand being a Witness until you've been there.
A belated "hi" to everyone...
Jewel