Hello all, thanks for all the warm welcomes this weekend. There was some interest in my origins story so here goes.
I am a born in, never baptised. My parents were immigrants who knew no one in a new town in a new country when they got love bombed into the cult. My dad was a complete zealot, my mom went along to get along. On a lot of stuff my dad was one of those witnesses that made everything worse. The beatings, worse. The preaching hours, ridiculously long, it was a competition after all and if everyone else was doing an hour he was doing 4 and we all had to go too. My dad is and always has been a social butterfly too, so we were early to the meetings and the last ones out. Is it any wonder I used to regularly fall asleep during the Tuesday night meetings? I was exhausted, I was also seven, up passed my bedtime and of course I hadn't done my homework. But no Tuesday night meeting would have been complete without being yanked out of my chair dragged through the hall and into the mens bathroom. That was after they had to make an announcement because my dad had been pulling me outside the front door of the hall to beat me. Must'nt shed bad light on the JW's, brothers, beat your children in the bathroom.
Well, even though my dad was one to make extra arbitrary rules and tell me I was sinning all the time. I can tell you one place he didn't go wrong, he never allowed my sister's and I to preach solo with anyone other then women. so thank God we were spared that awful horror. But he also did nothing about it when an elder got caught repeatedly groping me after he had inserted himself in a game of two hand touch football the kids were playing. All that happened was that an announcement was made and girls were no longer allowed to play with boys at picnics. That elder went on to molest his way through the population unchecked and is now in prison.
Another way my dad didn't fail us though, is when my sister got df'd at 16 and we were told to df her, he said no one is going tell me I can't talk to my daughter. So we carried on with her business as usual. Now you know no one ever gets away with anything as a JW. Two of my other sisters were getting married literally a week apart, so we went to the first wedding (it was enormous) we had a grand time we danced, we had a good innocent time. But the elder that we had known for ages that was going to give the talk at my other sister's wedding didn't like how we were dancing and having a good time with my df'd sister. So of course he reported us. And the second sisters wedding was put under the microscope, because I wasn't baptised yet they told her I wasn't a jw and I had to be kicked out of her wedding, couldn't walk in the wedding. I was 15 at the time. The good thing about that was it forever after gave me a comeback to my dad once I started rebelling and missing meetings. Oh well, they had a committee dad, it's official if I'm not jw enough to walk in her wedding I'm not jw enough to go preach or whatever other thing they wanted out of me.
I have other absurd experiences but I thought I would end on that for today. Sorry so long. -River