@stuckinarut2 I'm back! WHERE to begin?!
I began my fade in July last year after an apostasy trial went awry. I literally got up and ran away from my meeting DURING it. Since then, I saw my parents weekly (sometimes bi-weekly!). I did my best to give WHAM! Jr. a shot at having grandparents.
My relationship with my parents was strained (more so from my mother). My father knows DAMN well why I can no longer attend meetings. I've always been very forthcoming with my heartbreak over being lied to. I've often pleaded, cried and tried to reason with him to just try and understand my position in the light of my mother calling me "cruel" for withholding my son from meetings.
My father has always met my desperate cries with stoic silence and, at best, sarcasm and exaggeration to make me appear crazy. "Well, NOW that your eyes have been opened that this organization is sooo corrupt, devilish, Satanic, and what have you, you should be HAPPY! You are free from it! Go in peace. Why cry? And you would want to stop touching it/having anything to do with it with all this research!"
My tears were usually fueled by my mother's deranged beratement of me being "mentally sick", having "broken [her] heart" and making her "SICK" to her stomach for not wanting to be in the organization anymore. The tears were often propelled by sheer frustration when she would gloat about how wonderful the organization was doing to rub salt in my wounds, and if I dared to reply (seriously and gently) with some facts, she'd yell, "I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT! I DON'T WANT TO ARGUE! You CAN'T help someone who is SICK in the mind!" Then she'd call for my father to usher me out of the house for disrupting the peace.
Push started coming to shove when I was having a few words with my father in January. He warned me that if I continued to "speak about the organization, you will face dire consequences. You'd better keep your mouth shut."
I shrugged and said, "consequences? I'm not concerned about elders anymore. I'm holding fast to what is TRUE. They don't scare me."
"You will be disfellowshipped if word gets out that you have not been keeping quiet about these things," he replied solemnly.
"So?" I replied, nonplussed. "I'm still me. I haven't changed between now and when they disfellowship me, should that ever happen. It's just a title, as far as I'm concerned." And I meant it!
"You wouldn't be this nonchalant when you experience the ramifications of being disfellowshipped."
"Like what?" I countered.
My father looked me dead in the eye and uttered words any daughter would never forget: "You'll regret it when you or WHAM Jr. are ever in crisis or suffering from calamity, and your mother and I will NOT be there for you."
The tears. They just flowed. This man... who I have emailed in depth about the Biblical reasoning on shunning (note: it DOESN'T EXIST in the WT sense)... this man, whom I have looked up to all my life as my hero. My voice of reason. My rock. This man whom I was about to say goodbye to forever...
Something inside of me died that afternoon as I drove away, bleary eyed and completely shattered. It's been five months since he said that. And I won't look back. Since then, my mother has inundated my phone with attempts at calling. Messages. Emails dictated by her and sent through my father.
These messages and emails begging for me to do what's right in "Jehovah's eyes" and stop depriving them of contact from my son and I... They mean nothing to me anymore. I can't let them mean anything other than a selfish plea for a "dose of communication" to satisfy them, based on the technicality of me not being disfellowshipped. They really regard their relationship with my son and I as THAT disposable over a title? As something hinging on what a man in a suit says from a platform?
I'm done. I haven't addressed it with them directly (because, out of self preservation, I can't handle seeing these non-parents again in the cold-hearted flesh). But should that day ever arrive, I'll just let them know that I simply dropped the hammer for them. Why wait for an announcement?
I'm an apostate now as an "inactive" Witness. And I'll continue to be one whether I ever do get disfellowshipped or not. Let's not beat around the bush, mum and dad. I'm tired of sparing your feelings when you clearly have no regard for my own. Your callous, heart-wrenching disposition before I disappeared will haunt you to your grave OR your awakening. I'm ready for either.
Hurts, doesn't it?
Come get me, Watchtower. I've got nothing left to lose, you blood-sucking, family-killing corporation. I'm out of here.
