Hi there Moejojojo:
Welcome here from me to you too!! I was raised in the "truth" and am probably the same age as your mom. I've been here almost 3 months but haven't been attending for about 2 years now.
A few comments struck home to me.
RedHorseWoman's 1st paragraph:
I, too, was baptized at 13, and was questioning many things by the time I was 31. Actually, there were things that bothered me prior to that time, but I just pushed any questions or doubts to the back of my mind and blamed myself for not having sufficient spirituality.
... was my beginning exactly too.
Only I took a lot longer to do anything about it....until last year. I could not reconcile in my mind any longer the shunning requirement....I had withstood it for myself but was very bitter over being forceably kept from my aging parents by my brother. The last straw for me was when I was being pressured by my family to shun my da'd son. There is no way I could do that to him so I really started looking into the rest of my doubts too.
You said:
I was a 1970 baby, my mother always told me that she thought that I would never go to school at all in this system and here I am with kids of my own going to school. I'm not upset the end hasn't come, (I'll wait on God) just that a whole lot of people have been deceived-me right along with them.
My first child was that 1970 baby too and I thought the same as your mother thought....and you know the funny thing about that? MY mother thought and said the same thing about me 20 years previously AND about my brother who is 10 years older than I am.
That was one of the most hard hitting points for me....to have been told all my life that I would never grow old and here I am (not saying that I'm old yet) but am a grandmother and a lot older than I thought I ever would be in this system.
If you haven't already read it, Ray Franz's book Crisis of Conscience, is a further real eye-opener into all the little inner workings and underhandedness of the GB and headquarters that we never would have thought possible. As I've said before here...they paint a real pretty, pure, pristene picture of themselves but "are full of dead man's bones".
I didn't go looking for excuses to leave the org. as some JW's have accused us of. Like most of us here, I wanted answers to questions that I felt I couldn't ask, which is why a good many of us are here.
There's so much to re-learn...give yourself time, but you will find answers here that make sense and can be proven to be the "real truth".
Had Enough
