A request for some advice pls.
Firstly, a bit of background.
My mother raised my younger brother and I in “the truth”. She did so alone until she remarried in the early 80’s. My stepfather was a dyed in the wool dub who never varied from the party line. Never. Every minor transgression that my brother and I were involved in was subject to a discussion of how it contravened some trivial Watchtower regulation or other. Followed by a beating usually. He was like this to the point of obsession. He was made an elder in 1985 and this just made him worse. The kind of person who is critical to the continuation of the system that the Watchtower needs in its present form. In my opinion he was a nasty vindictive bastard of a man who was not fit to have children in his care.
For example he used to say things like: “It’s not what you did, it’s the fact that you lied about it that is wrong, it doesn’t matter what the “crime” is.” He was always going on about the need not to lie by omission. Hiding things that would not otherwise come to light. Days or weeks after the event. This was followed by being shown numerous articles about being truthful from the Watchtower or some other society publication.
Which is a fair enough point if a) you consistently try to teach your child the need to always be truthful, and b) you practice what you preach.
I think you see what I’m getting at in the paragraph above.
So the other day my mother is on the phone to me. She is discussing trivialities and I sense there is something more she wants to tell me. It transpires that my stepfather some 35 years ago, before he was a JW, fathered a daughter with his soon to be first wife. They were both 16 at the time and things being as they were in Britain in the early 60’s the child was taken from them and put up for adoption. They never saw the child again. My stepfather's ex wife at some point last year decided to seek out her daughter. She employed a detective agency and to cut a long story short the daughter was tracked down and re-united with her mother. Of course one of the first questions asked by the daughter was “Where is my father now?” (My stepfather’s ex-wife and family are not and never have been involved with the JW’s)
Now I am not moralizing here, I pass no judgement on my step-father for this incident, but it is what follows that makes my blood boil because of his sheer damned hypocrisy.
Recently my mother and stepfather were asked to come to my grandmother’s house in somewhat mysterious circumstances. They arrived to be greeted not only by my Grandmother but an unknown 35-year-old woman who identified herself as the daughter.
My mother on the phone to me nearly in tears states: “It’s not that he fathered a girl before I knew him that hurts. It is that he kept it from me for 20 years. I asked him in 1980 before we were married if there was anything in his past that I would need to know about.” At that time he categorically said no. It also transpires that he has asked my mother or my self and 2 brothers not to let the matter be known any further. He said “…especially not at the Kingdom Hall”
Basically HE LIED BY OMISSION.
My 2 brothers and I are in agreement that whilst we don’t give a toss about him fathering a child 35 years ago, we are LIVID that someone who had the gall to berate the 3 of us for offenses nowhere near that. That someone who has sat on Judicial Committees and counseled people about telling the truth at all times has himself covered up for 20 years something he was clearly asked about.
So why am I writing this?
1. Firstly because putting it down on the screen in front of me has calmed me down somewhat. My poor mother labours under the misapprehension that all elders are good and cannot comprehend how one who is her husband can be deceitful like this. (Yes she is that blinkered).
2. I am curious what the dub position on this kind of thing is. Do any of you better informed people out there know if he is/could be subject to a judicial hearing? Is he fit to continue as an elder, by their standards?
3. My motivation. To some reading this it might all seem so irrelevant and in the past. A fuss over nothing. But from a personal point of view I am absolutely raging that all the times I got a bollocking from him in the name of that bloody religion, he was sitting there quite happily covering up a secret, that for example had I been covering, he would have thrashed me within an inch of my life. My stepfather was no stranger to physical discipline.
So I would like nothing more than to drop him in it. To see him finally get a taste of his own medicine.
But am I being reasonable? Should I be this nasty or just let it lie? My brother is all for making an anonymous phone call to another of the local elders, but I don’t know what the fall-out would be. I don’t know if I’ve got it in me to be as nasty to him as he was to me.
Any advice?
Mr. Angry