Texasgurl

Texasgurl

Joined

My mother married my father who brought her into the religion at the insistence of my grandmother. My mom wasn't a very strong person, still isn't, and I went to meetings till I was about 3, my father was DF for smoking then(1974). In the meantime, I started school and wondered if I was bad because Santa didn't come to our house and my mom brought Holidays into the home but left out the "religious" parts of it. I LOVED IT! Always told I was one of Jehovah's Witnesses, I met some at school who told me I wasn't. It upset me a lot because they didn't believe me. My parents felt guilty and decided to start going back when I was 10. Bye-bye holiday's, birthdays, ballet and gymnastics class. bye-bye "worldly" friends, goodbye to my former fun life. I was introduced to GUILT. I was always struggling to be "good" and even auxillary pioneered a couple times in the summer as a teenager. My favorite part was the Dairy Queen Blizzard breaks! I think I gained 10lbs that summer! I got a job at 16, had a worldly boyfriend (I never seemed good enough for any witness boys to like me) and hid it as well as I could. I was disfellowshipped at 17 and married the guy when I was 18. I was a smart, pretty girl who was told she wasn't allowed to go to college so I took a Cosmetology course in high school so I could "support myself" in the full-time ministry (that was everyone's goal then whether you liked it or not) So, imagine how screwed up I was really! I got pregnant at 19 and had nightmares about my baby and I dying at Armageddon. I couldn't take it anymore, I went back. I hated it, but I hated myself for hating it because I "knew it was right". I struggled through another marriage, 2 more children and then, in 2003, after my husband at the time talked to an ex-pioneer friend who asked some thinking questions, I started to see the real truth. A mother who was raped at a building site, a father who secretly watched porn and was an elder, a brother who drank and went to punk-rock concerts, a love-less family and so much guilt.......I had a bipolar daughter who made a lot of noise at the meetings and I was tired, so tired of the guilt......... I could have walked away, faded away, but I couldn't. I'm too smart for that, and no way was I going to live anymore lies. I had already done that my whole life so I wrote a letter to disassociate myself, so did my ex-husband. My mother was devastated because we always said someone who "chose to walk away" was worse than someone who screwed up and was disfellowshipped. I made the choice for myself and my children to be FREE and that meant losing my family and lifelong friends. It still gets hard, when I see my hypocrite family doing things together, not bothering to tell me when my brothers are in town when I haven't seen them in over a year, doing things with my niece and ignoring my children. I would never ever in a million years go back to that kind of mind-control again. This forum has been great as an educational source and as a support for the feelings I and so many others have.