I was nine years old when I was baptized. By 15-16 years old I realized I'd made a big mistake. Sure, I knew all the "answers" from their list of questions but I didn't comprehend the extent of what I was doing. Ultimately all the other kids in the congregation were doing it and I was having a hard time fitting in so I thought I would do it, too. Great reason for making the decision, but as some others have mentioned it's usually why most kids around that age in the religion do it.
amama2six
JoinedPosts by amama2six
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11-yr old wants to get baptized, father objects, elders interfere
by Bonnie_Clyde inthe mother went to the elders when the dad objected to the girl getting baptized.
this prompted a visit from the elders who counselled him for wanting to hold his child back from baptism.
this girl is immature even for an 11-year old.
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63
New here, but not to being an Ex-JW...
by amama2six ini just thought i'd briefly introduce myself.
my name is april, i am a navy wife and mother of six children, will be 30 next month, and have been disfellowshipped for almost 12 years.
i was also reproved two years prior to that.
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amama2six
That's the biggest thing, Gary. Walking away doesn't always mean dropping the beliefs, and even though I was essentially "breaking all the rules" it has been hard to let go of the core teachings smashed into my head all those years. I ran to atheism because it was the simplest solution to dealing with leaving and not having any other religion I could really fit into. Things as stupid as "what Jesus died on"; kept me from being able to embrace any other religious group, even if they were non-denominational. At this point I can't say I'm outright "atheist"...nor a "believer". You could say I'm somewhere in the middle...if God exists, great. If not, that's fine too. Either way the worst I get is the eternal sleep, right? :p With as many kids as I have I could use the rest, anyhow. :D
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63
New here, but not to being an Ex-JW...
by amama2six ini just thought i'd briefly introduce myself.
my name is april, i am a navy wife and mother of six children, will be 30 next month, and have been disfellowshipped for almost 12 years.
i was also reproved two years prior to that.
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amama2six
Actually about three of them will claim hunger, and thirst, then need of a bathroom break, then thirst again, then bathroom break again. :rolleyes: hehehe A mother's work is most certainly not done!!!
Oh, and to the person who asked how many kids I was going for...I'm done. :p I wanted six kids over the course of 10 years and succeeded, now I'm all tied up and glad to move on to raising them and getting them out of the house! :D
Oooooh, that brings up another lovely subject, blood transfusions. When I had my tubes tied (the day after I had my last baby) the doctor screwed up and I bled internally for 2 1/2 days. By the time I went back to the ER I needed a transfusion to save my life. I took it. :D No WAY was I going to leave six kids motherless...I'm SO glad "religious beliefs" didn't stand in the way of that! -
63
New here, but not to being an Ex-JW...
by amama2six ini just thought i'd briefly introduce myself.
my name is april, i am a navy wife and mother of six children, will be 30 next month, and have been disfellowshipped for almost 12 years.
i was also reproved two years prior to that.
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amama2six
I just spent HOURS cleaning house (and it's still not clean) today, therefore it's now time for the kids to trash it again so I can have something to do tomorrow morning. ;) *looks at the time* Oh look, it's their bedtime anyway! :D
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63
New here, but not to being an Ex-JW...
by amama2six ini just thought i'd briefly introduce myself.
my name is april, i am a navy wife and mother of six children, will be 30 next month, and have been disfellowshipped for almost 12 years.
i was also reproved two years prior to that.
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amama2six
And now I fixed it...lol. Wow figuring this all out is so much fun! :D
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63
New here, but not to being an Ex-JW...
by amama2six ini just thought i'd briefly introduce myself.
my name is april, i am a navy wife and mother of six children, will be 30 next month, and have been disfellowshipped for almost 12 years.
i was also reproved two years prior to that.
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amama2six
There's only one reason I'll go on my knees, Hubert, and it isn't to sit in the corner. :p (Sorry, couldn't resist!)
I AM using Firefox, so maybe that's the problem.
I'm not sure if my friend would want to join the forum, but I'll ask her. She doesn't spend too much time on the internet but definitely has issue with the way she was raised and the way her mother treats her now. She only gets a call from her when someone is dying or dead. This poor lady has gone through cervical cancer, radiation treatment, hysterectomy, inability to bear children, her wedding, etc. all without her mother's support. That's just s*** if you ask me. :(
I didn't check that second box last time but I will try it now and see what happens. Otherwise I'll try Internet Explorer and see if things work better from there. :)
Edit: Baba, you were right, it's working now, thanks! :D On the legal thing...I am also having problems with her father, now, who came into her life when she was 10. That's actually where she's living at the moment and he's soaked up everything my idiot parents said about me so now he thinks I'm not a fit parent either. Apparently I'm a raging alcoholic, among other things I'm sure. *gulps drink* :D My daughter told me a few weeks ago that my parents and her father actually almost ended up in court. My stepmother wrote up an EIGHT PAGE report on how evil I am. As if her word would hold up in court (dumb people, I swear). So yeah, it's a little more complicated now, unfortunately. :( Edit 2: Apparently editing creates problems with the whole spaces thing. Won't do it again. :p -
63
New here, but not to being an Ex-JW...
by amama2six ini just thought i'd briefly introduce myself.
my name is april, i am a navy wife and mother of six children, will be 30 next month, and have been disfellowshipped for almost 12 years.
i was also reproved two years prior to that.
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amama2six
Thanks again everyone! I had that HTML box checked so I guess that's why my long post didn't show the paragraphs. Should be better from here on out. As for being able to find my topic...thanks for the advice and I will just have to be patient for the next few days until everything evens out! On my oldest daughter...getting her is easier said than done. She's nearly 13 years old and hasn't lived with me (aside from two months) for the last eight years. My parents have already indicated they have no problem dragging me to court which I can't do because 1. I can't afford a lawyer and 2. They live in Connecticut and I'm stuck in Virginia where my husband is currently stationed. There's also an issue with her father but that's an ENTIRELY other story. I just hold on to the knowledge that my daughter knows what they are doing and is not being dragged down the way I (unfortunately) so easily was for all these years. I myself am just now realizing the extent to which I was brainwashed; it went FAR beyond the religion itself and obviously leaving didn't fix everything that had been broken inside me. I guess my daughter is a little smarter (and more defiant) than I ever was...especially at her age. *proud* :D I have no idea why it took me so long to do this...well one thing is I had no idea there was a group like this out there. I should have figured there were plenty of other people affected in a similar way by the JWs...haha. I am a big fan of Lost (the series), though, and did manage to find a friend on a fansite that is an ex-Elder! Talking to him over the past year has been helpful. :) Here's a fun-fact...I live literally ONE MINUTE from a Kingdom Hall, now. Is it bad I've been tempted to go to a meeting, chat EVERYONE up there...then drop the I'm disfellowshipped bomb? I don't know, it just sounds like it would be therapeutic. :D One more thing...my best friend since I was six years old (in the religion, also, but different congregation) left the religion a year or two after I did. I had NO idea and she didn't know I had left either (we had lost contact for a few years). She showed up at my work one day (store at the mall) and it was really awkward. She apparently thought I wasn't supposed to talk to her and vice versa. Finally she blurts out "I know you aren't supposed to talk to me because I'm DFed but hi anyway!" LOL We still laugh about that to this day. :D Edit: Well that didn't work out so well...I put the paragraphs and unchecked the HTML thing but it's still not working right. Sorry... :(
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63
New here, but not to being an Ex-JW...
by amama2six ini just thought i'd briefly introduce myself.
my name is april, i am a navy wife and mother of six children, will be 30 next month, and have been disfellowshipped for almost 12 years.
i was also reproved two years prior to that.
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amama2six
I have a question about the Forum itself...is there a reason I can't see my topic in the section I posted it? To get back here I have to click on my name and search my topics, which is a bit of a pain. Thanks for any help! :D
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63
New here, but not to being an Ex-JW...
by amama2six ini just thought i'd briefly introduce myself.
my name is april, i am a navy wife and mother of six children, will be 30 next month, and have been disfellowshipped for almost 12 years.
i was also reproved two years prior to that.
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amama2six
Thank you, everyone! I honestly have no idea where to start. I CAN say that most of my childhood is pretty vague or has completely vanished from memory, likely due to the trauma I experienced. Here's a little bit, though. It will be a little random, but that's how my memories go on the whole thing. LOL As you all know it is unacceptable to have friends outside of the religion and unfortunately I wasn't the best at MAKING friends IN the religion so I spent most of my time alone or talking to the elderly ladies in the congregation. Unfortunately they kept dying. :( I think I went to ONE sleepover the entire time growing up and they decided to watch "Goonies", which my parents had forbidden me to watch. SO, all the other girls were mad at me for making them not be able to watch the movie and never invited me over again. Darn me for being the "obedient child" who never questioned my parents until I was around 15 years old. NOW I am the "BAD" child, even though my older brother left home when he was 13, spent years in mental institutions, had two prison terms for theft and arson, and doesn't take care of EITHER of his children. Why? I'm assuming because he was never baptized and therefore never DFed. :rolleyes: My father became an Elder during my childhood but ultimately lost his place and was reproved (we won't go into WHY just now). I left for a couple of months when I was 16, got pregnant, then went back because I was scared to be on my own. I was reproved that time. I finally left at 18 for good...my parents reported me to the Elders for "fornication" and I got a phone call to inform me of the committee meeting. I told them to go ahead and DF me and never attended. Those first few years were extremely difficult and I did a lot of inappropriate things just out of spite for all the time I spent conforming to their every whim. Pretty much everything I was told NOT to do (sex, drugs, drinking, etc.) I did just because I had been told not to. I ended up marrying a man I did not love just because he was obsessed with me and I had no self-esteem. That marriage ended a year and a half later...but I quickly fell into another. I am still with my second husband, not on the happiest terms (not the worst either, though) but at this point there's not much to do about it. Sometimes I wonder if things would have worked out differently had I been raised with self-worth and to believe that my own thoughts and feelings mattered. A HUGE part of why I'm here, I guess, is because of the amount of control my own parents gained over me due to raising me in that religion. I have not had my oldest daughter live with me since she was 4 1/2 (when I had my first divorce). At first it was just an offer from my parents to take care of her until I got back on my feet. From there it was all downhill...every time I indicated my desire to have her back (all the while raising other children) they somehow managed to convince me that she was better off with them and I was not "good enough". They stopped going to Kingdom Hall shortly after I was disfellowshipped, by the way, but were never DFed and still haven't really given up the beliefs. At first they were probably right about me not being in the best frame of mind for raising her, but that was over the span of a few months. After that I quickly cleaned up my act and have gone on to live what I'd like to think is a pretty good life. Nothing is ever good enough for them, though. I used to be VERY close to my father...now we rarely talk at all and when we do it's him returning my phone call from his work so my step-mother won't know he talked to me. I have a LOT of pent up anger that occasionally shows itself but usually I just stuff it down and keep the peace during the very few times I DO converse with them. My daughter has recently begun to recognize their controlling ways and understand what I have been dealing with for all these years...at one point she told them she didn't want to live with them anymore and my step-mother called her best friend since first grade to ruin the friendship. It's craziness...like they learned how to manipulate in the religion and have extended it into every aspect of their, my, and my daughter's life. I'm still trying to figure out why I am good enough to raise my other five children but not her...and am figuring out (albeit a bit late) that they're just dishing CRAP to get their own way. I'm sure there's a lot more but I'll leave it at that for now...lol. Thanks again for the welcome! :D
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63
New here, but not to being an Ex-JW...
by amama2six ini just thought i'd briefly introduce myself.
my name is april, i am a navy wife and mother of six children, will be 30 next month, and have been disfellowshipped for almost 12 years.
i was also reproved two years prior to that.
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amama2six
Hi everyone! I just thought I'd briefly introduce myself. My name is April, I am a Navy wife and mother of six children, will be 30 next month, and have been disfellowshipped for almost 12 years. I was also reproved two years prior to that. I was baptized when I was 9 years old...in my opinion far too young to make such a decision. I look at my two oldest children now (12 and 8 years old) and know neither would be capable of that same decision. My story is long and has a lot to it, but I won't go into all that just now. I'm sure most will come out as I spend more time on the Forum. :) This is the first time I have outright made a step toward facing what I have dealt with and continue to deal with due to my Jehovah's Witness upbringing and eventual shunning. I look forward to conversing with you all!