I was born in. My mother's mother had converted when my mom was a child; my mother's father was an unbelieving mate. He insisted his children have a choice in the matter and that they all be allowed to have holidays and birthdays. This was way back in the day when sisters were told to stay in subjection to their unbelieving husbands. So, conveniently for my mother and all of her sisters, they got to have it both ways growing up. For some reason though, all 4 of them converted once they were grown and married off, and all 4 became religious narcissists. This is always hard for me to understand because my grandmother was a genuinely kind and humble woman. Anyway, my mother married my father, a worldly young man just out of the army, and moved to the state where his family was. I think she was lonely when a kindly old JW gentleman knocked at her door and she immediately started studying and quickly became a dub. A few years later she dragged my father in and he eventually became an elder and congregation overseer, as it was called back then. He was a very intelligent man but emotionally immature and out of touch, and he ended up having a classic midlife crisis and fall from grace, and was DFed, my parents divorced and my mother quickly found another brother to marry, and my father was eventually reinstated and was married 3 more times before he died 20 years ago. I was baptized at 14 and my parents split up when I was 15. Having witnessed a whole lotta hypocrisy with the other elders jockeying for my father's position, not to mention the mess around the divorce itself, I stopped going to meetings after my mother remarried and I was living with my DFed dad. I was Dfed myself after a date rape at age 17....of course I and my 'worldly associations' were blamed. Somehow this didn't seem right to me, so when they gave me a choice between coming back to the meetings and being Dfed, I chose the DF. Over the years I had an off and on relationship with my mother and was usually shunned after the shunning conventions. It was very difficult, as most of you understand. She died earlier this year, and at her funeral the COBE who officiated found it necessary to announce from the podium that I and my never baptized younger brother had 'turned away from Jehovah'. What a comfort that was. I had been at JWR for several years off and on and had read CCMC and COC...but it was after my mother's funeral that I dug deeper and found out about all the lies and the protecting of pedophiles. So I'm here to watch JW.org go down and to offer support to others when I can. Sorry so long, but I don't think I've ever really told my story here.
