my zealously fanatic jw mum is aware of my current "tourist-jw" life.
what she doesn't know for sure is that she's part of the ones who brought me to this.. my mum was a quite moderate jw, she even got publically reproved once.
in our house, there was no daily text, no family study, no eating together, no preaching together, no watchtower study...even though she regularly checked my wt to see if i studied it.. being a single mother, she had a quite busy work schedule, so from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed, you'd better not waste a single minute of her time needlessly.
The whole belief system is a delusional fantasy. Why did you expect it to have limits?
I believe it rather works the other way around. These little things pieced together prove that the system has a problem, i.e. from insiders' point of view.
Now if your eyes are open, it's a different story.
back in the day, when my family moved to a new congregation, i fell head over heels with a young sister who was an elder's daughter.
it wasn't long before we were talking about marriage and i was contemplating buying her an engagement ring.
my parents were not happy at all.
I remember they also said the same thing about cleaning the hall: the singles who do it, despite being nicely dressed are humble and therefore will make good spouses!
Ow!
back in the day, when my family moved to a new congregation, i fell head over heels with a young sister who was an elder's daughter.
it wasn't long before we were talking about marriage and i was contemplating buying her an engagement ring.
my parents were not happy at all.
By the way, I remember an elder asking in a talk: 'if an able bodied person puts in 2 hrs in a month, how many will s/he put in once faced with the responsabilities of marriage?'
I remember nodding in agreement. If only I knew back then!
Stupid fools. Everything is good to get people to preach. Like...if you don't preach, you'll be punished by not getting a spouse.
back in the day, when my family moved to a new congregation, i fell head over heels with a young sister who was an elder's daughter.
it wasn't long before we were talking about marriage and i was contemplating buying her an engagement ring.
my parents were not happy at all.
It's also a very standard practice where I live. Which explains why I'm still single
Totally pointless though cos people who want to get married will just fake their time. How do you find out if they really did 15 hours in the Month? And if they genuinely did it out of their hearts?
Ask your parents and the co's wife that question.
There are more vital and relevant issues when considering a marriage mate and you should rather focus on those.
Stupid man made rules propagated by brainless robots.
my zealously fanatic jw mum is aware of my current "tourist-jw" life.
what she doesn't know for sure is that she's part of the ones who brought me to this.. my mum was a quite moderate jw, she even got publically reproved once.
in our house, there was no daily text, no family study, no eating together, no preaching together, no watchtower study...even though she regularly checked my wt to see if i studied it.. being a single mother, she had a quite busy work schedule, so from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed, you'd better not waste a single minute of her time needlessly.
LisaRose: I'm feeling you on this. I think there's so much attention on my mum because normal mum and dad families in my hometown are finding it quite difficult to keep their kids in. Their kids were angels before the era of hormones, now that they're adults, the parents are feeling the heat.
Vidiot: True! I think that for the kids the memories even get worse with time and for the parents it's the other way around.
my zealously fanatic jw mum is aware of my current "tourist-jw" life.
what she doesn't know for sure is that she's part of the ones who brought me to this.. my mum was a quite moderate jw, she even got publically reproved once.
in our house, there was no daily text, no family study, no eating together, no preaching together, no watchtower study...even though she regularly checked my wt to see if i studied it.. being a single mother, she had a quite busy work schedule, so from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed, you'd better not waste a single minute of her time needlessly.
If you beleeeve hard enough it changes history!
.I lived with her until I turned 18. No kind words, no meaningful conversations, you can't confide in her and she had a rule NEVER to congratulate any of her kids, she never enquired of my day at school.
I vividly remember getting bold one day while we were in the kitchen and taking the initiative of telling her about my day. After a few minutes she asked me to stop talking so much and pay attention to the way she's cooking else I'd never learn how to cook. I was 9 or 10 and that was the last time I told her about anything that happened to me in a school day.
Our communication was limited to orders from her about things to be done around the house, in school or at KH; and insults in the case of mistakes, not talking about the systematic beatings!Today, she blames me for coming back from work and keeping quiet.
She has become a dream grandma for her grandkids, and really, I envy the type of relationship she has with them. If she had given me one tenth of that we would have a good relationship as well. But now the wall has grown too thick and too tall to bring down.
In her mind, and in her statements, she was a model parent who NEVER hit her children.
(...) I was a bit shocked - my mother was a liar? - and then I realized that she had to lie.
Oh Orphan, I think we have the same mum!
my zealously fanatic jw mum is aware of my current "tourist-jw" life.
what she doesn't know for sure is that she's part of the ones who brought me to this.. my mum was a quite moderate jw, she even got publically reproved once.
in our house, there was no daily text, no family study, no eating together, no preaching together, no watchtower study...even though she regularly checked my wt to see if i studied it.. being a single mother, she had a quite busy work schedule, so from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed, you'd better not waste a single minute of her time needlessly.
my zealously fanatic jw mum is aware of my current "tourist-jw" life.
what she doesn't know for sure is that she's part of the ones who brought me to this.. my mum was a quite moderate jw, she even got publically reproved once.
in our house, there was no daily text, no family study, no eating together, no preaching together, no watchtower study...even though she regularly checked my wt to see if i studied it.. being a single mother, she had a quite busy work schedule, so from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed, you'd better not waste a single minute of her time needlessly.
My zealously fanatic jw mum is aware of my current "tourist-jw" life. What she doesn't know for sure is that she's part of the ones who brought me to this.
My mum was a quite moderate jw, she even got publically reproved once. In our house, there was no daily text, no family study, no eating together, no preaching together, no watchtower study...even though she regularly checked my WT to see if I studied it.
Being a single mother, she had a quite busy work schedule, so from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed, you'd better not waste a single minute of her time needlessly.
Sporadic and awkward family studies (daily text) would begin after she got a bad conscience from a guilt trip at a random assembly. Since us kids were not used to that, no one enjoyed it; that coupled with her busy schedule would make the initiative to fizzle out after a few days...back to normalcy.
She then retired...and became an extremist, out of sheer boredom and loneliness I think. By this time, we've grown and left the house. She now spends 90% of her time reading WT publications and the bible. I mean, the whole day, my mum is sitting down reading the bible and co. She's only in her 60s.
Whenever she comes visiting, she'll try to impose a rigorous 'family study' routine. This often brings frictions between me and her. I limit to the extreme staying over visits at her house and I avoid as much as possible her long visits.
I feel that it's unfair that now that I am the one working, she'd feel I have to make time for 'us' to study together. I mean, I'll be running late to work and my mum will start an emotional blackmail about me neglecting her spiritually by not sitting down and doing the dAily text with her (for 20 good minutes, mind you).
Anyway...
We have a particularly tragic family story, which made most of us kids unsually submissive to our mother's authority while growing up; so we all got baptized, though a few later dropped out of the religion. Some of us are still in, with different degrees of zeal, with a few 'doing quite well' spiritually.
Now in her congregation, my mum is one of the "old and spiritually mature" sisters that people look up to. People literally marvel at how "she was able to single handedly raise so many kids in the truth" and now most of them are still in the truth...and they assume that it's because she actively studied with us and gave us a model to follow. Don't get me wrong though, my mum has a genuine love for God and it's something we learnt from her.
So for the past few years she's been getting quite often KH and assembly interviews as an expert on the subject of successfully raising kids in the truth.
Only problem though, there's no way she can give these lectures and not talk about the importance of a regular family study. It HAS TO be part of the script. So she invents fictitious ones, straight out of her imagination.
The first time I heard her do that, I was visiting her KH and I just couldn't believe my ears... 'really?! If you're asked to give an interview which you know is going to make you lie, why don't you politely reject the offer?', was what I thought, but I kept it for myself.
It wasn't before long that I realized this was routine for her.
Imho, she now tries to ease her conscience with a reverse method. Now, she has to get us to sit with her and study, to somehow justify her blabbing.
She has a hand in the fact that I find it so hard to believe in things coming from the religion anymore. In my naivety, she's ONE person I never would think of doing that!
I've never told her about it. But one day, in an argument we were having (about me not supporting her in her family study initiatives when she comes visiting), I told her that I don't get it when she goes about the circuit flaunting her parental skills family study wise because I have no memory whatsoever of us having any steady family study schedule. She blamed my memory and acted shocked.
I then realized (sadly) that she's done so much of it that she's begun to believe her own lies. So she knows that I'm aware of it...
...the impact it has on me however, she's not aware of...
yes friends.....this is the comment said to me by an elder!.
"your bad attitude is evident because you don't bring your meeting bag anymore!".
i calmly replied: "but everything i need is on the tablet now......".
A real case of tempest in a teacup!
"Your bad attitude is evident because you don't bring your meeting bag anymore!"
You, with a dramatic shocked look:
"Bad attitude brother???!!!The brothers in Brooklyn are working so hard to make these publications available for us in digital format. I sincerely thought that Jehovah will approve of my making full use of them."
seriously.....even when you were 100% in "the truth", did you really believe in living forever?
?
I didn't buy into it all the way. The paradise pictures always seemed way too sappy for me. Everyone smiling too much, playing with pandas and tigers.... I guess it was my skeptical nature but I never, ever visualized paradise like this
(....)
So I did not knock on doors or anything I did for the paradise, but because I wanted to be a good daughter and not disappoint my parents.
THIS!!! Oh how you took words out of my mouth!!! I was going to write these words when I read your post.
I may have believed that doctrine if these typical pictures where not attached to it. THE FANCY PICTURES completely flushed out any trace of belief I might have developped for it.
I am so sure that I could have believed the bible verses and the watchtower publications'words alone; a weird psycho-cognitive process made the pictures to automatically cancel any gram of faith I'd be tempted to put into the teaching.
I enjoyed looking at the pictures though.
They'd make my heart smile. My head and my heart screamed "too good to be true" even before I learnt that expression.
