You always wanted me to tell my story, but somehow you never seemed to realize how different my story with you would be, if I'd had a different story to tell. You and I come from contrasting backgrounds, yet we carry a similar thread of trauma, abuse and hurt. I think we both were looking for someone who would still love us, no matter how ugly we got. I think we were looking for the one person who wouldn't run away screaming, and we were looking for that one small show of unconditional acceptance. And I think that we found that, somehow, in each other, even if at times that shouldn't have been true for either of us—in learning how to define our own story.
As a Jehovah's Witness, my story was very different from yours. I don't know if you ever had someone you could turn to, when you were that lost small, black boy on the streets of Chicago. I know that you turned to a white family who, at times, took you in, and that you still call them your family. Perhaps this is one of the ways we are different. I don't remember anyone I quite trusted enough to turn to as a child, and I don't think I would have known what to say to them if I had.
You see, raised as I was as a Jehovah's Witness, my traumas would have been the subject of whole congregations. My father was an elder, my mother, an elder's wife. And my sister and I were elder's daughters. So, in the eyes of all, being an elder's daughter made you present yourself as—trauma free.
My family was the definition of everything that should not have been kept a secret. At a young age, I was learning that there are many things that are none of anyone's business. For as a young child, not telling anyone about my family business was an impossible task to synchronize—with truth. And truth was what we called our religion, even more often than we called it, Jehovah's Witnesses.
When you talked about it in the hall, you said they were coming into the truth—or falling out of the truth. If I was asked by a brother or another sister how long I had been in the truth, I said that I had been born and raised in the truth.
In the truth, there was only one way to answer all the busybody questions an elder's daughter received, and not violate the family protocol of not telling family business, and that was to lie.
You can well imagine how the smell of a stinky story, within the congregation, would get the detective types on the scent—just with at the mere promise of a good story. People are people, and the idea of the truth was to never keep anything a secret.
Yet secrets were all we kept.
In the hall, if a family had a problem, they turned to the elders and worked out their problem. However, an elder's family was not supposed to be having problems. I think that in some sad way, this provided some the only real entertainment some of the sisters knew, and it became their life's ambition to ferret out any grain of truth.
Truth is what we taught. A witness's whole reason for being there was to teach the truth to the world. Truth saved people's lives. Truth about God's word and being a member of God's people was how to save lives. But the very word "truth" and yet, living with secrets, had become my daily battle, and I was well into my thirties when I realized that I didn't have the slightest clue who I was.
I had always been taught to have faith in the teachings, and to have faith meant I didn't question what I knew. I had an enormous love for Jehovah, so knowing some of things that were going on, caused me tremendous pain—and just didn't add up in my mind.
I kept telling myself, I needed to have more faith. If I had more faith, I would finally get it right. Something I was doing was causing me all of this pain, and if I could just get me right, then my faith in Jehovah would set everything right.
But I never got it right, whatever it was.
And it never got better.
It wasn't long before the only time I broke down and cried—was sitting right there in the hall, trying to take in what the brother's were saying—when every fiber of my being was screaming—no, what you are saying, and what happens to your people—just doesn't fit.
My father was made and elder at just nineteen years old. Back then, in a very small town in Montana, they didn't have much choice, but the idea of a nineteen year old boy running a congregation didn't sit will with some of the older brothers and sisters. And, truth be told, becoming an elder at such a young age ruined my father.
We never missed any meetings from the time that I was born, until I turned sixteen. The congregations held five meetings a week, and we didn't miss assemblies either. The congregations held two circuit assemblies and one district assembly ever year. Being raised a witness meant that I knew a great deal of brother's and sisters from different circuits and that I would get to see them at the District assemblies.
Over the years, I have picked up a few things that other people have written on the witnesses, and I can tell by the language that they were not really a witness, or that they had not been with the witnesses very long. There is a language and knowledge that is distinct, and most of the time that language is not completely correct and shows the immaturity of the person stating that they knew what they were writing about as a witness. I only mention this, because you will rarely see anyone speak out about being a witness, and you will almost never see someone who actually knows anything about being a witness—do so. Usually, you will only see someone who was with the witnesses a short time speaks out about them. And their language immaturity gives them away to anyone who knows.
As I have stated, I mention this to you because there is a reason for this. Anyone who spends a great deal of time with Jehovah's Witnesses, to the point of knowing their language and knowing everything that they believe, will rarely ever speak out about them. And that is because, to get that far in the truth, you would believe everything you are learning--and everything you are being told. To believe everything you are being told means that you also know how wrong it is to ever ask if the brother's back east have made a mistake. To question this means that you question how Jehovah provides information to his people through these brothers. So, you never do this. You have faith.
My family moved around a lot. My father was a voracious flirt, and my mother spent all of her time pining away about what my father was or was not doing. I wasn't very old when I knew, sitting in the hall and listening to what the brother's had to say, that my mother was sitting there, frustrated, thinking about how the brothers didn't realize what my father should and should not be doing.
In Haines, a young brother caught on to my father and wanted the "truth" of the matter brought to light. My sister and I were not ready for that kind of truth that day, sitting in our living room with my teary-eyed mother—and we told him to get out.
The brother's managed to remove my father's status as elder, and we moved again. By the time I was sixteen, we had moved to Anchorage where I put in regular pioneer hours with a young group of brothers and sisters that the elders had originally thought were too worldly for me to be hanging out with.
I had seen a town outside of Anchorage that reminded me of Montana and wanted to move there, and one day my father happily announced that we were going. However, I met a girl in Palmer named Kathy, and her brother moved there a few months later. I fell hopelessly in love with him, or so I believed, and then, my cousin moved there with us, and by the time I was done with these three, I was doing anything but pioneering. My life began taking a very dark turn, and my rage, of which I had no idea was simmering within me, was about to bubble in ways I was not prepared to understand—more-or-less accept.
I remember feeling frustrated, but I had been raised to believe that Jesus turned the other cheek, and I loved Jehovah with all of my heart and soul, so I didn't recognize the rage inside of me. I had been taught that I should always show brotherly love, so I believed that I was wrong to have anger towards others. I didn't see how much I wanted to expose my father for so much more than the seemingly petty way he had lost his eldership. I wanted them to know why he should have really lost it. But I couldn't allow myself to think like that. Consciously knowing about my rage would have set a whole lot of questions into place.
Questions I wasn't ready to answer.
Yet, there was this girl inside of me who knew the truth, and I was in no way prepared for the depths of which I would go to see my father ruined.
I fell in love with my boyfriend, and it wasn't long before we slept together. I was naïve. I believed him when he said we were not actually going to be having sex. I screamed, and he had to stop. It hurt unbelievably. I also took the blame. I never stopped to think that it wasn't really what I wanted.
I wanted to believe him.
But we did it again, and my Christian conscience caused me to confess both times. I was raised to believe, that the entire congregation would pay for the terrible sin I had committed. After dozens of elders meetings, of which they would not allow my family to attend and wouldn't let me discuss anything that was said to anyone, even with my family, I asked them to disfellowship me.
There were terrible things said in these elder's meetings that eventually led to them disfellowshipping me. These meetings were designed to get me to do what was right. They were supposed to help me to repent. But love was not what I was shown. They said a lot of things that I knew were inappropriate and cruel.
By this time, my mother had left my father, no doubt, bolstered by my courage to head face-to-face with the elders so many times. Torn between the same strict consciences that I had, she came back. That was considered repentance, so she wasn't disfellowshipped, although she was subjected to the same intense elder's meetings. My father said he forgave her, but then he took off and came back within a month with a brand new wife.
My anger had turned into a deep boiling rage, remembering the things the elders had said to me in the meetings they'd had with me. I was also angry with the things they had said to her—things I wasn't supposed to know about—any more than she was supposed to know about the things that had been said to me. I knew that I was guilty of wrong-doing, but I also knew I wasn't the only one sitting in those meetings that was guilty. I knew they were wrong, and I wanted them exposed. The problem was, I was too angry, and my anger was the only thing anyone could see. I didn't take anything they said to me, lying down. I fought back, and the only thing they saw was my rage.
My grandmother was my only salvation through all of this. Even though she couldn't help me, she accepted me unconditionally and was secretly appalled at the elder's treatment of me, and my obvious pain. I couldn't reveal to anyone that I had told her what they had said to me. But she would sometimes tell me that I should sneak a tape-recorder into these meetings. She was right, and I would sometimes try to think of how to accomplish this, since back then they didn't have tiny little tape-recording devices.
As the years rolled by, I could see many of the same effects my mother suffered paralleling my own. My own body would suffer the way hers had suffered, if I could not learn to tell my story. And I could not tell anyone my story—if I couldn't tell it to me.
This is my story. A story of trauma, betrayal, and the struggle to find my own truth. It's a journey that has been deeply painful, but one that has also taught me the power of resilience and the importance of breaking the silence. My broken wings may have kept me grounded for a time, but now, they are the very thing that will carry me to freedom.
