It
doesn’t impress my parents that I live a pretty decent life. I’ve never been
arrested, don’t do illicit drugs, I have a graduate degree, I’ve been married
for 18 years, work, have raised 5 children but Still……, I am a disappointment. They have one
reason for rejecting me: I do not share their religious beliefs. They are Jehovah’s
Witnesses (JW) and as their daughter , since I chose not to remain a Jehovah
Witness- I am in their words an apostate, which means they can nor will not
have any association with me . Jehovahs Witnesses are a cult and when you
reject the cult, you are ostracized you are shunned.
I was baptized by
Jehovah's Witnesses as a minor, without fully understanding the ramifications
this would have on the rest of my life. I gave in to the peer pressure of the
congregation in which I was raised, I did not know at that time what it meant
to accept Jesus as my Saviour and have a personal relationship with him, nor
did I comprehend the Grace of God and the action of the Holy Spirit. I
understood the words of their teachings but not their full meaning and
far-reaching implications, especially since, as a JW, I was discouraged from
questioning those teachings or making any in-depth exploration of the Bible
except in conjunction with your publications.
My mother buys
every bit of what the Jehovahs Witnesses sell--lock, stock, and barrel--and
since I could never go back to being one, especially knowing all I do about
them now, it seemed our relationship together had come to an end I have one
mother on this earth, and she has one child, but you the Jehovah Witnesses will not allow her to have an ordinary
mother-daughter relationship with me. The only way she can do that now is if
she is willing to suffer the same fate as me--disfellowshipping--which would
result in her too being shunned by all her Jehovah's Witness family members and
friends .Jehovah Witnesses you have led her to believe that to disobey you is
to disobey Jehovah , and, therefore, to continue our relationship would mean that
she was choosing me over Jehovah. This places her in a very difficult position,
and has greatly strained our relationship, causing much psychological stress and
sorrow. To my dad --Because
I do not agree with all your religious teachings, having found many of them to
be unchristian, and even anti-christian, mom worries that I will be sentenced
to eternal damnation. To live with the horror of this, she must harden her heart
toward me and put even greater faith in you as Jehovah’s chosen
representatives.
Do you truly understand the position of responsibility before God and man that you have thus taken upon yourselves? You claim to govern God's only spirit-directed organization on earth today, and that no one can come to God and receive salvation except through you as Jesus' agents. Although I do not recognize you as such, acknowledging Jesus as my only mediator, my mother does accept you in this capacity.
One of the first suggestions that people tend
to make upon hearing that my relationship with my parents would be improved if
I simply returned to being a JW is to fake it. First, I don’t want to live a
lie. Second, that’s not how this particular cult works. To be in “good
standing” within the congregation you must attend their church services weekly
and go knocking on doors in the local community . They ( the elders )literally
track your activities. Every month you report how many hours you spend going
door-to-door. You can attempt to make a false report, but they monitor their
followers closely. So, I couldn’t simply say I am a JW, I would have
to invest a lot of time in this lie. I would be disgusted with myself and I
refuse to do it.
I have grieved for them for years and it has
been excruciating. I wonder how and if my grief differs from people who have
lost their parents in death. It’s been emotionally devastating at times.. but
they are still alive.. so that fact makes everything confusing. I have pleaded
with my mother to just love me. Her response is that she does, but she loves
Jehovah more.
Mother’s day in the
past was a time of great anxiety for me. It was difficult to decide ‘how’ to
celebrate my mother; since as Jehovah
Witness they do not acknowledge nor celebrate any holidays including Mothers
Day but since I was an ex JW , I always
wanted to make sure my mother knew that I loved her and acknowledged that she
was my mom but their was fear and anxiety even when I got her a card or a plant
because her face told a different story , she seemed happy that I thought of
her but at the same time she knew she shouldn’t have accepted the gift being
from her non JW daughter her face would often look as if were a glass of spilt soured milk.
Mother’s day in the
past was about celebrating someone who hurt me. It doesn’t make much sense to
me today when I put it that way but back then I never thought about it that
way. I was in the deep fog of conditional
love, brainwashed to believe that mother is
right and that parent entitlement rules over all else, no matter what…
I celebrated my
mother on Mother’s day, yet my mother was someone who communicated to me that
she was more important than I was, that only her feelings mattered, that I was
somehow unworthy of the things that she was worthy of such as respect, equal
value, honor, love, validation, comfort, my own personality, thoughts, opinions
and choices.
In the past, in fact
for the better part of 40 years, on Mother’s day I celebrated someone that
taught me there were two sets of rules in life; one set that applied to her and
a different set that applied to me. God help me if I got mixed up about those
rules. I learned to prove my love and to prove my worth by trying to guess what
she wanted and then trying to do it. Those guidelines did not apply to the way
she loved me. She did not show me love in the way that I was required to show
her love. She didn’t respect me in the way that she demanded that I ‘respect’ her.
There were
consequences if I questioned my mother. I learned to try and avoid those
consequences when I was very young. The worst consequence that I feared was of
being rejected by her. I was afraid that if I didn’t prove my love in the way
that she wanted, that she would withdraw her love from me and the way you prove
it is by staying faithful to Jehovah and the organization . That seems a
strange fear to me now; all of the ways that my mother regarded me and
disregarded me were a rejection all along. All of the ways that she taught me
to love her were withheld from me. The entire relationship between my mother
and I was up to me to maintain; if it failed or if it succeeded (on any given
day) it was up to me. Society agreed with this dysfunctional definition of
mother daughter relationship. I was told all my life with statements such as
“you only have one mother” ~ “I am your mother” ~ “I am THE mother”
~ “You will be sorry” and I believed every one of those statements although
today I am not sure I knew what she meant by them back then. They communicated
my disrespect, they put me back in “my place” (which was UNDER her) and they
enhanced the ever growing fear of rejection.
When I was in my
forties I got so sick emotionally that I had to face the truth. The truth was
that rejection, my biggest fear, had already happened. My days were spent
trying to figure out what was wrong with me so that I could finally be loveable
in my mother’s eyes. I never considered that the problem belonged to my mother.
And today I understand how I never could have considered that; all my life my
mother considered me to be the problem , telling me I was rebellious . I had no
choice but to believe it and to try to fix me. Today I see it all differently.
I am feeling a little
more grief then in past years. My mother walked away from relationship with me
when I asked her for mutual respect. When I finally drew
my boundaries and make it clear to my mother that I was no longer going to
accept her devaluing treatment of me, she walked away. She never called again. My
mother abandoned our relationship.
I will never understand how a mother could make a choice like that but my
mother did.
I know that I’m not the only person who has a dysfunctional or
non-existent parent-child relationship, but my parents were good parents when I
was growing up. When I’m sad I still long for my mother’s hug.
When I realized that
she wasn’t going to contact me again, it cut me to the core. I was
rejected all over again. By walking away from me she was saying “you are
not worth it Karen. I can’t be bothered working on having a relationship with
you”
And that hurts very
deeply. That is a horrible thing to realize and accept.
Not being worth it,
had always been my deepest fear; I felt as though she proved I was unworthy of
her love by not trying to work on our relationship. But in reality, her
actions do not make a statement about me; they make a statement about
her.
I questioned myself a
million times about whether or not I had made a mistake drawing that boundary.
But the alternative was just too devaluing. It was at the root of all my
depressions and low self-esteem. I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself to her
anymore.
The truth is that
what my mother actually proved is that she either does not actually love me, or
that she is incapable of healthy loving and mutually respectful relationship.
(I suspect that both are true.)
I stopped using my
suspicion that she was incapable of loving me or herself as the excuse to let
her hurt me. There are all these “teachings” out there that when we are an
example of “love” we teach love. And the truth is that I was not “being an
example of love” by letting her walk all over me. In truth I was sending
her the message that she WAS more important than me and that I would accept her
nasty behavior no matter what because she was the more deserving one in our
relationship. Like a dog that always comes home to the master no matter how the
master regards the dog.
Eventually I began to
accept that this was the way it really was. I had to reaffirm my decision
that I didn’t want to live by her rules anymore. I spent months reminding
myself what the alternative would be if I lifted my boundary, and reaffirming
that I didn’t want to lift it because the alternative was too devaluing to me.
Although I longed for
a loving relationship with my mother ,
I had no frame of reference for what I actually longed for.
Standing up for myself
was empowering. It was like saying “HEY, I deserve better than what you offer”
and my actions proved that I believed it. I made giant strides in the
following months towards self-esteem recovery and personal growth.
There is no good
answer for the question of why my mother doesn’t love me. She just doesn’t. The
truth hurts but it has also set me free. I don’t wait around anymore for
approval and love from places where I will not get it. Her actions state that
she will love me only if I do things the way she wants. She will love me
if I do our mother daughter relationship the way she wants.
Unconditional love
towards my mother on my part no longer looks like me accepting her devaluing
and abusive actions and regard towards me. Unconditionally loving my mother is
only possible when I respect and love myself in the true definition of love. Relationship
with my mother is not possible when the price that I pay includes sacrificing
my human rights, individuality and self-esteem.
Today I am free of
that false system and false definition of love! I love in truth and equality. I
see myself as equally valuable to all others. My self esteem is strong and
healing more all the time!
For years I missed
the idea of having a loving mother. I don’t miss that idea anymore. I don’t
miss what I never had either. Standing up to the dysfunctional and toxic mother
daughter relationship stuff went a long way towards my process of emerging from
broken.
Rather than looking
at myself as a daughter on “Mother’s
day”, I have thought of myself as a mother instead. When I used to think of
myself as a daughter the purpose of mother’s day was to celebrate someone who
constantly reminded me that I was not the daughter that she wanted. I
celebrated someone who treated me like I was lacking in some ways. I celebrated
someone who seemed to be exasperated with me and communicated to me that I was
somewhat of a pain in her butt. I celebrated my mother even though she blamed
me for more things than I care to list in this post and I celebrated a mother
who caused me untold grief. (Well actually, it was untold until 6 or 7 months ago .... Now I have told…)
This year, along with
a little more sadness I feel a little bit more sorry for my mother as well. I
feel sorry for her that she didn’t find freedom from her own pain the way that
I did. I feel sorry for her that she didn’t find the glorious fullness of
knowing what love really is. I feel sorry for her that she lost me because I am
pretty awesome, but I didn’t know that until I stood up to her definition of
me.
I feel sorry for her
but not at my expense anymore….Im no longer spilt milk that has been soured .
