I’ve taken several swings, over the years, at finding people whose experience of separation from family of origin resembled mine. Plenty of people were kicked out of their church, but I disassociated myself. Plenty of people got sick of their parents and wanted nothing more to do with them, but my parents explicitly cut me off when I disassociated myself from the church.
I want to point out there was some optionality there for them. JWs don’t DF associating with their DF’d or DA’d family members and that’s a long-standing policy. But you can’t be an elder or ministerial servant if you hang with your DF’d or DA’d family. They don’t kick you out for going to college, but when the org came out hard against college, my family was very clear that they wanted me to go to college but I had to pay for tuition and books so the whole thing would be presented as, we house and feed her, but she’s the one who decided to go to college what can we do. Going to college was never a DF’able offense, but if you intentionally put a kid in college after a certain point (after my oldest sister had gotten her master’s), you probably wouldn’t be able to be an elder. They’d navigated that; I figured we could probably navigate a low-contact relationship after I left.
But it didn’t work out that way. Or rather, it did for a while, and then broke down irretrievably. There was a period of time where my mother would call me when my father had a health event, because she knew I’d be calm and useful, and my abuser elder sister who was somewhat further away (but not that far — 50 miles or so) and still JW 100% would not be calm and useful. But as my niece and nephew got older, my elder sister involved herself more and that period came to an end.
I’ve always found confusing the vindictive things my mother did next. She’d call and request that I come pick up my things, and I’d go, and they weren’t my things (of course they weren’t — I’d moved out a year before I disassociated). I quit responding to these overtures, and my sister visited with her stepson and stepdaughter and husband. She came back to me with a bag of “my stuff”, and it was more of the same. It was always tricky to explain to people why what my mother was giving me “back” as “my stuff” was so hurtful. People would say, but I’d love to have my baby book! But it was all of a piece with removing all the pictures from the walls of my sister when she left, and then me. Getting rid of the baby book was part of erasing having had me as a baby. Giving it to me was making sure I knew she was doing that.
It was less hurtful to me, but more legible to others, to describe receiving a bag of all the Happy Anniversary cards I’d given my parents that were not signed by my elder sisters (who continued to be JW). As JWs, we celebrated no holidays or birthdays (other than memorial of the last supper, which is a whole can of weird we don’t need to get into here), but in my family, we did celebrate my parents’ wedding anniversary. You are welcome to work out in detail all the problems with this — I certainly have — and I wouldn’t blame you at all if you need a lot of emotional support after that. If the social math is difficult, I will short cut it for you: imagine if your mother had saved every birthday card, mother’s day card, Christmas Card, whatever the fuck card, that you gave her, and handed them all back to you at once, saying, These Are Yours.
When my sister brought back a bag of this type of item, it was like a bomb had gone off in my living room. I called my parents on the phone, and I spoke to my mother, and when I was unsatisfied with that, I spoke to my father. I was extremely clear and calm. I told him that what my mother was doing was a wild violation of the principles and rules laid down by the WBTS / JW organization. He agreed. I said she had to apologize to me. He agreed. Her effort at an apology was completely not an apology, so I told her exactly what she had to say _and she said it_. I then told my father what he had to say, and he said it. Then I said Phyllis was not to contact me again, and he was responsible for ensuring that as the spiritual head of the family, and he agreed. And I said if he chose not to contact me at least quarterly (and notifying me of family funerals did not count) I was going to go forward assuming that he was no longer my father.
And then I said good bye and my mother never contacted me again. I think I might have seen her one more time (I don’t remember now if Maryann died before or after this phone call), and she wanted a hug and I shook her hand instead. She didn’t like that and I really didn’t care. My husband is still paying to this day for having insisted that I invite them to our wedding. We did. They declined. The cousins who came to WDW with us were horrified that my parents didn’t come to the west coast reception. I was completely unsurprised.
My father didn’t contact me again until he learned he had liver cancer (over a decade later). He called me and I took his calls; they ended with the successful surgery. When my mother was well into dementia and he had placed her in a home, he called me to explain things and I reassured him that I was sure he’d done all anyone could expect of him (that was sincere — I am sure he did everything he possibly could to care for her and keep her comfortable). I was traveling to Seattle and he wanted me to visit her in the home, and I declined. I suggested alternate places to meet — a restaurant, my rental, his house — and he balked so I figured it wouldn’t happen but he caved and agreed to have us at the house so we did, which infuriated my sister who came to supervise. My mother died not long after and I was not notified by anyone until a cousin’s wife texted me after the funeral to say she was thinking of me. (This was 7 years ago now.)
I gave my father some time before calling him to ask him why I had not been notified. He could easily enough have said he delegated the task to my sister, and the responsibility was hers, but he did not do that (I am absolutely certain that’s what happened). Nor did he claim forgetfulness. I worked out the list of who was not invited, and it became clear that everyone who could reasonably have been expected to tell me was not notified of Phyllis’ death. I made sure a whole lot more people knew after that that they should not assume I know anything in the future. My sister has stepped fully into her mother’s shoes, and my father continues his enabling of her, as he did his wife.
And that’s basically been it. There were zoom funerals of an aunt and uncle that I attended, but that’s a screen and I was mostly non-responsive to emails around them. Failure to inform me of my own mother’s death and failure to even describe the responsible party was the moment at which I lost whatever vestigial connection I might have felt.
But it was still incredibly confusing. Until today. Having spent days reading all kinds of weird shit about estrangements, it dawned on me that I’d been told repeatedly, since I was wee, _why_ JWs shun. _It’s so people will come back_. That’s why it’s so important to be complete in the shunning, and why the one exception is that if you come to a meeting, you can attend, and you are allowed a greeting. And once at the meeting, you can start the process of working with a Judicial Committee to get back in good standing. _The shunning is not just about compliance or you are out._ The shunning is intended to get you to come back. The whole system is built on contingent love, and avoidant attachment. And I am not. When I left and built a different life, my mother was frantic. I know she was, because I saw how she was when my younger sister left. She couldn’t sleep at night because she was so worried that my younger sister would not survive Armageddon. They wouldn’t get to be in Paradise on Earth for Eternity together. It devastated her. My attitude at the time was, if you miss R., you can call her. (I was still a JW when I said this. Calling is not gonna get you disciplined as long as you keep it to yourself. You just can’t be seen associating publicly.) But my mother wasn’t shunning my sister as part of staying in good status in the religion. She was shunning my sister in a desperate effort to convince my sister to return to the Truth.
When my mother was sending me all those incredible I Am Rejecting You packages, it was an overture to get me to return. See. Look. Do You Not Realize How Shunned You Are. Surely, If You Could Feel How Shunned You Are, You’d Come Back.
It’s _exactly_ stalking.
And I totally failed to realize that until today. (May I remind you that I am VERY autistic.)
So, yeah. The religion part of what happened with my family is actually totally irrelevant. I had become increasingly convinced of that, and just couldn’t quite get my brain to refocus and reframe and see what had _actually_ happened. It turns out that my estrangement was exactly like every other estrangement. We were all adults, but some of the adults weren’t okay with what one of the adults were doing, and what they did next was not okay with that adult, and it led to a rift.
It’s all boundary violations in the end. I tried very hard to live the life they wanted me to live, and I couldn’t. They couldn’t accept me living the life I could live. The End.
And the next time someone comes along and tells you what a pity it is that we all live in echo chambers and can’t get along with people who are different from us, agree with them, remember who they are, and do everything in your power to not interact with them in any way shape or form. Those people are looking to start trouble.
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