The following is such a heartbreaking story it brought tears to my eyes, how someone (and his wife) could be such a monster. Email Melanie and tell her how you feel. Her picture and name and email are on my website:
http://www.freeminds.org/women/poppers.htm
Randy
I Was Raised In "The Truth" And Am A Survivor Of Incest
I was raised in "the truth." I was born into a Jehovah’s Witness family in 1977 in the Caribbean, in Belize. It’s a small country about the size of Vermont with a few hundred thousand descendants of African slaves, Mayans, the Spanish, and British colonialists. We immigrated to the States when I was about four years old, in 1981. Within a couple of years, we moved right across the street from the La Cienega Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in south central Los Angeles, California. My parents had already converted to The Truth, as the religion is called by its members, after some men came to their door in Belize about a decade earlier. My dad quit smoking and my mom sewed matching dresses for me and my twin sister Nellie to wear to the meetings and to book studies.
I can honestly say that I remember La Cienega as a warm congregation filled with earnest and loving faces – the Morrises, a young interracial couple with four young children who’d spend evenings at our home watching Lakers games in the 1980s, the Carpenters, the Youngs, including my best friend Diane, and lots of other "friends." People really believed in the religion. It was the perfect solution for whatever my parents had just escaped from. My only clues as to what those things are is that I know that they were both raised as Anglicans, or basically Catholics. My dad was from a poor, rural, alcoholic family and my mother was severely physically and emotionally abused by her mother until her late teens. Both my parents were and are people of color – my mom is Black and my dad a mix of Spanish, mestizo and some white, I think. They met in the sixties, fell in love, found "the truth," and moved to the States. All of a sudden, I guess, life made sense and they had all of the answers. The grocery stores were filled with aisles of food, we had five television sets, this was the land of opportunity, and everything would get better still because they were "just waiting for the New World Order." "The End was near." "This old system of things will soon come to an end."
I remember the five day district conventions at Dodgers’ Stadium and I participated in a Circuit Assembly in Norco. Me and Nellie refrained from doing the pledge of allegiance at school, and we stayed away from children who were part of "the world." No dances, no birthdays, no holidays, no dating, no sleepovers, no smoking marijuana, no playing sports (although that issue was forced in high school when we both wanted to run track and field). No nothing. We were perfect, pure little gems who had to be home by dark every night. My mother would work all day at a doctor’s office as a medical biller and my dad had about three jobs in the 1980s, including one job as a security guard. I remember my mother peeling off his hot, wet socks after he’d pass out on the bed some nights when he’d come home after work. He worked hard. One night he got us a black Labrador puppy named Ching. And a set of baseball gloves and bats. My parents bought a motor home and took us all camping every now and then. We went to Las Vegas a lot. It was a seemingly wonderful little immigrant, post-colonial family complete with a nice set of Victorian arm chairs and couches covered in plastic. .
And then, when I was about eight years old, my father started coming into our room, the kids’ room, late at night after he’d got home from work and my mother was sleeping with the TV on. I could hear him making huffing and puffing noises next door behind the partition with my older sister Steph. He started coming over to me and my sister Nellie’s bunkbed and touching us, caressing us, kissing us, and even fondling my brother in his bed. One day I asked him why he came in and touched us at night and he said, "Oh no no no, darling. That’s our little secret. But if anyone ever tells you about another ‘little secret’ you come tell me right away okay? You’re Daddy’s little girl and I love you." I said, "Okay. I love you too, Daddy." My dad took me into the shower with him when I was only eight or nine years old and he made me do crazy things. I started wetting the bed at night and then sleeping in my older sister Steph’s bed with her. I slept in her bed as often as I could until I was about fourteen years old.
When we moved to Apple Valley in the High Desert about an hour and half away, the abuse got worse. My dad lost his job as chief security guard at a mall in Los Angeles, we could barely keep up with the bills, and my brother was giving trouble. The abuse escalated to unspeakable proportions, and my mother didn’t seem to notice a thing. Even when I was sulking one day after being forced to perform oral sex the night before and my father said out loud, in my mother’s presence, "I know what Melanie’s going to do. She’s going to go to the authorities and say that I’m abusing her." My mother said, "Oh, she’d never do a thing like that." They both dismissed me and went about their business.
We had book study meetings at our home and occasional congregational "get-togethers." My father was a ministerial servant in the Apple Valley congregation, someone who was supposed to set an example for everyone. My sister and I became auxiliary pioneers, going door to door on a regular basis. We talked about good morals and values during the day, but at night we were molested regularly and brutally by my father. On nights when my mother was working in Los Angeles and spending the night down there, my dad would come into our rooms masturbating, smiling crazily, and smelling like rum. I saw both of my sisters raped, one in broad daylight. (Since I have brought all of this up in the family in recent years, one sister has denied the rapes and said that what I remember is "nothing but Satan and his minions possession [my] mind.") And I was held down and raped by my father, the man of God, the head of the family who was supposed to protect me and love me and be good to me, on several occasions. It was a nightmare.
Now, somehow, I made it into adulthood and am a practicing civil rights attorney. I spend my days helping people who have been violated, harassed and discriminated against in the workplace. It’s fulfilling work, but sometimes a little triggering. Somehow, I made it out of what I now consider to be a cult called the Jehovah’s Witnesses and out of an abusive family. The first step was completely exiting the situation. I managed a scholarship to a college three thousand miles away when I was seventeen even though, at the time (1995), the Witnesses discouraged going to college and recommended just spending a life going to door to door preaching because "the End" was too near to waste time on higher education. Somehow, after acting out with years of alcoholic behavior, substance abuse, abusive relationships, and other self-destructive habits, I’m just arriving at a place where I have a personal relationship with a loving God of my choosing and with friends and family members that I choose to trust and love. God is a loving God. I’ve had to have and still do participate in all kinds of intensive therapy, including therapy for dissociation and "integrating" different parts of my personality that were "split off" because of the abuse. I’ve been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, taken medication when the memories got really bad, and done lots of writing. I used to feel very ashamed and confused about all of this, but it is just who I am. I’ve recently reported the abuse by my father to the police and District Attorney in Apple Valley, Los Angeles, and Belize and I am contemplating taking adverse civil action against my father and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Thankfully, in California the statutes of limitation are generally extended in cases like mine.
I hope that what I have gone through will help someone else in their journey. Most of all, I hope that my new outlook on the past will help those of us ex-Witnesses who may feel that we have lost precious time in this devastating religion or that we have lost our innocence because of the abuse. It’s my belief now that I would not be the person I am today were it not for my parents and the religion that they chose. I love my family and even though I choose not to be around them or their religious beliefs, there is nothing that they could ever do that could make that love go away. I have no problem stating that they thought they had "the truth," but it was just a pack of lies. They taught us to be pure, but that is not what they practiced. In my opinion, the religion is place where evil is easily manifested because children are taught to obey only those associated with the religion, with "the truth," and deny the rest of the world. This often means denying what is right in front of our eyes. The most trusted and most important people are the parents, then the ministerial servants, then the elders, and on up. No room, as I remember it, for psychiatrists, therapists, lawyers, police, and other authority figures not associated with the truth. I think this is the reason why my sister has accused me of being "possessed by Satan." That seems to be the family’s answer to every challenge – it’s just the hand of Satan moving about.
The End never did come and even if it is coming, it won’t change the fact that there is a lot of pain that was caused by my father’s experience of alcoholism in his family and my mother’s experience of physical and emotional abuse in her family. We also have the legacy of colonialism and racial hurts that have been passed down for years and years. I think this was also something that my father must have been trying to communicate when he engaged in such shocking behavior and what my mother must have been avoiding when she refused to see it. I don’t think they ever got over their own "isms" and they passed those legacies of trauma, denial and abuse on down to me and to my siblings. We were supposed to cover it all up and smooth it over by being good Witnesses. But not me. They can count me the hell out. The cycle of hurt, trauma, and denial stops with me. It has been observed by many writers and scholars that the religion of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is one of those intense Christian sects that people tend to use to cover up deep scars and wounds of the past. I firmly believe that if these deep scars and wounds are not faced and dealt with directly, they will show themselves in the end anyway. And that is the real truth.