As a kid, life started out normally. I was a little boy. I liked Spiderman. I liked the Incredible Hulk. I remember watching Dukes of Hazzard and playing with my GI Joes. I had a few friends that I remember going to their house and playing with. Some kids were probably from school. Although I loved toys, all I actually ever needed in my life was a ball. So give me a ball to throw against something to roll to myself and I could play all day. That’s all I ever needed. And sports were a huge thing to me.
We lived in the same neighborhood as my grandparents, maybe two or three blocks away. We were a pretty close family. We could just walk over there at any time if we wanted. I remember holidays. I remember going trick or treating in my neighborhood for Halloween. I have no idea what I dressed like. But whatever it was, it was fun. I remember getting buckets full of candy and who doesn’t like that? Thanksgiving was another holiday that I remember being a lot of fun. We would go to my uncle and aunt’s house on my dad’s side, and obviously the family would come. I even had a grandma who lived in Georgia that would come up to visit us in Kentucky. We called her granny and we’d eat and watch football and play outside with my cousins. It was a good time. For Christmas we’d go to my grandparents house on my mom’s side. I remember they gave us catalogs when we were little and we were supposed to go through them and look at toys and circle whatever we wanted. I guess I don’t know if I believed in Santa, but I probably did like most kids. So whatever we wanted Santa to bring we could put a circle around. I guess he shopped at Service Merchandise, an old company that is no longer around. So we’d circle those things that we wanted and see what he would get us.
I remember that when we went over to their house there was lots of good food and cookies and sweets. I’ve always had a sweet tooth. Those who know me know that.
My aunt and uncle on that side of the family would be there with their kids. They would come all the way down from Michigan and it was just fun to have family. I think there were some other people who would show up, maybe some first cousins or something at different times of my life. I can’t remember but I never really had much of a connection before, I guess. We kind of left our families behind a little bit.
Anyway I remember Saturday morning cartoons, getting up watching cartoons without a care in the world. Saturday morning cartoons were awesome. I remember coming home from school and there were cartoons I remember. I think there were those after school specials. I probably watched those as well. At the house that we lived in we had a creek behind it. I’d go back there and play a lot of times like any kid. I always wondered what was in the holes around the creek and I’m sure I stuck sticks in there. I remember that I had a sandbox. The sandbox was awesome. What kid doesn’t love that? I remember one time I was playing with a ball in the back yard, and it rolled next to a tree and there was a garter snake wrapped around the tree. I reached down for the ball, saw the snake, and thought I was going to die. Who doesn’t when you’re a kid, it’s a snake.
We had a dog named Barkley that was a collie. For some reason we gave him away. All I remember is that he liked to eat the back yard, and so our grass soon became a pit. Life was awesome. The only thing that really created a change in our life was my dad and his job prospects. He never was the kind of person who could really go out and get a job himself. He always struggled with that. If someone found him a job he would do it. He was a hard worker and an honest guy but he wasn’t exactly what one would define as a “go getter”.
He worked at Brown and Williamson here in Louisville Kentucky, and apparently that was a really good place to work. Then the company moved to Georgia. His mom worked there and I’m assuming that had some influence in how he got the job in the first place given his future track record of difficulty finding his own jobs. But when the company moved away he chose not to move with it. I think he married my mom at that time and stayed here and so what started as good employment took a big change after that company left. All I know is that he bounced around a little bit. He worked at U.P.S. for a while, then worked at General Electric which was a pretty good job but they laid him off. Ultimately after being laid off from these jobs there was a time at which we had to make a change. The finances just won’t allow us to continue living where we did at the time.
So we moved in the middle of the school year. I was about seven years old. So that would have been the second grade. I remember when we moved to the new school. I remember a teacher leading me down what seemed like a cavernous hallway to my new class. I had to be taken in front of the class and introduced to everybody and I just wanted to disappear and die. I’m not a person who likes to be in front of a lot of people. I am not an extrovert by any means. So actually me just doing this podcast is kind of out of the ordinary for me. I’m trying to push myself to do something new here despite that part of me that wants to hide.
The second grade change was nothing compared to what was about to happen in my life. For one thing I remember our new house had some issues. I think unbeknownst to my parents our new house was infested with roaches. We had a neighbor on one side of us whose backyard was kind of hoarded. There were a lot of TV parts and appliances and things back there and it wasn’t the greatest. I don’t know if that helped lead to the infestations that probably went through our whole neighborhood or if it was just the fact that we had old houses. Regardless, I remember the roaches, they are hard to forget. I remember laying there at night watching roaches crawl on the wall and hoping that they wouldn’t come visit me on my bed. I remember my mom would go and get some sort of wicked chemical stuff to try to deal with them. I remember the term German roaches being thrown around. So maybe that’s what we had. But I know that once the chemical was put down it resulted in mutated, disgusting, terrifying roaches that kind of raised it to the next level. Ultimately that problem was eradicated and we moved on.
I’ve been told by my parents that there was a story where I kept telling them that there was something in my bed and I’m sure they thought it was a made up monster or nightmares. But once they found the mouse droppings in my bed they realized that there was actually a problem. So that was yet another problem. To add to those issues, we also had cave crickets. And if you don’t know what they are I also think they’re called camelback crickets. They’re disgusting huge crickets with giant back legs that look like spiders. And I don’t like spiders either but we didn’t have a problem with those. We just had the cave crickets. So those kinds of things were kind of scarring to me as a kid.
There was a lot changing. We had gone from a house in a nicer neighborhood to a house in a not so great neighborhood, and a new school. All of that was going on. But as I was reflecting on this, I remembered that in the third grade I almost failed. I had all of my work done. I found it at the end of the year in my school desk, so clearly I just wasn’t an organized kid. I don’t know, I had always made decent grades before then so maybe it was just the change in moving and everything that was going on that had me struggling.
But I also realize that, in looking back, I believe this was around the time that my mom started studying the Bible. Of course, I can’t go back and ask, so I’m trying to develop a timeline now here in retrospect. Well they called it studying the Bible but it was really studying one of Jehovah’s Witnesses publications, a book that they’ve produced. They are the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York. So they were a publishing company and one of the books they published at the time was used to study the Bible with my mother. They had picked verses to study to fit their narrative, of course. So anyway my mom started studying with the lady next door because, as if the rest of the stuff wasn’t bad enough, we moved in next door to a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The mom next door and my mom became fast friends. They would talk about life and my mom always had lots of Bible questions.
My mom’s brother is a Baptist minister. I believe he went through the seminary, but I don’t think he could ever quite answer her questions, or at least not to her satisfaction. Jehovah’s Witnesses, though, have an answer for everything. Now just having an answer doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a correct answer. But they have an answer for just about anything you can ask. They have some way to make it fit into their narrative, or to at least make you stop thinking about whatever you have as a concern.
Life Changes
Around that time, things were really changing. I was around eight or nine. I had one younger brother at the time and he was three and a half or four years younger than me. In retrospect, I don’t believe it was just a coincidence that my grades suffered so bad that year because not only were we in this new situation and my mom was studying but that means she was also taking us to meetings as Jehovah’s Witnesses. At that time you would go to meetings Tuesday night for an hour, Thursday night for two hours, and then Sunday for two hours in the morning. So there was a time commitment right off the bat and that time commitment would grow. I’ll get into that later when I discuss later years. But that’s a lot to take on for a kid.
Along with that there would have been other changes. I don’t know exactly when, but at some point my mom was no longer wanting to do the holidays. If you know Jehovah’s Witnesses, one thing most people know about them is hat you’re not going to see them celebrating Christmas or birthdays or anything. They don’t celebrate any holidays. They see it all as pagan and therefore they believe it’s not what God would want for them.
At first my dad was not interested in that life. My mom would go to the meetings, and I’m pretty sure she would take us. I don’t know if she took us to some or all, but it took my dad about a year to come around and start wondering what it was that my mom was involved in. I believe that the first thing my dad ever went to was a district convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses where my mom was baptized. That’s a huge deal to them.
Just to explain that a little bit, when you study with one of Jehovah’s Witnesses they have a book that you’re going through with your teacher. At the end of that book you should have enough knowledge to essentially become one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Sometimes you will go through a second book, at least in the past. They want to make sure that you have brought your life into correspondence with their values. You can’t be living what they would deem an immoral life. So if you’re living an upright life as they see it and if you have the head knowledge from these books you can go through as set of questions found in another book with a series of three elders. The elders are the group of men who lead each individual congregation and those three will sit down with you to ask you the questions. One elder at a time, one set of questions at a time, for three separate meetings. They’re kind of evaluating where you are in life and if they feel that you’re ready, they will allow you to become baptized as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Those baptisms are held at the assemblies or conventions of Jehovah’s Witnesses. And there are two assemblies each year; one in the Spring, one in the Fall. Typically there’s a Special Day, a one day assembly in the spring, and a two day Circuit Assembly in the fall. Then during the summer is when they typically have their District Conventions (now called Regional Conventions). Back in the day the districts were much bigger and we would go to Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky. I’m thinking the attendance was around twelve thousand but I may be mistaken.
And so the first thing that my dad went to was a big deal because my mom got baptized at one of these large conventions. This was a big step that she was taking to become one of Jehovah’s Witnesses officially. And I think my dad saw that and thought – this is getting real and I want to jump in there and find out what this is. So he did that. It wasn’t too long afterward that a very nice, charismatic brother in the congregation took my dad under his wing. He studied with my dad. And I think the next year my dad got baptized, so it didn’t take too long. We’re talking maybe a year or two for both of my parents to become full fledged Jehovah’s Witnesses and at that point there were definitely no more holidays.
I can still remember my last Christmas. I remember my mom sitting me down and telling me that we aren’t going to do this anymore. I can’t remember exactly how I felt, but I’m sure I wasn’t too pleased with that. I was told a thing that is often told to a child of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“We don’t need those holidays to celebrate or to give gifts. People just feel like they have to give gifts on those days. It’s not real. Nobody really likes it. We can give you gifts all the time and from the heart.”
It was sold to me, and so many other kids, like we would probably actually get more gifts since the boundaries of holidays were done away with. I’ll let you place a wager on how much celebration and gift giving there is in the average Jehovah’s Witness family compared to the celebrations that everyone participates in outside of the group. I can’t speak for all families but I know I didn’t have a lot of friends that were one of Jehovah’s Witnesses who were receiving a whole lot of gifts or celebrating much of anything. Life had changed a lot.
That’s kind of the nexus of the beginning of my life. It started out like I would assume for any other kids out there. And then all it took was a chance real estate move by parents who had a financial reversal, and the next thing you know we just happened to move in next door to one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and things started to change.
So in the next episode I’m going to talk more about how my life changed. Aside from a few little things I’ve mentioned already I’ll talk about what it’s like for a young child growing up in this cult. What it’s like for them when they go to school. What it’s like at home.
This is not just a religion that you put on when you go to church. This is a life and it encompasses everything you do. It encompasses the way you think, the way you feel, the way you act. It is everything and it dominates your life completely.