Post by stampinmama on Apr 16, 2009 9:10:31 GMT -5
Hi, my name is Erika, but I usually go by Stampinmama on most blogs and forums because of my blog name.
I'm 32 and have been married for coming up on 12 years (in June). My hubby and I have a wonderful egalitarian marriage and we are both liberal Christians, though we respect other's right to choose their own spiritual/non-spiritual paths.
We have two children. Zach turned 10 in Feb. and is autistic. He's amazingly brilliant and loves bugs of all kinds. He'd like to be an entomologist when he grows up. He's in 4th grade at the public school and has an interventionist that works with him all day at school. He's mainstreamed into the classroom and is doing really well. Elise (she goes by "Girly" at home) turned 9 at the beginning of this month. She's a tomboy, just like her mama. She's in 3rd grade at the public school and loves to read and create. She's taken over one of the tables in my art studio and uses it for her creative space.
We live in northern Vermont, right along Lake Champlain.
My husband, David, is a carpenter and works for a company a couple miles away that builds dock systems for boats.
I am a work-from-home mom - as an artist. I teach rubber stamping and scrapbooking classes, online creative classes, on a couple design teams, as well as creating commissioned artwork from my home studio. I also teach some classes at an art school in the southern part of Vermont.
I like to use my scrapbooking as a therapeutic art form to share my thoughts and feelings.
I grew up in a mainstream Christian home until my parents pulled my siblings and I out of public school (while we were living in northern NH) when I was 14. We had a horrid school system in the town we were living in. Right before the school year started (I was going into 10th grade), my parents found a church about an hour and a half away (called Grace Bible Fellowship, which, ironically, was not at ALL about Grace) and dove in head first. This started their whole downward spiral into the cult of patriarchy. The entire church was full of homeschooling families and the father as the dominant head of the household. My sister and I (I'm the second of 4 children) and our mom were made to give up our pants and had to wear skirts and dresses.
While growing up from the age of 14 on, all phone calls, letters, friends, books, musics, etc. were censored.
We went to that church for about a year and a half, until it got too expensive to drive 3 hours round trip each Sunday, so my dad got a few other men in the area that were just as egotistical and patriarchal to start meeting in our homes for church.
My father was told by the head elder at Grace, "Take away everything that is important to your children and they'll eventually cling only to you, for that will be all that's left that is important to them."
Each week, when we were still going to Grace, I would sit and seethe while this man spoke his legalistic nonsense about how to dress, how to act, even using my father (who is 6'2" and on the heavy side) as an example of what gluttony is, preaching that we shouldn't use spices or salt on our food since we shouldn't be eating food to enjoy it but to sustain life, and a ton of other nonsense about girls being owned by their fathers and man being superior. I would sit with my hand in my pocket, with my middle finger pointed at him because he made me ill just to listen to him.
When I was 16, my parents lost their home because of the crappy economy and we moved to PA to start over. My parents had gotten a hold of the tape series - The Godly Home by Denny Kenaston (http://www.charityministries.org/tape-index.a5w) <--- read that if you want to be sickened. So, my parents moved us close to the church and we started attending there when we arrived in PA. That's when the head coverings were commanded by my father, as well as even MORE modest dresses (read: frumpy, unflattering jumpers and dresses). Right before we had moved to PA, my mother had started a custom clothing business to supply mothers and daughters with modest apparel. My sister and I were expected, without pay, to help with this business.
We only stayed at Charity Christian Fellowship for 3 months, as Mose Stoltzfus (one of the bishops....and who I later found out is actually a third cousin to my MIL - yikes!) tried to explain to my father that wife-spanking was biblical. My father was at least discerning enough to high tail it out of there when that was brought up. But....the head coverings stayed, even though we had moved on from the church. We started going to a brethren assembly after that and stayed there until we moved away from PA less than 3 years later.
At the brethren assembly, we were obviously the "weird ones." There was another homeschooling family there, but they were "normal." People welcomed us there, but were wary of us for a little while. We were active in the church, but us kids weren't allowed to take part in Sunday school or youth group. We were expected to sit in adult Sunday school because it was considered of the devil to segregate the family by age.
In 1996, we moved back up north and to Vermont. We had been given an eviction notice by the young Amish man who owned the house we were renting. His sister was getting married and he needed the house for her and her husband to live in. We missed New England and decided to go back.
I was 19 when we moved back and we lived in a tenant house next door to a farming family that my parents had met and kept in contact with over the years. They were legalistic and a homeschooling, patriarchal family. We met with them and a couple other similar families for church on Sundays. They moved about 5 months later to NY so my family started attending a Baptist church in town. in the meantime, we had moved into a bigger rental house a few miles away.
Right before we moved to VT, my mom and I stopped wearing the head coverings and kind of led a silent revolution. By March, I'd had enough of living under patriarchal rule and had planned to leave home and move in with an old boyfriend that I'd had growing up in NH. When my father found out, he begged me to stay. I bargained with my father and told him that in order for me to stay, I would have to be allowed to get a job and get my driver's license and to go back to PA for a quick trip to pick up the old car that we'd left down there because we had no licensed drivers to drive it up when we moved to VT. My father relented and I got a job, got my license and got the car back from PA. It wasn't long until the crap started all over again. I would go to work and change into a pair of pants on the way there. I forgot to change out of them one time and I had picked up my father from his job. When he saw me wearing them, he cried and put on a big pity party about how rebellious I was and how much I had wounded his heart. When we got home, he got of the car and ran up the street sobbing. I realized, years later, that this was just a form of manipulation and guilt tripping.
Right before we moved from PA, we met my husband's family. It was just 8 days before we moved. He is the oldest of 4 boys and our families seemed to hit it off really well. They were homeschooled and three of the 4 boys were the same ages as three of the kids in my family. There was no romantic interest at the time we moved, though.
After we moved (end of Jan. 1996), our families kept in touch and we'd made trips back and forth as families. By end of May of 1996, David asked my father permission to "court" me (oh, how I HATE that term). His brother had asked permission to court my sister that same day. Throughout the rest of the year, things were going really well, though we were separated by 450 miles. We were allowed only 2 phone calls a week (didn't have computers back then) and they could only last 30 min. each. My father usually had us sit within ear shot when we were on the phone, or he would be on the other end of the phone call. We were allowed only one letter a week from the guys. My father had put down very specific laws - no hand holding, no kissing, no hugging, no emotional talk. NOTHING. No affection, whether physical or not.
Near the end of 1996, my father started asking about the church they went to. We found out that they were going to a cult - following the teachings of William Marion Branham. (though my parents failed to see that they, themselves, were also part of a cult movement) Branham was an egotistical, male chauvenist pig that had pornographic visions and believed that he was given visions by God that confirmed he and his followers were the True Bride of Christ. ugh. My father tried to talk to the guys (they had been born into the church and didn't know any different and their mother is very controlling) and their parents about it, but they didn't want to hear any of it. So....by Feb. of 1997, my father decided that they weren't marriage material and ordered my sister and I (she was 21 and I was 20) to terminate contact with the guys. My sister had a really hard time with this so my parents sent her to NC to be a live-in nanny/teacher for a family friend whose wife was bed ridden by Lou Gehrrig's disease (ALS). She was not to be paid, but it would be her ministry. I stayed home and continued with helping out a couple of farmers with their milk cows. David and I refused to lose contact with each other, so I would drive into town to use a pay phone to call him with my grandparents' calling card (I would pay them back at the end of each month) and he would call me back and we would talk for about an hour or so. during this time, my sister eventually got back together with David's brother.
We realized that my father would never allow us to get married, so we took matters into our own hands. David came up to Vermont and Jonathan went down to NC ( my sister was still nannying down there) and we got engaged at the same time (well, 2 days apart). We knew that we couldn't go home, so we packed up and left with the guys and headed to PA, leaving notes under our pillows (my sister left while the family was at church and I had called the wife of the farmer that I had worked for and asked to work that weekend, free of charge, but had told her I would be leaving...she allowed me to keep my bags there until I left). I called 2 hours down the highway to let my mom know I wasn't coming home and to look under my pillow for my note. They soon found out that my sister had left NC, too. They had no clue what we were up to.
My parents were livid and my father arrived in PA the next day with my youngest brother in town (he was a very naive, immature and isolated 12 years old at the time). My father had told him that we were going home with them, so when we met at a public restaurant to talk with him and told him we weren't going home, my brother started bawling and I'm convinced that my father was using my brother as a bargaining chip with us. We stood our ground, though, and told him we weren't coming home.
Because my family was well known in the homeschooling and health ministry circuit, my parents were embarrassed and mortified. They were told by the leaders of the NY homeschooling conference that they could have a table as a vendor there, but they wouldn't be able to speak at the convention as health ministers unless my sister and I repented and came home. Because of this, my parents tried to guilt us into coming home, saying that it would cost them business if they couldn't be speakers there. They were working really hard on my sister because they knew I wouldn't budge. My sister almost went home, but I encouraged her to stand her ground and stay.
My parents tried very hard to make our engagement as miserable as possible. David and I were only engaged for a little under 3 months. We figured there was no point in dragging it out because we just wanted it to be done with. My sister and David's brother were married 4 weeks after we were (they've since divorced 2 years ago, though). My father refused to let my sister and I talk to our brothers. That lasted almost a year. My father called friends in PA and turned them against us. He called churches and pastors that we knew and threatened them to NOT marry us.
David and I had the mayor do our ceremony and we had an outdoor wedding, very plain and simple. Many of the people that David went to church with didn't come because my father had threatened the leader of the cult that he would expose them if the ministry had anything to do with our wedding and the church leaders scared many of the congregants into not coming to our wedding. I wanted nothing to do with a church wedding because religion had hurt me so much.
We were fortunate to become close to the woman that owned the horse barn where I had been taking jumping lessons at before my family had moved from PA. She and her hubby had given my sister a place to live and allowed us to use the estate to get married on. They also built us an apartment in their walk out basement so that David and I didn't have to look for a rental. We lived there until we moved a year and a half later.
My parents didn't come to my wedding or my sister's wedding. My grandfather walked my sister and I down the aisle. My father chided my grandfather for doing this, but my very gentle and kind grandfather stood up for himself for probably the first time in his life and told my father that us girls had asked him, since he had refused to do it for us. My sister and I had asked my father to do it, but he refused and said he wasn't coming. My grandfather told my father that he had given up his privilege and that was that. I was so proud of my grandfather for standing up and doing this for us. We were married June 14, 1997.
During our engagement, my father kept telling David that he had stolen his property - meaning : me. David explained to my father that he hadn't stolen me but that I had come of my own free will and that he was sorry he felt that way. My father insisted that if he was going to say "sorry," that he should give his property back. David refused. My father then told him that if he was going to keep his property, then he would be expected to pay for it. When I heard this, I was livid. I asked, out of morbid curiosity, what my father wanted for me. He said that $2000 should cover it. That angered me beyond belief. That I was only worth that little to him and that he would even think I was property that could be bought and sold, no different than a slave.
After David and I got married, my mom and I continued to talk on the phone once a week. I missed her, but the conversation usually ended in tears because of the tension my father created. She knew she would be interrogated after she got off the phone.
In the fall of 1997, my parents took a trip to Washington DC and NC. They made a stop in PA to stop at the restaurant my sister and I worked at. We spent the afternoon with my parents and my brothers going to a couple of stores and sitting at the restaurant. My father was very distant and my mother eventually told me, off to the side, that my father still wanted us girls to come home and repent. I told my mom that I was married now and I wasn't going anywhere. She told me that in their eyes, we weren't married because they didn't give their blessing and that my father insisted we were living in sin and fornication. It didn't matter than we had a marriage license....to him, it was all about twisting the Old Testament to his convenience.
Almost a year after I left home, my husband and I made a trip to Vermont to see my parents and brothers. We wanted to sit down with them and "bury the hatchet," so to speak. We had a good hour long talk and my husband I explained to them that even though it hurt them for us to do what we did, we felt we had no choice and that they had backed us into a corner. We told them that we wanted children of our own and didn't want them to not know their grandparents and uncles. The hatchet was buried and it was almost like nothing had ever happened. We had planned to stay at a hotel if things didn't go well, but my parents invited us to spend the night there and they took us out for dinner. Things have been great since. They didn't quite come out of the whole mindset until about a year later, but it was a journey for them to see the light again. It took my sister and I leaving for them to realize the mess they had found themselves in, to see that they had been brainwashed by the pretty, shiny package that the patriarchal cult presents to conservative Christians.
I'm very thankful that my parents have done a 180 and have gone back to being "normal" again. They've apologized over and over about the horrible patriarchal and legalistic lifestyle they forced us to live while growing up. My parents are some of my closest friends now. I hold nothing against them, but the scars I have are real and they recognize that.
My husband left the cult that he grew up in a few months after we got married. We now attend a non-denomination church that we love. The people are warm, friendly, come from all background and walks of life and don't judge. It's truly a church where we can find common ground in the freedom we've claimed in Christ.
My husband and I have an equal partnership, where neither one of us is in charge over the other, but we work as a team. It's the way it's always been for us. We're both extremely wary of cult movements and can smell legalism a mile away. I consider myself a biblical feminist and have a heart for hurting women and girls that have been subjected to spiritual abuse and domestic abuse.
I'm looking forward to being a part of this community and making new friends! Okay, that was a heck of a lot longer than I intended this to be. haha!
-Erika Martin
www.stampinmama.com
I'm 32 and have been married for coming up on 12 years (in June). My hubby and I have a wonderful egalitarian marriage and we are both liberal Christians, though we respect other's right to choose their own spiritual/non-spiritual paths.
We have two children. Zach turned 10 in Feb. and is autistic. He's amazingly brilliant and loves bugs of all kinds. He'd like to be an entomologist when he grows up. He's in 4th grade at the public school and has an interventionist that works with him all day at school. He's mainstreamed into the classroom and is doing really well. Elise (she goes by "Girly" at home) turned 9 at the beginning of this month. She's a tomboy, just like her mama. She's in 3rd grade at the public school and loves to read and create. She's taken over one of the tables in my art studio and uses it for her creative space.
We live in northern Vermont, right along Lake Champlain.
My husband, David, is a carpenter and works for a company a couple miles away that builds dock systems for boats.
I am a work-from-home mom - as an artist. I teach rubber stamping and scrapbooking classes, online creative classes, on a couple design teams, as well as creating commissioned artwork from my home studio. I also teach some classes at an art school in the southern part of Vermont.
I like to use my scrapbooking as a therapeutic art form to share my thoughts and feelings.
I grew up in a mainstream Christian home until my parents pulled my siblings and I out of public school (while we were living in northern NH) when I was 14. We had a horrid school system in the town we were living in. Right before the school year started (I was going into 10th grade), my parents found a church about an hour and a half away (called Grace Bible Fellowship, which, ironically, was not at ALL about Grace) and dove in head first. This started their whole downward spiral into the cult of patriarchy. The entire church was full of homeschooling families and the father as the dominant head of the household. My sister and I (I'm the second of 4 children) and our mom were made to give up our pants and had to wear skirts and dresses.
While growing up from the age of 14 on, all phone calls, letters, friends, books, musics, etc. were censored.
We went to that church for about a year and a half, until it got too expensive to drive 3 hours round trip each Sunday, so my dad got a few other men in the area that were just as egotistical and patriarchal to start meeting in our homes for church.
My father was told by the head elder at Grace, "Take away everything that is important to your children and they'll eventually cling only to you, for that will be all that's left that is important to them."
Each week, when we were still going to Grace, I would sit and seethe while this man spoke his legalistic nonsense about how to dress, how to act, even using my father (who is 6'2" and on the heavy side) as an example of what gluttony is, preaching that we shouldn't use spices or salt on our food since we shouldn't be eating food to enjoy it but to sustain life, and a ton of other nonsense about girls being owned by their fathers and man being superior. I would sit with my hand in my pocket, with my middle finger pointed at him because he made me ill just to listen to him.
When I was 16, my parents lost their home because of the crappy economy and we moved to PA to start over. My parents had gotten a hold of the tape series - The Godly Home by Denny Kenaston (http://www.charityministries.org/tape-index.a5w) <--- read that if you want to be sickened. So, my parents moved us close to the church and we started attending there when we arrived in PA. That's when the head coverings were commanded by my father, as well as even MORE modest dresses (read: frumpy, unflattering jumpers and dresses). Right before we had moved to PA, my mother had started a custom clothing business to supply mothers and daughters with modest apparel. My sister and I were expected, without pay, to help with this business.
We only stayed at Charity Christian Fellowship for 3 months, as Mose Stoltzfus (one of the bishops....and who I later found out is actually a third cousin to my MIL - yikes!) tried to explain to my father that wife-spanking was biblical. My father was at least discerning enough to high tail it out of there when that was brought up. But....the head coverings stayed, even though we had moved on from the church. We started going to a brethren assembly after that and stayed there until we moved away from PA less than 3 years later.
At the brethren assembly, we were obviously the "weird ones." There was another homeschooling family there, but they were "normal." People welcomed us there, but were wary of us for a little while. We were active in the church, but us kids weren't allowed to take part in Sunday school or youth group. We were expected to sit in adult Sunday school because it was considered of the devil to segregate the family by age.
In 1996, we moved back up north and to Vermont. We had been given an eviction notice by the young Amish man who owned the house we were renting. His sister was getting married and he needed the house for her and her husband to live in. We missed New England and decided to go back.
I was 19 when we moved back and we lived in a tenant house next door to a farming family that my parents had met and kept in contact with over the years. They were legalistic and a homeschooling, patriarchal family. We met with them and a couple other similar families for church on Sundays. They moved about 5 months later to NY so my family started attending a Baptist church in town. in the meantime, we had moved into a bigger rental house a few miles away.
Right before we moved to VT, my mom and I stopped wearing the head coverings and kind of led a silent revolution. By March, I'd had enough of living under patriarchal rule and had planned to leave home and move in with an old boyfriend that I'd had growing up in NH. When my father found out, he begged me to stay. I bargained with my father and told him that in order for me to stay, I would have to be allowed to get a job and get my driver's license and to go back to PA for a quick trip to pick up the old car that we'd left down there because we had no licensed drivers to drive it up when we moved to VT. My father relented and I got a job, got my license and got the car back from PA. It wasn't long until the crap started all over again. I would go to work and change into a pair of pants on the way there. I forgot to change out of them one time and I had picked up my father from his job. When he saw me wearing them, he cried and put on a big pity party about how rebellious I was and how much I had wounded his heart. When we got home, he got of the car and ran up the street sobbing. I realized, years later, that this was just a form of manipulation and guilt tripping.
Right before we moved from PA, we met my husband's family. It was just 8 days before we moved. He is the oldest of 4 boys and our families seemed to hit it off really well. They were homeschooled and three of the 4 boys were the same ages as three of the kids in my family. There was no romantic interest at the time we moved, though.
After we moved (end of Jan. 1996), our families kept in touch and we'd made trips back and forth as families. By end of May of 1996, David asked my father permission to "court" me (oh, how I HATE that term). His brother had asked permission to court my sister that same day. Throughout the rest of the year, things were going really well, though we were separated by 450 miles. We were allowed only 2 phone calls a week (didn't have computers back then) and they could only last 30 min. each. My father usually had us sit within ear shot when we were on the phone, or he would be on the other end of the phone call. We were allowed only one letter a week from the guys. My father had put down very specific laws - no hand holding, no kissing, no hugging, no emotional talk. NOTHING. No affection, whether physical or not.
Near the end of 1996, my father started asking about the church they went to. We found out that they were going to a cult - following the teachings of William Marion Branham. (though my parents failed to see that they, themselves, were also part of a cult movement) Branham was an egotistical, male chauvenist pig that had pornographic visions and believed that he was given visions by God that confirmed he and his followers were the True Bride of Christ. ugh. My father tried to talk to the guys (they had been born into the church and didn't know any different and their mother is very controlling) and their parents about it, but they didn't want to hear any of it. So....by Feb. of 1997, my father decided that they weren't marriage material and ordered my sister and I (she was 21 and I was 20) to terminate contact with the guys. My sister had a really hard time with this so my parents sent her to NC to be a live-in nanny/teacher for a family friend whose wife was bed ridden by Lou Gehrrig's disease (ALS). She was not to be paid, but it would be her ministry. I stayed home and continued with helping out a couple of farmers with their milk cows. David and I refused to lose contact with each other, so I would drive into town to use a pay phone to call him with my grandparents' calling card (I would pay them back at the end of each month) and he would call me back and we would talk for about an hour or so. during this time, my sister eventually got back together with David's brother.
We realized that my father would never allow us to get married, so we took matters into our own hands. David came up to Vermont and Jonathan went down to NC ( my sister was still nannying down there) and we got engaged at the same time (well, 2 days apart). We knew that we couldn't go home, so we packed up and left with the guys and headed to PA, leaving notes under our pillows (my sister left while the family was at church and I had called the wife of the farmer that I had worked for and asked to work that weekend, free of charge, but had told her I would be leaving...she allowed me to keep my bags there until I left). I called 2 hours down the highway to let my mom know I wasn't coming home and to look under my pillow for my note. They soon found out that my sister had left NC, too. They had no clue what we were up to.
My parents were livid and my father arrived in PA the next day with my youngest brother in town (he was a very naive, immature and isolated 12 years old at the time). My father had told him that we were going home with them, so when we met at a public restaurant to talk with him and told him we weren't going home, my brother started bawling and I'm convinced that my father was using my brother as a bargaining chip with us. We stood our ground, though, and told him we weren't coming home.
Because my family was well known in the homeschooling and health ministry circuit, my parents were embarrassed and mortified. They were told by the leaders of the NY homeschooling conference that they could have a table as a vendor there, but they wouldn't be able to speak at the convention as health ministers unless my sister and I repented and came home. Because of this, my parents tried to guilt us into coming home, saying that it would cost them business if they couldn't be speakers there. They were working really hard on my sister because they knew I wouldn't budge. My sister almost went home, but I encouraged her to stand her ground and stay.
My parents tried very hard to make our engagement as miserable as possible. David and I were only engaged for a little under 3 months. We figured there was no point in dragging it out because we just wanted it to be done with. My sister and David's brother were married 4 weeks after we were (they've since divorced 2 years ago, though). My father refused to let my sister and I talk to our brothers. That lasted almost a year. My father called friends in PA and turned them against us. He called churches and pastors that we knew and threatened them to NOT marry us.
David and I had the mayor do our ceremony and we had an outdoor wedding, very plain and simple. Many of the people that David went to church with didn't come because my father had threatened the leader of the cult that he would expose them if the ministry had anything to do with our wedding and the church leaders scared many of the congregants into not coming to our wedding. I wanted nothing to do with a church wedding because religion had hurt me so much.
We were fortunate to become close to the woman that owned the horse barn where I had been taking jumping lessons at before my family had moved from PA. She and her hubby had given my sister a place to live and allowed us to use the estate to get married on. They also built us an apartment in their walk out basement so that David and I didn't have to look for a rental. We lived there until we moved a year and a half later.
My parents didn't come to my wedding or my sister's wedding. My grandfather walked my sister and I down the aisle. My father chided my grandfather for doing this, but my very gentle and kind grandfather stood up for himself for probably the first time in his life and told my father that us girls had asked him, since he had refused to do it for us. My sister and I had asked my father to do it, but he refused and said he wasn't coming. My grandfather told my father that he had given up his privilege and that was that. I was so proud of my grandfather for standing up and doing this for us. We were married June 14, 1997.
During our engagement, my father kept telling David that he had stolen his property - meaning : me. David explained to my father that he hadn't stolen me but that I had come of my own free will and that he was sorry he felt that way. My father insisted that if he was going to say "sorry," that he should give his property back. David refused. My father then told him that if he was going to keep his property, then he would be expected to pay for it. When I heard this, I was livid. I asked, out of morbid curiosity, what my father wanted for me. He said that $2000 should cover it. That angered me beyond belief. That I was only worth that little to him and that he would even think I was property that could be bought and sold, no different than a slave.
After David and I got married, my mom and I continued to talk on the phone once a week. I missed her, but the conversation usually ended in tears because of the tension my father created. She knew she would be interrogated after she got off the phone.
In the fall of 1997, my parents took a trip to Washington DC and NC. They made a stop in PA to stop at the restaurant my sister and I worked at. We spent the afternoon with my parents and my brothers going to a couple of stores and sitting at the restaurant. My father was very distant and my mother eventually told me, off to the side, that my father still wanted us girls to come home and repent. I told my mom that I was married now and I wasn't going anywhere. She told me that in their eyes, we weren't married because they didn't give their blessing and that my father insisted we were living in sin and fornication. It didn't matter than we had a marriage license....to him, it was all about twisting the Old Testament to his convenience.
Almost a year after I left home, my husband and I made a trip to Vermont to see my parents and brothers. We wanted to sit down with them and "bury the hatchet," so to speak. We had a good hour long talk and my husband I explained to them that even though it hurt them for us to do what we did, we felt we had no choice and that they had backed us into a corner. We told them that we wanted children of our own and didn't want them to not know their grandparents and uncles. The hatchet was buried and it was almost like nothing had ever happened. We had planned to stay at a hotel if things didn't go well, but my parents invited us to spend the night there and they took us out for dinner. Things have been great since. They didn't quite come out of the whole mindset until about a year later, but it was a journey for them to see the light again. It took my sister and I leaving for them to realize the mess they had found themselves in, to see that they had been brainwashed by the pretty, shiny package that the patriarchal cult presents to conservative Christians.
I'm very thankful that my parents have done a 180 and have gone back to being "normal" again. They've apologized over and over about the horrible patriarchal and legalistic lifestyle they forced us to live while growing up. My parents are some of my closest friends now. I hold nothing against them, but the scars I have are real and they recognize that.
My husband left the cult that he grew up in a few months after we got married. We now attend a non-denomination church that we love. The people are warm, friendly, come from all background and walks of life and don't judge. It's truly a church where we can find common ground in the freedom we've claimed in Christ.
My husband and I have an equal partnership, where neither one of us is in charge over the other, but we work as a team. It's the way it's always been for us. We're both extremely wary of cult movements and can smell legalism a mile away. I consider myself a biblical feminist and have a heart for hurting women and girls that have been subjected to spiritual abuse and domestic abuse.
I'm looking forward to being a part of this community and making new friends! Okay, that was a heck of a lot longer than I intended this to be. haha!
-Erika Martin
www.stampinmama.com
I'm glad the world has personalities like yours! I'm sure your sister is also glad, because I'm guessing without you there to lend support and take some of the brunt of the anger, and be an example.
