Death-Cult Adjacent Pt 3
Stupid Pancreas! Honeymoons and Hellcomehome!
From Pt 2
No photos of the bride and groom or even the newlyweds exist. No pics, but it happened. Only the marriage certificate and new white gold bands on our ring fingers proved it ever happened (and later, a divorce decree.) Fresh camera batteries allegedly died. Just black shadowy darkness and blurs on the developed film. No one seemed upset but me.
That was a major omen. It was a bad sign.
It was carpeted when we lived there. My happy place, once.
We spent a few days enjoying being married and my being done college for Winter Break. It was idyllic. It was like playing house but real- not a game. We were married and alone. I loved our 1939 cottage. We’d repainted the entire weird 1950’s kitchen in clean crisp high gloss white, faded now in pictures, instead of weird dark green and yellow with checkerboard tile shown at walkthrough. We put out yard art made by our local artist landlord, the landlords were a couple of artists and absolutely lovely. We used the ancient clothesline posts in the yard when the dryer failed. P. fixed our washing machine when it broke himself. I liked having him around and being together every day and night. He had some habits like wet towels and small things I never expected. He even brewed a cherry beer while at the cottage when we were newlyweds. Brewing and distilling were a hobby of his I knew little about and found delightful and scientific I loved just sharing my day with him, hearing about his day, merely looking over at him. Holidays and Birthdays celebrated openly with glee!!
I never took his surname. He expressed displeasure with that but didn’t push back against my decision. He would bring this up in the early part of the marriage a few times and while we were dating. I didn’t feel welcome to that family. Taking his name didn’t give me any benefit or change anything, though 2 now out of his 3 wives did take his name. We shared no property or common things, so why would I take his name? If “what was his was his, and mine was mine, and we both contributed”, taking his name was a moot point.
I had no qualms with us having a child with his name. It’s a patronym. He wasn’t my father. I already had a father. My father was dead, and I carried my name on. My lineage died with me as an only child of an only child and an estranged aunt I never knew on my father’s side who was a Horowitz. I hadn’t seen them since I was maybe seven or eight and none of them were Bruners. I am still the last and only Bruner.
It implied new ownership like a slave name or a handmaid in Atwood. I didn’t think being “ of_____” was necessary. I have a dear friend since the 90s trapped bearing the name of the wasband who dumped her after 13 years. She took his name because she wanted to make things easier on her future children, not realizing that the stigma of surnames not matching is long gone. She did it for tradition and now she’s stuck with his family name, just so she matches her near-grown kid.
It was a more known prestigious name, esp. in the Piedmont area of NC. I didn’t need or care about the reputation that came with that family name. I married him. All my degrees are under Bruner. I’m a Cohn and Bruner, the last of my line. As a woman, my child doesn’t carry on my family name. Any children I have would carry on the genetics and the history, but wouldn’t have my name. Most children carry the father‘s name, and if male children, men have a sense of immortality.
The idea of giving up who I am and erasing my achievements for someone else whom I loved, when I hadn’t been welcomed warmly to his immediate family sat wrong. It also differentiated me from the other Mrs._____ my ex-MIL, and my paternal grandmother-in-law, whom it was a title and honorific . I saw it as a matter of principle. I was not a _____. even though my college added it on mailings until I told him I was divorced. They saw it as an honorific and gave them a pass for it.
We went down to GA for our honeymoon tour of duty now that we were (semi-) respectable, and we promptly both came down severely ill with bronchitis, pharyngitis and probably three other severe upper respiratory infections. He brought down the .308 rifle I bought him as a wedding gift to shoot at his father’s oversized hideously decorated mid-80’s Southern style almost 4000 sq ft with a rebar-enforced safe room/tornado shelter retro Barbie ex-MIL-designed pipedream house with acreage.
As a MODY diabetic, I wasn’t on insulin yet, but a week into being GA, staying at his parents, before even sneaking sex in when they were all out of the house, we were snotty, coughing, fevered, wheezing messes and miserable. He was a tacicturn lie-about manchild when sick and best left alone to grump and drink hot toddies, I suddenly couldn’t control my blood glucose at all!
It was stuck over 400 and then close to 500. I was spilling over ketones. I was nearing DKA and in danger. His mother worked at a medical clinic in the office and got the doctor she worked for to prescribe me insulin and brought me over a vial and syringes right to his father’s house. P. had been making me walk as I’ll as I was around their house to exercise, despite exercise sometimes causing paradoxical increased hyperglycemia in some circumstances, like we were in the last hours of the dance marathon on “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They”. I was so ill, exhausted, dazed, and out of it.
I hadn’t injected insulin since I was 14 and now my life immediately depended on it again. Occasionally, the UNC student health center nurses would give me a unit or two after meals starting only right before we married and a lingering hyperglycemia occured after dinner. I managed that life-sustaining self-administered bolus somehow (had to have been muscle memory) and was okay.
Sadly, I kept needing daily insulin after the antibiotics we were both prescribed were over and we returned home. I was on a diabetic transformation phase. My diabetes honeymoon was over forever as ours started. The honeymoon was just bronchitis, doctors, overbearing in-laws, fevers, phlegm and my pancreas tapping out forever. “In sickness” part of vows came on hard and quick.
We returned to NC and he got a job at a fabric company that sold imported fancy fabrics to Hollywood stars remodeling their homes. P. helped Stephen Spielberg’s assistant with the new upholstery and brought home samples I never did anything with and misplaced eventually. Beautiful handwoven luxury toiles and jacquards I never made the patchwork quilt of my dreams with. I love textiles and tactile things of quality.
Being in the same state as my husband and living with someone was also an adjustment. It felt claustrophobic to me at times. I had to adjust to sleeping with him every night instead of just on weekends and we didn’t touch. I couldn’t sleep if he touched me. I couldn’t sleep well with another human being and wasn’t used to it. Sleeping better and alone wasn’t an option once you’re married. We kissed goodnight and retreated to our own sides of the bed. Sleeping all snuggled up is a Hollywood movie thing, not reality . Least it wasn’t for us, especially in a house with central heat from a single forced air heater in the hallway and two A/C window units and just ceiling fans in every room. We never touched in our sleep. No real affection, overall. He was just like that by nature. He hated my corpse cold feet. I don’t really recall a real honeymoon happily ever after period. We simply were married now and lived together. We had opposite schedules during the weekdays as I had night courses often and he had a 9 to 5 office job. His parents were always calling and asking about things. He spoke to them on his cell and never called to speak to me. I didn’t have a cellphone. I used the landline we had.
When I mean no affection, he didn’t walk past me and just give me a kiss on the cheek or casually touch me for no reason. I’ve learned that you can be in a relationship with someone for years and they will still never not take any opportunity to kiss you or touch you if close. I definitely blame his parents for not demonstrating or having genuine love or affection for each other. It always rubbed me the wrong way (hah!) and troubled me, the lack of warm natural affection in our relationship. 🚩 I was the cold one, allegedly. I never complained or expressed my needs for more. I feared rejection.
Within a month of us returning to NC after the “Not Christmas” break and two weeks on GA, I was adjusting to an insulin pump. 2000’s era insulin pumps were primitive, there was only the Disetronic and the Minimed to choose from, no CGMS tech existed, and pumping required fingersticks 8 times a day at least. I went from no or one shot a day to five or more a day required on MDI (Multiple Daily Injections). My pancreas had stopped and tests showed it was barely producing the bottom of the normal range of insulin to survive. I required store bought ‘slin. As he and I never merged lives, no shared bank accounts, etc, I paid my own bills. He had everything but the lease for our cottage exclusively in his name.
I was T1 diabetic again and antibody testing wasn’t done then. It was a massive life adjustment. It was testing and emotionally exhausting to adapt to life with a pump attached to me 24/7 and tubing and all the random things that happen when pumping. He was a trooper though and didn’t even notice my tubing and infusion set. He let me handle it and didn’t ask questions or express concerns even. To this day I don’t know if it was apathy or trust in me to handle my health, and anyway, the answer doesn’t matter now.
I was just so lucky he had no diabetics in his family and my shitty dominant MODY diabetic genes would be balanced by his family health and lack of all diabetes. He considered his family a Howard Family from Heinlein. I had the Howard longevity— I met my great-great grandmother several times as a child and had more long lived grandparents than he did.
Eugenics made easy- Bad Jewish girl whose ancestors were once slaves in Egypt marries someone who comes from a family with a plantation house museum and once owned slaves. No trace of Jewish blood possible in him and genetic testing proved it. It was all me with tainted lineage, it was me with the East Asian and any other Klan disqualifying blood. When his great grandma died, the local KKK group showed up with groceries and money for the family, and somehow he could say it without disgust or shame, which always bothered me deeply and intensely.
His parents and sister kept in close contact with him. I thought this normal as I and had no siblings or parents since 17. I had no basis for comparison so that skewed my perception. They were all abnormally enmeshed due to the JW gestapo surveillance teachings and economic hope of inheritance connections to each other.
My stepbastard was out of my life and I had a TPO and firearms on the house to protect me from that monster. P. promised to protect me too. He was my knight in shining armor. He did protect and defended me, went to court with me, but at the end, he used my SA and abuse by my stepbastard as an attack on my character. It may have been the coldest, cruelest, stupidest, most painful thing anyone has ever said to me.
He used my stepbastards coercion, power of attorney over me during my late teens and 20’s, his being my representative payee. and P. made my C-PTSD from sexual assault and the abuse and twisted coercive freeze and fawning to avoid more ER visits into a weapon with which he claimed was somehow consent to SA despite the hospital records showing I was injured often and fought back and always paid dearly. Mot screaming bloody murder so someone saves you is consent to Witnesses. I was a survivor not a victim, and sure as hell not someone who had “an affair with my stepfather”. He said that in a pique of rage to fuck me up, scare me from fighting him in court, and trigger me beyond functionin. At the end, he just needed me useless and in a perpetual trauma response, broken, and back in PTSD-shutdown. Thanks Witnesses!
Women are merely existing.
Watchtower claims we asked for rape.
Here are the rape victim blaming doctrine receipts!
In early 2000, the halcyon days, I would bring him lunch at work or meet him there and we’d go out together for lunch, often at Panera. He once brought me dinner to the college library where I was stuck in research. We never fought. We had minimal disagreements. I let resentment build for years and we should have occasionally disagreed or fought. I had been abused so I complied. I had no idea what was normal and I thought all modern marriages were like this. Seperate everything.. Libertarian. Rational Anarchist, based on Onkectivism which he loved and I HATED and kept silent about. Many years later, for reasons , realizing other marriages shared property, money, resources, couples merged loved, and it showed they were “all in”, commited, and invested together in the relationship and each other, I asked him about the bills, money and things. He gave me a modern variation “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it” without complementing my prettiness or making a backhanded compliment about my intellect. I was smarter. He had animal cunning and ambition He had absolute control. JW men always do.
We explored Greensboro together. We were generally happy. I was still stupid- madly in love. My Depo Provera hadn’t worn off yet so I wasn’t getting my period yet. We adjusted to living together over the Winter into Spring. When my computer was fried by the modem getting hit by lightning striking the wall with my outlet, he let me use his computer to finish my paper on sacrifice for my Thursday night religion course.
He preferred Southern food, so he decided he’d do the cooking and I was only encouraged to make an occasional Yankee and Jewish meal when I craved comfort and my soul food. I think the braciole and farm-raised venison tenderloins au poivre I made was just not how he liked Italian or venison. Later, he’d go hunting with the boys and I jokingly told him come home with venison or be bought home stuck in antlers or some variation if the “Come back with your shield or on it” of antiquity. He never came home with venison. I love venison and alligator too!
I was doing coursework and preparing my thesis on Roman dinner parties of the Silver Age. He was working. His family and him were close. His dad was always calling him, sometimes they’d argue. P. claimed his father beat his ass every day until he was 14 and turned on him and was the same size. I may be remembering it incorrectly but the beatings ended the day he caught his father’s hand it or something. I recall it was a dramatic defiance proving he was a threat back to his dad finally couldn’t be whipped anymore physically at least, and I believe that to be true.
JW’s bring their babies, infants and toddlers to the Hall. There’s no child-safe or appropriate religious education. If the adults are hearing about the Apocalypse, Lot’s SA by his daughters, and the dangers of everything on the world outside, so are the three year olds five hours a week.
“Children are taught from infancy that their non-Witness schoolmates will be destroyed by God. Convention videos depict graphic destruction scenes. The message is clear: stay obedient or die.” At 5, they go with mommy and daddy door to door and are recognized as “unbaptized publishers .”
https://exjwanalyzer.com/wiki/articles/10-02-baptism-born-in.php
There are countless tales of parents taking kids into the bathrooms or foyer for discipline, meaning a beating. Corporal punishment is okay in the cult and it beats any wiggles out of you. They literally beat the fear of god and dissapointing elders and the others in the congregation into you.
Caleb and Sophia: Since 2012, the organization has produced an animated series featuring child characters Caleb and Sophia. These videos teach children Watchtower-specific values: that birthdays are wrong, that other religions are false, that disobeying parents is displeasing to God, and that Armageddon will destroy people who don’t listen to Jehovah. One controversial video showed Caleb’s mother instructing him to tell a classmate that her same-sex parents would not be accepted by Jehovah. These videos are shown at meetings, used in family worship, and available on the JW.org website and app.
You become afraid and exposed to thought control as soon as your mother is healed enough after giving birth to return to the Kingdom Hall. No Sunday School, no Vacation Bible school, no happy “Jesus Loves Me”, “ Jesus Loved the Little Children”, or “Kumbaya”, just the same as the adult “talk and singing the same songs and watching JW broadcasting cartoons of children eerily singing “Listen, Obey, and be Blessed” and the one that makes me nearly stabby— Kingdom Hellody #137
“Mothers and daughters, sisters, wives, and widows,
“Willingly laboring, glad to do your part.
Modest your bearing, submissive is your heart,
Having God’s approval, may you never fear.
Christian sisters, may Jehovah keep you
Firm in your conviction, your prize is drawing near.”
More happy songs for indoctrinating children!
SONG 61
Forward, You Witnesses!
Firm and determined in this time of the end,
Prepared are God’s servants the good news to defend.
The Devil has fought and opposed them.
With Jehovah, they take their stand against him.(CHORUS)
Then forward, you Witnesses, ever strong of heart!
Rejoice that in God’s work, you too may have a part!
Go tell far and wide that the Paradise is near
And that soon all its blessings will be here.Servants of Jah do not seek a life of ease;
The world and its rulers we do not try to please.
Unspotted at all times remaining,
Our integrity we will keep maintaining.
My wasband grew up in this. It wasn’t until high school that he discovered secular people as associates, while also being a good-appearing witness. No one could compartmentalize better. I literally didn’t ask about his family chats when we were newlyweds. Assumed they were irrelevant and not in the picture since we were married now. I thought married children and their spouse were utterly independent from their families. We were living in a different state and married and he was away from their sphere of influence. I was looking forward to the future and enjoying our freedom. I had freedom. I was not one of them. He was still under their thumb and he was very prone to the fear of dissapointing his dad. I think he thought there would be a generational wealth legacy if he remained close. I have no idea how often they spoke. It was at least a couple times a week. I really didn’t know what was normal, some adult children have close relationships their parents and others polite distances, mutual respectful space to tragically estranged.
One day his father called and some sorta shit was going down with his mother. His sister called him or he called her. Calls were ongoing and in/outgoing. He was broodily pacing. I was clueless and anxious. There was outrage about ex-MIL. I didn’t get the subtext as a non-Witness. Apparently she had gotten married to her dedicated bachelor next door neighbor. She committed JW adultery and was reproved or something. P. was shocked, as was I. I was shocked because I have no idea who she married or that she was dating or anything about this. I didn’t know the guy. He was her condo neighbor and not a JW as well. It came out of the blue to us as we weren’t in GA. P and his mom weren’t super close after we married and then she married months after. She faced some sort of JW judicial committee censure. She was basically persona non gratia suddenly.
She did get her second/fourth (simultaneously!) husband to convert and get baptized and be a JW so she did good by them. I don’t know JW details other than his father was cut off from his scriptural piece of wife ass and she was now a bad JW. The family treated this new marriage and her actions like a great horrible personal attack on them personally so we went NC (no contact) over her remarriage. She claims she wasn’t removed/disfellowshipped but she was also an Elders daughter and sister, gaslights me, and indoctrinated her kids and filled a new seat on the Hall with her new investor man. Maybe scolded privately (reproved). My ex two children. were extremely angry at her. Her parents didn’t even bring her up to us that I know of but once again, no one ever talked to me. He had a cellphone and the family spoke only to him. She vanished from our life for a bit.
As that first married Summer drew close, his dad needed P. constantly. He was always calling. I remember him saying he needed to go back and save the company waste water chemical treatment and chemical sales company. His dad couldn’t do it and his longtime business partner was ill. We needed to move down to GA. We’d live at his dad’s rent free and save up for a house.
There went the cozy weird cottage, my love of our laundry hanging on my laundry line in my yard, the wood siding, the re-dyeing all his black faded tees with Rit dye once, going up to Raleigh for Vampire Games on Duke Campus, my garden with my black Queen of the Night tulips some asshole neighbor lopped the heads off that surrounded our front deck teeny patio. The new owners let cottage go to hell.
I was leaving a place I loved and moving to GA. Atlanta was a major city. I was excited. And so, his father came up with his minivan, and we loaded everything up in the two vans and my Honda Civic and drove the one way trip down to GA.
I-285, aka the Atlanta Perimeter is a black hole. He didn’t warn me we were entering the Witness and his entire family proximity event horizon. We were now surrounded 24/7 everyday and everyone was a JW. I remained hopeful though. Paul was not a Witness at all and his mom wasn’t a problem anymore. We were heading back to big city life. However, Loganville GA in 2000 was the last line of white flight and rural. He’s grown up there and spent his life there and in adjoining Lawrenceville where Larry Flynt got shot and paralyzed, the hometown where half his graduating class five years prior were either pregnant or married. There was something in the water.
Greensboro was a small cool college city with rich history and culture, and I was not prepared for rural life amongst the JWs. We were young, smart, newly married six months, and making a temporary sacrifice for the family business. We’d be fine! We loved each other and there was that troth thing we pledged. There were even cows on the farm next door to his dad’s property I could observe. Sidney ,the best cat ever until the ones I have now, exploded from both ends in the cat carrier. Always trust cats. Feline intuition is wisdom.
We settled in the upstairs master suite. I found the best endo in Atlanta, I met and made friends with the Ford family beef cattle next door. Black Angus are super giant puppies!! Life wasn’t bad or good. There were a few confrontations running errands with his father trying to persuade me JWs were “The Truth”. He lost every attempt. I refused a Bible Study even with a “Jewish sister I’d have a lot in common with”. Our privacy wasn’t respected at his dads. A couple times his dad just walked into our bedroom without knocking catching us either in flagrante delicto or on the cusp of it and he quickly learned to knock after the second or third time doing that, plus P. blessing him out and once throwing something at the door.
Nine months after the wedding, and my last Depo-Provera shot of three +years, my period resumed. We decided to forgo contraception. We wanted a family and it’d expedite our getting our own house too. A Catawba alumni trip to England to study Cathedral Architecture and visit Stonehenge, Bath, Canterbury, Wells, Dover, and Glastonbury was a lovely and generous real honeymoon his father paid for and we’d leave December 28th, 2000 and welcome the New Millennium in London!! New Years Eve Strauss London Symphony Concert tickets! Seeing online friends from the UK Vampire fan club. We had itinerary, tickets, and were so excited. Hotel across from Hyde Park.
Despite butting heads and exchanging words with his dad, Watchtower, Awake!, an entire JW Library in living room, and other JW materials in every room and every surface, and I eye rolled and laughed through them as I read them, especially Awake!, the educational trip of deep meaning to me led by my undergrad advisor, and members of his family on the board going with us as well showed me his dad liked me on his own way, or at least pretended to. I was even writing Laws of thee Wild : Changing Breed Book Three Ananasi for White Wolf. LARP rules for werespiders and by first book credit and professional pay rates. Just because my writing sample was good enough! I had merit and was writing a book and going to England with my husband, all in the first wild year of marriage and a major move, an insulin pump, and multiple lifestyle changes. Another shorter term change of scenery and seeing the Temple of Sulis Minerva with my husband, scones and clotted cream- it was my heaven and the dream honeymoon chasing Cathedral cats through ancient cloisters!
In November, I was constantly nauseated and napping. I took a pregnancy test. We were pregnant on our first wedding anniversary! I don’t recall my actual immediate reaction. We called everyone, even his mother. I was six weeks along. His cousin V. was also pregnant with her second child so we’d have children we would raise together just like P. was raised with his cousins even though V. and I never hung out once or even knew each others phone numbers or where each other lived really- family ties would draw us close! I wasn’t aware of witnesses rules at the time. I assumed all the women were busy!
She was “soft shunning” - didn’t treat me outright like what Watchtower called spiritual “gangrene” that needed to be cut off to protect the spiritual body of God‘s organization on earth. She just kept me a safe distance and wasn’t close to Paul since her marriage to a JW he wasn’t friends with l still had absolute no idea I was seen as a bad influence on their spiritual purity.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are so sensitive and fragile about the risk of becoming exposed to metaphysical cooties/pathogens that they have a cult bubble in which they must be bubblewrapped to keep themselves separated and protected from anything that could possibly “stumble”them. Thought crime! Shun unpeople! Memory hole apostates and the worldly!
While the pregnancy continued along, the fetal sac was smaller than expected and no electrical pulsing (“heartbeat”) was visible yet at my first OB/GYN appt and they put me on prometrium. Jehovah’s Witnesses claim they have “The Best Life Ever”- No, it was my husband, the fetal cells in my uterus that would become our child, and I who were going to have “the best life ever” together. Every domino was set up to perfection and falling into place!
To Be Continued…
#cults #religion #DeathCultAdjacent #SurvivorStories #JehovahsWitnesses #Non-Fiction #essays #womensvoices #feminism
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