Tag: family

I Forgot I Had a Sister-in-Law

photo courtesy Bethany Leger

This isn’t about my sister-in-law. It’s also not click-bait. Until a month ago, I literally forgot she existed.

The last time I saw her, she was wearing a wedding dress and exchanging vows with my brother. That was almost ten years ago. They settled on a small reception at a friend’s house. Guests drank champagne in a living room that looked like it was decorated by Laura Ashley herself, while I excused myself to sneak shots of tequila I had stashed in the fridge behind a fruit tray. They cut the cake (I didn’t eat it.) The majority of the time I hid in the kitchen, pacing in front of the fridge like I was guarding a moat. “Is something wrong with you?” my mother asked under her breath, not so much out of concern, but irritation. “I’m just tired.” Only, I had a sneaking suspicion this was the last time I would see any of them ever again.

Being raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, I was very lonely. That’s not the case for everyone. Some come from large families. Even if they, too, are indoctrinated from birth, they still have siblings to play with. They have cousins in the neighborhood, and Grandma lives two blocks down. My father’s side of the family were “believers”, but may as well have not existed. They lived a few hours away in West Texas and made their one token visit in the eighties (frankly, I think it was an aberration.) My mother’s family were New Yorkers, none of them Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the ones who were lived on the other side of the Atlantic and talked shit about us in German at the dinner table. 

What does this have to do with my sister-in-law? I had decades of practice detaching myself from people. As one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, I was taught to avoid my classmates, coworkers, and yes, even blood relatives who didn’t “serve Jehovah.” That left me with a small pool of forced associates at the Kingdom Hall, and an estranged brother whose neck I would hug for the last time on his wedding day. I don’t blame him. It couldn’t have been easy being a 16 year-old guy with a sister in kindergarten. The age gap didn’t help, but the Jehovah’s Witnesses managed to drive the final wedge between us, removing what little semblance of normalcy I had always longed for.

My hunch was correct. I never saw them again, because I flew back to North Carolina, realized I was in a cult, and left shortly after. This is not what I want. No one wants this. But these are the rules: you leave, you’re dead. My brother’s wedding day was the last time I saw my mother, eyes bloodshot from orchestrating the day’s festivities, but relieved the wet blanket was going. I said goodbye to my father, stomach rotund and content. And, I said my final goodbye to my sister-in-law, beaming and beautiful on her big day. I can’t save her now. 

Happy “Beth” Day: Eating Birthday Cake with a Clean Conscience

Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays because a long, long time ago, a drunk, horny King Herod dumped his wife, shacked up with his sister-in-law, requested his stepdaughter Salome do a creepy little shimmy for his birthday, then told her she could have anything she wanted. Apparently, the sadistic little shit and her mother ordered John the Baptist’s head on a party tray. So, considering the astronomical rate of beheadings that occur at birthday parties nowadays, Jehovah’s Witnesses naturally want to distance themselves from such revelry.

My parents secretly celebrated my birthday for years. On the morning of September twenty-first, my bedroom door would crack open, my mother’s grin peeking through the doorframe like Jack Nicholson’s stunt double: “Guess who’s one year older today?” For the record, I appreciate the effort. I knew birthdays were against the rules, and they were trying to find a way to celebrate their daughter in a way that still let them sleep at night. They came up with a clever solution: on my seventeenth birthday, my mother pulled an ice cream cake out of the freezer with the following words swirled across the top in cursive frosting: Happy Beth Day!

Yes, we acknowledged the absurdity of pretending we weren’t being rebellious—or, maybe we weren’t? It didn’t say “Happy Birthday” we reasoned, blue frosting smeared on our red hands. I find this even more humorous since my birthday fell on a Sunday that year; we had just returned from the meeting, Jehovah’s Witnesses’ version of church services. We spent two hours denouncing anything associated with mainstream society, then we went home and stuffed our faces with Baskin Robbins.

Coincidentally, my twenty-fourth birthday also fell on a meeting night. Afterwards, I made the mistake of mentioning it was my birthday to my brother’s then-girlfriend who was not a Jehovah’s Witness and was dumbfounded that I wasn’t out getting wasted. She promptly whisked me away to a dive bar where I was given a birthday girl shout-out and handed a flight of Buttery Nipples. It was awkward—but so is convincing yourself (and trying to convince others) that you’re not in a cult. If I was going to hang out with the heathens and consume three to six ounces of a smutty beverage, why bother with the whole religious act? Why walk the line? And why did my parents, two grown people, need to commit culinary subterfuge to celebrate the birth of their own child?

A lot of my Jehovah’s Witness peers never had the chance to celebrate their birthday growing up. Their parents gave them chili-bowl haircuts and beat the shit out of them. You had it good, they say. Your parents were awesome. Whether it was sneaking me a cake, a trip to the movies, or a wink-wink on my special day, my parents were awesome for pushing back—so far as I was willing to not turn them in.