“She said you were doing great,” he sighed. “I was furious.”
My mother tells people I’m doing great because she knows that if she admits she shuns her only daughter, she’ll sound like a monster. My buddy, a family acquaintance and self-appointed covert agent, will occasionally send me updates from back home. Indignant, he recounts conversations with my parents whose voices I haven’t heard in years. Somewhere in the middle of our phone call, I assure him there’s no need to feel sorry for me. My mother isn’t a monster—she’s just a liar.
My mother needs to lie. Image is everything to Jehovah’s Witnesses, the little-known early pioneers of cancel culture and tea-spilling. For someone of my mother’s caliber and popularity, having an apostate child translates to having no child at all. My mother is a second-generation Jehovah’s Witness who strolled the Coney Island boardwalk as a young woman. She weathered sweaty summers at Yankee Stadium and saw a hooker murdered in Times Square. My mother rose from the swamp of East Coast derelicts to become a spiritual pillar in the South, the wife of a respected elder and mother to two God-fearing children, until one of those children went horribly astray. My mother needs to lie to others so everything appears copacetic. But, she also needs to lie to herself, because the truth would destroy her.
Shunning kills. Without a support system, Jehovah’s Witnesses who are excommunicated and ignored by their family have literally jumped off bridges. “Remember that family with the bipolar daughter who got disfellowshipped?” My hometown pal pointed his index and middle fingers to his temple. “Pulled her car off the road, and pop.” If they don’t take their own life, they’re manipulated back into the fold through a humiliating judicial process just so they can speak to their family again. After their tax-exempt status was yanked by the Norwegian court in early 2024, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have attempted to backpedal on their inhumane shunning policy, allowing the faithful to extend a brief “hello” to family members who were previously considered subhuman. Some would call this a win. More often, shunning backfires.
Truthfully, I’d have more respect for my parents if they took a dump on my front porch and owned their position. Beth is apostate. We reject her. But, they know shunning is harmful, which is why they skirt the question. Their canned response to my whereabouts is the equivalent of shipping off your knocked-up-and-unwed daughter to a maternity home in 1950s America. When I revoked my membership from the Organization nearly eight years ago, I have no doubt my parents believed their radio silence would humble me back into submission. But, I’m not going back, and their shunning is hurting them more than it hurts me.
I wish my parents were free. I wish they weren’t under the influence of a vile cabal of pedophilic frauds. My parents know I’m alive and well, and this pains them, because it doesn’t confirm their bias. It pains them to navigate basic pleasantries like How’s Beth? because it’s a pesky reminder that I’m not just going away. My mother doesn’t shun me because she suspects I’m evil—she shuns me because she suspects I could be on to something. Once you survive a transit strike and spot a limb floating in the Hudson, you definitely weren’t born yesterday.