Posted by:
shannon
(
)
Date: September 29, 2010 10:58AM
Before we finally resigned under threat of excommunication by the Bishop.
We had quietly gone inactive and rejoined the Catholic Church. I had all my kids re-baptized. The charge against me was apostacy. Interestingly enough, my Jack Mormon husband was not threatened, even though he attended Mass regularly with us (whole 'nother story there).
I had three teen girls in Young Women at that time. To try and reactivate us, The YW leaders and ALL of the girls would EACH make a hand-written/colored card or letter to EACH of my girls during their Wed. nite meetings. That's a letter from every single YW and every single leader X 3!! A couple of days later, when I'd open the mailbox, cards and letters would literally fall on the ground.
I made repeated requests to the Bishop and auxilliary leaders to put us on the "no contact list." But we continued to receive multiple, unannounced visits at our door, baked treats on the doorstep, incessecent phone calls (I was so traumatized by the ringing of the house phone that I refused to answer it for a year), letters/cards in the mail, emails, and random emotional chance encounters in public. One lady hugged me and actually broke down CRYING at the middle school open house! We received giant banners from the Young Women, signed by everybody and expressing how much they loved and missed us.
In one 2-week period, I counted the Mormon contacts we received. I got to 30 before I gave up and quit counting.
Yes, we were STALKED. Yes, we were traumatized.
We had simply tried to sneak away peacefully, under the radar, without any fanfare . . . but the Mormons wouldn't let us.
Finally, when my little boy received a birthday card with a long, rambling, inappropriate note from some stalkerish man, I blew! (We hadn't been in church for more than a year). I called the Bishop at home and told him I was going to take legal action and go to the media if he didn't call off his people and stop harassing us. I told him we were CATHOLIC now and would never be returning to the LDS church.
He told me to remove my name from the rolls. I said we weren't ready to take that step because my TBM FIL was dying, and my husband didn't want to hurt his parents. They are "Mormon Royalty", and we were certain that our resignation would get back to them somehow. Why bust up their entire "eternal family" at the hour of FIL's death when it was such a comfort to both him and my MIL??? What good could that possibly do? It would just inflict unecessary, terrible emotional pain. For what?
Bish didn't care for my explanation. He was just tired of trying to reign in the do-gooders from his ward who kept trying to bring us back into the fold. So he told me I had 2 weeks to resign or he was going to convene a church court for my apostacy.
Bastard.
One of my children was a mentally handicapped YW adopted from Russia. She was extremely disturbed and confused by all of the drama. One late Saturday night, during yet another confrontation call from the Bishop to my husband ("Why can't you reign your wife in?"}, my daughter became so upset that she ran away. Hours later, the police picked her up. She was out of her mind hysterical, and a danger to herself, so the cops handcuffed her and transported DD to the nearest psych ward for 3 days.
I HATE the Mormon Church and everything about it.
Yes, they are stalkers.
The missionaries still hit us up on a regular basis, no matter what I do. And I do some funny things - like slip 'em the Sure Sign of the Nail and chant the "Health in the Naval" ditty.
I hate missionaries, too. I'm sorry to all who have served and all who have children on missions. I will *never* be nice to them - they have disrupted my family beyond repair - literally (again, story for another time). The last companionship that came by recently acted like they were just "tracting out" the neighborhood. Bullshit. They know exactly who we are and they are trying to get to my husband (a Jack Mormon). Now DH's *mother* is dying so he still won't resign. And that's his choice - I don't push it.
I tried to locate the Mission President's phone number last week but got nowhere. I need him to call off his goons. If anyone knows a way to track it down - we are in Jacksonville, Florida.
So, yeah, I HATE what the church has done to our family. Their love-bombing backfired on them big time. NONE of my children will ever go near a Mormon church again in this lifetime. They've seen the damage it has done. And they've told all their friends, too, even keeping one guy from taking the missionary discussions and converting! The kind of PR my kids spread counteracts ANY hokey "I'm a Mormon" campaign on our local airwaves.
So LDS, Inc. pretty much shot themselves in the foot with us. There may have been a chance of "redeeming" some of my kids as they got older and could make their own decisions - they were pretty well indoctrinated. But now?
Hell. and. no.
That's why I post on RfM. Because of what The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did to my family. (And this is just the short version).
/Rant over/
;o)
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/29/2010 03:38PM by shannon.