When I think back to being Amish and all that has transpired in my life I don’t mind telling you I was born Amish and lived it the first 30 years of my life. Where I hesitate is to keep on talking about that life because so MANY folks who have never lived the life think the Amish lifestyle is ideal and to be patterned after.
I agree and disagree.
I agree, the Amish lifestyle leaves many of us wanting. It appears to be so simple and organic. I wish I knew no different. Soft spoken, reserved, seemingly untouched by the outside world. It all looks so good and clean.
The reality that I lived is that not all was simple or organic. Most of what I knew and lived was surrounded by conforming to what the “minister’s bench” dictated. It was hard stuff for a free heart such as myself. I will try to explain some of my experiences here in this post, but I want to put a disclaimer out there. I do NOT hate the Amish and I am NOT out to make them look bad. I only write this because it was/is my experience.
My parents sent my brother and I to a public school. Our sister didn’t come until we were both out of school, and she also attended public school, but we didn’t grow up together. She was a little over a year old when I got married.
In school and in our neighborhood we rubbed shoulders with the “English” kids and our best friends were English. We moved several times and in each neighborhood we had English neighbors so we almost spoke English before we spoke Pennsylvania Dutch. Not really, but speaking English came natural for both my brother and I.
When I was 15 years old I went to church services with my best friend. Church was at her cousin’s house and she invited me to go with her for the day. At that church service is where my husband first saw me. I was the stranger in their church and everyone there knew my name and who I was with, but everyone was a stranger to me, so I didn’t see one particular fellow, I saw many of them and they all looked the same to me. My husband didn’t forget me and when I turned 16 he came calling and we started dating. We dated off and on for nine months before he finally asked me to be his girlfriend. There is a reason why it took him so long…but it is too long to put here on this post.
While dating we went out Saturday nights with his buddies and we “partied”. Us Amish kids would get together at someones house or barn and drink beer, smoke, listen to music really loud and just be loud. It was not a good thing, but it was about the only thing to do. That and most Saturday nights there were 2 or 3 fellows and me in one car, if the others didn’t have dates we would go around to other girl’s houses and try to pick up dates for the guys who were dateless or they would find a girl at a party. Yes, it is hard to imagine and explain. I’m not telling you this because I am proud of the things I’ve done. We always had transportation of some sort, someone had a car or cars and we would pile in like a bunch of sardines and we would go.
There were moments when I would think, “My English friend’s boyfriend is taking her out to eat and to a movie, I wish I could be dating that way.” But it was a fleeting thought and I would push it back and go on as I was taught to do. It was just the way of the Amish kids I grew up with. My husband slept in my bed with me before we were married. The Amish call it “bed courtship”. I may have to do a post about that one day, but tonight, I want to move on from that.
When I was 19 years old we got married and soon after I was pregnant with our first child. I was sicker than a dog and really had a miserable pregnancy. It wasn’t a high risk pregnancy, I just don’t do pregnant very well. We had our baby three weeks early on a hot, sweaty August day. We had a son, and he was the love of our lives. A little over a year later I became pregnant again, but we lost that baby. It was hard to accept, but we moved on. Awhile later I became pregnant again and we had our little girl arrive ten days early and we were so happy. I wanted a girl so much and there she was, my little girl. Again, this pregnancy was the same, I was sick the whole time and just didn’t do pregnancy very well.
After we brought her home from the hospital, though, not all went so well for me. I became so depressed. In a nutshell, I had postpartum depression and it was a hellish nightmare. Today, when I look back, I wish..I WISH…I would be able to step into that young woman’s life and help her out of her funk.
My depression lasted for years. I was in a rage half the time….nothing was right in my life…and there were times I would remember a past that was not so great. You see, I was a statistic, I was sexually abused for years by some family members and it messed with me intensely. I walked a very dark journey of misery and despair for a very long time.
In 1994 my father in law passed away, and that Fall one of my English friends told me in great detail about how she nearly committed suicide one night. It haunted me and I fell into such depression that I was now suicidal. I won’t go into too deep of details, but I will say I ended up in counseling and that helped, but not very much at first. During this time I had this question burning in my mind, “Who is God and what does he mean to me?”
I was a mess, a hot mess. Paranoid, alone, and one night I felt my mind slipping. I didn’t know what it meant to lose one’s mind until that night and then I knew you really could lose your mind and I knew what it felt like. I was so afraid.
Well, from there I had no place to go but up out of that hellish pit of depression or to shoot myself. I’m so serious when I write that. And one day when I was alone at home in my paranoia I knelt down in my living room and I prayed….and cried and I asked God to take over. I told him all my grief and I asked him to be Lord of my life. I wish…so much…that I could tell you every word I prayed, but what I didn’t pray in an audible voice, I know my spirit was praying for me that day and I know that God heard me and I KNOW I was saved out of the torment THAT day. It was a cold, dreary day in February or March of 1995 and when I got up off my knees I felt the change in my soul. It was at this point that I began to understand who God was and what he meant to me.
Does that mean things got better right away? No, they didn’t. My mind was so messed up, I was finally remembering the abuse and I was so ashamed and embarrassed and angry and grieving the loss of my youth and all the implications it had on my life today. I had years of wrong to somehow make right in my mind. You know?
Two years to the month of falling into my deepest depression I was able to pick up the phone, dial the numbers of my abusers and extend forgiveness to them through the phone.
God has been so, SO good to me. He has applied his grace to my mind and memories and has restored me and renewed my heart. I still have to work on my thoughts and how I look at folks. I still don’t trust everyone, but I trust more people today than I ever have before. I wish I were able to wipe every bad memory out of my husband and children’s minds. This is the one thing that can haunt me if I let it. I feel I was the worst mama on so many levels and I wish my children would never have had to suffer through some of the worst times. I wish I could have had a better handle of things when they were babies. I wish so many things…..
The reason we left the Amish is simple. It is not because we wanted a car and be more worldly as the Amish judged us to be. Things were said about us that was mean and hurtful, we found out that a family member told one of our friends that I am going to divorce my husband. They judged, they ridiculed and they shunned us. We lost everyone. Family and friends alike. And still they didn’t know the truth. We left the Amish because in my deepest despair when I knelt and prayed that one day, I actually became born again. I was changed and I knew it, and I knew that I had to be in a church that preached so I could understand and grow from it. I wanted to grow in Christ and I wanted to get better. Instinctively, I knew if I could get it together spiritually that I would make it, but I needed teachings and the Amish church did not teach enough, they honed in on what you can and can’t do, they dictated and they made us conform.
When I say that – I mean this…the Amish church has two communion services each year and there is a counsel meeting service two weeks before those communion services. At counsel meeting they remind you of the Amish rules, what we can and can’t do, what is allowed and not allowed. At the end of counsel meeting each member has to then give a testimony and agree to the rules. If for some reason you miss three communions in a row you are then excommunicated. Well, when I became born again I also knew that lying was wrong and I knew if I attended the counsel meeting that I would have to lie in order to attend communion services. There were things that I did not agree with, but had always before conformed, agreed and not rocked the boat. Now, however, I had a dilemma, because I wasn’t going to lie, but if I didn’t attend and agree in counsel meeting, then I couldn’t go to communion and if I missed three communions in a row, I was out.
Also, my husband had talked with his mother about my depression and the sexual abuse I had endured as a child and she told him that one of his aunts had been abused and after she was married she had gone to her Bishop and confessed this sin and she then went in front of her church and confessed and after doing so she felt better about everything. Knowing this sent me into a panic because if anyone had wanted to push the sexual abuse off as my sin I WOULD have lost my mind right there. (I do know now, that the Amish church probably would not have made me confess such a sin, because they aren’t completely barbaric, but at the time when my mother in law had told my husband all this, I was not thinking clearly.)
That Spring I told my husband that I couldn’t go along to counsel meeting because I couldn’t lie. Because of my fragile state of mind he didn’t argue with me and went by himself. I had also told him I wished we could go to a different church. His first reaction was that he could never do such a thing to his mother, but by the time communion services had rolled around two weeks later he came to me and said he wasn’t going and that he would go to a different church with me. Believe me, this is all very much in a “nutshell”. The story is very, very long and detailed.
My husband became born again a few months later and Mennonite folks helped us along for awhile getting us to church services. In the meantime we purchased a car and my husband got his drivers license…then I followed and we started to live life as a Mennonite family. More hurts and bumps came along the Mennonite Highway of life…and we struggled…a lot.
We left the Amish in the Spring of 1995 and we have come a very long way. Very long way. We were shunned for three years and those years were awful. When we were face to face with our family we were so uncomfortable because we knew and felt the judgment they placed on us. When we first left we had visitors and letters from our family and it was not good. It was all guilt and accusations thrown at us. It was their way of getting us to turn away from the gates of hell. Some of the things those letters carried were crazy. We threw them all away. Wanted none of it in our home. Some of the conversations accusations burned a hole right through our hearts. It crushed our spirit. I remember my husband coming home from work one night and going to our bedroom, throwing himself across our bed and just sobbed. A family member had called him that day at work and hammered him for 45 minutes. It was hard, hard stuff.
Life has moved on and we have grown and gained a thick skin. After three years of being shunned the Amish bishop told his congregation they no longer had to shun us, but if someone still wanted to they could do so. Knowing that messed with us for a long while. It can almost make you bitter and in fact we were bitter about things for a long while. There were whole spans of time when I wanted to pack up our family and move away, far away and never return to Amish country. I felt if I was literally out of their sight, maybe their disdain for what I had done would be forgotten…they would forget me and and move on to torment another person, to talk about them and come to judgments that were wrong about someone else.
But we didn’t move, we stayed, we endured, we tried to give our children as much access to our families as we could, feeling responsible to let them know their family and have a relationship with them even if things would probably never be the same for us. It was sacrifice and love…it was the only way for us to live. And it was God, every day, helping us endure and try to find a new normal to life.
Things are better today. A few years ago I started to realize that if I lived my life to please others, to conform to who they think I should be I would never be happy and I would never be able to move forward in doing what I felt God was calling me to do with my life. To set an example, to help those who oppose themselves and who are struggling through life. God wants my life to be a testimony to others who are struggling through hard things. He wants me to be free to be who he wants me to be, not who and how others want me to be. A few years ago I quit wearing a head covering and then I would still wear it around the Amish because I was afraid of them, but when I realized to be free I had to not care about what they thought of me, was the day I quit wearing my covering all together. I see the Amish glance at the back of my head sometimes to check and see if I’m wearing anything on my head. I really don’t care anymore, if they must look to satisfy something inside of themselves, that is their issue, not mine. I know that I have to have a relationship with God, I have to care what he thinks of me and wants from me, I canNOT care what everyone else wants me to be and do.
I live in freedom today. I enjoy things that I never could before. I love LOVE music. I can’t get enough, I was starved for music when I was an Amish housewife. Being able to listen to music is such a luxury and blessing, still. God speaks to me through music. I can’t carry a tune in a very large bucket, but I can hear it and that is enough. I am OK with not having everyone be my best friend, if I am not measuring up to how you want me to be, it is OK with me if you distance yourself from me. I prefer we keep our distance than we fight. I find comfort in words. Depending how they are put together they either build up or tear down a person. I enjoy theater, Broadway shows and movies. I enjoy walking through a museum and looking at the art and feeling it deep inside. I enjoy driving a car, it is still a luxury for me to drive down the road and know I’m in control of where this vehicle is going and to feel the wind in my hair in the summer is the best and feels so free. I also live in freedom from rage and shame and guilt. Sometimes things haunt me a little bit and I feel it is the evil one trying to cause me to stumble and I breathe a prayer and ask God to be near me and make the evil one go.
We do have our family back for the most part. Things will never be the same. In some ways I feel like things are better, in others, not so much. I see stirrings among the Amish…some of them are starting to see that they have to teach their folks more and be less dictating. I don’t know if they will ever not dictate and make folks conform, but I hope they all find a way to live more in freedom and along with what God’s will is for their lives, than what the will is of those sitting on the “minister’s bench”.
I will say this again….please don’t think I hate the Amish. I don’t. It is a part of my story and quite a few folks have been asking me why we left the Amish. I felt like I had to give you some back story so you can understand where we have been and where we are today. I still battle with depression in the Winter time. I am vitamin D deficient, we can never seem to build it up in my system. So, I know that part of the mild depression has more to do with my body than my mind. Recently my husband turned to me and said, “You know, you are never in a bad mood.” I really am happy most of the time. Or should I say, I really am content most of the time…and contentment brings happiness. There is only about one area in my life that I am unhappy with and confused about. I know God is in control of my life and he has a plan for me and a reason he has me walking through those murky waters at the moment. I believe all of life is a lesson. Sometimes you are learning the lesson and sometimes you are teaching the lesson. My hope and prayer is that I would live in God’s will for my life. I try not to have much of an agenda for myself and somehow things seem to come together and it all makes some sort of sense in the end.
I even found a way to make sense of the sexual abuse…Joseph in the Bible gave me a clue…when his brothers had so mistreated him and they were found out…Joseph extended grace and mercy to his brothers and said to them, “I understand why you did what you did to me, you sold me into slavery because you hated me, you were jealous of me and meant evil on my life, but you see, God meant it for good, he knew that my life had a purpose and he used me to save many folks…even you my brothers, because of my planning and leadership, you will eat and live, because I love you, I forgive you now go get my father.” In the same way, I feel a purpose on my life…a calling..I know what I am free from and of, and I am able to extend a hand to those who have been abused and love them right where they are at. I pray each day that I am a vessel for which God will use however he so chooses. My life is not perfect, but I am content.
I have a Facebook page, you can direct comments and questions there, if you are unable to comment here. I sort of have a feeling this post is going to raise a couple questions, and I look forward to answering any questions you may have.
Looking in my Rearview Mirror 