Room

I recently watched a move called “Room” that was about a woman that had been abducted for seven years. She was confined to a storage shed in a man’s back yard that had a steel door with a security code and no windows, only a tiny skylight at the top of a tall ceiling. In the course of her abduction she had a child by her abductor and for five years she raised this child in the only world that it knew. She created a world within those walls that was all the child was to know. As the story progressed a moment presented itself where the child provided a means of escape and then it had to find a way to explain how to find its mother. Yet even then the story was not over, how do you cope never knowing anything but four walls of a ten by ten room? Or how as an adult do you deal with being kept as a sex slave with a child for seven years? All these issues came to bear as the story unfolded and as I watched I found myself welling with emotion at different moments as I could see parallels from events in my own life and the lives of so many others.

You see my parents were abducted not by a person but by a cult. It confined them to a room of sorts that limited their life in every way. Stopped them from seeking opportunities, higher education, insurance, retirement, building a future, but instead, living as if the end of the world was coming tomorrow, and all they had to do was hold out for one more day and sell books for one of the largest publishing companies in the world. If they would do that, then their abductor would not kill them. So their confinement continued, for not just seven years, but for over sixty years, I was born into it, and held within the same bonds for forty-three years of my life and even in the process of doing the same confinement to my children. But one day I had a moment that changed my life and I realized that I had to seek my freedom. It was terrifying to be out of the safe place and with everything that I knew so well. There was a moment in the movie when the child looked out a window for the first time; he asked if it was real? There were moments when I felt the same way as I began to see things that I had never seen before and had to accept that I had been blinded from so many realities. 

Perhaps a moment that touched me the most was when he first escaped he desperately cried for his mother. The police were able to put things together and track him back to her. He was locked in the back of a police car and as he looked out he could see his mother bust through the gate and come running to grab him into her arms. This was so emotional for me, for when I escaped the thing I wanted most after helping my kids and spouse to escape was to see my mom and dad. I wanted them to be free, to come bursting through the gate and grab me up in their arms and hold me, to reassure me that I was loved, their blood and would always be the most important thing to them. 

Yet I was left to feel like a child in the back of the cop car whose mother never showed up, who stayed in the room and preferred her abductor to being with her child. Feelings like that are hard to sort out and yet that is what thousands of JW children are forced to do each day as their parents selfishly choose book sales over their children and stay in their safe place. 

There were other thoughts in that the mother had a hard time adjusting to life outside and attempted to take her life. She had to go away into treatment for a time in order to get better while her son was taken care of by her mother. Often we have emotional pain when leaving a way of life we have known. It is funny fifteen years out I sometimes wake up with a Kingdom song in my head like it was yesterday. You will always be a JW to some extent, as you can never block out the time you spent in the ‘room’. But you have to develop coping skills to deal with the big world outside and how to have relationships with real people, how to take responsibility for your actions, to learn to think for yourself, and most importantly how to take care of yourself. To develop those skills you may need assistance or some really good books, but whatever the process seek that assistance as part of your journey to healing and finding normalcy. 

Toward the end of the film the boy asked to go back to visit the room. His mom took him back and his first comment was, “Did it shrink?” After walking around and recalling a couple memories his mom said, “Are you ready to go? The boy said, “Yea, goodbye room.” They walked away never to return. To me it seemed a type of closure, a final farewell to something that was such an integral part of their lives that seemed so large and now finally could be seen as so small and insignificant. It is much like after many years when you go back to a meeting of Jehovah’s Witnesses, they seem so limited, confined, and sad. You look at them and try to be kind but you know and see things they cannot even comprehend. 

That is a good thing because you are free, you are on your journey, you are living a real life, and while there are many things you may not know, there is one you know for certain, you will never ever spend one day in their room…