minoanmiss (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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agonyaunt2019-10-15 02:25 pm
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2019-10-15 02:25 pm
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Dear Prudence: Mom Threatens To Baptize Child Against Father's Will
Not very long but I'm cutting it anyway. Dear Prudence,
I’m Jewish by conversion, having been raised in a conservative Christian environment. My parents are generally good, even mostly liberal these days. However, my mom has directly told my mother-in-law (also a Christian) that she would have any child of mine baptized against my will. My wife is not pregnant, but this offends me deeply, terrifies me, and honestly is making it difficult to even be sexually intimate with my wife for fear of this. What do I do?
—Religious Kidnapping
You have every right to be angry and offended about this promise to directly contravene your rights as a parent and your Jewish faith. In the short term, you and your wife can talk about how you want to respond to this and how you two can back each other up when your respective families try to butt in, and have more concrete conversations about what sort of religious training, if any, you two would want your future children to receive. I don’t know if your wife is also Jewish or to what degree she supports your conversion, but she should be your first choice for discussion and support right now. In the long term, you can tell your mother that her ability to spend even supervised time with any children of yours will entirely depend on whether she’s able to commit to agreeing not to kidnap and forcibly baptize them. If she can’t do that (or even if you suspect her agreement is superficial and an attempt to get you off her back), then she won’t be given the opportunity to take any children of yours anywhere. The choice is hers.
I’m Jewish by conversion, having been raised in a conservative Christian environment. My parents are generally good, even mostly liberal these days. However, my mom has directly told my mother-in-law (also a Christian) that she would have any child of mine baptized against my will. My wife is not pregnant, but this offends me deeply, terrifies me, and honestly is making it difficult to even be sexually intimate with my wife for fear of this. What do I do?
—Religious Kidnapping
You have every right to be angry and offended about this promise to directly contravene your rights as a parent and your Jewish faith. In the short term, you and your wife can talk about how you want to respond to this and how you two can back each other up when your respective families try to butt in, and have more concrete conversations about what sort of religious training, if any, you two would want your future children to receive. I don’t know if your wife is also Jewish or to what degree she supports your conversion, but she should be your first choice for discussion and support right now. In the long term, you can tell your mother that her ability to spend even supervised time with any children of yours will entirely depend on whether she’s able to commit to agreeing not to kidnap and forcibly baptize them. If she can’t do that (or even if you suspect her agreement is superficial and an attempt to get you off her back), then she won’t be given the opportunity to take any children of yours anywhere. The choice is hers.
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(I'm probably not going to be engage with any kind of comment thread, I'm sorry, this is apparently pushing some buttons for me.)
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I don't think I can say I fully understand because that statement feels... appropriative, but the idea of posthumously stripping someone of the religion and ethnicity and culture for which they lived and died, or even attempting to, makes my guts twist in visceral horror. "Tacky and antisemitic" is exponentially too small a description, I think.
the things people come up with to do. :(