Breaking Free by Rachel Jeffs

Breaking Free by Rachel Jeffs

Author:Rachel Jeffs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-11-14T05:00:00+00:00


The next few weeks were happy ones for me; I spent lots of time with my other sisters, and gossiped and laughed late into the night. Mother Annette came into our room one night, acting like she was sleepwalking. She held her hands out in front of her and walked in an unstable, crazy manner, just to make the girls scream. Then she laughed and said, “You girls go to bed!”

One day I was taking a walk with Angela when we ran into Tina Steed, an old friend of mine, on a dirt road. Tina showed off her two beautiful children, a boy around two years old and a baby daughter. She told me that when her son was just a few weeks old, Father had told her she was unworthy and made her leave the lands of refuge to repent, leaving her baby behind. How could he separate a tiny, helpless baby from his mother like that? Father had let her return after her son was a year old.

All of Father’s family took time out of their days to come see me. I had missed them all so much. I spent most of my time sewing with Teresa and Josie. Josie had kept most of Mother’s belongings, so we went through it all together. Josie wanted me to take a lot of it, but the memory of Mother was still hard on me because of all that she’d gone through with her illness and being separated from her children. It hurt too much to think about it, so I didn’t want to take anything that would remind me.

Even though Teresa was married, once she went back to live in Father’s house, everyone treated her like a child. She wasn’t allowed to make her own choices or be responsible for herself. Both she and Angela still loved Ray, and they missed him. Maryanne missed him some, but had had a lot of struggles with jealousy and didn’t know if she wanted to go back to him. In fact, her struggle with jealousy over Ray’s spending time with his other wives was the reason Father had sent him away. It was all a big mess.

I got to spend time with my brothers during their mealtimes too. They were required to eat downstairs, away from Father’s wives and daughters, so that they would not be tempted to look at or like the girls. The boys shared bedrooms down one hall, and the girls down another, and each group was prohibited from entering the other’s area. Married sisters were allowed to talk to the brothers as long as we didn’t get caught doing it too often.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.