Women 100 Years Ago and Women Today

Loftus 1 How Religion Has Affected My Life I’ve been going to church with my grandparents for as long as I can remember. I’ve always been a part of church related activities. We always said grace before we ate a meal. I said my prayers before I went to bed. I was baptized when I was born. I had my first communion. I was a very religious little kid and I always had God in my life. Of course, I only did all those things because I thought I was supposed to. I just thought it was something that everybody in the world did. But, as I got older I learned that it was all just a part of my religion.
I also learned that not everyone had the same religion as I did. There were many different religions. There were even some people that didn’t have a religion. Once I realized all of those things, I started asking questions. Why was I catholic? Why did I have to go to church every Sunday? Why is it so important? I asked my grandmother these questions and her only response was, “It’s because Jesus died on the cross for us. ” But I still had the question lingering in my head: Why? My mother and father never went to church with us. My mom would drop us off a religion classes but that was about it.
When I asked my mom why she’d never gone to with us she had said, “I don’t believe that you have to go to church every Sunday to show your appreciation for God. ” That really had me thinking, if my mom and dad never went, did I really have to go? I certainly didn’t like sitting in the cold for an hour listening to people singing terribly and other people talking about things I never understood. Always standing up and sitting down every couple of Loftus 2 minutes. It got very old, very fast. By the time I was a teenager, I got really tired of the same old thing.

That’s when it all started. At the age of thirteen all I wanted to do was hang out with my friends. They weren’t the best of people but they accepted me and that’s all I cared about. I started being more like them. Wearing all black, doing my make up really heavily, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, experimenting with drugs. I turned into the complete antithesis of the girl I was when I was younger. My family definitely started to notice. My mom and dad said it was just a phase but my grandmother thought I was starting to become a “devil worshiper”. She orced me to go to church with them. I was forced to go to religion class. I got the you-need-Jesus-in-your-life talk every time I was around my grandma. That is when I really started to resent everything that had to do with my religion. My grandmother had pushed me to my breaking point. I didn’t want anything to do with God or Jesus. When asked, I always told people I didn’t have a religion. I was against it. I refused to go to church or religion class. I stopped saying grace before I ate. I stopped saying prayers before I went to sleep. I even stopped believing there was a God.
This caused a lot of tension between my grandmother and I. We never saw eye to eye on anything. We were always arguing over something. She always told me that she never thought she’d have a granddaughter like me. She expected me to be more of a lady. I couldn’t stand being around her. I didn’t tell her anything. She had forced religion on me to the point that I didn’t want to have a religion anymore. It even caused me to think I hated her. You could only imagine how much harder it got once my mom lost our house and we had to move into my grandparent’s house.
I got so angry when my mom told me the news. All I wanted to do was scream. The thought of having to see my grandma every single day was terrifying. My life had gotten significantly more tough Loftus 3 at that point. When we moved in, I stayed in my room all the time. If I wasn’t in my room, I was either at school or out with my friends. When dinner was ready I ate with my head down. Not speaking to or looking at anyone. My mom caught on real quickly. I remember one night she pulled me into her bedroom after dinner and asked me why I was acting so strangely.
I poured my heart out and told her everything I was going through. She told me, “You need to stop hating your grandmother. She is getting older and her health is declining. She won’t be here one day and you’re going to regret not having a good relationship with her. You don’t have to go to church every Sunday. You don’t even need to go to religion class. You just need to respect the fact that your grandmother is just leading you by example. That’s how she was raised. So, you need to stop getting angry at her and you need to start building a better relationship with her. That is the night that things got better. Every time I want to get angry with my grandma I remember what my mom told me and I haven’t gotten angry with her since. I never got my faith back and there are still some things I can’t tell my grandmother due to her being so religious. I would love to tell her that I’m engaged but, I can’t because I’m a homosexual and I’m sure she’d disown me. But despite that, my grandmother and I are now on good terms. We talk on the phone more often since I moved away and I plan on visiting her whenever I make my trips back home.