When I was in a relationship with Bub’s father, one of the things that his paternal grandmother did after the birth of our child was rush me into filling out forms for their church’s religious conversion classes without giving me a chance to read those forms. This was entirely intentional on her part, and meticulously planned out. She even went so far as to make sure that I put down her own phone number rather than my own, wanting to hide her attempt at converting me by force from my own family, who would not have been supportive of her attempts to do so. It wasn’t until several months later that the start of these classes eventually rolled around, and I decided that as long as I had to sit through them, I wasn’t going to follow any of the tenets of their religion — I would “fake it until I made it”, or fake it until it became so apparent that I got dropped from of the classes because I was not a good candidate for them or conversion into their church. I reasoned that the latter was statistically more likely to happen. I wasn’t going to change myself to appease a single one of them, and I wasn’t going to allow them to forcibly indoctrinate me so that they could baptize our child while he was an infant, because that was how Bub’s paternal grandmother exerted the level of control that she did over all of her children… even though all of them were adults. I guessed they would learn.

It took sitting through all of one class for me to out myself as a long-time non-believer. I was impressed.

With that realization also came the realization that as long as I was the staunch non-believer that I was, his church would not baptize our child — not only was my consent required as the custodial parent (and it made certain that it would not be given), but his church would also make it clear that they did not feel comfortable baptizing our son with there being no assurance that he would be raised in the faith because of the… level of disbelief that I expressed and lived my life by. Soon after this, Bub’s father and extended paternal family members stopped being present in his life. I figured that this would happen. I was not surprised by any of it.

As the years went on, I became increasingly more hostile toward religions that forced their doctrine and ideology on children as a result of that. I spoke out more about how the practice of doing so did not sit well with me and how I found it abusive. To this day, I actually continue to find it abhorrent and abusive. So Bub’s paternal family can thank themselves for that by attempting to shotgun me through their church’s religious conversion classes without being honest about me about the classes that I was signing up for (and Bub’s paternal grandmother was not honest about what those classes actually were), and attempting to incite enough fear in me that I would consent to allow our son to be baptized into their faith. Having been a non-believer for as many decades as I can remember, having devout believers attempt to evangelize to me or proselytize their beliefs on me and mine has never been something that has sat well with me, and her attempts to do so only further solidified my own lack of belief in any higher power or supernatural deity.