Tia Levings thought she was a ‘trad wife’. When her daughter died, she realised she was in a cult.
Published By admin with Comments 0
When Tia Levings was a teenage girl, she was preparing to serve a husband she hadn’t even met yet.
Levings’ only goal was to be a ‘trad wife’. Really, it was her only option in the eyes of her Christian Fundamentalist family. It was an environment where marriage was not a partnership, but a contract between a domineering man and a subservient woman who made no choices for herself.
“Dating was more like a job audition. I wanted to prove I could be a good wife and mother,” she tells Mamamia’s No Filter podcast this week.
Levings’ family wasn’t always extremely conservative. When she was 10, they moved to Jacksonville in Florida, as her parents wanted to provide their kids with a “protected childhood”. The message in Jacksonville was that the best way to raise your kids was to join the biggest church in town.
“It was a Southern Baptist mega church,” notes Levings. “I was there six days a week, and all the women there were growing to prepare to be Christian wives and mothers essentially. Then by the age of 19, I did exactly that.”
In her late teens, Levings married a man. She says he was charming, but quite erratic. He also had an obsession with theology.
“We were engaged four weeks after meeting. He had decided that I was the girl who he wanted to marry. And I was in pursuit of a husband at the that time, so I was primed and ready to receive whoever said they were God’s will for my life,” Levings tells No Filter.
Content retrieved from: https://www.mamamia.com.au/tia-levings-story/.
