Growing Up Amish
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Amish No More !
One woman’s difficult decision to leave the Amish to live in the modern world
“The Puzzles of Amish Life,” by Donald B. Kraybill
Published December 14, 1995
Editorial Note: Anna Dee Olson was not married when this article was written.
Hence the name Anna Miller
Posing in front of a china hutch, she is dressed in the traditional bonnet and black dress. On her face is a smile of defiance, provoked by the fact that having her photo taken is a risk, an act deemed a sin by her culture.
Years later the woman is posing for the camera again. Only this time she is wrapped in a beautiful, flashy, bright green dress. On her face is makeup; on her ears, golden earrings.
To the casual viewer, the latter photo does not seem out of the ordinary. Juxtaposed with the first snapshot, however, it hints at the severe lifestyle change the woman has undergone.
She is Anna Miller, a 27-year-old Wadena woman who broke free from the rigid rules of the Amish community to forge a new life in modern day society.
Looking at the photos side-by-side, she is clearly thrilled at what the second image represents; freedom, courage, strength.
“I fee like I’ve come a long ways,” she says. “I guess I’m proud of where I’m at today.”
She pauses a minute and adds, “I don’t just guess, I know I’m proud of where I’m at today.”
As an Amish person, she struggled with uncompromising rules that she felt lacked consistency, hinted of hypocrisy and generally stifled her ability to find happiness.
"I lived for other people,” Miller says.
Her ultimate decision to leave the Amish community, and her family, did not come easily.
One of about 50,000 Amish people in the United States, Miller was raised with her nine siblings near Hewitt. At the age of 15, she moved with her family to Blair, Wis., where her parents David and Susie still live.
Their home was not equipped with electricity. As such, it was easy to stay away from the 90’s icons Amish were forbidden to use: televisions, radios, computers, and refrigerators. Likewise, their home did not have a telephone nor warm running water. The family’s main mode of transportation was a horse-drawn buggy.
Amish men make their living by farming or operating their own saw mills. The women stay home to take care of the cooking, sewing and cleaning chores. Some taught school. Children attend Amish school through the eighth-grade level and then joined the working, the nature of their job dictated by their gender.
The Amish live according to their literal interpretation of the Bible. Their lifestyles are willingly trapped by time and are marked by a firm commitment to a Christian God, simplicity, discipline and modesty. It is humility that brought about their many rules. Seen as an evil that only encourages people to put themselves before the good of the Amish community and its integrity, immodesty is frowned upon.
The Amish’s solidarity is marked by their uniform way of dress and their use of only the German language at home. Yet they are flexible when needed. The severity of their rules differ according to geographical location. They generally recognize that they need to compromise with modern life, and do so when it is for the betterment of their society. For instance, they can ride in motorized vehicles, they just can’t own them. They go to the doctor, the dentist, and sometimes the Laundromat, but they can’t attend public schools, movies, plays, or dances.
As a child, Anna Miller was reminded of the outside world when people came to their home to do business with her father, who owned a saw mill. She wanted the things the “English” –the Amish’s word for those outside their community—kids had.
As she grew older, she broke the rules when her parent weren’t looking, as do many teenagers, Amish or not. With others, she sneaked cigarettes and sips of bear at the “young people-only” gatherings allowed after the every-other-week church services.
A radio, kept hidden in a cabinet at home,
was typically lowered out a window for the Sunday gatherings.
A radio, kept hidden in a cabinet at home, was typically lowered out a window for the Sunday gatherings. Unknown to her parents, Miller bought a camera and took pictures of most of her siblings.
Her early 20’s were spent with one foot in both the Amish and English worlds. With her parents’ permission to work outside the community as a nanny, she lived the week days in a Wisconsin family’s home, complete with its modern amenities.
Some may be convinced this style of living is to blame for her leave of the Amish, but she says it was merely the catalyst for something she had long dreamed about.
“I was getting into things that were really not allowed, like leaving the house without my black bonnet….Plus I watched TV all the time….” Miller said.
She fast forged a friendship with her employers, Jon and Penny Paulson, and their three children. Penny challenged Miller to make decisions, something Miller wasn’t accustomed to since most everything was dictated by the Amish rules of operation. At first, a simple mealtime choice between hamburgers or steak was overwhelming for Miller.
“Penny was a very good person to talk to. I started feeling comfortable enough with her to voice my opinions. I never had any opinions. Well, I had opinions but I didn’t voice them” In the Paulson household, Miller was afforded the luxury of examining her desire to live outside the Amish world, one which she felt she never belonged. She began to put distance between herself and the feelings of downtroddeness, ill-treatment and humiliation that ruled her life.
Childhood memories of being teased by their peers for being overweight were less painful.
She stopped thinking about the harassment she underwent after a move to an Amish community in Indiana failed, forcing her to return after five months to escape loneliness.
"Basically when I came back to Wisconsin….
I was like an outcast almost, you know”
The Paulsons were two of the first, Miller believes, to pay her respect.
“I was happy with Jon and Penny. I was happy with their friends. They were all so friendly and….they didn’t judge me or they didn’t criticize me….,” Miller says. And, her dreams of pursuing her education and a career seemed within reach in the English world. She envied the women dressed in business attire carrying brief cases she had seen in nearby La Crosse, Wis. Miller knew she liked office settings because she had gone to work with a former neighbor while visiting the Wadena area.
Yes she did not act hastily in setting up her leave of the Amish. She considered the pros and cons and labored over the decision. “I had to think of all the consequences that I was getting myself into,” she said.
She was, after all, going against everything she was raised to believe in.
Would her relationship with her parents and siblings be forever damaged?
Could her parents handle the criticism they would surely face from the community?
And, most pressing, did she have the strength to follow through with her choice?
Memories of her failed attempts at living in Indiana, as well as an unsuccessful stint at teaching in Wisconsin, were engraved in her mind.
Not sure how to broach the subject to her parents, Miller told her mother she was going to ask the ministers to “put her out,” a form of punishment in which Amish people can’t go to church or sit at the family table during mealtime for a specified period of time. Staying with the Paulson’s during this time would provide an opportunity to live unfettered in the English world.
Miller didn’t tell her mother why she wanted to be put out, nor did her mother ask. Susie probably assumed her daughter was simply rectifying a wrong in the proper way Amish children were taught to do. When her parent figured out that Miller wanted more than to be put out of the community, they paid a visit to the Paulson home, with four ministers in tow. Their attempt to convince Anna to come home was fruitless.
“They kept asking me,
‘Do you have any idea when you’re coming back?’
Miller stood her ground, but her own indecisiveness troubled her. “They kept asking me, ‘Do you have any idea when you’re coming back?’ and I said, “No, I don’t, no I don’t”….It was the truth because at the time I didn’t know. I didn’t know that this was going to work.
Silently, she thought her springtime leave would never take hold. “I thought, “There’s no way this is going to last—by fall I’ll be back.”
Her motivation to stick with her decision was the fear of being humiliated further for starting something she couldn’t finish. “I knew if I went back….I would have been looked down on by everybody in the community because of what I had done. I didn’t want to be humiliated anymore”
The guilt she felt for leaving her family persuaded her to don her Amish attire when she visited months later.
“They’re going to see me as the biggest failure they’ve ever seen,” she recalled thinking. “I didn’t want them to see me in my non-Amish clothes.” “I’ve gotten over that now,” Miller added.
She enrolled in a driver’s education course and began the journey to her new life. She urged her instructor to let her drive to and in the bigger city of La Crosse. “I had depended on other people for happiness for so long—not just for happiness but also for other things that I wanted to do—for such a length of time that I was just like, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to be able to drive wherever I want to go.
The world was full of opportunities that many take for granted, but which were foreign to Anna; voting in a presidential election; reading fashion magazines; getting a checking account and credit cards; ordering food at a drive-up window.
There were other things to be learned, such as how to style her hair and dress in coordinated colors and patterns. Simply wearing pants as big change; Amish women only wear dresses.
Eventually Miller moved to Wadena, where she took classes at Northwest Technical College. Living with her brother, Jacob was a great opportunity for Anna to maintain a sense of family and to get to know the brother that had left the Amish in 1984.
Anna’s new live was not free of pain, however. The Amish are raised to believe that they will go to hell if they leave the community; this haunted Miller after she left. And she initially had few friends outside of the Amish community. She also suffered tremendous guilt.
“The Christian beliefs are still there the same as they were,” Miller said. “But all the other things as far as you as you know what’s good and what’s evil, I went against. And that was the first thing I had to deal with.”
She became depressed. Not something readily recognized in Amish communities. Miller didn’t see the signs of depression.
Penny, whom she remained close with through phone calls and visits, talked her into getting help. “What convinced me finally is I got sick. I was so depressed I was physically sick.”
Still, she had no intention of returning to her former lifestyle.
“It was never that hard that I wanted to go back. There were times when I…..was in depression and I wasn’t in my right mind, when I thought, “Why….just do something about it and kill (yourself) and have it all over with.” I didn’t want to hurt anymore”
“I’ve really gotten over that now…”
Later, Miller moved to the Twin Cities, found an apartment and a job as a receptionist. She also met a man in Wadena whom she has grown to love. After a few months she was laid off and decided to move back to Wadena, taking up her boyfriend’s invitation to live with him.
With nearly four years of living in the modern world behind her, Anna is confident she will never return to the Amish. She has no regrets about her decision, but she does worry to this day that she has caused her parents undue pain. Rarely a visit to her home goes by without her mother asking her to return.
“She feels like she failed because I have left and I wish there was some way, some miracle that I could get her to understand that ‘It’s not your fault.’ It doesn’t have to be anybody’s fault.”
While a number of people who leave the Amish is small, it is growing. It is difficult for those who stay to learn to live together, Miller says, quickly adding that not everyone in the Amish community is as unhappy as she was.
“I think that a very hard thing for the Amish community today is to stay together. They’re such a small group and you have to get along. There is nobody else there. You can’t just say, ‘OK, I forget you. I’ll go pick some other friends.’”
Miller’s two siblings who still live at home are curious about her new life. But she has no intention of persuading others to follow her.
“I’m never going to do that. I will not influence my brothers and sisters or anyone in the community because I think they have to make their own decisions. I had to make mine.
Nobody influenced me as far as trying to talk me into it and I will not talk anyone else into it.”
Separation from modern world essential to Amish
The name Amish is derived from Jakob Amman, a Swiss Mennonite bishop.
Subject t persecution in Europe, the Amish migrated in the 18th century to Pensylvania, where their descendants are called Pennsylvania Dutch. They then spread into Ohio, other Midwestern states, and Canada.
The most conservative are known as Old Order Amish. Their communities are arranged according to church districts. Religious services are held in homes; foot washing is practiced in connection with the communion service; discipline is enforced by shunning; and marriage with outsiders is condemned. Some Amish church districts are milder in discipline than others. For instance, those in Indiana can ride bicycles, while in other areas this is forbidden.
Amish people practice adult baptism and often refuse to take part in civil affairs—voting, serving in the military, etc. They are known for their exemplary farming skills.
The Amish separate themselves from the modern world to maintain the purity, simplicity and wholeness of their community. The “world” represents the values, practices and behavior of the larger society, such as pride, greed, war and sin.
Their unique dress, dialect, transportation and farming methods mark the symbolic fences around their subculture.
Humility and modesty is paramount because pride threatens Amish community harmony. Proud individuals are thought to show off by placing themselves above others. Jewelry, wristwatches, fashionable clothing and personal photographs accentuate individuality and call attention to one’s self.
Automobiles can not be owned by Amish people because the car provides automatic mobility and embodies individualism, autonomy, speed, freedom and social status. If the Amish permitted cars, their members would have easy access to cities and other faraway places. Local church districts, held together by horse travel, would begin to erode if members could drive away to the congregation of their choice.
However, the Amish recognize that a compromise her is needed. They do accept rides in vehicles. In certain locations, “English” people offer “taxi” service to Amish for business or vocational travel.
Source: “Amish,” Microsoft Encarta;
“The Puzzles of Amish Life,” by Donald B. Kraybill
