Former Kalona woman writes book about leaving the Amish way of life

      Ottie and Irene Garrett ran off and got married.

      They literally escaped from their homes in and near Kalona in 1996, to get married.

      "We didn't let the grass grow beneath the wheels [of Ottie's van]," Irene recalls. "We worried that we might be followed, that the police might be summoned by the Amish. We took the back roads out of Kalona."

      Their hasty escape wasn't because they were too young to get married. Ottie was 47 and Irene was 22. Ottie ran his own business; Irene was a school teacher. Neither were married at the time, though Ottie was a divorced man. That was one of the major strikes against the couple. Differences in religion also was a factor in their elopement. But, perhaps, the biggest difference to overcome was cultural. Irene was a member of the Old Order Amish group in rural Kalona; Ottie was not.

      Irene, along with a co-author, Rick Farrant, have published a book about Irene's decision to marry a non-Amish man and leave her family: Crossing Over: One Woman's Exodus from Amish Life.

      In the foreword to the book, Irene writes, "Leaving the Amish is perhaps the most serious offense one can commit. From the time you are born until the day you die, you are reminded by the leaders of the church that you are privileged to be Amish, that the world outside the Amish is evil and corrupt. One grows up thinking the Amish are the only ones with a real chance of going to heaven."

      Irene told a bookstore audience recently that she did not make a hasty decision to leave her Amish roots and community. She said she spent about one and a half years thinking about leaving. However, in the book, Irene says her first "inklings that the Amish way had flaws" began in "subconscious childhood realizations."

      Many of her childhood realizations grew from the way her father treated his family. Irene describes him as a "sometimes cruel man" and as a "stern, unforgiving man."

      "For as far back as I can remember, my mother was the subject of his persistent ridicule, warranted or not," Irene writes. "[We] children were held to sometimes impossible standards, and any weaknesses [we] might have - physical or mental - became the subject of my father's scorn ? We were all deathly afraid of him, unsure, for the most part, when something was going to send him in a rage."

      While outsiders may think Old Order Amish people and communities are all alike, Irene says, "I come from an Amish group in [Kalona], and our dress, our buggies, our way of life were quite different from another Amish group less than 100 miles to the north. My story, then, is rooted in the ways of one particular Amish community and does not necessarily reflect the ways of all Amish."

      That becomes apparent when Irene finds a way to explain her father's behavior towards her mother. Her mother was not from the Kalona group, but grew up near Kokomo, Ind.