How did it play out? Did their disaffection trigger yours? Did you shun/distance yourself from them?

Yes. My assigned "calling" was to hide the beer when the Home Teachers crash-landed at out joint...............

My dad was inactive/jack when I was born, 3 years after he and my mother were temple married.
He still gave me my infant blessing.
When I was 8 and ready to be baptized, he had to argue with the bishop to be allowed to baptize me, but in the end he won out.
When I was 14, he and my still TBM mom divorced, almost entirely because TBM mom wanted a temple-worthy husband.
Two years later, she met a newly converted TBM, and wanted to marry him in the temple...my dad just ignored letters to him asking for his cooperation, so the church exed him and declared their temple marriage null, paving the way for mom to celestially remarry.

I never shunned or distanced myself from my dad (frankly, I enjoyed his less than active company a lot more than my mom's, even though I was TBM). He was supportive when I went on a mission, but was frankly ecstatic when I left the church shortly after coming back. I went to visit him not long after, and he loved being able to take me out for a beer :)

He died about ten years ago. After three strokes. I had bought him a condo to live in after the first one (since he could no longer work), and was paying for a caregiver. Nobody else in the TBM family cared or helped. When he died, TBM family all wanted a mormon funeral and internment -- he had asked me to cremate him and spread his ashes in his favorite hunting spot, and didn't want any part of the church. I had to physically remove two TBM family members (his brothers) from the hospital morgue to assert my rights to carry out his wishes (fortunately he left a will).
After the cremation, TBM family all wanted to come up to the mountains to help scatter his ashes, so I relented. They tried to turn THAT into a mormon funeral. I picked up the urn and walked out on them. They were so annoying.
One of them asked me why I was trying to keep him away from the church even in death...I replied that I didn't understand why they kept trying to make him a part of something he left 50 years before, and wanted nothing to do with.
Sigh.

So glad you stood your ground and saw to it that your dad got the send off he wanted.

Yes, my mother painted my father as a bad decision maker for leaving the faith. I always grew up thinking, sheesh, if mom treats a non-believer this way, I will always be a believer. Well, that bit of manipulation probably resulted in me spending my 20's in the church. Early 30's, I declare I can't emotionally handle the TSCC anymore and leave. In my case, having the non TBM parent probably made the situation even more high pressure for me to stay.

What a sick religion.

Yes, by the time I was 19 and pumped to go on my mission, my divorced parents were both living in sin with their respective partners. Needless to say, they weren't worthy to do the things TBM parents do. Another ward member had to ordain me an Elder. I had to go to the temple for the first time without either present. I recall being endlessly pitied by the ward while feeling completely mortified and embarrassed for having such heathen parents. My father has since remarried and returned to the fold while my mother has not returned to this day.

Long time lurker here. I just want to give a quick thanks to everyone here for being such a great support group and I have decided to finally become a participant. I'll post my exit story on the appropriate forum, but I just wanted to express my gratitude for the wonderful people on this site.

Now, to the question at hand. My father was an apostate parent in a very unique way and I thank him so much for helping to show me out. My father received a "revelation" that he was to return the "Higher Light Energies" from the "Angels of Light" by the use of polygamy. Of course he was exxed, because apparently only Joe can receive polygamy prophecies.

Thank you so very much Dad, for showing me first hand what Dirty Joe's teachings does to families. My father's belief systems paralleled Joseph's "magical" belief systems very closely. When I realized Dad was a little coocoo and his "prophecies" didn't "come to pass, thus sayeth the Lord", I started to see a lot of parallels of Joseph Smith. If Dad was up in the night, could it be possible that Joseph was too?

I grew up with crystals, séance, meditation circles, and the like. We were the special group in Mormondom that had even more "power" than the 15 and destined to save humanity for the second coming. Wow, that really farks up the mind growing up on that stuff since age 8. I have lots of fun stories I'll try and get into other posts.

Wow! I can't wait to read your story. My mother got all caught up in the crystals, pyramid power, herbal voodoo stuff. She would have continued, but mentally went off the deep end and the family took away all her books and crystals. They threatened to tell the bishop if she didn't stop. I wouldn't be surprised if she still does it in secret.

My mother was the RS president for 6 years, and the stake RS president, after that. When the Mormons dropped in, she made me run in the kitchen, dump the coffee down the sink, hide the pot, and turn on the vent fan.

Neither my RS president mother or my gospel doctrines teacher father wore temple garments. They went to their own temple wedding, and the weddings of their brothers and sisters, but they had to get a new temple recommend for my brother's and my weddings. The Mormons have those wedding rules for a reason--to make parents like mine PAY.

My father was bishop when he was younger. They asked him to be bishop again, twice, and in the stake presidency, and he turned down all those callings. He said he was too busy with his family, and had to travel too much in his career.

My parents would play with us on Sundays. We would go to the beach, away camping for the weekend, to concerts and operas in the city, to movies, even shopping.

They knew the truth about Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, but refused to talk to us about it. "Don't ask so many questions." My mother taught us the Bible, and had us memorize a lot of Bible verses. Somehow, the Bible balanced out religion for me, and helped me see Mormonism as not very Christian, when I was quite young.

When the Black were given the priesthood, my mother paced around the house, repeating, "It's a cult. It's a cult." She became basically inactive, after that. When TSCC sold our ward house, to the Seventh Day Adventists, and got rid of the whole stake, my father wouldn't make the long drive over to the other stake.

My parents never came clean and officially apostatized, but they stopped attending meetings, when the kids left home. They said they didn't enjoy going to church anymore, and had paid their dues. Their fanatic TBM families never found out, because they lived away. They both had Mormon funerals, because all their children and grandchildren were Mormon at the time.

Not me, but a friend, dumped his terrific girlfriend because her parents were less than active. He married a real super TBM who had nothing in common with him and hated all the things he loved.

The girlfriend he dumped (TBM by the way) was his dream girlfriend and she inherited a very large fortune when her jack Mormon parents died. Serves him right.

My dad was indifferent for my first decade. His parents were full out apostates over polygamy and church finances and politics. They weren't allowed to talk to us grandkids about the church, but we all figured it out. It helped me immensely.

Our brother and sister-in-law left the church while their oldest son was on his mission.

SIL and I left at about the same time; she had heard through the family grapevine that I was deeply disenchanted. She called me, and my first thought was "OMG, she's going to call me to a position in RS!" But no. She called me to say she had sent in her resignation letter. A few days later, I sent mine.

They flew out to the state where their son was serving his mission, to tell him. They didn't bother getting official permission, because they knew they would get the MP's run-around.

They told the boy, very matter-of-factly, that they had left the church, but that they still loved him very much and respected his own religious choices.

It was pretty rough for him, but he remained in the church.

I wish I could say that everything turned out well, but it didn't. A few years after the boy came home from his mission, he was killed in a freak accident that should never have happened.

His parents respected his Mormon beliefs. He was buried in his full temple garb, and the service was held in a Mormon chapel. But his parents kept an iron grip on the service itself. The boy's father gave a very beautiful, moving eulogy; the mother, who has a lovely, professionally-trained soprano voice, sang a fairly universal, non-Mormon hymn. There were NO Mormon speakers allowed to get up and do the "captive audience" bit about how families can be together forever.

The audience was probably about three-quarters Mormon - many of them from our former ward, because that's where the boy had grown up. But there was absolutely NO bad-mouthing (that I heard, anyway) about the rather non-[Mo]traditional form of the service. There were tears, hugs, and affectionate greetings between Mos and exmos. I had braced myself for confrontation, but there wasn't any. For once, everyone just came together for the family.

My daughter was dating some guy who had been kicked out of "Ricks" and was inactive at the time. She broke up with him and he made the statement to her, "But but but I was willing to put up with your family."

That didn't go over too well with her.