u/Itchy-Drummer1324

This is going to be a long post. :( thank you to anyone who takes the time to read it and add your two cents.

My husband and I are cradle Catholics. Unfortunately, we’re not in good standing with The Church bc we were married (outside The Church) and he hadn’t had his first marriage annulled. It was supposed to be a priority that he go through the annulment so we could have our marriage recognized, but we ran in to some stumbling blocks along the way.

First, he was very upset with the sex scandal. That put things off for a long while. After getting over that enough, he started the paperwork, but it asked many personal questions about his sex life with his first wife, so he put it to the side. Long story short, (and I’m sorry if it’s tmi-) she was physically/mentally abusive and ended up having a lesbian affair. There was a lot of trauma that he wasn’t ready to unpack.

A few years later, he pushed through the paperwork and turned it in, but they said it needed to go through some council. They’ve basically put us off for quite a while & we don’t feel like we’re any type of priority anymore. We just don’t feel welcome at all.

Fast forward to today… there’s a lot of questionable politics that have raised my brow recently and I feel like The Church may not be as stable as I once thought it was. But I believe in her teaching and I know Orthodoxy is somewhat of a sister church in a way.

I come from a very devout Catholic family and my mother is elderly- it’s very important to me that she sees us in good standing with The Church so I can take Eucharist and go to confession. I’ve been feeling a pull to Orthodoxy for at least a year or two, now, but I hadn’t told her because I was afraid of her reaction. But I told her today, and she was accepting of it, so I’d like to explore the option of looking into possibly joining the Orthodox community.

I guess my question would be- would my baptism, and other Catholic sacraments be accepted here? How would a conversion and an annulment process/possible marriage in The Orthodox Church occur? Thank you to anyone who read this far.