In remembrance

A book of remembrance was written before the Lord
for those who thought on his name.
They will be mine, says the Lord,
in the day that I make up my jewels.
(3 Nephi 24:16-17)

This is my mother’s story, based on my memories of her experiences as I heard her recount them and based on my own observations. This is the “truth wherein [I] know [it]” (D&C 123:13).

Her father was physically abusive and was periodically in jail. I’ll skip those stories: it’s enough to say that she cut him out of her life as an adult. I'm told that I and my next youngest brother met him, but I have no memories of those visits, and they ended within a few years. We phoned my maternal grandmother regularly on holidays, but not my grandfather. I know him only from photos and a tape recording of a visit to him when I was an infant.

My mother joined the LDS Church as a teenager. She hoped that the rest of her family would follow and that they would become the happy family portrayed in church literature. Instead there were fights with pans being thrown around. My impression is that her ward wasn’t very welcoming—a girl from the wrong side of the railroad tracks, so to speak—but she stuck with it.

At a youth fireside, she heard the speaker say that those born in the church were special spirits whom God had sent into LDS families so they would be equipped to build the kingdom. My mother carried from that talk the idea that she was a lesser spirit, a conviction that I imagine her marginalization within her church community must have a reinforced—on top of the abuse she suffered at home, of course. She told me once that she thought she might be the spirit child of one of God’s polygamous wives, not the first, favored wife.

She went to BYU. At one point her mother cut off her funds, and she went a month without eating. She ended up in the hospital and spent time living with a local LDS family while she recovered. She met my father, who was also a teenaged convert. He courted her before and after his mission. She intended to turn him down, but after fasting about it at my father’s request, she heard an audible voice instruct her to marry him, so she did.

She threw herself into raising the privileged spirits God had entrusted to her. She had read the manual Gospel Principles with me by the time I was baptized at age eight, and by the time I was ordained a deacon at age 12, she had worked with me to memorize all the seminary mastery scriptures. We held family home evening regularly, family scripture study, family prayer. For family prayer, we knelt in a circle holding hands and repeated together the words of the person saying the prayer; she wanted us to feel at home when we finally reached the temple. (Her own first temple experience had been very alienating.) We held sunrise services in cemeteries for Easter. We observed the four weeks of Advent. Christmas was the occasion for amazing outputs of creativity on the part of my parents. My continued attachment to Mormonism has much to do with the positive memories—and spiritual experiences—created for me at home.

My mother's aspirations to a model Mormon family unravelled as her sons got older. In different ways we all deviated from the path she had mapped for us, though in the end most of her sons remained active in the church and gave her grandchildren. When I was in high school, one betrayal caused her to break down into a debilitating depression. (Bitter irony: When no one would tell me what was going on, I concluded she must have cancer.) She clawed her way back out, fragile but iron-willed, determined to put her household back in order. She reacted similarly when she discovered I was gay, telling me to leave graduate school and move back home so she could “fix this problem.” I had to put a lot of distance between us in order to have the room to let my life grow in the way I wanted it to. I formally cut off contact in 2001—a big dramatic production—aware of the irony that I was doing to her what she had done to her father, though I don’t know if she ever recognized that irony.

Her cancer prompted a slow, cautious reconciliation, the unspoken terms of which were that big parts of my life remained un-talked about while I expressed more sympathetic interest than I really felt in the church activities that were at the center of her life. This meant that our relationship was constantly feeding an element of dishonesty—like the body feeding a tumor, I suppose—but I consented as a gift to her. And I recognize the concessions she was making to me. On my last visit to her, this past November, we sat on the couch, embracing, and she said that she hoped she hadn’t said anything to make me uncomfortable while I was there. She asked my forgiveness. A decade earlier that would probably have made me feel vindicated, but by that point my thought was simply, “You don’t need to do this.”

Earlier in the visit, as we did the five-kernels-of-corn tradition before Thanksgiving dinner (you say five things you’re grateful for), I had said that while there were things about the church that made me very angry—I could feel the ice cracking under my feet as I said that—I was grateful for the ways it had supported my parents and for the positive influences it had on my upbringing. Even that wasn’t the full truth, though. I don’t know if I could ever have articulated my relationship with Mormonism to my mother in a language she would understand, given her basically fundamentalist way of seeing the world. I don’t intend that to sound pejorative; it’s just the reality of how she was raised as someone who passed through a succession of evangelically oriented Protestant churches growing up.

She approached cancer the same dogged way she approached “fixing” her wayward family. It was not the life she had hoped for; it was not the life she had trusted God to give her; and she hoped at first she would be able to wrestle it back onto the track she wanted it to run on. In the end, she had to reconcile herself to being carried whither she would not.

I hope she was met by her Heavenly Parents, and I hope they made her know she was acceptable and had been all along.

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I assume the guilt driving this narrative screams loud and clear.