Sins of the father....

I would like to believe that my father did love me. I choose to think so, even though I have no evidence of this love. I would like to believe that there was a time when my innocence was intact, but I cannot remember that time. I do not believe that a child has the ability to give their innocence away, only an adult can make that choice. A child’s innocence must be taken. Was mine taken out of love, fear or ignorance?
When I was about four, my family lived on a farm in Cash Valley, Utah. We didn't live there long, as with most places, maybe a few months. This is the place of my first memories as a child. The house, I remember was old and very large, but most things are when you are small. My mother had a large garden behind the house and a small flower garden in the front. I remember digging in the dirt with a spoon, while my mother planted flowers, singing Little Purple Pansies. I remember playing marbles in the family room with my older brothers and chasing them through the cow pasture until the mud became too deep for my little legs to keep up. I remember sliding down the stairs on blankets with my younger sisters and my mother yelling at us to stop before someone got hurt. I remember my older sister standing in her bedroom with the sun streaming through the windows, shinning around her like a halo and thinking, there could be no other creature quite as beautiful. I can also remember watching my father beat her until she fell to the floor because she pierced her ears when she was eighteen without his permission.
One of my favorite things to do was to play in the small barn where we kept chickens and rabbits. I remember the day the baby rabbits were finally old enough to be away from their mother, the favorite of my brother and me. My brother, older by 3 years, and I had gone into the barn to play with the baby rabbits that day. I remember the feel of their silky fur as I cupped one in my hand and rubbed it against my cheek. My father came into the barn while we were there, holding a hammer and a very large nail. I don't remember feeling frightened when he came over to the rabbit cages. He opened the door on the mother rabbit’s cage and pulled her out and tucked her under his arm. He looked at my brother and me and told us to put the baby rabbits away and shut the cage; he had something he wanted to show us. We did as we were told, it wasn't like any of us to ever back talk or be disobedient, and followed my father to the other side of the barn. He told us that he thought we needed to understand the way of life and the purpose of the creatures God had left man as masters over. He then proceeded to nail our rabbit to the wall and gut it. I don't remember screaming. I don't remember breathing. The only things I remember were the touch of my brothers hand in mine, whether he grabbed my hand or I his I don't know, and the wet stickiness of the tears that slid down my frozen face. I couldn't move, I wanted to run, but I couldn't turn away, my whole body was numb and then slowly, gratefully so was my consciousness. That night my father placed a plate of chicken fried rabbit in front of me and told me to eat. I shook my head. He told me that I would get nothing else and that I would sit there until I ate it. I shook my head again. I have never eaten rabbit.

I love my father. I think he needed to be loved, even more than I did. What sins had he committed or what ones had been committed on him, to make him as he was?

The only constant is change...

I don't believe that I ever set out to leave the church. When I was a child other than my family the church was the only constant in my life.
My parents had a very volatile relationship, whether this was the fault of one parent, the other, or both, I cannot say. My father was one of eight children, born to a Baptist minister from Arkansas. I never knew my paternal grandfather as anything other than the person in the bed in the back bedroom of my grandmother’s house. I ask my mother once what was wrong with him and her only comment was that the day he could no longer have sex with his wife he went to bed and never got up. I do not know what actions caused this bitterness in her and I cannot say that she hated him because I have never known my mother to hate anyone. What he thought about my father becoming a Mormon I will never know.
My father has always been an enigma to me. My oldest sibling believes he suffered from severe ADD. I, through my experience working with physically and mentally disabled people, feel it was closer to Bi Polar disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder. To me, as a child, he was the embodiment of fear, which is sadly ironic because I later came to the realization that he was in fact afraid of me. It is only as an adult removed from his physically and verbally abusive, fear mongering countenance, that I can objectively say, his inability to control himself was probably the root cause for his obsessive need to control everything and everyone else around him. I use to wonder in the time after my parents' divorce, if he wasn't just the resulting figure in a cycle of abuse, again this is something I can only speculate. Regardless of the reasons and because of them, my father had a tendency to quite jobs and lose jobs frequently, which in turn led to the continuous uprooting and moving of our large family.
When my parents divorced for the final time, my freshman year of high school, I had never finished a single grade in the same school. There were even times that I didn't finish a grade at all because we moved to completely different geographical locations. This constant upheaval in home, school and friends, made the church all the more necessary to my identity, as all Mormon churches have the same structure, teach the same lessons, read the same books and sing the same songs.
I wish that I could tell you that there were specific circumstances or experiences that caused me to lose my faith, but how exactly does one lose something they never had. The analogy that a blind person does not know what it is to see has never seemed entirely appropriate when applied to my feelings or concepts, it was always more like a dog does not know what it is to be a cat. Some things are what they are because that is what they are. I was a little sister, a big sister, a daughter, an aunt; I was a Mormon.

When the only constant is change, how do you change what is constant..

Beginnings.....

I do not know if anyone who was not raised Mormon can fully understand what it is to be Mormon. Being Mormon is so much more than a religion or faith, it is who you are, like being a mother or a daughter or a sister. It is a thing that defines you as a person, you are a Child of God, a chosen Saint of the Latter Days, special, blessed, important. As a child you are taught that not only are you of God but that one day if you remain righteous you will become God. You pray in the morning as a family, you read your scriptures every day, you pray before each meal and again every night as a family. One Monday night you have a Family meeting where you pray and read scriptures and you play games and learn more about what it is to be a Mormon. When you turn eight you are baptized and become an official member of the church. When you turn 12 you are old enough for Mutual (youth group), for boys this is the time when you receive the Priesthood, this time is also spent doing Boy Scouts and preparing to go on a Mission. For girls this time is spent learning how to cook and sew and care for children and a husband. When you enter high school you start going to a scripture study class called Seminary, everyday before or during school depending on where you live. Once a month there is a youth church dance, in the summer there is Youth Conference, Young Womens Conference, Fireside meetings. You eat, sleep and breath being Mormon. You never question, you never doubt, you never leave, for doing so is unforgivable.

So to walk away is in a sense like Solomon has indeed cut the baby in half....