Part One: The Black Cloud
the tenebrous shadow of bad omens
Dr. Feinauer was my pediatrician when I was a little girl. I remember visiting the Salt Lake Clinic with my mother and pressing my nose against the aquarium in his waiting room, hoping to catch a glimpse of the black spotted pleco that liked to suck up rocks on the bottom and spit them back out.
This Norman Rockwell print hung in the exam room and I worried a lot about whether the doctor in the picture was going to warn the boy before sticking him. Dr. Feinauer always warned me and I thought that was only fair.
I don't remember if I cried getting shots or if I was indeed "very brave" like the doctor always said; either way I got a lollipop at the end and some kind of sticker, but the best part was the colorful bandaid. After receiving my Kindergarten shots, I ran to my friend Jill's house (just across the cul-de-sac) and promptly dropped my Holly Hobbie drawers to show her the Snoopy bandaid on my butt. She had one too; I think it was Woodstock.
As far as I know, my siblings and I all had regular checkups and received our childhood vaccinations on time, though regular and reliable medical insurance was not a part of our upbringing.
My mom told me they'd sign up for health insurance when she was pregnant, would maintain coverage for delivery and aftercare (she had four cesarean sections), but would cancel it sometime afterward.
Throughout our adolescence, she’d pay something like $2.00 per child to the school district so we’d be covered if anything happened during recess---though I'm not sure what they did after my two younger siblings were pulled out of elementary school to be homeschoooled. For strep throat and sprained ankles, my dad would phone the obstetrician who lived next door.
Dr. Anderson would come over, peer into our throats, take our temperatures, and prescribe antibiotics if needed. If we needed stitches or a cast for a broken bone, we were taken to the emergency room and my parents would make payments on the subsequent bills.
Dad came to trust deeply in priesthood power, and believed his children weren’t sick or injured very often because we were being protected via his (and our) faith in god. It wasn't too difficult to believe back then; no one had any major medical issues and despite our somewhat free-range 80's childhoods spent climbing fences and trees, digging snow forts and playing with matches, there were only a few broken bones and stitches among the four of us.
My father was self-employed throughout most of my life. With undiagnosed and untreated issues---including what I suspect is a crippling case of ADHD---he often struggled to bring home a reliable paycheck. As such, I believe our lack of regular healthcare sprung initially from financial difficulties, though it would eventually mutate into something else entirely.
I can't pinpoint the moment dad started down the path of conspiracy theories and fear, but over time, his many theories and beliefs (all tangled up with theology and his own personal flavor of Mormon doctrine) got wilder and he developed clinical levels of paranoia.
He won't talk on the phone with us (the government is listening), won't answer emails with anything personal (the government is reading), and often thinks he is being followed by the FBI. Amid ascribing to a myriad of conspiracy theories (Bigfoot is Cain, 9/11 was an inside job, the government is controlled by an elite group who regularly meet at Jekyll Island to plan widespread genocide, to name a few), he also decided anti-depressants would herald the downfall of human kind and that routine childhood vaccinations were harmful tools of the adversary to be avoided at all costs.
It was 2001 and I was pregnant with my first when my dad started sending me articles about the dangers of vaccinating my child. He also started encouraging me to get a midwife and have a homebirth. Only twenty-four years old, and almost entirely shaped by the people-pleasing (father-pleasing, really) mindset I'd grown up with, I read everything he sent me. I wholeheartedly believed my father had special spiritual gifts that enabled him to discern absolute truth from a morass of confusion, so even though the literature he was sending me made me uncomfortable, I set out to understand it so I could protect my unborn child from danger.
It was still early days on the interwebs, but I could easily find emphatic and increasingly vehement arguments on both sides of the vaccination fence---AOL chatrooms and the now-defunct parenting forums on That Homesite! were an abject war zone. I had (uneasily) settled on a delayed vaccine schedule, hoping that this (along with my hospital delivery with a certified nurse midwife) would both appease my father and keep my baby safe.
When Jake was born, I signed a wavier so he wouldn't get the newborn Hepatitis B shot, but had (after giving myself a research ulcer) decided the Vitamin K shot would be okay.
Our families had been waiting and listening outside my delivery room during Jake's birth, so Eric had a large audience while giving him his first bath in the nursery. I think Jake had been washed, dried, and dressed before the nurse sat him in the bassinet in clear view of our families to take his first portrait and give him the Vitamin K shot.
I don't remember if my dad rushed right up to my recovery room to tell his still-bleeding and swollen daughter about his experience, or if he waited until after I'd brought his first grandchild home (Eric and I were living with my parents at the time). Either way, the story goes like this:
My dad was standing outside the nursery, gazing upon Jake with all the wonder and love a brand new grandfather can feel. When the nurse prepared to give Jake the much agonized over and researched shot, my father says a dark, foreboding cloud (that only he could see, of course) immediately descended upon my baby. My father was overcome with the knowledge that whatever was in that syringe was about to do great harm. Jake was only saved because my dad, in that moment, called down a powerful priesthood blessing of protection from the heavens above.
I don't think my dad makes these things up. I believe he really experiences them, even if they are just inside his own head---even if they are constructs born from years of untreated trauma, and stem from a faith within a faith he built to hold himself together. But I no longer believe they are true and I no longer use his stories to guide my life and my choices.
But at the time, I believed him. And I understood that my months and months of research (along with praying and fasting and begging god for insight) was all for naught. It was an irrefutable Truth with a capital T; I had made the wrong choice. My own brain, my own spirituality, my own relationship with god was not enough. By foolishly thinking it was, I had nearly damaged or even killed my child.
The knowledge that I had failed was swift and immediate; it sunk into my bones and filled up all my insides. Despite all of my best efforts, I had chosen incorrectly, and those incorrect choices could have had devastating consequences. The answer was clear: listen to and heed my father's inspired and godly counsel. If I had chosen a homebirth like he wanted, if I had waived all vaccines and injections like he had counseled, Jake would not have needed a miraculous priesthood intervention in order to be safe.
Prior to giving birth, dad had talked a lot about the dangers of cord blood donation and stem cell research. He said the scientists would use stem cells from Jake's umbilical cord in order to create little Jake-clones, and that god would be forced to send spirits down to occupy the clones even though they were an abomination. Because they were of my DNA, they would be spiritually my own children, and would be waiting for me in heaven after their torture and suffering in test tubes had concluded. It was implied they would also ask me upon my long-awaited arrival at the pearly gates, "Mother why? Why did you let them create us and hurt us like that?"
I'm not sure where dad got this sci-fi horror story information; it obviously wasn't true. But in 2001, stem cell research was still very new and had launched (or fueled?) panic about cloning. Whether he cooked this particular fear soup up in his own brain or cobbled it together from ranting talk radio hosts and prepper newsletters, the stem cell thing was one of the reasons he wanted me to have a home birth.
I had dutifully not given permission to donate Jake's cord blood, going so far as to write "NO" in big black letters on the permission slip I was supposed to sign, but Jake's cord blood was taken anyway. I watched from my tangled sheets in a sweaty, post-birth heap as the nurse midwife squeezed the umbilical cord, collecting the blood in a glass vial. Eric had already gone with Jake to the nursery and I could not muster the energy or wherewithal to ask her what she was doing.
Late one night (it might have been our first night home from the hospital) as I laid there in a puddle of new mother emotions waiting for my milk to come in, I realized what had been done and knew Jake's cord blood must be en route to the evil scientists in their evil lab. Devastated, I crept out of my room and found my mother sitting at the computer in her long silky nightgown.
I started to cry and knelt down and laid my head in her lap.
"Oh honey, what's wrong?" she asked.
I cried and cried, soaking her blue tricot, thinking about my dozens? hundreds? of test tube babies, loving these imaginary beings as deeply and as powerfully as I loved my newborn down the hall and knowing I could do nothing to protect them.
"Shhh," she soothed, stroking my hair. "It's just the baby blues. It'll pass."
Eventually I choked out my fears about Jake's cord blood and the scientists and the tortured fetuses. Dad was watching the news and heard me. He rushed in and scooped me into his arms. I was much too big to hold, of course, so I just hung there while he bounced me side to side like he used to do when we were small.
"Don't worry," he said. "God knows all things. He knows your spirit. It will be as though it never happened."
My broken heart latched onto this. God could erase it? He could erase the stolen cord blood? Vanish it from the labs?
"Yes," he nodded, rubbing my sweaty back. "It's like it never happened. Let it go."
I went back to bed, hiccuping and tear-streaked. I climbed onto the tiny life preserver dad had thrown me, and held on, bobbing in the burgeoning sea of postpartum depression that was threatening to pull me under.
A few years before this when I was struggling through an abusive relationship with a controlling, manipulative man eleven years my senior, my father pointed out that he (my fiancé, Matthew) was the one creating our problems in the first place. He said that Matthew would cause a problem, manipulate me until I believed the problem was my fault, and then offer the solution in order to position himself as my savior.
It would be decades before I realized that one of the reasons I was drawn into that relationship was because it felt familiar.
Despite the prodigious eradication of my test tube baby grief, dad's description of the dark cloud of evil threatening my newborn stayed with me. And when I told Eric about it, it stayed with him. How foolish of us to think we understood the vaccine issue! Of course all the research we had done was poisoned by conspirators who only desired us harm! Of course we couldn't simply read and evaluate the science! Through my father, god had given us extra special insight and we must be forever grateful Jake narrowly escaped ruination.
So, as more babies came along, I gave birth to them at home. We didn't have to sign any waivers or fight any hospital staff on injections or eyedrops or vitamins. And we did not vaccinate.
It was not a comfortable decision. I had, after all, worked in a pediatric clinic; I had given countless children their routine childhood vaccinations. I knew the science of introducing a tiny portion of a virus to encourage the development of antibodies was sound. I felt sick, knowing my children were protected from serious illness only via herd immunity. I worried they would become carriers for something and pass on a potentially fatal disease to an immunocompromised person.
Eric and I felt trapped between the proverbial rock and hard spot, wedged there by dad's visionary dark cloud. It seemed to hang over our heads, following us from place to place, from child to child, crackling with ominous bands of thin lightning, a constant menacing reminder that it could unleash a torrential flood of devastation and destruction if we failed to heed my father's warnings.
It was a terrifying, isolating place to be. I still have a hard time talking about it. I didn't identify with the fervent anti-vaxxers waving posters and soap boxing all over the internet. I felt shunned and ridiculed by the pro-vaccination camps, unwilling to be lumped into an uneducated and fearful populace.
Eventually the kids grew old enough to understand when we lied at doctor appointments and answered "yes," when asked if they were current on all their shots. Their confusion and distress turned into embarrassment, not wanting to admit to their friends that they'd never (or rarely) been vaccinated.
Eric and I knew we wanted to catch them up at some point, but we didn't know when that would be. Do we wait until they're in their twenties? When their brains have fully developed? When will it be safe? We weren't the types to get visions or see augurs of catastrophe in dreams---would we need to bring my father along when we took our kids to the clinic? Ask the nurse to pause before plunging the needle into their skin while my dad waited for a sign to proceed?
Or would we be like Oliver Cowdrey who received an answer from the Lord, but would not heed it and then lost the blessing? If we decided to vaccinate later, would the blessing of protection be removed?
Part two coming tomorrow.