Part Two: Bandaids and lollipops
my own autonomous revolution
Even though I'd spent my life believing my dad's financial difficulties existed because god was testing him, I also believed that eventually, he would be blessed with a well-earned escape from poverty.
My dad had been working on an intriguing invention/development since the early 90s. Eric had interned with him for one summer, and we believed it had promise. In February of 2018, I arranged a business meeting with a potential investor and invited my dad up to Idaho. Dad showed up and walked through my house closing blinds, lifting a blade with one finger to nod at our neighbor's truck.
"That's an agent," he said in a low voice, his lips barely moving. "They followed us up here from Utah."
"Dad," I said gently, tugging him away from the window. "That's Brother Martin. He's a chef at the casino on the reservation. He always gets home at this time."
Dad shook his head, telling me all secret agents had a front or a cover story.
We left my mom at the kitchen table, where she sat, hands clasped, hoping if she prayed hard enough, we might come home with good news and the promise of a living.
Dad asked Eric to take a circuitous route to the investor's house in order to lose all the other FBI or CIA agents who were absolutely hanging out in our small farming town. I shifted uncomfortably as Eric did his best to shake the zero number of cars or people trailing us down Farm to Market Road. I'd met with the investor a few days prior in an attempt to prepare him for my dad's particular eccentricities, but I wasn't sure he'd believed me.
Upon arrival, my dad requested the modem to be unplugged, wifi to be disabled, phone shut off and placed in another room, and had us place black electrical tape over our computer or phone cameras regardless of whether or not they were turned off or unplugged. The investor balked, glancing at me. I tried to smile but felt it came off as an apologetic grimace.
"My phone is turned off," said the investor, moving to place it face down on his desk.
"Oh no, that's not sufficient. They can activate your phone as long as the battery is intact... probably even after it is removed." As the investor rose to take his phone out of the office, my dad added, "I'm not paranoid. I have a friend who works for NSA."
Dad would repeat, "I'm not paranoid" many times throughout the duration of the meeting and I cringed every single time. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
When the investor returned, Eric and I perched on the edge of our chairs. I chewed the inside of my cheek to a pulp while Eric kept picking at a spot on his pants. We were aware of, but had grown used to dad's idiosyncrasies; it was uncomfortable to see them through the investor's eyes.
Dad fished a jump drive from his pocket and handed it across the desk.
I took a deep breath, anticipating a business plan. Dad had negotiated business deals and brokered investments before, I thought. He was peculiar, but he knew how to write a business plan, didn't he?
He did not.
The investor plugged in the jump drive and opened the included PowerPoint presentation. This was no glossy deck with a tidy market analysis, financial projection, and clear funding request.
This was a messy, disorganized, crowded stream of my dad's consciousness and I think my mouth physically dropped open when I understood what we were all about to dive into.
There were nearly eight-hundred slides containing almost thirty years of my dad's journal entries detailing his spiritual experiences (in teeny, tiny type!) with photographs of feathers and mountain streams he'd taken crammed into every available space. Here and there, he'd squeezed in mini dissertations on elementary particles, quarks, and quantum physics.
A few things suddenly clunked into place:
First, my mom on the phone during the past few months, telling me about how great it was that dad was focusing, how hard he was working down in his office; how hopeful she was that something would finally work out.
And second, How often my dad must have done this over the years, hyperfocusing on a big pile of nonsense, going uptown to harass someone with it, occasionally finding people who were touched by his journey and his particular aura of Holy Man, who would then give us money or cars to "help" because the spirit prompted them to do so. It was never enough to make anything happen; never enough to actually launch a business or take a prototype from CAD sketch to a production line, but it would buy some groceries, catch up the utilities, maybe cover the mortgage for a few more months.
This. This was how we had survived.
I had wondered. My brother and I had made conservative calculations based on the cost of living in a suburb of Salt Lake City during the 80s and 90s, how much my parents' mortgage was, and the bare minimum it would have cost to keep four children fed and dressed and with the lights mostly on. We couldn't make sense of any of our data; even if we had lived primarily below the poverty line of the time, dad had not had any kind of regular income since I was around nine years old. Just how much charity had we subsisted on?
When a little money would come in, I'd ask mom where it came from. She'd would shrug and say, "Money from heaven."
Poor mom, indexing upstairs in order to keep busy and assuage hopeless thoughts and worries about the eviction notices taped to their front door, full of hope that after forty-three years of marriage, dad might pull something off. He had been focusing all right, but he was making this. This 789 page travesty that I was now going to have to translate.
It took Eric and I over four hours to help my dad boil down all the extraneous information and simplify the way my dad talks in circles (I also do this; I think it's an ADHD thing?) to find the scattered nuggets of necessary business parts. We skipped hundreds of pages that didn't matter, reassured dad (over and over) the investor didn't need a crash course in the irreducible complexity of bacterial flagellum, and tried desperately to get him to focus on an actual, actionable plan.
He couldn't do it. We redirected him a hundred times. As I mentioned, Eric had spent a summer working on this many-headed hydra of a project with him, and we knew at least one of the heads had promise. But in the most stereotypical ADHD cartoon of a parody ever, dad could not focus on it. Instead, he got stars in his eyes and talked about the completely out of control hydra heads so swollen with dreams not even Hercules could take them out. He had zero evidence these pie-in-the-sky ideas were viable investment options and all would be extraordinarily expensive (and therefore an enormous risk to the investor) to even test!
The investor seemed to shrink deeper and deeper into his plush leather chair, searching for an escape hatch that did not exist.
Reader, I broke. And in that splintered, fragmented space, I saw my father clearly for the first time in my entire life.
We left in a daze. One of my dad's more baffling symptoms is a perpetual, sunny outlook on life. It doesn't matter how bleak their situation is, my dad deeply, fervently, emphatically believes that everything will work out tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, the next day for sure. If not then, by Friday at the latest. If not by Friday, no later than June. It goes on and on and on and on (and makes my mother ill). And without a rock bottom to hit (because he doesn't believe one exists), he just.keeps.going.
I can still close my eyes and see my mom's sweet, expectant face as we walked in the door. My stomach had sunk into my toes. I didn't know how to tell her... I didn't know how to say, "Hey... dad is nuts. Nothing is ever going to happen. Nothing is ever going to get better."
I don't know what I choked out to my mom, but I remember how she deflated. I had to sit down. My brain was struggling to re-catalog and re-arrange memories of my formative experiences that I thought I had understood.
Growing up, our electricity had been shut off and my mother had wrapped her own sweater to give me for Christmas... not because god was testing us; not because we were enduring the furnace of the refiner's fire, but because my father was actually incompetent---because he was likely plagued with a garden variety of worsening mental health issues that would continue to go untreated.
It's still hard to type. 💔💔💔 I remember how it felt to have my dad upon his pedestal, carved of impenetrable and gleaming marble, worthy of my accolade and admiration. I liked feeling like the world made sense because of his insights; always knowing there were beautiful explanations for all the plot holes in my culture and religion.
With this new perspective, my kaleidoscope was mid-turn, the pretty patterns falling away, and I couldn't tell up from down.
The foundation beneath me shook and crumbled, plunging me into a deep crevasse. If my dad was crazy, what had I built my life on? The Mormon church encourages a close, personal relationship with god, one that includes answers to prayers and ongoing revelation. I felt like I had that, but relied heavily on my dad to patch up anachronisms in the scriptures, problematic early church history, sexism in our temple ordinances, and explain why god, through his prophets, was treating LGBTQ people so horrifically.
What did I believe without him? Without his explanations that weren't always strictly doctrinal? So many of his explanations came with warnings: "This is no longer taught from the pulpit; it is part of the 'shrinking gospel' because the church is under condemnation for not practicing the law of consecration. You can't talk about this with anyone else."
I spent the better part of twelve months trying to separate my dad's version of Mormonism from the mainstream church. I needed to see if there was anything left for me if I stripped all the dad-parts away. It was a frustrating, impossibly confusing endeavor. Eric and I started playing a game we called "Normal not Normal."
Me: "Did your dad (or mom or any church teacher/leader) ever flip to the facsimile 2 in the Book of Abraham, point out figure 7, and explain in very reverent tones, that the figure's penile erection meant that it was a symbol of the most holy god and signified the creation of the world and all the people in it?"
Eric [horrified]: "Not normal! Not normal! Not normal!"
Me [genuinely baffled & confused]: "Huh."
*The facsimiles in the LDS book of scripture called The Pearl of Great Price are actually common funerary texts and the figure with the erection is the Egyptian God of Fertility, Min. Something definitely not covered in Sunday School. My dad read what would have been considered "anti-Mormon literature" (which would have covered Joseph Smith's mistranslation of this text) and made sure to introduce it to us in small quantities with his own faith-promoting explanations. I think it was his way of inoculating us against anything that might be considered an attack on our faith.
Throughout the extremely painful process of deconstructing my religion, Eric wrapped me up in the kind of love I'd never felt I had to earn, and waited with me for the dust to settle. And when it finally did---when I landed on the agnostic side of the post-mormon coin---one of the few silver linings was that the ever present portend of doom, that hovering black cloud of fear that had haunted our lives for eighteen years, was gone.
I cried when my children received their massively delayed shots. There were a lot of feelings swirling around me all at once: lingering fear that lightning would strike or a dark cloud would burst, drowning us in the fury of a scorned god; deep humiliation at having to explain our situation to the clinic nurses; anger that my dad had terrorized and frightened me into almost two decades of frozen inactivity; and a tingling, ecstatic joy that I was, at last, reclaiming an important part of my long quashed autonomy.
The nurses were so nice, reassuring me that I wasn't the only one, that they got older kids caught up all the time. I don't know if it's true or how common it is here, but I appreciated the effort to calm the rash of embarrassment that spread across my neck and face as I filled out all the paperwork.
The nurses gave all my kids cute bandaids and lollipops and one even photo bombed us, just happy we were there and getting this taken care of.
We had to wait a little longer on Jake due to some troubling health issues, but finally got the green light from his neurologist. He got his first round of vaccinations last month (not counting the covid shots and boosters we all got on time as released).
I hate that my crippling fears became Eric's crippling fears. I hate that we spent so many years afraid, uncomfortable, ashamed, and unable to openly talk about the vaccine issue. I wonder what Eric would say if he were here; if he'd been allowed to finish walking me through the deconstruction of my faith and my eventual rebirth. I think, I hope, he'd be proud.
xo, Jessica