The boy in the poster
no longer exists
Welcome to the land behind the paywall! I'm delighted (and a little gobsmacked) that you're here. Thank you.
My parents were babies when they got married in 1975. My mom just 19; my dad fresh off his two-year proselytizing mission for the Mormon church at 21. They had me, a bicentennial baby with a red, white, and blue birth certificate, a year later.
The church was more outspoken against birth control in those days, issuing this statement) in 1969:
We seriously regret that there should exist a sentiment or feeling among any members of the Church to curtail the birth of their children. We have been commanded to multiply and replenish the earth that we may have joy and rejoicing in our posterity. Where husband and wife enjoy health and vigor and are free from impurities that would be entailed upon their posterity, it is contrary to the teachings of the Church artificially to curtail or prevent the birth of children. We believe that those who practice birth control will reap disappointment by and by.
My mom tells me that shortly after they were married and thinking about the logistics of family planning, they heard something along these lines in General Conference, though I can't track down the talk she might be remembering. The church periodically (and quietly) scrubs content from its archives. "We were very young," she says with a shrug, "but if we listen to the words of the prophet and obey, blessings follow." She pauses, picking at a spot on her pants before looking up at me and smiling. "When it's right, everything always works out."
Her eyes had a pinched look, despite the smile, because life hadn't worked out for us. My dad struggled to provide, and financial problems were our standard norm. We were taught (and I believed into my forties) that our parents' financial struggles were a trial from god, meant to purify us in the ‘refiner’s fire,’ and that as we worked to become more faithful, more pure, more holy, and more penitent, we would be blessed with both spiritual and temporal needs.
I have memories of my mother crying and wringing her hands, blaming herself for our ongoing financial hardships. She’d say, “Maybe I just haven’t learned whatever I’m supposed to learn from this yet.”
She still does that, and they're now homeless, forced to move into my maternal grandmother's basement.
My parents knew each other growing up because they attended the same ward. My dad started walking my mom home from mutual when she was twelve and he was fourteen. "He was the bishop's son," my mom says. "What more do you need?"
In high school, mom was pretty and popular, with luxuriously long hair, a tiny waist, and curves in all the right places. She was the president of the dance team, on the drill team, and came from a relatively healthy, balanced, 'normal' Mormon family with a working mom and a gregarious and outgoing father.
After silently suffering years of sexual abuse from a babysitter and struggling with undiagnosed and misunderstood dyslexia and ADHD during his childhood and throughout his formative years, dad had built some walls around himself by the time they were teenagers. He had a small, close-knit group of friends, went hot dog skiing with his brother, and was a skilled diver on the dive team. His father was a loving grandfather to me, but had been a grave and serious patriarch who often prioritized church over family and cared deeply about appearances.
After dad graduated, he gave my mom a promise ring---a thin gold band with a tiny chip of diamond in the center, then left for his mission. He served in what was then called the Washington DC mission; an area that spanned several states and consisted of knocking on doors in an attempt to convert and baptize folks into the Mormon church.
Mom wrote him faithfully, though she later burned all their letters. I’m furious about this to this day. "They were embarrassing," she said. "I was writing him about what my friends and I were getting up to at school. They weren’t uplifting at all." She reserved a page for him in her senior yearbook, writing his name at the top. She mailed him the book, he wrote in it, and sent it back, along with a poster of himself leaning up against a tree. She hung it in her room and blew it kisses every night.
When I was a kid, the poster was still around, rolled up and secured with a brittle elastic in the storage room under the kitchen. By the time I found it, my father was no longer that easy-going guy flexing his folded arms across a red shirt, a swoop of sun-kissed hair caressing his forehead. I’d seen photos of my parents as teenagers going to Junior Prom together; I’d seen photos of my dad as a happy young kid with a military buzz cut (his dad was in the Navy), but this poster-sized thirst trap photo of himself was something else.
I think the poster highlights the extreme contrast of who he once was and who he eventually became better than almost anything else---even the old Super 8 movies of him four-wheeling in his yellow Jeep or doing flips off of jumps at the ski resort, both of which used to stun friends into open-mouthed silence. They couldn't connect my scary severe father who controlled every aspect of my life to that fun-loving, smiling young man.
I could, but that might be because as the oldest, I was the only sibling to know my dad while he was still normal. I have fond memories of a warm and present---even delighted---father. I can remember him lifting me up to see blue eggs in a robin’s nest, remember crawling into my parents’ waterbed and tracing letters through his silky garments before he got up and got ready for work, I remember him struggling to brush my hair before taking me for a McDonald’s Happy Meal when my mother was in the hospital after giving birth to my sister. Even after he started shifting into who he is today, I remember him teaching me how to ride a bike, remember him pitching softballs to me in the backyard, and once, taking me on a daddy-daughter date to play mini-golf.
Growing up, I think we all knew that dad had been abused by a babysitter when he was little, but we didn't know any details. It was a whispered story, spoken in undertones and shrouded in a deep shame we were not old enough to understand. As a child, I never linked whatever he might have gone through to the stern, exacting, impossible-to-please father I knew. How could I when he couldn't see it himself? He never realized that the ways he coped with his unresolved trauma filtered down to us like drops of stinging acid rain through a canopy of leaves.
He's hard to write about, my dad. He doesn't really fit into any neat and tidy boxes. When I read Educated by Tara Westover, I was stunned. It was the first time I'd ever read anything that came close to describing my father. Tara's dad is an unrefined, unpolished version of mine. Her father swears and slams doors, he uses poor grammar, and doesn't care if his children wash their hands after they use the bathroom.
He is someone my father would have befriended and attempted to mentor because they see eye to eye on conspiracy theories, distrust the government, and are obsessed with the End Times (second coming of Jesus, Armageddon, Last Days, End of Days, etc).
Trying to describe my father to my first therapist was an exercise in futility.
"He didn't hit you or your mother?" she'd ask.
"Never. He was calm, quiet, and clean. He liked everything to be orderly, including the house, the yard, and all of us. He never raised his voice; I never saw him angry or in a rage. He was tender-hearted with babies and children. He gave us beautiful father's blessings, never swore or used slang of any kind (not even heck or gosh or any of the other popular Mormon substitution swears), and took every tenant of the church very seriously."
But both my dad and Tara's took a path through Mormonism that resulted in our being raised in sort of a cult within a cult. Our fathers functioned under the larger umbrella of mainstream Mormonism; they believed in and sustained the Prophet and the General Authorities. They studied the standard works and taught their families from these books. But they also dove deep into what my dad called 'the shrinking gospel.'
This included reading, studying, and teaching early church views no longer taught from the pulpit; things only found in records like the Journal of Discourses. Their worldviews were/are shaped by prophecies about the ever looming End Times when the world as we know it will end. When we will need to rely on our food storage and primitive skills to survive, when we will be 'called up' to journey to and build 'The New Jerusalem,' and when, in the calamities that occur, only a small percentage of the Lord's one and only true church (Mormons!) will survive into the millennium where Satan will be banished for 1000 years and Jesus will reign.
For both Tara's dad and my dad, these (terrifying) beliefs led to clinical levels of paranoia and exacerbated other probable mental health issues.
I love my dad. I don't want anyone to judge him unfairly or attempt to label him in ways that don't fit or are inaccurate. I hope to tell our story (because they are impossibly intertwined) in a way that preserves his dignity and leaves you with compassion for him. It does not excuse the harm caused, but I know he did his best with the knowledge he had.
Thanks again for being here.
Jessica