Turn around don't drown
the National Weather Service PSA gets it right
This is part of a maybe never ending series. Here is part one, part two, part three, and part four.
My parents returned home after the ordination, and my kids and I returned to the monumental work of breathing in and out and putting one foot in front of the other.
About a month later (not yet three months since Eric died), things came to a head.
I was still struggling with my dad and his eclipsing experience at Ben's ordination. Despite being able to talk to my brother about it, I felt muzzled. Not wanting to hurt my extended family, I was keeping so much about my faith crisis inside and it was making me sick. It wasn't sustainable; I was going to explode.
I labored over a blog post. I don't remember what I wrote, but I remember I tried so hard to be vague about what had happened. I didn't yet have words to describe the ways my dad continued to center himself in stories that weren't about him. I didn't yet know what spiritual bypassing was or how it affected almost every aspect of my life.
I just knew I needed to say something out loud or I might die.
After publishing the blog post, I laid awake, worried about how it might hurt my mom. I'd been as gentle as I possibly could; I'd been incredibly vague, not describing at all what had really happened. Unable to sleep, I texted my mom to give her a heads up.
I told her I'd written a post and was worried she'd be hurt. I told her for the first time that I was struggling to process dad's experience and how much it hurt.
She replied telling me she was feeling very insecure, but appreciated the heads up and would wait until the next day to read it.
That night I had a panic attack and pulled down the post before she had a chance to look at it. Even after pulling it down, I wished I hadn't sent a text; wished I hadn't said anything. Because it opened... not a flood gate, but something smaller... maybe a sluice gate on a canal?
We texted back and forth a bit, and that sluice canal gushed. I told her that I was upset that dad was telling family and friends about his experience, how it was eclipsing our own experiences and how I felt like he was co-opting our grief in a really big way. I explained how little sense it made that Eric would appear to dad of all people, and how I wished dad had more awareness about how his worldview impacts others.
I tried to explain why I wasn't ready for a family meeting about my faith crisis and apologized that my efforts to protect her from hurt had only widened the gap between us. I gave her a very watered down version of the "business" meeting I'd put together for dad and how it triggered everything.
"All of this is secondary to Eric's loss," I wrote. "Secondary isn't even the right word. It's at the very bottom of my priority list. Marinating about faith and mormonism and dad and visions is stuff that cannot occupy my days because I just have to survive right now."
Her replies were... frustrating. As I suspected, she took responsibility for things that weren't hers. Dad's experience was now their experience. "They" were just trying to help, not HE was just trying to help. She told me I was remembering things differently and that we would just have to "agree to disagree" -- a phrase I hate with my whole body and soul because it's dismissive and silencing.
And reader, I don't know what happened. Looking back on my journal entries, this was the moment when I could have just walked away. I'd already said I didn't have any energy for this. But that sluice gate was open and the fields were filling up with too much water and all the crops were going to drown.
I got off of the text machine, because is there any worse way to try to communicate? And went back to the only communication medium in which I can think.
I wrote a letter.
It wasn't without insecurities of my own. I had very recently attempted to save my 13-year friendship with Tracy via letters and it hadn't worked. I had lost confidence in my ability to communicate and worried I was only going to make things worse.
In my many other attempts to tell this story, I have versions where I include the whole letter, versions where I include only excerpts, and versions where I try to sum it all up. None of them are great, all of them are overlong.
Here's probably the most important part:
Can we not both agree that there are good and wonderful things [in our family] while also acknowledging that there have been some hard things? The hard things do not negate the good things, but when we can’t have honest conversations about the hard things, it teaches me that my feelings are not important and that my experiences are not valued.
If this is going to be an agree to disagree situation where the hard conversations aren’t welcome, then I don’t actually know how to move forward. I can tell you all day that I love you, that I love dad, that I appreciate the many, many wonderful, happy moments from my childhood and upbringing. I can tell you all day that I am not bitter or hard, that you were wonderful parents, that we all do our best, that my own kids will have their own beefs with me regardless of how hard I try... but no amount of this feels like it buys me enough space to say, “And also, these other things hurt me, can I talk about them, please?”
I don't know how many of you have experience with or know how to recognize toxic positivity, but it is a serious, serious problem in Mormonism. Toxic positivity is as prolific as our suited missionaries knocking at your door and it is BFFs with spiritual bypassing. Together, they teach us from childhood to disconnect from our feelings, from our own intuition. Bad things are blessings in disguise, traumatic things are opportunities to forgive, and self-sacrifice to the point of misery is the path to eternal happiness.
There are lots of stories I could tell to underline this, but here's the lightest and shortest one:
When I was in high school, my mom sewed all my dance dresses. I've probably mentioned this before. This was partially because purchasing a dress at a store was probably too expensive, but primarily because of my dad's strict modesty rules: nothing sleeveless, nothing above the knee, nothing backless, nothing that would "entice" the opposite sex.
I once tried to borrow a dress from my friend Liz. She is Russell M. Nelson's granddaughter and one would think with that royal connection, her dress would be worthy. (Nelson is the current Mormon prophet; back then he was one of the twelve apostles, still a 'high up' General Authority). Alas, my dad did not allow me to wear it because the the sleeves were sheer; my mother went along with his ruling because the dress actually fit -- the horrors.
Mom sewed all my dresses baggy. I would cry and plead, "Just please make it fit," and she would snap, "I'm not making it skin-tight!" I'd cry some more, "I don't want it skin-tight! I just want it to fit!"
Homecoming... 1993, probably? And look, it's not the worst dress in the world. I mean, it's all wrinkly because it can be taken in at least two inches and the hem is at least four inches longer than what was stylish, but whatever!
My point is, it's a very funny story to tell. I'm a good oral story teller, I can usually have people in stitches, and the literal gunny-sack boxy styling my mom insisted upon for modesty during the popular Gunne Sax dress era is hilarious.
Funnier still is how my baby sister -- the most pious of us all -- was the first to quietly return the garment to the sewing machine and take it in herself. 🤯 I mean, we all knew how to sew, but I would have never circumvented a parental edict like this. Best example I have:
My mom sewed all the bridesmaids dresses and please note how none of them particularly fit. My little sister (sitting at my right) took the top back to the sewing machine and took it in. It's not expertly done, but hers is the only defined waist in the lot. 😂 (My dress fits because my grandmother sewed it).
If I tell this story when my mom is around, she gets upset. It feels like an attack. It feels like criticism; she can't laugh because she can see now that she was over-protective. She can't admit she sewed me unflattering dresses so no one would know I had a feminine shape. All I am allowed to say is, "My mom was amazing; she sewed all of my dresses and did such a beautiful job."
This, my friends, is toxic positivity. Only blowing sunshine up one's ass is allowed, even when it's something very silly like a misshapen homecoming dress.
And hey! She was amazing! She sewed dresses when she didn't want to. She gave me something to wear when we weren't sure if we had money for food! I had a good time at almost every single one of those dances regardless of how well my dress fit.
As my own kids have grown up, I've more fully realized how important it is to let them talk. They bring up the time I banned Beyblades because I was afraid they were playing them too much. They remember how I banned Sponge Bob Square Pants because he was so annoying and they were afraid to watch if it playing on the ceiling while they were at the dentist. They laugh about how I found them watching an actual Manga pr0n film when they were too little to understand what was going on and then panic banned EVERYTHING Manga just to be on the safe side.
And sure, sometimes these stories can give me a pang of regret; I often wish I could go back in time and do things differently, explain things better, be less ridiculous. But it's also important to let them process, to let them remember, to share in the communal grief that was the era we sold their Wii, afraid video games would make them grow up to be serial killers. And it's important to be able to laugh. Yes I overreacted. Yes it was because I was afraid. Yes I was doing my best. Also it's funny. You suffered some things that make for funny stories now and it's okay to talk about them and laugh.
I can laugh now. But my mom can't. And so the idea that I would be able to sit down with them and say... welp, here are the things dad did to set himself up as the ultimate all-knowing-ruler of our family, and here's how it affected me, and here's how it all fell apart, and here are all the ways my mom was an enabler... I just... how?
After I sent the letter I got some more apology texts from my mother and the first real e-mail from my dad I'd had in years. He called me his pet name for me, "Fuzzy," because my hair stuck up when I was a baby, giving me a fuzzy appearance, especially in sunlight. Mom had said he was devastated to learn he'd fallen from his white horse and felt like he had gained some insight into why he was as stern as he was when I was a child that he wanted to explain. He apologized for not making sure I felt loved unconditionally and asked if he could bring mom up for a talk.
I cried for a long time. Again, we are not even three months out from Eric dying. I cannot stress this enough: the timing on this was awful. Also, I felt responsible. I was the one who had written a blog post. I was the one who texted my mom. I was the one who opened the sluice gate. Trying to hide my faith crisis, trying to hide how upset I was with my father... none of it was working. All I'd succeeded in doing was worrying everyone, and the muzzle I'd placed upon my own mouth was suffocating me.
After a lot of self-reflection and talking with my brother and my friends, I finally told them I'd rather mom come up on the shuttle the following Wednesday; I wanted to talk to her first. Alone. Then said dad could come up on Friday to pick her up. I could talk to dad then, and there would be a hard and fast end-date to the visit so it wouldn't drag out.
So that's what we did.
The most common question I get when others find out I'm no longer a practicing Mormon: "How did you tell your parents? How did it go?"
After five posts, I'll finally be able to explain what that meeting was like.