I M Perfect lady

Between going back in my blog and reading Martha Beck’s book, “Leaving the Saints,” I see how it always falls into just two sides.

 

It seems very cut and dried, just two people and their view of the same exact event, failing to agree. 

 

What if the event is between father and daughter in abuse?

 

Martha Beck met with her 90-year-old father after a ten-year estrangement and shares this.

 

“Well, see, Dad,” I say carefully, “I find your reaction to the scar thing kind of strange.”  I notice his eyes widening a little, perhaps because I’m openly disagreeing with him, perhaps because I called him dad.  This suddenly feels right.  It feels like rebellion.  It’s the harshest, most disrespectful word I’ve ever deliberately said to him.

 

“If one of my daughter’s turned up with a lot of weird scars,” I go on, enjoying the giddy reckless feeling of saying what I actually think, “I wouldn’t just blame the Evil One, and drop the subject.  I would want to know what happened to her.”

 

“Nothing happened.” My father’s voice carries a ring of absolute assurance, absolute finality, that has made him a safe haven for so many Mormons whose faith is getting a little wobbly. The debate is resolved, the balcony is closed, the fat lady has sung, the last dog is hung, that is all she wrote.

 

This dead-certain tone is characteristic of many deeply religious folk, but Mormons are trained to use it about as thoroughly as any group of people I’ve ever known.  As soon as they can talk, Mormon toddlers are held up to microphones in church meetings, lisping to hundreds of onlookers the words their parents whisper in their ears; “I know the Church is true.  I know that Joseph Smith was a true prophet.  I know our president is God’s prophet on the earth.  I know these things without a shadow of doubt.”

 

Mormons tend to know a whopping lot of stuff beyond a shadow of doubt.  I envy them.  My whole life is shadowed by doubt.  The only conviction I embrace is this; whatever I believe, I may be wrong.

 

For a moment, looking at the stern pioneer conviction on my father’s handsome face, I’m so disoriented that I feel my brain twirling even faster – not in agreement but in familiar hopelessness, in the sickening conviction that no one will ever take my word over his.  Everything seems to slither right off the hard drive in my head.  “He’s right:” People underestimate the capacity for things to disappear.  At the moment, I can’t even remember the chain of events that took me out of Mormonism, that have made me “a hiss and a byword” not only to my father, not only to my family, but to an entire religion.

 

Then I remember Miranda and Diane, just a few feet away and my vision seems to clear.  The whole thing comes back to me, the journey that has taken me out of religion and into faith.  I recall its horror and beauty, the enormity of things I have lost and the incalculable preciousness of the things I’ve gained.  I wouldn’t give up the journey, not a moment of it.  On the other hand, I have no desire to live it again.  If Santayana is right, this means I must be willing to remember the whole story.  I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and force myself to go back to the beginning.

             Martha Beck

Her and I share a common story, being abused by our fathers and having to deal with religious overtones, is like attacking two sacred cows at once.

 

The Dead-Certain Tone is how my mother speaks and her certainty is beyond the shadow of doubt and leaves no opening for another’s view. 

 

My father said more than once, “I don’t remember” or “whatever they said I did.”  He never once brought forth remorsefully his own personal responsibility in the ‘event’ of child abuse.

 

Yet as adult children of this ‘event’, what we want most is for there to be an agreement towards the ‘event’, not even so much as who is to blame, but that the actual ‘event’ really happened.

 

She had scars, literally physical scars to her bottom from her ‘event’ and he still, at 90 years old says, “Nothing happened.”

 

Neither side is willing to recant.

To retreat, to surrender, you stand at an impasse.

 

Can a relationship be found on the island of impasse?

Is this where you are supposed to agree to disagree?

To each respectfully bow to the others point of view?

 

I feel huge amounts of angst in the frustration to face such a figure, to bare your wounds in a show and tell, and have them dismissed in a dead certain tone.

 

A lone voice against loud chatter of canned responses, where it seems we are not even granted access to the man behind the tone, the woman behind the religious front, we stand outside and alone, shunned and our words falling on deaf ears, two sides so horribly off balanced.

 

We finally have the courage and the words and we shakily stand, heart and soul in hand, pleading for them to see us.

 

Our family stands Dead tone certain against us, like a cold front bringing in bone chilling truths.

 

To feel the cold, to experience the dead certain tones spoken without compassion or empathy, freezes something within you, covers with ice, the coldness of their lack of response.

 

Death to a relationship, dead it now stands.

 

It wasn’t the ‘event’ that killed the relationship, but the cold dead tone after it.

 

What I feel most from them is cold, bone chilling cold, remorseless, dead certain tones, that I am wrong.

 

I feel the tiredness and hopelessness.

I feel the artic blast towards me freezing me out of that family while they will state in dead certain tones I left!

 

I left?! 

 

I left and am now writing in a blog about it, but to what end?