Home again, home again, jiggedy jig

Warning: this one is LONG. Making up for lost time I guess.

Well, we made it. We've returned from Utah pretty much in one piece. It's totally amazing to me how quickly and completely one can be pulled back into family dramas. I love and adore my family, especially my 2 sweet sisters, but man alive, it can be tiring to be around the whole whirling dervish that is family. In response to a request from an admired reader, I've decided to give a little rundown on the extended family. Extended family, if you're reading this, don't take anything personally, you all know how much I love you.

There are six of us in the Smith family. Mom and dad, the three sisters, and one brother. I'm the oldest, then comes lovely MissuzJ, then the little bro, Jon (yes, Jon Smith, no, I am not making this up), and brining up the rear, Katester the Greatster, aka Katydidz. We were raised a very tight military mormon family. An interesting combination of influences, the military, and the church. My dad served in the Navy for 20 years, and of course, with this came the requisite moving around. We were lucky that he had some long tours along the way so we weren't moving as often as some of my military friends, but we were still on the road a lot. The church was always a safety net for us. Even when you didn't know anyone in a new town, you had friends at church. We spent a lot of time in and around church in such varied places as San Diego, Minnesota, and Monterey. The people were lovely, and the fellowship appreciated. I grew up believing that my family would be together forever as long as we all stayed active in the church, and followed all the rules. There are lots of rules in the mormon church. Anyone who reads Dooce may be familiar with some of the mormon culture, and I can confirm that in my experience, she is RIGHT ON. OK, started out talking about the family, ended up talking about the church. sorry. That seems to happen a lot with me.

Anyhooo, my early memories of my childhood are fairly idyllic. Stable, secure, loving, comfortable, are all words I could use to describe life in our home. My parents had a very traditional relationship. Dad worked, mom stayed home, mostly. I think she had a few part-time jobs here and there when we were older, but mostly she was there. We sat down to dinner together pretty much every night, and aside from the typical sibling rivalries, we all got along. Now, of course, everything changes when puberty comes along. I had started questioning the church at about 11 or 12. I was kindof an intellectual kid, and started wondering who's kidding who when my elementary education in evolution started clashing with the traditional teachings of creationism. My dad patiently discussed the many philosophical possibilities pertaining to said discrepancy, but the seed of doubt had been planted. Add to this my burgeoning interest in boys, and my little mormon mind started spinning out the guilt and worry about how to be happy and still be "good".

I started noticing my mom's depression in high school. I don't know if that's when it started getting bad for her, or if that was just when I was mature enough to notice it for what it was. My dad started sitting me down for conversations about how my mom was hurting or upset, and how I needed to stop distressing her with my boy-crazies, and general disregard for her opinion. Sometimes it feels like my mom and I aren't related at all. Much of the time I just don't get her, and I know that the feeling is mutual. We have tons of love for each other, but the understanding can sometimes be in short supply. My dad played go-between a lot. Which, looking back, I think contributed to the lack of understanding between my mom and I. I often felt like she wasn't interested enough, or, honestly, didn't have the balls to deal with me directly. My dad and I could always talk. He was the one who helped me with my homework, as good grades were incredibly important to him. He encouraged me to think, even when everyone around me was telling me I thought too much. I think, on some level my mom might blame him with encouraging me to be too much of a free thinker. She tended to want me to conform, and I didn't want any part of that. We struggled through early adolescence, and then, when I was 16, my dad retired from the Navy, and decided to move the family to southern Utah where he had found a job. He had promised my mom we'd come back to Utah when he was done with the military, as she grew up in northern Utah, and always missed it. I think she suspected that if we were surrounded by other mormons, then everything would just be so much better, and her children would be somehow be guaranteed protection and continued faith in the church. She was to be sorely disappointed.

So, the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school, we move from affluent, interesting, beautiful Carmel, CA, to...... Utah. Shit, meet fan. I had to leave my friends, my school, and my boyfriend (a very sweet mormon boy, who could actually keep up with my crazy ass. I still wonder if we would have stayed there, if he and I would have ended up raising little mormons together). Needless to say I was PISSED. Mostly pissed at my parents. It seriously took me years to forgive them for that one. Maybe you can imagine what that kind of move would do to a kid like me. Or maybe you can't, so let's compare for a moment, the differences. Made particularly acute by the fact that I was 16, and seriously hormonally compromised.

Let's start with the school: I was used to Monterey High, and Carmel High, since my sister and I went to different high schools (long story), where the parking lots were peppered with Mercedes and BMW (with an occasional Porche thrown in for fun) low riders and loud stereos. Cut to Cedar High: old, OLD pickup trucks, mostly with gun racks in the back, and many of those gun racks holding actual guns. Hunting rifles, of course. Not considered dangerous for teenage boys to carry around at all, considered, in actuality, a necessary tool for taking down that stray buck who might wander onto school grounds. OK, that's slightly exaggerated, but not much!

The student body was another major difference. Monterey High was, I'd suspect, one of the most diverse student bodies in the country. There was a lot of military there for one, and the type of military was unique. In the area were the Defense Language Institute on one side, with students and instructors of about every language one could think of, and on the other side, the Naval Post Graduate School, where all the super-smart navy guys hung out. Carmel High was wealthy beyond belief. Scary wealthy sometimes. Lots of kids with too much money and not enough supervision, and very sophisticated in that weird way teenagers can be sometimes. Again, cut to Cedar High. It took me a few days to realize that the main thing that was odd about it was the complete lack of color. I actually laughed out loud at my first basketball game, watching all those skinny white boys try to play. It was the most completely blond haired blue eyed bunch of mormon DNA I had ever witnessed. Not to mention the overabundance of COWBOYS. I think, at the time, I didn't quite believe they existed any more, but here they were, honest to goodness cowboys. At the time, I was wearing my hair short, and many of them honestly thought I was a lesbian. Big hair abounded. It's making me cringe, just thinking about it.

Other differences. Too much nothing in Utah. Having come from central California, where it feels like every square inch is packed full of something, all the open space out there gave me some serious agoraphobia for awhile. Also, the food. I had acquired a taste for good food pretty early in life, thanks to dating a couple boys whose families owned (or could just afford to take me to) some of the nicer restaurants in Monterey, and if you've ever been to Monterey, you know that is saying something. Helped along by a best friend (with a car, bonus!) who waited tables weekends at a fantastic breakfast spot on Cannery Row by the ocean. Our location of choice for skipping school. In Cedar, the choices were pretty much deep fried something at the local greasy spoon, or fend for yourself at the gas station, which was the main school skipping snack spot. Sad.

OK, I have gone on much longer than anticipated about the charms of Cedar City. It has changed a lot in 15 years (wow, 15 YEARS, that's for-freaking-ever!). Back to the family for a sec, then I better wrap up, the kids are calling.

Moving didn't alleviate my mother's depression, it did, however introduce me to mine. I hated being there, and hated my parents for taking me there. My mom and I basically stopped talking to each other for long periods of time. My dad continued being the go-between, with less and less success. My sister Becky and I got a lot closer during that time. Being co-victims to the whole moving to Utah disaster. I consulted my bishop about my unrelenting sadness, and he suggested I see a shrink, cause I was WAY too crazy for him to deal with. The shrink might have helped at the time, if it had been some kind of family counseling, instead of just my mom dropping her crazy daughter off in a back parking lot, so that, please god!, she could start acting like a normal kid again. (Smell the bitterness? I do.) Between the church guilt, and the depression, I was not in a good place. Therapy didn't help much, and immersing myself in a new boyfriend didn't help much either.

One day, however, I had a moment of clarity. I can still remember how that moment felt. I decided not to believe what "they" wanted me to believe. I had an image of "them" being all the old men supposedly in charge of the mormon church. I decided that from that moment on, I was going to decide what I believed. It felt like the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders, and the light started coming in through the darkness that had surrounded me. My salvation and my mother's condemnation all in one fell swoop. I didn't make any kind of announcement to my parents that I was done with the church, but I was DONE. I stopped going, and broke my mother's heart. Not too long after that I was handed the ultimatum, by my dad of course, that I needed to stop hurting my mother, or I needed to move out. That he loved me, but he loved her more. Ouch.

I'm not blaming him, I'm not blaming either one of them. They did the best they could, and I'm completely sure I did nothing to help them at the time. I also understand that they believe what they believe, and just as there's nothing they could do to make me believe in the church again, there's nothing I could do to make them stop. We're at an uncomfortable impasse as far as that goes. And, unfortunately, their beliefs make it impossible for them to completely accept me and my choices. My mom sees it as losing her child for eternity, which now that I have kids, I can understand would be about the deepest pain there is. I, on the other hand, feel like there's no way she's getting rid of me that easily. As I see it now, we've been doing this for lifetimes, and will likely continue doing this for lifetimes more. Maybe next time, she'll get to be the daughter, and my karmic reckoning will commence.

Our visit together was nice. It had it's difficult moments, but less than I expected. It's an uneasy truce, and I can still see the pain in her eyes sometimes. I wish there were something I could do about it, but I've learned that I need to let her have her pain, and that trying to make it my own doesn't do anything to help her anyways. I'll try to recap some more of our trip another day, with pictures, if I can figure out how to get them from the handy dandy kodak disk to the super cool blog.