I guess we all have a different story. I am sure few people actually get to have the ideal family. But what really is ideal. I don't mean ideal like Leave it to Beaver with mom always dressed to the nines and a big smile on her face. I mean an ideal quirky family. Because that is the nature of us humans, we are quirky. But I want a different story for my childhood family.
What do I want? I want a mother that feels loved and valued by her husband. I want a mother that can spend her energy living life rather then constantly licking her emotional wounds that were inflicted on her by her husband as a means to control her. What do I want? I want a father that does not think that little girls are sex objects. I want a dad that I could trust to have children around. What do I want? I want happy, silly, simple childhood memories. I don't want to be afraid to remember anything from my childhood. I wish the memories of me being silly with my sisters were not tainted by the fact that my father was manipulating and abusing all of us. I want to know that I was safe as a child. I don't want to have to worry that I was abused more then I remember.
But what is my reality? I don't want to tell you. It is funny that I don't want to tell you because I am afraid that you will judge the LDS church because of my messed up family. Every church has perpetrators in it. Does it make the LDS church wrong because it has my father in it? Because it has perpetrators in it? Don't give me your answer, I don't want to know. This is a complicated enough question for me I don't need to hear others thoughts on it. I am LDS, I am active LDS. It is something I chose to fight to keep in my life every week. Because it is a fight to stay LDS for me. I love the LDS doctrine and the LDS scriptures. So I draw a line between hypocrites like my father and the church. Hypocrites and perpetrators infiltrate and use many different churches to enable their abusive plans. A fact that makes me spitting mad. Here only a few paragraphs in I am already talking about my most difficult religious issue, when I had only planned on introducing my self.
So back to introducing myself. My father is of course a perpetrator. My father is LDS, active LDS. My father holds a temple recommend, is a temple worker, and thinks that he is highly respected in the LDS community. And he probably is right. Why does he still have a temple recommend? Maybe that is because I mentally am not strong enough to take it from him. I almost was once. But the stress and fallout of that was quite allot, more then I was ready for.
So I have not yet chopped down the giant of my fears. But I am not sure what that matters. As far as I know my father would be excommunicated for a year, and then he would be back to his same old self. Looking and feeling respectable. The actions that I take don't really matter it does not change the fact that my father is a perpetrator. It does not change the fact that my father needs the LDS church in order to look respectable. It does not change the fact that my father will do what ever he can to gain back the respect of the LDS community. It does not change the fact that the LDS church believes that anyone/ everyone can be forgiven of their sins and washed clean. Even perpetrators, I would have put a descriptive word in front of the word perpetrator but there is not one strong enough, not lying, not deceitful not any word can tell you how evil my father is. It does not matter that my father used the LDS church to control me. That I was essentially abused in the name of the church by my father. These things do not matter, no sin is too great for the atonement, no perpetrator too far gone for the atonement. The fact that my father is a respected member of the LDS church is not something I can change.
And here I feel like I am writing anti LDS propaganda. It is very hard to face the reality of an LDS perpetrator father and not feel some anger directed at the church from time to time. I could easily be angry at the church, decide the church is part of the problem, and go my separate ways from the church. But I don't want to. I love the LDS church, I love their doctrine so I fight to stay. Are there other daughters of perpetrators out there who fight to stay LDS too? I am sure there are. Somehow I fear that by opening this blog I am opening myself up to have anti LDS stuff fired at me like machine gun fire. I don't want that or care to read that. What I find interesting is the victim who fights to stay LDS, who fights to keep the church she loves in her life. If you want to tell me about that I would love to hear about that.
Now again I have debated more of my core issues and done little to introduce myself. I am the middle of five daughters. As I write that my fear pops up, does that tell you too much about me. I think we were all perpetrated on by my father. But I am the only one who has come to terms with the abuse I experienced.
It feels wrong to mix these realities. While I did not have the ideal childhood. I am a mother and a wife and I try to give my children something closer to the ideal I missed out on. By some miracle I married a very supportive husband. We are both seeing a counselor full time. My husband is having something of a mid life crisis, and I am seeing a counselor because of my abusive father.
That is me in a nutshell. Ideally you could say I am like an injured bird trying to heal, trying to reclaim back my life, tyring to make sense of it all. And this blog is a place for that mental journey. Blogging about this feels very risky, but I hope it will be better then keeping it bottled up running circles in my head.
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