Ya know, I’ve blamed myself for being a failed parent most of my life since the divorce. After all, I cowardly ran into the arms of another woman who supported me and accepted me for who I was, not what I was expected to be, a high-salaried Mormon. My ex really tried to support me, but in the end just could not accept that the number one reason I was leaving the Mormons was not my desire to screw around, but to not be involved with an organization that openly and actively sought to destroy the lives of people that God sent here who didn’t fit the neat mold of pink or blue. The more I studied Proposition 8, the Mormon church’s clandestine, covert efforts to fund it without anyone knowing even though that was directly against the policy of the Church to get involved in political matters, the more I read about different thinkers over time who questioned their shitty Christian roots, the more I knew I was done. I couldn’t stay. In fact, I left the church in my heart about two years before cheating.
So what does this have to do with being a parent?
Yesterday, I randomly told the story of how the Universe worked it out that I was stable and sane and available to support my gay son when his mother told him, “you can stay here, but none of that gay stuff.” He celebrated his anniversary to his partner just last week and couldn’t be happier (from the pictures). It wasn’t even really that I was the support for him as much as my wife, Doris, was. She was there to help him find his path in ways that I could never have anticipated. I’m still a fuck up. I’m insane. He saw a lot of that while he stayed with us. But, the point is, as bad a parent as I think I am, I was there when his mother wasn’t. Her love was conditional, predicated on how he defined love personally. Mine never was, and it took just about going completely insane trying to exit the Mormon church to pave the path for support that he later received. I’ve been a zero in terms of other support in most ways. But at least I have that.
My wife tells me all the time that my warped ideas about what it means to be a parent are from my upbringing. That if I’m not constantly sitting in church, or having a catch, or hiking, or sending them money, or going out to eat, or having random games at the table, that I’m not a good Father. By the way, I did orchestrate the most elaborate D&D campaign with him and my other sons and their friends for more than a year. I think it might be one of his best memories. Anyway, being a good parent can take many forms. It’s not rationalization, I think, to say that. And here’s why I am saying that today.
Yesterday, after sharing what I did, someone sent me this in whisper chat privately on Twitch:
When I came out my mother’s boyfriend said he “didn’t want a gay living under his roof,” so my mother kicked me out. I had to wait 5 hours on the side of the road for my father to go AWOL, fly back to the UK and come pick me up. So genuinely, I want you to know that you’re awesome.
I don’t do Twitch to solicit praise for my parental failures, and validation for my choices in life. It’s not the reason I stream, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t need to hear that. I’ve heard that story before, so many times, from so many different people. It absolutely blows my fucking mind that humans can be so fucking cruel to their own children. Was I there for my boys as teenagers? Not in the real sense, I let my ex take them out of state where they could live with her without the distraction of changing homes every week. I could have blocked her from moving out of state with them. I was already married. It was the right thing to do, but my God it hurt. I realize now I just — very suddenly — had my boys move out. All parents go through that loss, just more gradually. I went through it all very suddenly. But in many ways I was still there. I paid $42,000 a year in support for more than three years (before I realize my ex was breaking the law since she had been remarried and was collecting illegal alimony and not reporting it to the tax people). I bought my sons the tools they they used to become the professionals they are becoming now. I played occasional video games with them online. I setup our own private Discord (way before the divorce) that is our safe place to discuss whatever the fuck we want, and always has been, including when two of my other sons who very independently proclaimed they wanted nothing to do with the Mormons. I mean, they were very vocal and very well researched. I didn’t do a fucking thing. I was just there for them, unconditionally.
To this day I still get calls from them. They are coming to visit soon. I finally have financially recovered enough to fly them in and see me. I haven’t seen them in person in more than five years. They are fully grown adults now. I’m nervous a bit. I’ve done what I could. I have to not think about it too much or I shuts me down completely, the remorse, the dark memories of leaving the Mormons, the personal threats of violence her father made to me proclaiming with a demented smile that he would deny it. I was fucking terrorized by these assholes. And I was not always strong enough to bring it all back up. When I did, sometimes I would end up catatonic on the floor, sobbing. So I survived. For me survival meant just being able to function from day to day. So full of rage, so wanting to give in to the dark side of hate, and anger, and resentment. But I didn’t. I did what had to be done, even if that meant being more distant from everyone that loved me, including my own sons sometimes.
My oldest (who’s Autistic) cited a Godfather reference when I tried to reach out to him, he’d been shown it by his Mormon Bishop grandfather, the fucking Godfather. Such FUCKING hypocrites! Hey, you piece of shit, lying asshole, do I have to tell a Mormon bishop that taking your Autistic son to see the very violent, rated-R Godfather movie is strongly against the church policies? Seriously, what the FUCK! I hate to say it, but he’s dead to me. I love him somehow, but he’s been so corrupted by the dark side he has no love left in his heart. The tragedy is that I failed him the most. He tried to leave the church when he went off to college and nearly had a psychotic break over it. He made videos about it. He really tried, but then he god reeled back in, and I let them take over his psyche. I knew there was nothing I could do. I was too far away. I would lose my ability to work and support anyone financially if I didn’t keep it the fuck together. So I let the Mormon cult consume him back again. I haven’t communicated with him in over seven years. I do remember him struggling to hold his head up on my chest while I laid on my back on the floor. I spent so much time with him as a baby. I created so many ways to entertain him.
What was I talking about?
The point of all this, I think, is that being a parent really radically depends on the situation, and it might not even have anything to do with your own flesh and blood children. I know that starting SKILSTAK was also directed by the Universe. The number of abused kids I was able to help, without even trying, just being there, astounded me. The stories, oh my god, the stories. But, they had a safe space to be nerds, sometimes with very absentee parents who didn’t even try to be in their lives, or who did but where blocked through circumstances out of their control. Parenting is just about being present for this immediately around you, that are led to you, and, I suppose, working your hardest to make sure you are there in the ways that they need, when they need, as much as is in your capacity.
My father was almost never home. But he was providing financial support for a family with eight fucking children in it. All because of the lies of the Mormons. Do I fault him for it? Fuck no. He did the best with what he had been given. My mother is fucking insane, for so many reasons I can’t even comprehend, but one of them was raising eight children and learning after the fact that the Mormons now said it was okay to do birth control, that God has somehow changed his fucking mind. “If someone had told me birth control being for ‘the health of the mother’ included mental health I would have taken it.” But she was lied to by THOSE SHITTY PRICK MORMON WHITE MEN telling her that as long as she was physically capable of pumping out another child, it was her sacred duty to do so. THAT’S SO FUCKING UP I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING BUT HATE! (Okay, keep calm, Rob.) So after my mother almost died giving birth to baby number eight (from an spinal block going bad and blacking her out so long they never told her what happened and rushed my father out of the room) she finally decided God didn’t have any more children for her to bring into this world.
That is so many levels of fucked up I can’t think about it very long or I want to destroy the people and organization that forced that shit on them. They were faithful, wonderful, happy people until the Mormons took advantage of them, all while giving that FUCKING church 10% of their income and more because of “the temple fund”.
The Mormons are fucking horrible cult, one of the most insidious, dangerous cults to have ever existed because of how much financial influence they have, how much they fly under the radar. Make no mistake, they are destroying lives and have been since Joe Smith decided to fuck his 14-year-old hand maid while Emma (his wife) was still in the home because God commanded it, crazy FUCK.
So, I guess that rage is a part of this story. I could stay. I left. I survived and I paved the way for my sons to escape, mostly. Perhaps that’s the best this parent could have done in that situation. All parents face very unique challenges that no other human being on the planet can judge. Being a parent is not a recipe, it’s not prescribed by some committee of old while men saying that God told them you need to have more babies. Being a parent is listening to your heart and your mind. Being truly in tune with what is right by listening. If there is a God, then that God would make sure we all have that ability, no matter how fucked up or crazy we are, when we are still, when we are at peace, when the Force flows through us, we can all hear and know what is right, even if society and everyone around us doesn’t understand.
Like anything, I have a ton to learn about being a parent. But, all I can do is take it one day at a time. Who knows, you might be that person standing in for other parents who can’t be what a specific child needs in that moment. We are a community, and yes, we are a part of the human family. Families are far more than what the 50s would have us believe. Thanks God, Disney and so many others are finally realizing this has always been the case. The movement to include everyone in the human family is going to get messier and messier as those grasping to dead ideas and the power those things gave them fade away. They say its about love, it’s not. It’s about fear and power. But I know better. We know better. And I will stand and fight to the death (literally and metaphorically) to protect everyone, not just those who project conditional love on their own fucking offspring.
#parenting #rant #inclusion #love #mormons