EPILOGUE
THE SMALL WHITE HOUSE came into view as I rounded the corner. I pulled into the driveway and heard the sound of gravel beneath the tires of the rental car. My eyes were drawn to the apricot tree in the front yard as the memory of my mom singing to me flooded my mind: “I looked out the window and what did I see? Popcorn popping on the apricot tree . . .”
This trip had been a distant milestone on my journey of writing my story, so knowing that it had finally arrived was a bit daunting. My mom and I had been discussing this trip since I’d begun writing the first draft of this book in January of 2014. What will she think about what I’ve written, since she still believes in polygamy? Will she understand why I had to tell my story? How will she react to reading about the things she did not know had happened? So many questions ran through my mind as I approached her home, steps closer to our highly anticipated visit. I had struggled over the years with wanting to lash out at her in anger while at the same time wanting to protect her.
It’s a dichotomy I still struggle with. I hid my suffering from her for the same reason others who have experienced hardships do: We don’t want to cause more pain. I had reconnected with my mom as an adult with the realistic understanding that a sense of disappointment would be inseparable from the love I have for her. She simply could not be the mother that I need her to be while still maintaining her beliefs in the religious system that has caused such devastation to so many. Her duty and loyalty to her religion had already been firmly established. That is evidenced by her inability to refrain from talking about her beliefs to her grown children even though it causes us pain to hear her go on. In spite of all this, she and I have cobbled together the best relationship possible under the circumstances.
As much as the prospects of this visit filled me with trepidation, I was determined that my eighty-five-year-old mother would not read my story alone. Some of the events I’d written about would prove painful for her to read, and I wanted to be physically present so we could talk about those hard things together. My intention all along was to be the hands and feet of Jesus to her, to comfort her heart with my very presence. I wanted her to see me, alive and well, with her own two eyes. I wanted her to know that I had matured —both physically and spiritually —and would not allow the pain of having grown up as the polygamist’s daughter to determine the outcome of my life.
I rolled to a stop in front of the house, shifted the car into park, and opened the door. I took a deep breath, reached into my bag, and pulled out the manuscript I’d had bound, complete with a color photo of the book cover on top. I wanted to show it to Mom immediately. I walked over to the apricot tree and plucked a ripe, juicy fruit, warm from the sun, from its bountiful limbs. Just holding it in my hand was comforting. Then I walked up the steps to her front door.
Mom’s sister-wife Elaine answered my knock with a chuckle and playful reprimand. “You’re late! Your mom has been waiting for you!”
“The drive from Salt Lake City took me twenty minutes longer than I anticipated,” I explained.
I made my way through the home shared by three of my mom’s twenty-one sister-wives. I found Mom sitting in her recliner in the back bedroom. She greeted me with a smile and a little bit of nervous laughter as she anxiously anticipated the task before us. She could imagine the challenges ahead of us, based on the few sample chapters I’d read to her during my visit the previous year.
I handed her the completed manuscript, and she began leafing through the pages. Then she looked at me and said, “You did it, Anna. You said you would come see me when you were finished, and here you are.”
We wasted no time in getting me settled in so we could begin. Over the next few days, we spent hours sitting together while I read the manuscript aloud to her. Sometimes Elaine sat in on the readings. Even though she got tired, Mom didn’t want me to stop. She and I both shed many tears as I read.
At times, it was uncomfortable for me to read things I had revealed about our family and about my own life —things that she had never known about until that moment. It was excruciating for us both to relive the day I ran away from home. We paused frequently, as she was often surprised by parts of my story. “Anna Keturah, did that really happen to you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I had to answer every time.
I turned the last page of the story and closed the manuscript. Mom took it from me and sat with it in her lap, silently caressing the picture of a younger me on the cover. I watched her hands repeatedly brush back and forth as tears fell from her eyes and she wept quietly. Ten minutes passed before she was able to speak.
“What was it like for you hearing the things that happened to me?” I asked carefully.
“It’s awful. I didn’t know . . . I don’t even know how you still love me,” she replied.
“Mama . . .” I began.
“I’m glad you do,” she continued. “And I’m so glad you’re here.”
She lowered her eyes before wiping away more tears with the back of her age-spotted hand.
“I just don’t like your eyes covered up, or your mouth. I still think the publisher ruined a perfectly good picture of you!”
She was alluding to a conversation we had had months before this visit, when the design for the book cover had just been finalized. I had sent a photo of it to her. She didn’t understand it, so I explained by phone, “Those are censor bars.”
“Why would they do that?” she asked indignantly.
“Because I was censored, Mom,” I stated matter-of-factly.
“You were not censored!” she argued in her high-pitched tone I was so familiar with.
“I think you are remembering a different life than the one I lived,” I said as gently as possible.
Now that she had read the entire manuscript, she said she understood the cover.
“Well, I’m glad for you because it heals your heart. But reading all this hurts me.” She gestured toward her heart. “I’m not going to lie about that.” I’m not sure my mom had ever been forced to face the pain that her choices had caused her children. She voiced regret about following Ervil and went so far as to condemn him as a false prophet.
When she immediately followed that declaration with her strongly held belief in her most recent late husband as the true prophet, I drew in a deep breath. Deep breathing was one of the many tools I had learned in counseling to manage the anxiety and the triggers I experienced. I did not have any expectation that her beliefs had changed. But I needed her to hear my story and to know that in spite of everything, my heart was still tender toward her.
Mom read the manuscript twice more on her own while I was in town that week. We discussed at length events she had not known about, both of us acknowledging that there were aspects of our respective beliefs that we disagreed upon —namely tenets of polygamy that were important to her and caused me to question how she could still believe in them. We had agreed to disagree years before. Her beliefs about who Jesus is and who I have come to understand Him to be are miles apart, stretched to a thinness I did not know was possible. The connection between the two is in name only.
On Friday, as I prepared to depart for the airport, I walked across the front yard to the apricot tree. I picked several pieces of fruit from the tree to take with me, humming softly to myself. “I could take an armful and make a treat, a popcorn ball that would smell so sweet.”
After arriving home, I stood at my dining room window and gazed at my backyard, recalling my visit with my mom. This house is the one I’ve lived in the longest of my entire life. It is the house I’ve made into a home for my five children. I’ve put down roots here, both literally and figuratively. When we moved in ten years ago, we planted a tree in the backyard —one that I hoped my future grandkids would climb one day. A few years later, I planted an apricot tree to remind me of my younger years with my mom. The leaves on the apricot tree danced in the summer wind as I peered at it through the window. “It wasn’t really so, but it seemed to be, popcorn popping on the apricot tree.”
The weight of all the questions I’d held in anticipation of sharing the words I’d written with my mother had lifted. Relief that the task was done washed over me. Our phone calls and infrequent visits will continue as long as she remains with us. She doesn’t understand the conflicting feelings her children carry within themselves toward her, and we cannot fathom how she can continue holding on to her revised and updated fundamentalist Mormon beliefs. I listen to her say things she feels compelled to say, not shutting her down or shutting her out completely, as others of my siblings have chosen to do for their own well-being.
With this visit and its painful revelations, my mom and I had reached the beginning of the end of my healing journey. I said the things that needed to be said —even though it hurt her to hear me say them —and found steady ground for us to walk on. I know that because of both my father and my mother, I was born the polygamists’ daughter.
But that truth has been redeemed by a bigger Truth. I am a child of a God who loves me unconditionally. He knows my name. He knows my story.
And He has set me free.