What Makes A Family?

I asked my husband if I should post this; he said I should.  So if you hate it, blame him!  In all seriousness, though, this post is churchy so if you’re not into that you might want to give it a miss.  That being said, it’s also a fairly rare opportunity to hear me talk about myself.  Until I started this blog, I’d never really talked about myself–with anyone.  Friends used to tease me, sometimes rather pointedly, that it was like I’d sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus.  It was someone at church (in our ward’s bishopric, i.e. a leader in our congregation) who, the product of a similar upbringing, himself, challenged me to start writing about my life.  The first real post I wrote on this blog was an open letter to my family; talking about all the things I’d never had the courage to tell them in person.  Since then, I’ve been blessed with more love, support, and acceptance, from my family and friends and even from total strangers, than I could have ever imagined.

A few months later, I was asked to give a talk in church.  Which I’m doing, later on today.  What follows is the text of that talk:

I’m speaking to you today, on extending the love of Christ in all things, because the fact that I’m standing here at all, before you or anywhere else, is proof that Christ’s love saves lives.  And proof, too, that we as everyday missionaries have the power to do His work and through so doing, to save lives.  Without His love, and all the ways in which its manifested itself in my life, brothers and sisters, I would be dead.

In foster care, they teach you a lot of minute strategies for coping with stress and for disempowering your abuser.  One of those strategies is to think of alternate names for your biological family members.  Particularly if, as was the case with me, you’re in the situation you’re in because they’re more or less permanently unfit.  Calling the person who burns you with cigarettes or fractures your scull and locks you, unconscious, in a closet for four days mother reinforces some very unhealthy attitudes—and the guilt that goes along with them.  Particularly if, like most foster children, you’ve grown up with your abuser (or abusers) telling you that the abuse was your fault.  If you’d only be a little nicer, a little sweeter, they could love you like a mother. 

That’s not how a mother behaves is the healthiest lesson a social worker can teach you.  Because, implicit in it, is the idea that titles like mother are earned.  So, after long and careful consideration, I decided to call my—for lack of a better term—life-giver Gargamel.  Because Gargamel was, at once, both a villain and ridiculous.  She started seriously abusing me when I was about two or three or, at least, that’s as far back as my memories go.

Sometimes, she beat me because I made the wrong face.  Other times, she was simply in a beating mood.  I learned when it was safe to ask her for food, and when I was better off just drinking water from the toilet bowl.  The first time I was removed from my home, I hadn’t gotten a change of underpants in almost six months and there was a hive—an actual hive—of lice so bad at the base of my scalp that the tissue there had to be debrided.  I remember that period of my life very clearly, even though I was only about nine years old.

I had scabies.

After that, the next few years were a constant parade of one house after another, from family member after family member who, after being threatened by Gargamel, gave me back to the state.  Where I eventually learned to hate myself.  I’d spent the first decade of my life being wanted by nobody.  My own flesh and blood didn’t want me, and neither did anyone else.  The sad truth is that, once you’re old enough that prospective families can no longer pretend that you’re their baby—i.e. once you’re no longer a baby—no one wants you at all.  This is, believe me, a truth that foster children learn early on.  If for no other reason than that their social workers have to discuss it with them.  Foster care works, to the extent that it does, by making the facts of your situation just the facts of life.  Spend too much time laboring over the emotion of it all and you’ll lose your mind–you and your social worker, and whatever foster family you’re staying with, and just about everybody else involved.  What can seem like cruelty from the outside, really isn’t.  The fact is, you and your foster care brethren are basically the human equivalent of those puppies you see at mall pet stores; looking out at the world and hoping that maybe, just maybe, this once, someone will stop.  When enough people have stopped, and moved on, because you weren’t lovable enough to join their family…someone has to address this issue with you.

I used to lie awake at night, thinking about the fact that nobody wanted me, and wondering what I’d done to be so unlovable.  I didn’t pray, because I didn’t know about praying yet, but in my heart of hearts I do think I was asking God.  It was the hardest lesson of my life so far, realizing that the fact of my biological parents not loving me had also somehow made me unlovable to everyone else.

And then I went to church.

I’d seen an ad on TV.  And as it so happened, there was a ward building a few blocks from my placement at the time.  Nobody particularly noticed or cared where I went, and for once I was grateful.  To this day, I’m surprised that I did what I did, because I have terrible social anxiety and new situations are hard.  But this just felt…right.  Inexpressibly right.  And once I walked through that door, I discovered a world of adults I’d never before known existed: adults who were safe.  Who weren’t violent, or rage-filled, or disinterested.  Whom I could trust.  And I knew, although I didn’t know much about the church  yet, that I’d found the right place.

It’s through church that I met my family.  Or, rather, they found me.  My sister took one look at me, knew that I was her sister, and took her home with me.  And that was the first time that I felt the love of Christ, and of my Heavenly Father.  We all come with baggage, a teenager who’s never had a real home before the most baggage.  But for the first time, here were people who wanted me anyway.  Who’d chosen me, and who every day continued to choose me.  Who responded to my anger, and my self-hatred, and my conviction that at any moment they’d toss me out the door with we love you, and we want to adopt you

And then: we want to be sealed with you, in the Temple.

I have a powerful testimony of the atonement, because it was—and continues to be—through the atonement that I learned to stop hating myself.  To even love myself, a little.  To understand that I truly did have a Heavenly Father, and that He loved me.  That I had never been unlovable in his eyes; that my mistakes didn’t make me unlovable.  That I was part of His plan.  People ask me, sometimes, why I’m so cheerful all the time and I tell them: it’s because of the atonement.  The peace that the atonement has brought into my life is the greatest peace that I’ve ever known.

President Uchtdorf counsels us to, “instead of being thankful for things…focus on being thankful in our circumstances, whatever they may be.”  And I’m thankful in my circumstances, and for everything that’s happened to me; because they brought me to Heavenly Father—and through Heavenly Father, to my family.  Every day of my adult life has been, and continues to be, an opportunity to witness miracles: the miracle of going to bed in safety, and of waking up in safety.  Of experiencing the truth of our Gospel in my life, and of having the freedom to share that Gospel in both word and deed.  Of experiencing the truth of the statement that the family truly is God’s creation, given to us by Him as both a blessing in our lives today and a tool for our eternal progression.

Because no one in my family is biologically related to me, I have a special testimony of this principle: that happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded up on the teachings of the Lord, Jesus Christ. Ultimately, no matter how our families are formed, or sustained, or who they involve to include, this is always true; that family is a choice. A choice we make every day; a series of covenants we renew every day. I’ve been blessed to know, for much of my life, that my family is a choice; literally. And the decision to become a family, first made by myself, along with my parents and siblings, and then made, later, by myself and my husband, was indeed founded on our shared knowledge of His plan for us; that families are eternal and that the decision to add to one’s family, and thus to affirm that true wealth is family, is the best decision that one can make.

I have a special testimony of the power of Temples, because the Temple is, to me, all that symbolizes family, and, through family, my knowledge of God’s plan for me.  Each and every Temple stands as proof that family is a choice and that Heavenly Father sees our families of choice with the same eyes as our families of flesh and bone.  My son is my first family member to be biologically related to me, but because of the Temple, and because of the love I feel there, and the love I feel when I share about the blessing of the Temple with my non-member friends, I know that my family—my family of choice—is no less legitimate.

Brothers and sisters, I know that sometimes the challenge to share the love of Christ in all things can be overwhelming.  If you’re like me, then you spend a lot of your time not feeling particularly Christ-like.  Worrying about deadlines at work instead of visiting teaching obligations; feeling anger, or resentment, toward the people we love for failing to meet our expectations.  Carrying the burden of anger toward those who’ve wronged us, which seems so hard to put down.

But I want you to remember that my life was saved because imperfect people made me welcome.  Christ saved all of our lives and He was perfect; but you don’t have to be perfect, to do as He did.  You just have to love.  Our Gospel is one of love; of repentance, and of acceptance.

You might not know the effect you’ve had until years later; God’s timeline is different than ours.  But I challenge you to share your love.  Not the love you think you should have, some ocean of kindness that overlooks all wrongs; but your authentic love.  Share of yourself, as an individual, warts and all.  Have the courage to be yourself, and to love as yourself.

For thereby will you make the greatest difference.

I want to testify to you, in closing, that this church is true.  This is God’s restored church upon the earth.  The Book of Mormon is a true document; it contains the revealed word, and will, of God.  The Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price, are also true and revealed scripture, containing within them the wisdom we need to return to God.  And because our God is a kind and loving Heavenly Father who knows us, He knows that we need proof: and He gives us proof, in the ability to follow the commandments and see for ourselves their workings in our lives, and judge their source.  And in hearing each other share our stories, and testify to the workings of the Spirit in our lives.

The love of Christ is, and can, and should be in all things.

I leave these words with you in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

If anyone has any questions, comments, or concerns, or would like to know more (about anything), then please don’t hesitate to ask.