ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

I’ve lived my life for one year without you now. I miss you more than I’ll ever be able to write. I miss having a mother and Harley misses her Nana.

I found this in my old school papers. I wrote it for a Book of Mormon (RelA 122) class sometime in March or April of 2002. It shows what you really were.

I wish you weren’t gone.

———————————————–

This past semester presented a challenge for me quite unlike any one that I have ever experienced before. On the very last day of January, I woke up feeling terrible. My throat hurt and I had trouble talking and breathing. Walking to work at 4:45 AM in the frigid air didn’t help. I commented to my friends how breathing the air outside felt like breathing acid. I also developed a cough that sometimes woke me up several times a night.

I cannot remember ever having been sick for more than a few days, so I felt sure that my condition would clear up within a week. But it didn’t, it just got worse. I fell sick on a Wednesday, and by the following Sunday I couldn’t talk above a whisper. I wound up being unable to talk for three weeks straight, including the week I flew home to Washington State for the Olympic winter break. Now, almost two months later, I still can’t sing very well.

On February 15th, the night I flew into Seattle, I still couldn’t talk. My troubles breathing were worse than ever. After my mom got off work, she took me straight to the hospital. On the drive out to the Ft. Lewis hospital, I broke down sobbing. I was beginning to worry that nothing short of corrective surgery would restore my lost and congested vocal chords. I was beginning to wonder why, for over two weeks, God had neglected my desperate pleas for mercy and healing.

But the thing that amazed me that night in the truck on the way to the emergency room was that my mom was there for me. She reached across the truck and rubbed my hand and kept telling me things like, “Oh, honey, don’t cry . . . they’ll figure out what’s wrong with you and you’ll get your voice back. It’s going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay.” I hadn’t been comforted like that in years. I have been playing the part of mom for myself since my mid-teens. But for the first time in a long time, my mom was my mom again. She was with me in that truck and she went with me to the X-ray room and she stayed with me in the hospital past 3 AM while the doctors kept examining me and trying to figure out what was wrong.

I have been reading a book by Frank Peretti called The Wounded Spirit. It is about bullying, teasing, and verbal abuse and the scars these things can leave on our souls well into adulthood. I certainly had my share of bullying. I was picked on a lot as a kid. But the most painful verbal abuse I ever endured came from my father, often because of the fights I had with my mother. I don’t think I realized just how deep these wounds still run until last Thursday when I was talking to my pastor, Rick Rudquist. I had passively mentioned my father’s verbal abuse and my shaky past relationship with my parents when he, since he’d never heard me talk about this before, probed the issue deeper. I don’t like crying in front of people, but within a few minutes tears had slipped from my eyes as I repeated for him all the things my father had said and done to me when I was in ninth and tenth grade, and how my mother had done nothing to stop him.

The point of all this is that these past few months, I’ve gotten to see just how God has healed my relationship with my mother. Through my illness and pain I saw just how much she really does love me, and just how far she has come since those troubled teen years. My relationship with my father had gotten better too, mostly because I don’t live at home anymore, and I’ve gotten very good at walking away from a potential fight. My parents even paid for $750 of my tuition this semester as well as my round-trip plane tickets home and countless other bonuses sent through the mail, when previously they’d barely supported me at all. All I’m saying is that God is really working on their hearts just like He’s working on mine.