MOVING ON.....

You know, there is no easy way to do what I have to do. Our daughter is gone.  Bob was right all those years ago, "one day she's going to grow up and leave home, and never look back."  It has happened.  I am so sad for her.  Her patriarchal blessing says she'll have many dark days, and it tells her how to get through them, and even how to minimize them.  But it's all conditioned on her worthiness.  And, as we have taught her, "worthiness" means that you simply get back up each time you fall. That's what "worthiness" really is.  It doesn't mean you're perfect.  It means you do you very best.

Well, today I actually let her go.  I don't want anything more to do with her in this state of existence that she has chosen.  She has made it very clear she doesn't want us or need us, and she is happier without us.  I cannot go on and keep worrying over her, and loving her and thinking of her on a daily basis.  For one, that causes way too much pain, and for another it isn't real.  What is real is that I have two children at home who still need me.  I have a husband who needs me.  And I have ME who needs me.  The only way to move forward is to put her behind me. And so I have done.

If the day ever comes that she wishes to come to her senses, to humble herself, and to actually seek the professional help she so desperately needs, then we are here for her with open arms, and all the tender love of a parent.  But, like the prodigal son's father, we cannot just sit here mourning her, and waiting for her return.  We have lives that we must keep living.  And so we are.

It doesn't sound pretty, does it?  but it's what's right.  Our love for Jessica is forever.  We will help her whenever she honestly desires that help.  But until then, the only option is to let her go.  This is the only way she has chosen to learn from life.  I fear for her.  But I have left her in God's hands.  He can meet out consequences, both good and bad, much better than I ever could.

We wish her well.  We love her.  We will miss her.  And we look forward to the day we can see her again, embrace her and let her know again that we love her.

I feel better.  More "settled" with all this drama.  I feel more free to press forward now with our two youngest.  I am so thankful for the Gospel, for our family, and for such a wonderful husband.  I could never make it through life without him!  I truly am blessed!!! 

PERFECT PARENT SYNDROME

I have come to the conclusion that no matter whether you raise your children to believe that you are the All-Seeing God-Parent, or that you are a sin-filled, fallible Human-Parent, that your children will ALWAYS think of you as the PERFECT PARENT!

My father raised us kids to believe that he was the all-knowing, all-wise, God-parent.  Did he do it on purpose?  i don't know.  I just know that that is what we all thought, and that he actually vocally took pride in it at times.  So as I grew older I vowed that I would NEVER do that to our kids.  Our kids would KNOW that Bob and I are most definitely IMPERFECT, full of sin, full of weakness, and that one of the reasons Heavenly Father places the human in a family setting, is so that we can live together, come to know each other's weaknesses, forgive each other, over come our weaknesses AND OTHERS' weaknesses, and just "hold hands and love each other anyway"!

So, that is exactly what we did.  We taught our kids - practically every time we screwed up: "see?  we mess up too.  we make mistakes too.... NO ONE IS PERFECT!... so you should never listen to satan's discouraging thoughts he tries to put in your head that you just can't match up, and you might as well give up, because you'll never be perfect. Of COURSE you'll never be perfect! NONE of us are!"

We have taught all three of our kids this since the day they were born. I have taught them that especially - because it took me decades before I came to fully understand the power of the Atonement - and how the Atonement can apply in our lives.  I still don't comprehend it 100%, but I do enough to know that there is no sin that is too big that the Atonement won't cover.  There is ALWAYS HOPE in CHRIST. 

Well... evidently it doesn't matter that we taught them that.  Our oldest daughter has recently run away from home and she is fully convinced that she can never be as perfect as her parents are - specifically as perfect as her mother is.  Somehow she got it into her head that she is past hope, that the Atonement will cover everyone else on earth except her, and that somehow WE expect her to be perfect!!!

What!?!?!?!?  That is 100% opposite from all that we have ever lived and taught her!!  How could she possibly believe that?

I don't know.  All I now it that it didn't seem to make any difference that we taught our children that we are not perfect.  Because, I guess, in a child's eye, you - the parent - will forever be "perfect". 

Maybe it's just something that comes with with being born into this world, to a mother and father???
Maybe it's something that we just assume, deep down in our spirits, because, after all, we did just come from heaven, where our Mother and Father there ARE perfect.

I thought I'd do our kids a favor, by helping them learn early in life that their parents are far from perfect, and that perfection was never something that was expected of them.  Evidently, there is no such thing as teaching your kids that you are not a perfect person/parent. 

I don't know about any of you, but I find comfort in knowing that we are all sinners, and that we are all trying to endure well unto the end, and that we are all "in this together".

RUN-AWAY-DAUGHTER

Well, not much to say right now but that our daughter, Jessica, has run away.  I guess it's not called "running away" when the person is legally and "adult" at 20 yrs old.  But in essence that is what she did.


She has been struggling with bad choices the past 4 years.  We have tried to work with her, help her, counsel her, reach out to her, and allow her the agency she has to make her choices and suffer her own consequences.

It seems the more we tried, the more she rebelled.  She actually told us that her entire life had been one big lie.  From the time she was a toddler, she said, she would say "yes" to our face, but do "no" behind our backs.  How do you work with that?

It became painfully clear just last week that she desperately needs professional help.  We actually had an appointment, which she went to this past Tuesday, and then on Wed. morning - poof! - gone.  My heart breaks for our two younger kids. Emily has asked a couple of times "Why doesn't Jessica love us?" and Jonathan feels betrayed and deeply disappointed.

We know Jessica deep down.  She is a vibrant, intelligent, loving, fun, wanting-to-please-Heavenly-Father kind of girl.  When she sets her on mind on something, there is nothing that can stop her from achieving that!  She makes friends so so easily, and can blend in with any type of person or culture quite easily.  She is artistic in all her ways and has a natural God-given talent with all animals and in particular with horses.  She is a natural "horse whisperer"... she has been able to reach horses and get them to do things when no one else could, and that was all by her own teaching and reading books!!  She is truly amazing and has so much potential!  She has always been sensitive to the Spirit and has had many occassions where she had spiritual experiences and where her testimony of the Gospel grew.  So how could this have happened to her?

I know in part it's been that she has lied for so long, and eventually acted on all those "bad thoughts and desires" that she said she's had all her life, and then living under the enormous GUILT of it all, that finally it ended up affecting her thinking patterns.  Right now she feels so utterly unworthy that she truly has listened to the adversary and thinks there is no hope for her to repent.  She feels that she has gone past the point of no return and that the Atonement is not good enough or strong enough to cover her sins.

How do reach in to a person's head like that, and get them to understand how utterly wrong and ridiculous those thoughts are?  And get them to truly understand that the Atonement covers PRECISELY those multitude of sins!  That's what it's all about!  But she simply refuses to believe.  Plus - she's not ready to believe.  She WANTS to finish living out her dreams and desires.

Our concern is that when you go down that road, those particular dreams and desires turn from one bad thing, into a worse thing, into a purely evil thing, and it goes further downhill from there. 

But we have LET HER GO!  We have come to accept that she simply insists on learning things the hard way.  She must experience things and touch things for herself.  She's not satisfied until everything had been touched and tasted and done.  So... in a sense I guess we're glad that she is gone.  We love her and miss her, and we're not glad about all that she will be going through, but we are glad that the process has begun.  What process? The process of having her hit rock bottom, and then one day coming to her senses and realizing that that is not the life that will bring her true peace and true joy.  That is all she's looking for.  Peace, joy, love, acceptance.  I understand.  We all fall short, and we all sin.  We all wish we could do all the things we secretly want to do, and wish it was "ok" to do them.  I guess some of us have to actually DO THEM. 

So we wish her well.  We pray for her and for her safety.  And we pray that people will be placed along her path that will love her righteously and unconditionally, that will be able to reach out to her and/or be an influence for good in her life, and that will make such a difference in her life that heart will soften, and that her mind will become ready to accept the truths of the Gospel and repent, and turn her life around.

She has projected on us, and especially on to me all the frustration, enmity, and resentment of having always known what she was up to, and always trying to help her and call her back to repentance.  She has grown to hate us so much, that she has completely tried to block Bob and me out of her life completely. 

We thought we was living with Nate, the current boyfriend.  But now we believe she might be living with a lesbian gal.  Both this gal and Nate are bixsexuals.  Wow - today's youth are really messed up.  I feel so sorry for them, but even more so for Father in Heaven. I cannot imagine the pain He must feel when He watched us, His children, make bad choices.


We love our Jessica so very much.  We will have to leave her alone, and work out her own path, and just keep her in our prayers.  We are so thankful for the Gospel and that the four of us that are left can continue on in life and continue to feel joy and peace and happiness, as we try to keep our covenants and do the best can.  So thankful for the Atonement of the Savior, which we know will cover not only our sins, but will covers any sins that Jessica can think to commit.  We pray she will turn back to Father in Heaven one day.

That's her below... she looks so "happy" doesn't she?  It's all fake. Evidently, it always has been according to her. :'(