Fourth Grade Love
I think that love and I have had a tumultuous and confusing relationship. As a kid I remember thinking that when I grew up, I would move to the mountains and live, hidden in a cabin deep in the woods, and be a hermit and exist with the land, connected to no one. Looking back, I think the thought of being a hermit came as a coping method to deal with the complexity of wanting to love and be loved and accepted just as I am and at the same time feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere, I was different. In thinking about love, there are moments in my life that stick out like a huge spotted wart on perfectly smooth skin. Some memories are painful to remember and some so ridiculous that as I look back, I can’t believe that they happened. The fact that they did happen makes me question the sanity of my parents. Were they so intrenched in the Mormon church that the very idea of love, different than their devotion to the so-called gospel of Christ, terrified them? Maybe the idea of death and preparing for the afterworld had them so blind that they couldn’t see living life any other way. It is the looking back at my childhood that continues to prompt me to live a bigger life now. I refuse to settle for an ordinary life, walking around in a numbed down corpse, trading connection for a belief that death is larger than life. I don’t think my parents meant to teach me that love and relationships were wrong, they just wanted me to fit neatly packaged in their box of proper righteousness with the corners of appropriateness and modesty folded neatly over any desire that would spark life to look different than organized shame and hidden pain.
