Friday, June 18, 2010

My mom preferred to live in fantasy and denied her attraction to gay men

I am wearing the cowgirl outfit in the video below I might have worn in Utah to a summer celebration complete with music, dance, rodeo, whatever. I used to look forward to those celebrations every year, but these are the years of my exile from Utah because I have undertaken the task of writing about the homosexual husband and my father in my mother's life, and I suspected in the lives of a number of other women married to the cowboys and ranchers of those days who spent so much time camping out tending to their cattle. My grandfather did not marry until he was 30 years old, my father until he was 26, plenty of time for those behaviors to become a way of life, but anathema for the naive but very strong minded women they married who simply were not going to register such abnormalities in the men they preferred to glorify and try to make into the romantic figures of their fantasies. I am afraid too many women are addicted to romance instead of to the truth. So the truth is made into an unwelcome stranger they must fight with all their might and banish from their ken if possible.
I always hated my mother's addiction to romance in the midst of her very unhappy marriage to my father. She never stopped talking about how unhappy she was and how miserable a man my father was. As a result I thought her memoir about her life with my father, the Kings, and Boulder was marred by such negativity about him it stopped short of being a great memoir.
I now am faced with the task of revealing what she did to endure the marriage which she left out of her memoirs completely. She could not bring herself to admit that she started a long string of affairs after she got a tubal ligation ten years into the marriage. She was only 30 years old, unhappy, and now could not get pregnant.
I feared the worst and my fears I thought were soon realized. Even if I suggest affairs it would appear that I would feed gossip about my mother. She was gossiped about a great deal as it was, I am sure, even though she never admitted to having the affairs. She was so hot tempered none of her girls tried to force our adverse opinions on her. I remember once I made up my mind to talk to her about chasing after a movie maker who came to town. She said in a very cold voice, "If you don't shut up, I am going to run this car off the road into a ditch!" I did not know but what she would carry out her threat, so I shut up.
I felt very depressed for many years over what she was doing on top of what my father had been doing. In fact, just as she was getting a good start, he began winding down from impaired health with emphysema and alcohol abuse. My mother said he had become impotent, so that was even more reason for her to stray. Once she even ran off with a young hitchhiker she picked up on the road when she was in her fifties. She bragged he was only 28, but then one awful thing leads to another.
Even though my mother never seemed to be able to connect my father to homosexual behavior, I thought his affairs over the years she was having children led to her having affairs. She was dissatisfied, miserable, but did not want to leave the marriage poor and unable to earn a very good living. She wanted a big settlement which he was not willing to give her so they wrangled for years over that. He knew very well she was not sure of what he had done except drink a lot, so he made her feel as guilty as possible over her affairs.
I thought this was so unfair of him, and when they divorced and he was going around trying to get sympathy over her adultery, I said coldly,"Daddy, you weren't even attracted to women, so how can you claim virtue for not having affairs with them?" He didn't like where this was going and never mentioned Mother's adultery to me again.
He had blame in this awful marriage. All men who marry women and can't stop their homosexual affairs need to tell the women in their lives the truth at some point. I realize that is a lot to ask, but in the most advanced circles of gay men I think most would agree this is good conduct toward women. Some men want to marry, have kids and live 'normal' lives the worst way, so the temptation is very great to try to play into the fantasies of some women. Most of the women end up being deceived, and in some cases the men are deceived as to the woman's penchant for homosexual affairs.
In the big cities gay communities address these problems much better than they do in the little towns across America where the attitudes of the churches toward homosexuality prevails. People can take a line in the bible and use it to club the homosexual nearly to death. Some churches, as the Mormon one in my home state of Utah, has rehabilitation for guys who believe themselves to be gay, probably generally a failure if the truth were to be told.
Imagine a church that does not love the truth, but if a church claims to be the only true church on earth and that all people must be baptized into it to enter heaven, I can't think this church can love the truth too well. I did not think the Mormon church handled homosexual problems well. But instead persecuted just about everyone they could that was connected to them. Including me. I am just about at odds with the church on how to handle every aspect of this problem.
Another reason why I do not believe in Mormon heaven, but some people like to live in fantasy about that, too, and do. And will have to await the hereafter to see whether there really is only a Mormon heaven and everyone will have to join the church to enter.
I will take my chances! In fact I am busy imagining a hereafter where therapy is offered for Mormons who are disappointed in a heaven that is not Mormon!

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