I was born in Salt Lake the summer of 1946, the fifth generation out of Nauvoo on both sides of my family, and naively thought the whole world believed what we did.
My maternal grandmother used to tell me how neglected they were as children of a second polygamist wife as she grew up in the polygamous stronghold of Riverton, Utah, but it wasn’t until I was 12 studying Utah state history that I really began to realize there was a problem with the polygamist culture of my birth, and became very grateful for the Manifesto of 1890!
I was baptized in Riverton Ward on the 4th of July, 1954 by an Uncle, and confirmed by my maternal Grandfather, who were both active in the church, because my father was ‘inactive” after he returned from WWII, and judged “unworthy”.
What I didn’t know until 1993 was that both of these men were sexually abusing my younger sister and cousins…. (But, I understand now why my dad told me Uncle Lynn was a “pervert”, and “Grandpa Green was a “hypocrite”!)
Still, by the time I was 10, I loved going to Primary, and consciously chose to be active in the Church throughout my teenage years, enjoyed leading the music in Mutual while my mother played the organ in Lee Ward, and worked hard at Granite High to earn a scholastic scholarship to BYU, because I believed the poster that said “special things were worth working for”.
Nevertheless, I felt like an “old maid” at 18 because of the churchs’ teaching “that a woman’s place is in the home”, and would have gladly gotten married the summer of 1964 if the 23 yr old return missionary I was dating had asked me.
But he didn’t, so when my roommate told me she’d “met the man I was meant to marry” our Sophomore year of college and told me to write to this 19 yr. old from Tucson who had just left for the Great Lakes Mission with her boyfriend, it was with faith and the belief in “the One” that I waited 2 years for “my missionary”, and was proud I was worthy in everyway to be married in the Salt Lake Temple, Nov. 22, 1967 a month after he came home…. (but was beyond disappointed my father couldn’t be with me on my wedding day, and shocked by the Masonic oaths, tokens, and handshakes I was glad to see removed from the Endowment in 1990!)
I was teaching first grade in Salt Lake City School District on the BYU Internship Program my Senior year, getting my student teaching credit and “half salary”, which enabled us to get married, and my handsome young husband enrolled in the Mid-Term Block Plan and commuted to the “Y”, just as we had planned while he was on his mission.
It was because I believed the church teaching that the man should be the provider and a woman’s purpose is to be a wife and mother, that I didn’t care that I didn’t complete the last 13 credit hours I needed to graduate by going to summer school in 1968 when I didn’t get offered a teaching position in Scottsdale School District so my husband could go to DeVry Institute of Technology, and we went back to Salt Lake instead, where I was prompted to start our family in August….
Over the course of the next 10 yrs. Norm moved our growing family away from and back to Salt Lake several times, being transferred as a Manager for Radio Shack with every move, but I was the one who was prompted to move to Tucson after my mother died in Oct.,1977, and my sister moved 8 houses down the street from us in Hunter 6th Ward.
Unfortunately, my husband changed dramatically in Arizona the summer of 1979, and I began to pray and search for answers about what was wrong in our active Mormon lives…. and documented everything Norman was doing in my Personal Journal as Pres. Harold B. Lee told us to do in May of that year.
I grasped the teachings in “The Art of Effective Living” by LDS Psychologist Gary G. Taylor like the stressed and unhappy “Molly Mormon” non-assertive pleaser that I was taught to be, and bought copies and gave them to everybody I knew who was also struggling with the false perfectionist, irrational and unrealistic teachings and expectations of the church at that time.
To my dismay, in the Fall of 1981, when my father was in critical condition in Salt Lake before passing away on Dec. 3rd, my husband accepted an offer for a better paying job in Chandler, Az., and started on January 2nd, 1982 just coming home on Wednesday nights and weekends until we finally sold the house and the kids and I were able to move into our beautiful new home in Chandler on April 3rd.
It was during the 3 months alone in Tucson, that I found and was prompted to read Dr. Kevin Kline’s insightful book, “Pleasers - Women Who Can’t Say No - And the Men Who Control Them”, and realized how badly men and women were being hurt with the teachings and attitudes taught in the polygamous Mormon Church with D&C 132 still going on in the temples around the world!
The film “The God Makers” was released shortly after we started attending Chandler 7th Ward that year…… and one of the women in Relief Society asked me if I had seen it and encouraged me to read that very controversial book when I said I hadn’t. When I finally did, I was able to see both sides.
By the Summer of 1985, while teaching the “Mother Education” classes, I went back to college at Arizona State University with a real desire to start working towards my Masters in Psychology, and to Chandler Community College Spring Semester 1986 where I took Assertive Training to deal with Face to Face Confrontation, and taught my 5 children at home, and my husband, everything that I was learning as we all tried to live the 8 rational attitudes we’d been taught in “The Art of Effective Living” by LDS Psychologist Gary G. Taylor!~
So much so that in 1987, the growth in our family was praised over the pulpit twice in Chandler 7th Ward, and I began being prompted to write a Spiritual/Psychology book for the LDS Church.
On March 15, 1988 I clearly heard my deceased mother say “I love you, Pie” while I was praying for guidance to write my manuscript, and work began for the next 9 months on that divinely inspired 500 page miracle through Spiritual Guides at a higher level than those of Ruth Montgomery.
To my surprise in July, 1988, without even reading my manuscript, my sister threatened me with a “liable suit”, my husband became extremely defiant and defensive, my 2 teenage daughters supported their father instead of me, and his oldest sister started calling my Bishop and Stake President behind my back trying to force me to stop “causing contention in the family”…..
The ecclesiastical abuse I endured through the “good ole’ boys” network in operation within Chandler Stake for the next 7 years is well documented, and is now under investigation by Sister Lavina Anderson of the Mormon Alliance, and by author Grant H. Palmer who wrote “An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins”, whom I have asked to write my autobiography.
By God’s design, Dr. Palmer was in New Zealand teaching at the Church College in the mid 1960’s at the same time my husband’s oldest sister and her spouse where hiding out down there for 8 years hoping the gossip would die down in Tucson Stake and in the Scott family about their adulterous affair and what hypocrites they were…
The last time I was in Salt Lake, in October, 1996, my sister’s husband told me that under hypnosis Bonnie admitted to her psychiatrist that she had “walked down the hall naked to our parents bedroom in Nov., 1967, and had seduced my sleeping return missionary and fiance’ with oral sex”….. and that she had had a dirty, filthy, disgusting affair with my husband for 11 years…… which finally explained what had happened to the kind missionary I had fallen in love with and why he told me in 1986 “if there was still polygamy in the Mormon Church I’d marry Bonnie and Maggie….” (My married sister and a single promiscuous secretary at work from 1984-86)!
Because Norman wanted plural marriage in the “life hereafter”, he already had his 3 wives all picked out, and I'd been conditioned to believe I had no choice in the matter!
John told me my sister had done the same thing to him when he came home from his mission in May, 1969, and that in the 1980’s she was so adulterous she had talked him into joining a “Swingers” group in their neighborhood in West Jordan when she was a Counselor in the Relief Society of their Ward….
Sadly, I have not seen or spoken to her or any of her diagnosed “Multiple Personalities” since, as she has spent the better part of the past 20 years in the University of Utah Mental Hospital healing from being sexually abused as a child by that Uncle who baptized into the Mormon Church and the Grandfather considered worthier than my goodly father to confirm me on July 4th, 1954!
I spent the next 3 yrs in Chandler Stake trying to get the brethren to believe me as well as 3 of our children to hold Norman accountable for his adultery and abuse as they said they would do in the “Proclamation to the World on the Family“ in Sep., 1995!
But Norman continued with his insane denial, so Bishop Jones did nothing to help me and my badly hurt children who continued to look to me for their strength in the Fall of 1999 when their father became critically ill and nearly died.….
As fate would have it, in the Spring of 2001, my husband was transferred by MCI in Chandler to Lexington, Ky.
Since I had grown up in the Salt Lake Valley being taught that “in the last days the Church would move back to Independence, Missouri”, we took the transfer, and left our adult children in the hands of their psychologist at the Avalon Counseling Center in Mesa.
Luckily, Norm and I had to work at EDS on Sundays the first 2 years we were in Winchester, so going to church wasn’t an issue for us, but unbeknownst to my husband I started writing to Bishop John Goodwin as soon as we got settled because I needed his emotional support during this difficult separation from our children…..
So, in August, 2002, the Ward Bishopric came to our home to meet me, to Norman’s shock and horror!
This shift of support was so important to me, that in February, 2003, when our schedules changed, I decided to give the Mormons a second chance, and we started attending our Sunday meetings.
That was until Elizabeth Smart was discovered in Sandy, Utah the following month walking along State Street in broad daylight as the “second wife” of the schizophrenic Brian David Mitchell, and nobody said a word to them because polygamy is so accepted in the Beehive State!
Realizing that this was just part of the cancer caused by the main body of the apostate polygamous Utah fraction of the original Mormon Church Brigham Young established along the volatile Wasatch Fault on July 24th, 1847, was the last straw for me, and I am still so repulsed by it all now that I haven’t been back since…… and when the Mormon Missionaries come to my door now I tell them to their face that I don't want anything more to do with the polygamous mess you represent!!!
But, in January, 2004, when I found pornography on my husband’s computer, it was my friend Bishop Goodwin whom I called to walk Norman through this forced repentance as he was confronted with his Sex Addiction, and told to get professional help to begin to overcome it!
It was finally Bishop Goodwin who asked my husband of 35 years for the 6 computer discs for my divinely inspired manuscript so he could give them to the General Authorities for publication someday with the help of my brother-in-law, Delman, and sister-in-law, Kathleen, and all my LDS friends in Tucson North Stake who chose to believe me, and my youngest son, Sheldon, over Norman in October, 1989.
Only time will tell the importance to our posterity of our oldest daughter being prompted to marry a very kind Jewish man in 2002, and giving birth to our 3rd grandson on July 12, 2003, Noah Christopher Schloss, who is ½ Jewish, and ½ Mormon, as he grows up celebrating “Chrismukkah” every December with his aunt and 3 uncles in Phoenix, while enjoying the lights and music at the Mesa Temple on Christmas Eve as was our family tradition the 18 years we lived in Chandler.
Because the foundation of our 41 year marriage is strong, and was based on true love, my missionary and I have been blessed beyond measure in 2008 with an Early Retirement Offer from EDS, and great new jobs at higher pay with better benefits with Norm working in Sales and me in Customer Service, which allowed us to buy the new house we will retire in in another 3-4 years, just 2 blocks from work, and were able to pay cash for the 2009 Genesis we wanted to symbolize this new beginning for our healing family outside the polygamous mess we were all born into….. including my younger sister!~