Somebody Save Me

When I was a young mom living in New Jersey during the early 1990s and trying to raise two little boys, I was often very impatient with them. And sometimes I was angry with them. 

They didn’t want to listen to me, broke a lot of rules, got into a lot of things they shouldn’t have, hurt each other, hurt me, and made the house an ongoing mess. 

When I sat down to build Legos and blocks with them, I tried to build something creative and interesting, but could never get very far before they would knock it all down. They took total pleasure in this. I think this is funny now, but at the time it was pretty frustrating. 

Symbolically, I wanted to build things up, develop, achieve, and grow. And they wanted to knock things down, experiment, play, and test boundaries.

I was always cleaning up the spaghetti and green beans that they threw on the floor, changing explosive poopy diapers, trying to identify the source of their discomfort and crying (ear infections, constipation, diarrhea, flu, colic, fevers, etc.), and searching for ways to keep us all educated, entertained, and spiritually fed during the long days at home with no car. We only had one, and my husband drove it to work every day.

And in regard to my mind…I couldn’t stand Barney. Sesame Street was okay. I eked some drops of intelligence from Reading Rainbow that prevented my mind from wasting away into literally nothing. 

In conclusion (as my daughter Laura would say), I had a good reason for feeling impatient and angry. Motherhood was a heavy burden. The sacrifice was really intense yet extremely boring, and I couldn’t seem to find much relief from it. 

So, after I responded to situations by yelling or tossing a boy onto his bed in frustration, I wanted to experience comfort and understanding for what I was going through. Instead, I felt awful feelings inside of me. And I felt like a total failure. I could not stop my boys from misbehaving and making messes and neither could I stop myself from getting upset about it. 

I felt trapped in this never-ending cycle of failures.

At the time, I could not explain what was happening, let alone why. I rarely wrote in my journal throughout these years, but when I did it was to reach for someone to save me during some of my most intense emotional periods.

Somebody save me

I don't care how you do it, just save, save

C'mon, I'm waiting for you

Listen: Save Me by Remy Zero 

(This song was used for the Smallville Television series)

I noted in my journal that I was reading my scriptures every day and praying. I also read to the boys from the scripture readers for kids and sang hymns with them. And I was going to church every Sunday. I was doing everything I knew to keep God’s commandments, but apparently, all of this was not enough. I ended those journal entries with the conclusion that I did not like myself and sometimes even confessed in Toxic Shame that I didn’t like motherhood either.

I feel my wings

Have broken in your hands

I feel the words unspoken inside

When they pull you under

And I will give you anything you want, oh

When I look back on this time period and other events throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, I recognize that I was in a type of bondage that I did not know how to get out of. Spiritually, I was experiencing anxiety and depression.

I see the world has folded in your heart

I feel the waves crash down inside

And they pull me under

And I would give you anything you want, oh

You were all I wanted

And all my dreams are fallen down

Crawlin’ around and around…

Out of all the years I have lived since this time and all the trials I have gone through, these early motherhood years were the hardest. I mean, I have had harder trials, but I had the strength and the relationship with the Lord to bear them. During these early years, even though I was reading my scriptures and praying I hadn’t yet developed a close enough relationship with him. And so, it was this combination of my distance from him, subsequent weakness, and the intense long-term sacrifice that kicked my butt.

There is an even deeper reason for why this failure hurt me so badly. Before I even met my husband, I had made a sacred covenant with God in which I told him I was ready for the sacrifice that motherhood required of me and I was willing to stay home with my kids. I was determined to be there for them and not leave them alone. This meant everything to me and I wanted so badly to be true to this commitment to God and to my kids. And I thought this determination would be enough to succeed. It wasn’t.

Somebody Save Me! 

In 1999, I remember getting to a low point and asking my husband for a priesthood blessing. I had been pleading with God for years in my prayers to “please, help me be a better mother.” In the blessing, I was promised that because I had been constantly asking him for this for so long, he would give it to me. Later, I would understand better why he put it like that. It became an opportunity cost to some of my other relationships.

Soon after this blessing, I was prompted to learn about nutrition and exercise balance. For the next five years, I journeyed along this pathway and I found greater healing, strength, and joy.  The first blog post that I ever wrote was about this part of my journey: Anxiety & Depression

But by 2006, I was still struggling with my role as a mother. Some things had settled down. I had read a lot of parenting books. I had learned how to eat and exercise in balance (as mentioned in the Anxiety & Depression blog post). I had more time to develop my personal talents. The kids were a little older and in school. We lived in a large house on a couple acres of land and had more money to spend on toys, sports, talents, activities, travel, etc. With experience, I had improved my parenting skills, but I still was not there yet. 

Inside me, I was still crying out:

Somebody save me

Let your warm hands break right through

And save me

As you may remember from my previous posts, during this same time I was studying semantics. I had begun to realize that I could figure out whatever I wanted to figure out. I just turned my eyes on it, studied it with the techniques the Lord was teaching me and could see it. And when I applied what I was learning to my life, it solved the problems.

I turned my focus on parenting. I knew that much of my salvation had to do with my getting this parenting role down and doing right by these four beautiful children that God had entrusted me with. I could not pass on what was passed on to me. I had to somehow stop it. I wanted this so badly. My attitude was:

I don’t care how you do it, just stay, stay

I was willing to do whatever it took. Just show me how… and stay with me.

What does it mean to be saved? 

I had very little understanding of what was meant by being saved before I looked at it. It was one of those words I just glossed over when reading because I had seen it so many times. And in my earlier years, I didn’t really like to talk about being saved because the Holy Rollers that used the term made it sound super weird. They seemed to hype it up and define it in a way that did not resonate with me. And then I heard other people making fun of this Holy Roller presentation of God’s grace. But I would not make fun of God or his grace.

In my studies and through the last sixteen years of training with the Lord, I have come to understand what the words Saved and Salvation mean:

Sustainable Compatible Relationships

Sustainable Joy

As a Child (of my parents and of God), I am loved, nourished, evaluated, and disciplined within the Northern Threshold. 

As a Parent, I love, nourish, evaluate, and discipline my children within the Northern Threshold - in alignment with God's will.

As a Wife, I am balanced with my husband within the Northern Threshold (see my Soulmates Marriage blog).

As a member of my Community, I love, nourish, and look for the good in others, empathetically forgiving, while objectively working together to resolve what’s not working

It sounds so simple. And it is. But because of the Fall, agency, adversity, Satan, and the subsequent imbalanced incompatible relationships and situations that complicate everything, the solution also gets a little more detailed.

Just stay, stay 

C’mon, I’m still waiting for you.

If you are struggling with parenting, I am going to share how the Lord saved me in this role in the next few posts.

My Teenage Dating Years, My Father, and His Shotgun

We’ve all heard of fathers warning the boys who come around to date their daughters. We know about the proverbial shotgun in the father’s hands when the guy shows up on his porch. It makes us laugh, but the reality is that most fathers love their daughters so much that they want to protect them from the type of young men who have trouble actually having their daughters’ long-game welfare in mind over their own short-term needs.

Here’s an example of one father singing to the boys who will one day date his daughters: Thomas Rhett

I didn’t have a father who warned the boys who came around to date me. At least I thought I didn’t. I never knew my biological father very well and my mom had divorced my step father after a rough five-year marriage. Neither father knew what I was doing when I started kissing boys at age 14. But what I didn’t know was that there was a Heavenly Father with a shotgun standing between me and every single boy that came around. But He was facing me, not the boy. I sensed this shotgun, but I didn’t realize that was what it was.

At church I had heard about the law of chastity and I was fully on board with that. I never had any desire to cross that boundary but I wasn’t sold on the idea that I shouldn’t date or kiss boys until I was 16. And I didn’t understand the motives of some boys. I thought that their attention and kisses meant that they really liked me. So, I did what I wanted without having to report to anyone. Or so I thought. 

My first kiss was just before my freshman year of high school. It was during a game of hide-and-go-seek with some neighborhood friends. His name was Billy. He was my age, and I knew him from junior high. The kiss was brief and somewhat awkward. That night, I couldn’t sleep. The emotions I experienced were extremely intense. I found it interesting that they didn’t occur during the kiss, but only afterwards when I was alone and thinking about it. I was surprised by the depth of emotion swirling around inside of me. It was a mixture of good and bad feelings. I didn’t understand what it all meant. 

Billy wasn’t interested in developing any kind of relationship with me. I never talked to him again. 

A few months later I met another guy at a church dance, who was 17 years old. When he kissed me, it was less awkward. I enjoyed it, but afterwards I freaked. I described the feelings I experienced as gagging. It was a term that I borrowed from a popular song out of Southern California called “Valley Girl.” Gag me with a spoon was a good way to describe the Repulsion I was feeling. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It was a reaction I could not control. And because I couldn’t control it, I had to get away from him when he wanted to continue with the relationship. Again, I had liked to kiss him, but the Repulsion served like shotgun vengeance.

Over the next few months I tried to figure out what this Repulsion thing was all about, not yet understanding how my Father was working with me. I decided that it wasn’t a good idea for me to kiss a boy after I had barely met him. I needed more time to get to know him and develop an attraction to him. 

A few months later when the next boy came around, I took a couple of months to get to know him. He went to church with me. We exchanged the “I’m interested” glances for a while. We danced together at the church dances. His friends told my friends and my friends told his. We exchanged notes at school (archaic form of texting). When he asked me to be his girlfriend, we both were very aware of the mutual attraction. I told him about my past experiences and warned him that he needed to wait to kiss me. But as we talked, he convinced me that we had already known each other for a few months and that was probably good enough. 

It wasn’t. He kissed me and I experienced the Repulsion afterwards. I didn’t want to feel it. I fought against it. I wasn’t aware that I was actually fighting my Father and trying to push past his boundaries. I was trying to work out my emotional problems so I could make the relationship with this boy work. But every day in second period before I would see him, I started to tremble. My teeth actually started to chatter as if I were outside in the freezing cold. 

I couldn’t figure out why I was responding like that. It seemed like fear but I wasn’t mentally afraid of the relationship. The Repulsion was some kind of automated response in me. In fact, even though I experienced these feelings, when I saw my boyfriend during break I would kiss him anyway in attempt to smother the shaking feelings.

But two weeks of this was enough for me to finally conclude that I couldn’t do it anymore. When I heard this boyfriend of mine was kissing another girl, I seized the chance to break up with him. When he apologized and wanted to get back together, I wouldn’t. That was hard because I had already bonded with him physically to a certain degree. It hurt to end the relationship.

These experiences happened within a six month period during my freshman year of high school. After that, I didn’t kiss any more boys until my senior year. That didn’t mean I didn’t want to. But I ended up unconsciously raising the bar to guys that were above my reach. These guys were good, clean, totally attractive, and had higher level values (truly Christian!). 

For many years, I labeled the Gagging-Repulsion-Shotgun feelings as my Psychological Problem. I spoke about it in jest with my friends. But it was real. I figured there was something psychologically wrong with me because of some of the abuse and neglect I grew up with. This is why I saw it as a weakness in me that I had to somehow fix.

Even so, I learned to yield to the feeling. I backed off from a relationship if I started feeling that way. I eventually figured out that if I pulled back enough and didn’t cross the boundaries, I could maintain the relationship. How much I was required to pull back seemed to depend on the guy I was dating. I remember just going on a first date with this one guy and there was no kissing, but I was already feeling the Shotgun Repulsion loud and clear.

I dated a guy my senior year who rarely crossed my boundaries. We became good friends before he kissed me and when he did, it was very sweet, short, infrequent, and respectful. No Repulsion. But there was one time, I did feel it. I backed off a little and the Repulsion decreased.

There was a guy in college who I explained my Shotgun Psychological Problem to before he kissed me. He risked it for the sake of NCMO and I wanted the NCMO in order to spite the guy I really wanted who didn't want me. The Repulsion was powerful and there was nothing but regret on my part. I should have known by then that my Father would never allow NCMOs for any reason for me. The guy tried to force the relationship anyway, deciding afterwards that it wasn’t so much of a NCMO for him. But it was too late. The Repulsion only grew more intense and sickening. I had to stop seeing him. 

It wasn’t until after I was married and had started developing a closer relationship with my Father and recognizing how he communicated with me that I realized what had been going on. It wasn’t a Psychological Problem. It was the Atonement of Jesus Christ at work in my life. Because I didn’t have a father protecting me, He stepped in and played that role for me. And He did it by influencing me internally. I was given the choice to override the Repulsion, but I chose to yield to it.

At the time, I didn’t like my Father standing there at the door with his proverbial shotgun so much. Most teenage daughters don’t like their fathers interfering with their love life. But most daughters, when they grow up, change their minds. I absolutely love Him for being there for me. To be chastised by Him has helped me realize that he values me and cares about my long-game welfare.