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me as a child was true: Many of my forefathers were among the pioneers that crossed the Great Plains looking for a new home in Salt Lake Valley. She showed me birth and marriage records dating back more than one hundred and fifty years. The Mormon Church had been there throughout our family history. Many of my relatives had organized the groups that made the long trek and had eventually settled throughout Salt Lake Valley. They were the stonecutters that carved the stones for the Salt Lake Temple, the masons that spent their lives building and believing in the teachings of the Church. When Mom showed me the marriage records she told me how I was related to this person and that person.
    Like so much else in my life, it was emotionally crushing to learn that Mom had the means to help me with my quest to understand, and had blindly turned away. Her life had evolved so far distant from what she was once familiar with. I knew that alcohol was what had destroyed her ability to believe in herself and help those she loved. I knew that for a long time she had been drained of her mental faculties as well. In short, she was a different person from the person she once had been. Her mental state was deteriorating further, and her actual body was barely hanging on. Her life as an adult was filled with shame and was void of direction and purpose.
    I saw that my life was headed in the same direction.
    Since I had discovered that Mom was more than familiar with the wealth of knowledge that I had recently been introduced to, I had to find out from Gram just what was true and what wasn’t. For the first time, I actually wanted to find out whether Mom’s bad-mouthing the Mormon Church was just another game she was playing to destroy something I valued.
    So I spent time in Holiday, Utah, with Gram and asked all the questions that I feared the answers to.
    “What was Mom like as a kid?”
    “What were her friends like?”
    “Was Mom always in trouble as a kid?”
    “How did you discipline her?”
    “Did Mom ever go to church as a child?”
    I learned that all I’d suspected was true. Mom
had
been raised Mormon and chose to erase all traces of those beliefs. I learned, too, that Gram was well aware of the abusive situation at home when we were growing up in Daly City, and she, like Dad, had felt that there was nothing she could do to stop her own daughter. Gram had developed the same need I now had: the need to find another family and another sense of belonging. And she did. She simply moved on and befriended another family north of Salt Lake, and my brothers and I simply faded out of her life, as far as Gram was concerned.
    With this new knowledge came a new conflict between believing what I was now being taught about life to be the truth, and the life experiences I knew to be all too real. And an awareness of just how far apart the two were. I had an overpowering need to make a choice as to which direction I would now follow. I had the chance to socialize with kids my own age and make myself fit in, and no one need ever know about my recent past or my childhood. I had the chance to start life as a teenager.
    And yet I couldn’t. I wasn’t about to let it all end as simply as that. I couldn’t simply move on, and allow the years and years of tears and pain to have been for nothing.
    I wanted revenge—I wanted Mom to pay for all the hell I was raised in. I had to find some way to make her feel the pain and the shame I knew too well.
    The second mistake I made as a teenager was trying to serve two masters at the same time. By not making a conscious choice between my two options I lived a lie, pretending that I understood and believed in what I was being taught while secretly continuing the drugs and booze and the ungratifying and emotionless sex. I chose to hide my destructive behavior as best as I could and continue with the steps needed to become a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
    I enjoyed getting high more than I enjoyed