What's So Bad About Being Poor? Our Lives in the Shadow of the Poverty Experts

Preface

Charles Murray interfered with my career plans. During my first year of college, I was taking a required economics class. Early in the semester, when the subject turned to poverty, my professor assigned an essay from Murray, a conservative political scientist, think tank researcher, and future supporter of eugenicist theories. At the time, Murray main claim to fame was being a poverty expert whose criticism of welfare programs buttressed the Reagan revolution. ¹

Until I encountered the notorious Dr. Murray, my plan had been to research schizophrenia in order to find an effective treatment or a cure for my father’s schizoaffective disorder. But I was so appalled by Murray that I decided to focus instead on taking him down a notch. His theories about poverty simply weren’t accurate. I knew this because I grew up poor. Murray’s wrongheadedness bugged me enough to change my life course.

The title of Murray’s essay was, What’s So Bad about Being Poor? ² It appeared in 1988, in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s two-term assault on the welfare state. In it, Murray suggested that being poor in the United States was not so bad after all, because welfare benefits were too generous. He blamed the plight of poor people on their own behavior, suggesting there was something inherently wrong with them. There were strong racial overtones to the article, portending the firestorm to come when he expanded on those sentiments in his 1994 coauthored book, The Bell Curve. ³ What’s So Bad about Being Poor? was one of many rhetorical questions or hypotheticals raised by Murray about welfare dependency. My professor snapped them up and decided our assignment would be to answer Murray’s questions.

The essay made me so angry, and I got out some of my feelings in my response paper to Professor Lund. But Murray had left a mark. I had been alerted to the fact that there were people in the United States who actually believed what I had suffered through was not so bad.

What’s so bad about being poor? What kind of person would even ask such a ridiculous question? What kind of person would casually observe that there is nothing so terrible about poverty per se? What kind of person would argue that material resources . . . should be put last in discussions of poverty policy. This point of view could not stand. I had to be part of correcting the record.

I had to become one of the people considered legitimate enough in my expertise to convince everyone that Charles Murray was a fool. I had to become a poverty expert in my own right. I wanted to explain that his ideas were toxic misconceptions, but I knew my personal experience alone would not be respected. I would need to become an academic.

Interestingly, Murray claimed that personal experience was precisely what was missing from the knowledge base of policy thinkers. The first line of his essay read, One of the great barriers to a discussion of poverty and social policy in the 1980s is that so few people who talk about poverty have ever been poor. He himself had never really been poor (which was why he proposed thought experiments to understand what it might be like to be poor), but he was definitely right about the value of personal experience.

College can often be an awful experience for a poor student. I was fine academically and picked up what I needed to quickly. Yet, I nearly dropped out numerous times since I felt like I didn’t fit in. Thankfully, fortunately, I had the help of a woman named Phyllis Gray. She worked with the federal educational opportunity program Upward Bound, which I had participated in during high school. I stuck it out through undergrad and eventually was ready to pick a graduate school.

One day, I was walking past the bulletin board in the social sciences building when a flyer caught my eye. It was from the University of Michigan. It said I could get a joint doctorate in Social Work and Psychology—at the same time. I could pursue my goal of working with serious mental illness, and learn how to combine my life experience with scholarly evidence to put Murray in his place. Michigan had its own poverty expert, Sheldon Danziger. He was the anti-Murray.

I applied to the program despite the skepticism coming from my undergraduate advisers in both psychology and social work. Each told me to apply to other graduate schools, because Michigan was very difficult to get into. I shouldn’t get my hopes up. I did as they suggested. When I was accepted to University of Michigan, it was against the odds. Thankfully, the School of Social Work used affirmative action for many types of underrepresented groups in higher education, including those from a low socioeconomic status.

I didn’t realize that you don’t really get to focus on your own goals in graduate school. You find senior professors to mentor you, and you work on their research. Eventually, your dissertation becomes something related to your mentor’s research. Thankfully, I had a good mentor. I would never have finished graduate school without Dr. Carol Mowbray, co-leader of the Center for Poverty, Risk, and Mental Health. She made sure I understood how to do research inside and out. But it was her area of research I was working on.

I thus wasn’t able to aim my work toward countering Charles Murray. The deeper I got into academia, the more I was bifurcated into having two areas of expertise: 1) poverty and social policy; and 2) mental health. My publications were not in social policy either. They were all coming out in the mental health area. I was restless with frustration.

Meanwhile, Charles Murray wouldn’t leave me alone. In 1993, he published an article about the coming white underclass. This spurred an article in the U.S. News & World Report ⁴ that identified my hometown, Waterloo, Iowa, as having the seventh-largest population of poor white people in the country. Murray was writing about people like me, and he was blaming the rise of the white underclass on single parenthood. The implication of his work was that these were dumb white people who weren’t getting married but were procreating dumb, violent, drug-addicted children. Read in light of Murray’s controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve, ⁵ the strong implication was that these poor white people were genetic failures.

Murray was particularly focused on the inability of poor whites to form families. Single women were destined for poverty, he argued. He didn’t realize that conservatives had set up welfare in the stupidest way possible if their goal was to encourage marriage. My own parents had once gotten separated in part because of the rules made for welfare. When Reagan came into office, conservatives prevented two-parent families from receiving aid. My family couldn’t get aid unless my mom was single.

I know about these cuts, because, in 1981, my parents became ineligible for Aid to Dependent Children of Unemployed Parents, the program that was then often simply referred to as welfare for two-parent families. Murray was insulting poor women of all races for being single mothers when that was the last thing they wanted to be.

As a graduate student, I taught social policy to master’s-level social work students. I told them about theories of poverty, including Murray’s, and then presented research evidence to dismantle Murray. I threw in personal experience to hammer the points home. My students gave me great reviews. This wasn’t exactly making change on a large scale, though.

When I became a professor, I continued to read Murray and his employer, the American Enterprise Institute, spewing forth about how easy it was for Americans to live in poverty, yet I had no effective way to respond. I was at a different university with another renowned poverty expert, but we weren’t working together. I was being drawn into research on the quality of care in social services. This was a worthy cause, but not a step toward shutting down Murray’s falsehoods.

Charles Murray said that readers should do a thought experiment in which they imagined they were poor. But I don’t want readers to use their imaginations. I want them to listen to a testimonial like mine about the reality of being poor.

I had been writing a book about my family since I was ten years old. Because of the age I was when I first developed this goal, I believed that it was a mission that came straight from God. At that age, I was praying daily, out loud, and I imagined I heard God’s reply. At the time, I wasn’t too far removed from being a fundamentalist Mormon.

I wanted to pattern my book after Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, ⁶ a memoir that doubles as a scientific study. But I ended up making different decisions than he did. In his book, he tried to use real names as often as possible. I couldn’t do that. I have used a lot of pseudonyms, mixed in with as many real names as I could muster. Welcome to my family and our mental health struggles.

My book is about poverty and mental illness in a white, American family, my own. It is also about coming of age, coming apart, and coming to the point of finishing this book. Nothing is this book was easy to experience, and I wish I could portray the true emotional impact of the array of experiences, but I’m so damaged by them, my emotions are frozen. Everything in this book suggests why I took personal offense at Charles Murray’s question and why the best response to him was to tell my family’s story.

It is so bad to be poor.

1. Risen, D. (2017, June 8). The war on the war on poverty. Democracy Journal. https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/6/the-war-on-the-war-on-poverty/

2. Murray, C. (1988). What’s so bad about being poor? National Review, https://indexarticles.com/reference/national-review/whats-so-bad-about-being-poor-2/

3. Murray, C. & Herrnstein, R. (1994). The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. The Free Press.

4. Murray, C. (1993). The coming white underclass. Originally from U.S. News and World Report. https://www.aei.org/articles/the-coming-white-underclass/

5. Murray, C. & Herrnstein, R. (1994). The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. The Free Press.

6. Solomon, A. (2001). The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Scribner Press.

Chapter One: Early Onset of Mental Illness

Fifty years ago, my mom and dad created thick, heavy books of family history with page after page of our relatives listed with their families. At first glance, this seems like an extremely boring hobby. You’re just systematically listing family members with birth, marriage, and death dates. Over and over.

They created the genealogy books in Salt Lake City, Utah, where they met in 1970 at the famous genealogy library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ (LDS). Their relationship began because of the Mormons.

My father in a suit and tie

A picture containing my mother, standing, posing with her Bible in a church gown

Figure 1. Pictures of my father and mother in their youth

This should have been a romantic story of a chatty blonde with a cute gap in her front teeth falling in love with the dark-haired, seductively good-looking man who is equally entranced. Except that’s not how it happened. They both had a secret. They were two very troubled people when they met.

In 1965, my father, John, graduated from high school, and voluntarily joined the Air Force, as his father had done during World War II. It was not an easy time for Dad. His best friend from high school had just been killed in a car accident.

Dad wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. Diabetes had prevented his father from being a pilot during WWII, but our dad could join the Air Force to serve during Vietnam. Maybe he could even learn to fly planes. He tried to do everything right. He had been an altar boy and a Boy Scout. Dad voluntarily joined the Air Force, but when his parents were not happy that he had enlisted, it broke his heart. Dad had the weight on ancestry on his side, though.

When I conducted my own genealogical research, I found that on my dad’s side going back to the Revolutionary War —and even well before then in the Pequot War in 1636—our family has been involved in battles.

During his time in the Air Force, Dad was stationed in Texas, Arizona, and Colorado. He was nearly deployed twice to Thailand. The orders were canceled both times when war plans changed. One day, when he was twenty-one years old, my father heard a man whistling. The whistling began to agitate and then infuriate him. He attacked the man he thought was whistling. Witnesses said the man wasn’t making a sound.

Dad was sent to psychiatric lockup. Based on his obvious psychotic breakdown, he came away with a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, which combined the often-paranoid delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenia with the deep despair and self-loathing of depression. ¹

Dad told the psychiatrists about his military buddy Alex from the planet Orarus-Orr in another star system. He also told them about going in a UFO to Zorcon and Mare Crisium, planets supposedly prophesied in the Book of Samuel in the Bible. In 1969, the Air Force gave him an honorable medical discharge after three-and-a-half years of service.

Other people may have simply concluded Dad was becoming mentally ill when this incident occurred, but he told me that his visions went all the way back to early puberty.

Picture of the Angel Moroni trumpeting

Figure 2. Picture of the angel Moroni

As Dad told it, a Mormon friend from the military had taken him to visit Salt Lake City during leave. He had seen the magnificent Mormon temple with the statue of the angel Moroni trumpeting to the people to come to the Lord. He understood Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, and his visions of angels. He had them too. He felt the Mormon faith call to him.

Dad was particularly obsessed with the Lost Tribes of Israel, and he believed he made contact with them on other planets. He would talk about this all the time. The Lost Tribes of Israel were part of his dreams. They were part of how he interpreted every Bible verse. To show his devotion to Israel, he made an official-sized canvas flag that had blue and white stripes with a Star of David in the corner of it. It represented the Lost Tribes of Israel with whom he’d had contact in outer space. Dad hung the flag in a prominent place on the wall wherever he lived.

Dad fit in perfectly with huge numbers of his countrymen who followed faith leaders. Plenty of other Americans are obsessed with Israel too. Kurt Andersen wrote a book called Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire—A 500 Year History, ² in which he explained that a generation of Americans began obsessing about the End Times right about the same time Mom and Dad did. It wasn’t specific to their mental illnesses. It was part of the culture too.

Andersen explained that Americans became actively involved with fundamentalist faiths again. Check. He said they were taking the Bible literally more often. Check. He said they were exploring the occult and mysticism. Check. He said they were seeing every war in the Middle East as a sign of the apocalypse. Check.

Apparently, at the time Dad came to Utah, his parents were going to kick him out of the house. They didn’t understand his medical discharge from the military, or why he seemed to be lying around in bed a lot. That was the affective part of the schizoaffective disorder. Once, many years later, when I was about eighteen, our grandmother leaned over to me and whispered, I think your father has schizophrenia. He hasn’t been right since he was a child. With that, his mother turned away ashamed. We never spoke of it again.

Once he was married, Dad could not have resented the fact that he had a wife and children more. It wasn’t his idea to have a family. He always swore he loved our mother and us kids, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel manipulated into having us.

In 1968, when, my mother Laura ³ was twenty-three years old, she returned to Iowa months early from a two-year Lutheran mission to teach English in New Guinea. It had not gone well there. Once she arrived, she realized the arrogance of telling other people what to believe. They already had their own belief systems and she felt shy about imposing hers on them.

The first year went okay, but two new missionary women arrived the second year. They were not there to be helpful to the local people or to spread Christianity. They were exploring their freedom and rebelling against authority. They drank. They smoked. They played poker all night long, flouting a law that prohibited card-playing in New Guinea. The law was enacted because many gambling husbands traded their wives, who had been put up as collateral for bets. The new girls teased our mother for her devotion to the Bible and the missionary rules. Mom had counted on them to help grade the stacks of children’s school essays; instead, they were like children themselves. The more Mom dwelled on the situation, the more upset she got. It wasn’t long before she ended up in the hospital with an opportunistic case of mononucleosis. Her Australian doctor diagnosed her with major depression.

She took the yellow-and-white pills he prescribed until she became convinced they were making her depression worse—even making her feel suicidal. Decades later, research would show that antidepressants can make depressive symptoms worse in people with bipolar disorder, ⁴ but Mom’s bipolar disorder II was not yet recognized. ⁵

The doctor scoffed at the notion that the pills could be making her worse, saw the palmful of pills she had been hiding in her drawer, and made her take all of them at once. This psychiatrist was so aggressively arrogant that Mom crumbled instead of resisting further. These pills are perfectly safe. They do not cause depression, he insisted. Take them!

She did.

That solution actually worked, briefly. She was awake for days, happy and full of energy. ⁶ She exercised three times a day for a week. She did all her work, plus the work of those lazy, mean missionary girls. The elderly German woman she was staying with commented, Why, I haven’t seen someone go from so sickly to so healthy so quickly in my whole life.

Beaming, Mom said, We can do anything with God’s help. The crash that followed approximately five days later led her to take every pill she had in an attempted overdose.

In Laura’s mind, the only precipitant for her depression was her poor health and the other missionary girls. However, reports by her sisters and brothers contradict this perspective. As her sister told me when we discussed Mom’s depression, She was a sensitive child, often withdrawn. She seemed down much of the time.

But I was more interested in how Mom ended up halfway around the globe from her family and in a totally different culture. I remembered how scared I was to live in Germany with a class of college students I knew, including a dear friend, for only six months. Not alone. Our mother was brave. Gutsy. I knew this, but she had cracked up overseas, and I also wanted to understand that.

Mom told stories about how she grew up driven to seek approval, running into the house and asking if she was doing a good job after she swept each concrete block on the sidewalk. She took it as a personal failure when no one accepted the cream and sugar she offered at her mother’s tea parties. She’d cry silently in the closet from the rejection if no one was interested. She endlessly tried to get attention, most often by faking sickness or injury.

Mom would cozy up to the heat register to make her forehead hot and feverish. She would lie on the ground under a swing set, making it look as though she had fallen off. After she twisted herself into a position on the ground as if she’d been injured, she’d wait for someone to rescue her, eventually giving up when no one seemed to notice her lying there.

Her father’s narcissistic focus on his own ideas and his business meant his daughter often went unnoticed. Even at the age of seventy-five, Mom still displayed a picture of her father with her perched on his knee. Our grandfather suffered from bipolar symptoms that his daughter inherited. His migraine headaches drew his attention away as well. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his children. They were sometimes brought along on business trips. It was the pervasive neglect, and his insistence on having things his way that eventually led to the self-imposed moniker, Crazy Dad.

Whatever the factors that led to her suicide attempt in New Guinea, Mom returned home earlier than planned in 1968. While she was in the southern hemisphere, half of her family had converted from the Lutheran to the Mormon faith, led by her brother, Paul ⁷. When she got back to the States, she dutifully attended an LDS church service in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Her father’s influence had always cast a long shadow on her worldview, and with both of her parents converting, it felt lonely and marginal to remain Lutheran. The family members who weren’t converting had married and moved away. Besides, she said that the Mormon missionaries who came to visit were lovely people, always so sincere.

Trying to make a new start in the United States, Laura moved to Minneapolis and took a job at the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center, a maximum-security facility for both male and female offenders. One of the most interesting people she met was the real Charlie Brown. He worked with the male offenders, so they didn’t get to see each other often.

On Christmas Eve 1968, when only a few detainees remained over the holidays, Charlie Brown played the piano and sang. He reminded our mother of the cartoon character, and she learned that he and Charles Schulz were indeed good childhood friends and that Schulz had received his permission to base his Peanuts character on him. Mom said he was truly a wonderful human being—just one that seemed to have more than his fair share of melancholy.

Mom was back into a state of suicidal crisis by the spring of 1969, about a year after leaving New Guinea. Working at the juvenile detention center, county employees were supposed to go to a county health clinic. However, the doctor did nothing for Mom but send her home for the weekend, asking her to return on Monday. The only trouble was that suicidal feelings are a life-and-death problem, so this was like sending someone home with a heart attack. Even though she said, I feel just like I did a year ago, it was not judged to be an emergency.

She turned to Dr. Green, a private physician, and called him when things were becoming too much to cope with. She asked him if he was busy. He bluntly stated he was, so she apologized and hung up, quietly determined never to bother anyone again. She devoured a bottle of sleeping pills and turned on the gas in the apartment she shared with three other inhospitable women.

That landed Mom in the hospital, where the story gets confusing. She remembers being discharged shortly after that. She began seeing Dr. Green on an outpatient basis, but she quickly ended up in a six-week recuperation at Glenwood Hills Psychiatric Hospital. Glenwood Hills was a beautiful new facility dedicated to treating mental illnesses.

At one point, Laura met someone who recommended that she see one Reverend Pfotenhauer, a Lutheran minister who had a deliverance ministry in his basement in St. Paul. She described the meeting with Rev. Pfotenhauer as follows:

He began to speak to the ‘demons’ in me, asking them questions. I was a bit shocked when my voice answered—without my volition—that his name was Bavasiki. He identified himself as the ‘spirit of suicide.’ . . . They proceeded and a second demon was identified. This one, called Kenona, refused to come out. He just said . . . ‘It isn’t time yet.’ That seemed to be the end of it, and the session was over . . . He [Kenona] was the ‘spirit of depression.’

That’s Mom’s interpretation of her experience, and she says she was never suicidal after that. She doesn’t seem to remember that she was suicidal again during our childhoods.

On a visit home to her family in Iowa, she was introduced to a recent Mormon convert, a nice young man. This was my future father, just home from the service. They saw each other at a ward (local congregation) event and exchanged small talk. Shortly afterward, Dad decided to move to Utah. Mom decided she was maybe not interested in him anyway because he was Mormon, and she was still trying to figure out her own faith in the wake of her family’s conversion. At any rate, she was living in Minneapolis, not near Utah.

Mom didn’t seriously consider converting from Lutheran to Mormon, until she went to a Billy Graham crusade and saw a table of literature with an anti-Mormon section. She compared what she’d experienced with Mormons to what she was reading in this denigrating literature. To her, those brochures were proof that people lied about Mormons. Therefore, the Mormon Church must be speaking the truth and was being persecuted. It was enough to tip Mom over the edge, and she decided to become a Mormon.

She began studying the texts of her new religion with devotion: the Bible, ⁸ the Book of Mormon, ⁹ the Doctrine and Covenants, ¹⁰ and the Pearl of Great Price. ¹¹ Ultimately, she pursued her desire for spiritual sustenance ¹² by moving to the Mormon mecca: Salt Lake City.

At this point, neither of our parents were aware that this religion is based on white supremacy. Joseph Smith created a religion with a story in which dark-skinned people in the Americas killed off light-skinned people. (Needless to say, there is no archeological evidence whatsoever for this having happened). Those dark-skinned people became Native Americans.

In January 1970, Dad took a job at the Visitor Center near the Temple in Salt Lake City. Later that month, Mom arrived in town to deepen her understanding of her new faith, while using the Mormon Church’s world-renowned library of family genealogy to learn about her family tree. The Mormon ritual of baptizing the dead has led them to amass the largest collection of records related to family history available anywhere.

Mom stopped into the Visitor Center to get information about the area. Again, our parents crossed paths. The fact that these two Iowans, who grew up blocks away from each other, both landed in Utah and crossed paths in the Mormon Visitor Center, compelled them to spend time together, especially at the genealogy library.

When church elders got word of the two new converts meeting by chance, they were confident God was asserting His will to have these two people marry. The odds of meeting in Iowa about six months before running into each other again in Utah had to be supernaturally small, right? They were both in Salt Lake City trying out a new faith as a remedy for old troubles. There, in Salt Lake City, coincidences were interpreted as destiny.

A tradition of the Mormon Church is to offer a patriarchal blessing when a patriarch of the church provides guidance about life, ostensibly channeled straight from God. The patriarch is part of a hierarchy not unlike the Catholic Church, with its single leader, cardinals, and bishops.

The purpose of a patriarchal blessing is to restate one’s connection to the tribes of Israel, provide gifts of spiritual knowledge, and offer specific advice to individuals about their circumstances. At a general conference of the Mormon Church, President Ezra Taft Benson stated, Study [your patriarchal blessing] carefully and regard it as personal scripture to you—for that is what it is . . . then read it regularly that you may know God’s will for you.

Dad’s blessing included a recommendation to marry and begin a family. It was this spiritual mandate that led him to ask Mom to become his wife. Mom had her own vision foretelling that this marriage was God’s plan, but she was more enthusiastic than John. He silently felt manipulated into the whole thing by the church elders. Within five months of meeting in Utah, they married with two witnesses in attendance.

Given what I’d eventually learn about their past, this clearly was the beginning of one of the most ill-advised couplings imaginable. Prone to zealotry because of the desperation of their search, they had neither the will nor the wherewithal to resist the elder’s blessing.

During their short courtship, they learned almost nothing about each other. Even our father’s disclosure that a UFO had abducted him failed to scare Mom away. Likewise, Dad did not call things off after learning Mom participated in an exorcism. What did they have in common besides growing up near each other in Iowa?

They knew they both liked to read. They both loved genealogy. They both felt they were on a quest for the truth. Mostly they enjoyed asking existential questions such as, Which is God’s true church? and Which modern-day prophet should one follow?

Much later, Mom would say, I think it all boils down to that your dad and I simply never were really ‘in love,’ although at the time it seemed like a good idea. Who knew back then? Dad only wanted to join the Mormons because the angel Moroni called to him and they talked about the Lost Tribes of Israel. He never counted on this whole family-responsibility angle. He could deal with getting married to this woman. He could love her. But he didn’t think about the fatherhood duties. He wasn’t up for them. He wasn’t well.

Our parents met a couple named Kurt and Angie shortly after they got married. These two were hard-core survivalists who believed they needed to prepare for the coming invasion of the government due to the collapse of society. This was going to happen near the impending apocalypse. The omnipresent, always imminent apocalypse.

They had stored away a year’s worth of supplies, and Mom and Dad attempted to do the same. Their survivalist friends told Mom she would be giving birth in the woods by the time of her due date if she got pregnant. They took our parents around to different stores to buy supplies for the coming Armageddon. Mom and Dad looked for land to purchase together with Kurt and Angie. Only a few months later, Mom was pregnant. When I arrived before the End Times, I surprised everyone.

Home pregnancy tests were not available over the counter at the time, so Mom went to some extreme lengths over a weekend to find out if she was expecting. She had heard about a Hungarian physician named Dr. Ignatz von Peczely, who re-founded the science of iridology. Iridology was reading the iris of the eye to detect medical conditions. Although discredited, ¹³ and probably in part because it was discredited, Mom sought someone who could perform this craft. The man she found told her that iridology only detects disease, not naturally occurring phenomena like pregnancies. She dragged our dad everywhere over the weekend, looking for someone to tell her if she was pregnant or not, but she ended up having to wait until Monday.

When I was older, Mom shared a letter with me about how she told our dad that they had a firstborn on the way:

I rushed home from the doctor’s office in the happiest state I had ever experienced. My feet never touched the ground. At home, I found your father reading a newspaper at the kitchen table. Coming up behind him, wrapping my arms around his chest, I announced, ‘We are having a baby.’ Immediately, he threw my arms from around him with such force as to send me flying backward across the room. His face became a deep purple, his eyes glowered, and his fists clenched. He left the house for the remainder of the day.

He was clearly not ready for the responsibility so soon. He didn’t have a solid job yet. Anyone can understand where he was coming from. In the Mormon belief system, as the man, he was responsible for the family. At least in his family growing up, his parents had worked equally to support the family.

My college-educated mother wasn’t exactly prepared to have me either. She thought that when I was born I wouldn’t open my eyes for the first few days, just like a newborn puppy. She was amazed when I came into the world with big blue eyes full of curiosity. It seems like a significant gap in the education of a woman licensed to teach elementary school.

Thankfully, things got much better after I was born. Mama told me later: You were completely doted upon by both your father and your mother. I remember when I had you wrapped up like a mummy in your blankie and I placed you between the pillows on our big double bed. Your dad just looked over at you—so tiny against that big bed [and cried, saying], ‘You don’t know what that little girl has done for me.’

His attitude had changed quite a bit by then.

During the early part of her pregnancy, Mom went for prenatal care with a medical doctor. Once. Perhaps through years of influence from her very patriarchal father, Mom accepted alternative medicine much more than traditional medicine. Grandpa Meyer was famous for saying things like: A lack of aspirin doesn’t cause headaches; They took fifty years to accept the thermometer; and, "Remember, the establishment mocked the man who said handwashing was key to preventing disease ¹⁴."

At the appointment, an argument ensued between Mom and the doctor, whom she saw as hyper-arrogant, over the best way to proceed with her delivery. The doctor said, If you’re going to be so pigheaded about it, why don’t you go home and deliver your own baby?

The suggestion became her new conviction. She found a naturopath who agreed to deliver her firstborn at home. This doctor, Rulon Allred, would later become famous for his violent death at the hands of a faction of fundamentalist Mormons. My parents had no idea Allred had five wives and was the leader of a polygamous cult. In 1977, a rival cult leader ordered one of his wives to kill Allred. ¹⁵ Allred’s name appears on my birth certificate, though it was actually one of his associates who delivered me.

Until 1890, polygamy was a doctrine of the Mormon Church. However, after about sixty years of being mocked by other Christians and out of a desire to join Utah with the United States, the Church opted to outlaw polygamy or, as many advocates like to call it, plural marriage.

A group of followers who disagreed with the change in the church’s stance broke off, many moving north to Canada or south to Mexico to live out their beliefs in communal settings. Those who remained in Utah frequently skirmished with each other, and once with the federal government. In a 1979 stand-off, federal agents ended up killing one such Utahan, John Singer. This fed our parents’ anti-government attitudes.

Our parent’s association with Dr. Allred, led the elders of their church ward to call them in for a meeting. The elders questioned the circumstances of their connection to Allred and warned them about interacting with him. Defiant toward authority in their own ways, my parents likely became only more determined to learn about fundamentalist Mormons. This was the first rumbling of my family’s avalanche of later problems. In many ways, it was predictable that they would be vulnerable to a cult.

Shortly after getting married, Mom brought home a little blue book from the Salt Lake City Public Library that in her words caught her eye. She saw Book of Onias, ¹⁶ authored by Robert C. Crossfield, and she felt drawn to it. Mama felt the Holy Spirit, (or as Mormons frequently said, the Holy Ghost), calling her to read his book.

Crossfield was a self-proclaimed prophet and seer, a man who was extreme enough to have been rejected from all the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saint (FLDS) sects. In his 1969 book, Crossfield revealed that LDS leadership was misleading the Mormon Church. The Mormons, he argued, had abandoned Joseph Smith’s teachings when they agreed to give up polygamy in exchange for being part of the United States. He chastised the faithful for abandoning polygamy and called on Latter-day Saints to heed the words of the church’s founding prophets, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

Smith’s revelations focused on marriage. Essentially, Smith told his followers that God wanted humanity to practice polygamy with men having multiple wives, just as occurred in the Old Testament. Smith married more than three dozen women himself.

Also known by his self-decreed name — the Prophet Onias — Crossfield wrote about receiving a series of revelations from God beginning in 1961. He received divine guidance straight from the Lord that men were to have multiple wives as Abraham of the Old Testament had. He appealed to fellow Mormons to look at sections promoting plural marriage in the Doctrine and Covenants, an LDS holy book. Onias knew directly from the source that God was unhappy with this betrayal because having multiple wives was the Most Holy Principle. Most LDS members rejected Onias’s teachings, and the Church eventually excommunicated him. Onias’s presence threatened the leadership of sects of the fundamentalist Mormons too. They let him visit their compounds, but he didn’t seem to have permission to stay.

Enamored with Crossfield’s apparent connection to God, our parents wrote to him in 1971 and invited him down to Salt Lake City to share his revelations in person. Excited to have potential new followers, the Prophet Onias obliged and said he would come to Salt Lake City to visit. He traveled with two of his daughters from a small town in Alberta, Canada, to Utah shortly after I was born.

Onias’s girls were dressed in the traditional clothing of fundamentalist Mormons: long dresses that covered them from neck to toe, and they didn’t wear any makeup. Their long hair was braided and twisted into an attractive style. They were the picture of demure, polite, submissive women trained to serve their male superiors.

Mom was impressed when Onias took me as an infant into the bedroom and cuddled me to his chest as he rested from the long drive. She liked how fatherly and family-oriented he was. He certainly reacted to me in an immediately positive way that differed significantly from how Dad had initially responded. For this reason alone, she was drawn to Onias.

Our parents said goodbye to Onias, enthralled with him. The Most Holy Principle he taught about polygamy as God’s highest law appealed to them. Even Dad was intrigued. But he was now supposed to go out and find another wife to have children with. I imagine my father thought he could exercise more choice this time. Having just gotten married to Dad, Mom wasn’t sure she felt ready to share him. But she was eager to get on with the process of starting their plural marriage if that was what God wanted.

They kept in touch with Crossfield but chose not to move to Canada to live with what Crossfield hoped would be his growing congregation. They were going to be a part of Onias’s scattered flock—a flock spread out all over North America, and beyond, too. They began several years of studying Onias’s teachings. When he received a new revelation, he mailed a copy to our parents.

Shortly after Onias’s visit, Dad declared that Salt Lake City was too oppressive for him. Too many rules, too much dogma. He liked coffee. He wanted to smoke Camel Straights again like he had in the Air Force. Mormons did not do such things. Strangely enough, fundamentalist Mormons have not always followed the same rules about avoiding alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco that the mainstream LDS Church has.

Besides, the park they loved to take me to, Liberty Park, became the scene of a double murder—a mixed-race couple jogging together, the crime motivated by racism. Mom was certain it was a legacy from the racist past of Utah. Our parents decided to move home to Iowa. But if that’s where Dad was going to avoid feeling oppressed, he was heading to the wrong place.

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