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Show in my father's house/ 368 personal growth, a criterion by which the Lord will judge us, it also acknowledges that Eve was tempted through curiousity. The drive to better understand the strange world beyond my family was precisely what had caused my own fall (though I then only sensed this and felt ashamed of it without understanding that I was victim of my own questioning nature. ) How much greater the consequences might have been had I grasped the paradox ? asked myself the riddle of Mormon womanhood. Given the pain I had felt for my mother and for myself, I believe the knowledge of this confluence might have tilted me into an eternal hatred of my native religion. But I was allowed to retain innocence in this regard at least, and continued through my confusions , weaving in and out them as a worm in sandy soil. My felt-dilemma was similar to my mother's: The contradiction between spiritual responsibility and ineptitude had always betrayed her integrity and led her into illness. There she would be incapable of resolving the unresolvable and would not have to struggle with it. As long as she remained ill, the dilemma belonged to someone else - implicit^-, to my father, the priesthood-bearer. Similarly, I had been physically overpowered and introduced to spiritual weakness. I had been knocked to the ground and taken by a man-animal or cave-man. I was despised for being weak enough to be drawn into temptation, despised for being weak enough to be treated as despised. /And so I accepted mvself as weak and despicable. Had I known at the time,of a woman's control over 7 / sexuality in plural marriage, it might have made considerable difference in my relationships with men. Later in life |