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Show with my mother. . .when I spoke. For she did most of the talking, pouring her pain before me i n t o a great shimmering pool that stunned me with i t s m i r r o r l i k e r e f l e c t i o n of a mutual capacity for suffering. She talked for awhile of her youth. Unlike me, her early life had not been fraught with broken commandments and periods of willful r e b e l l i o n . On the contrary, she had been submissive and placid, always yielding to the notions of others. When she was fourteen she had entered her f i r s t nervous breakdown, a f t e r a childhood mottled with i l l n e s s : rheumatic fever, heart trouble, chronic s i n u s i t i s . During the parallel period of development in which I had talked back to my father and been declared a hussy, my mother had been reclining on itUo\ a cot in the ^infirmary, trying to control the writhing of her nerves. She had been reared in poverty more discouraging than ours, for there had been no end in sight. Her father had been ill with tuberculosis since she was very young, had died before she was married. She and her mother and sisters had spent their years scrubbing away the accumulating shame of 'being on relief.' They diligently scoured away the filth that often clings to the impoverished and tarnishes their will to shine on. But my mother's family had kept their lives clean and dignified although their only tools had been faith and devotion: Faith in God, devotion to the truth they found in Mormonism. And n°w, in her fifties, her eyes blinded with sorrow , my mother searched for a truth that lay beyond her perimeters. por, like me, she felt that my father had betrayed her. |