Most current published Version
This is a myth about my mom and me.
I have a friend who is a self publisher who loves my writing and has told me for years a book about overcoming difficulty with a religious context could sell well.
When I expressed this desire to my wife she mentioned that I needed my siblings permission to write about their lives. I then decided to limit the story to my and my mother's experiences during this dark period.
A couple decades ago, I completed a footnoted transcription of my teenage journals. This was a much more accurate record of mine and my mothers dance. This journal transcription has existed for over 2 decades and I am still unhappy with it. This record did not allow me to express to my children how much I have grown to adore their grandmother.
Mother's Day when they were growing up was uncomfortable for them and their mother as I was still working out my feelings towards my mom.
After my mother passed away, my sister, Annette, managed my dad's affairs for several years. She did an excellent job. When her health was affected, I took over the management of his affairs. After a few more years, I became his live-in, caregiver, visiting my wife on the weekends. In the end I was his legal guardian and he felt like my oldest child. Walking in my mom's shoes, I began to understand her world. I began to understand the battles she was fighting through the dark years of our dance.
This is when I truly began to understand her world and the choices she made.
Loving my mother was like hugging "a cactus in a coffee can; it will hurt you to hold it, but it bloomed every spring."
My parents were not evil they were just immature and damaged from generational trauma. This myth is a partial exploration of that trauma.
This is the story of our dance as I learned to adore her, and she learned to govern her kingdom.
The picture shows my great-grandmother, Laurette West Byington, and an unknown baby. She is my guardian angel and muse.
# a note to the reader. The myth is written in a third person untrustworthy narrator style. It is a style of writing I discovered while attending Brigham Young University - Idaho online. I developed it as a way to talked about difficult subjects in my past. It creates a distance between myself and those experiences. I am the only person not labeled by name. The pronouns he and him only refer to myself in the myth.
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