Valentine's Day

I remember it well. Valentine's Day 1983 - the first Valentine's Day after Brent and I were engaged. I made him a giant, elaborately decorated sugar cookie, housed in a customized pizza box appropriately adorned just for the occasion. I spent days shopping, baking, plotting, and planning. I entrusted it with a friend early that morning who would deliver it to the LDS Institute Building where Brent worked part time. I had Brent pick me up and take me to work that day - I don't exactly remember what excuse I used for not being able to drive myself - just to add an extra element of surprise, him having no idea how my gift could have possibly arrived at the Institute.

I waited with great anticipation for him to retrieve me at the end of the day, wondering how my culinary offering was received. If you know Brent at all, you would know he's not one to get overly excited. But suffice it to say, I made him happy. He felt loved.

I remember walking out to his car after work, excited to find out what he got me. I don't remember the exact details, but I do remember his words as he handed me the cassette taped version of Lionel Richie's latest album with "our" song on it:

"I woke up this morning and wondered what I should get you for Valentine's Day."

What? Did I hear that right? He thought about it when? This morning? I had been plotting and scheming for days - weeks, really - and he waited until this morning to even give it one iota of thought?

I don't really know why that has stuck with me. Maybe because it convinced me at the time that even though he thought he loved me, he didn't really love me enough. Maybe I wasn't enough. Was that true or was that just my perception of how things were in order to protect myself ? Was I just creating my own reality to keep myself at a bit of a distance to avoid any future pain?

I'll admit, in the early years of our marriage - and for more years than I'd like to admit - I believed there could be a distinct possibility I would be sharing him with others through the eternities. Other wives. It's impossible for a relationship to not be affected by that thought and belief. Shared anecdotal experiences illustrate that it's equally impossible for many women who have been taught to believe in eternal polygamy not to hold something back - to maintain a certain sense of distance from their spouse without fully embracing intimate unity and commitment. To be honest, I have no idea exactly how profoundly the thought of that affected our relationship. I just know that it did.

Today marks thirty-five Valentine's Days that we've been sharing gifts. Each year the gifts have gotten less important and the relationship has grown. Aside from all the endless projects I've thrown at him through the years that he never ceases to complete, all the demands I make that he patiently endures, one thing I love the best is a certain facial expression he sometimes has when he looks at me. It's a look of pure adoration coupled with absolute contentment. It's like he's found his most favorite spot on the face of the whole earth - a space that's perfectly comfortable, secure, and sublime  - right next to me. It's an unspoken level of commitment, safety, and joy that is bound up in perfect, unending love.

Nothing else matters - as long as he's with me.

I've spent a good chunk of today transcribing a fictional (yet meant to be educational) conversation between two women (from an 1853 Millennial Star) in which one is extolling the benefits and virtues of polygamy to the other. By the end of the conversation, they are both singing its praises. I have plans to include it in an upcoming post. The virtues and benefits of the "Patriarchal Order of Marriage" - according to the conversation - are unlimited "wealth, honor, glory, intelligence, power, principalities, dominion, exaltation, and endless procreation." All those things are promised through the eternities to those righteous, obedient few who enter into God's highest form of marriage!

But where is the love?

Where is the intimate, binding love that can only exist between two people who find themselves wholly and solely intertwined and forever committed to each other?

And only each other.

In His polygamous plan of happiness for His children, did God simply forget about the love?

What would I do if Brent were "counseled" by his religious leaders to look at another woman the same way he looks at me? And to do it through all eternity?

What would I do?

My world would end. I would desperately search for a way to sink into the shadows of oblivion and forever cease to exist.

Too many early Mormon women knew all too well exactly how that felt. They lived it. The more I read their stories and try to get inside their heads the more my heart breaks.

My heart breaks especially for my women - my g-grandmother Lily, my g-g-grandmother Johanna - who were victims of prophecy and religion gone so terribly wrong. Only by exposing their stories can I begin to feel like I'm validating their pain.

Fanny Stenhouse was a legal wife to her husband Thomas. When he was 39 yrs. old he married the 15 yr. old daughter of Parley P. Pratt.  Fanny was 2 months pregnant with Thomas' 8th child when she was "counseled" to witness and participate in her husband's sealing to his new, young wife in the Endowment House or risk being eternally damned and "destroyed." Fanny wrote:

It is a cruel thing for a woman anywhere to know that her husband’s affections are divided, that she is not his only love, and that his heart is no longer all hers. But far worse is the lot of the wife in Utah. She has to see and be present when the love-making is going on, when her husband is flirting and saying soft nonsense, or looking unutterable things at silly girls who are young enough to be her daughters; —nay, her own daughters and her husband’s may actually be older than the damsel he is courting for his second wife! Such an outrage upon the holiest feelings of womanhood would not for a moment be tolerated in any civilised community; but among the Saints women are taught that this is but one part of that cross which we all have got to bear.

 … How sweetly did the men preach patience and submission to the will of Heaven. I wonder where their own patience and submission would have been had matters been reversed and their wives had been taught that it was their privilege and a religious duty to court, and flirt with and marry men younger and handsomer than their husbands.

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