I came across this letter from Margaret Young to her son on his 18th birthday.
She wants above all things that he remains a Mormon.
Seriously, this is her greatest wish, sadly enough.
Here’s the appropriate response.
Dear Son -
As I watch you sleep in my arms tonight, I think of many things I want to tell you.
I first think of my own history and how you have made me a better man whose goal is to, one day, be able to look you eye to eye and honestly tell you I did the best I could for you.
In our family we never shied away from any difficult issues and we always shared our different views with respect and tolerance. We also felt confident in openly criticizing mutual lines of thought and understood that, sometimes, we just have to agree to disagree.
We welcome new perspectives and explore new ideas rationally and skeptically, always looking for a better understanding of ourselves and those things around us.We have taught you to love art and music, animals and science, history and discovery, friends and family, and the planet in which we live.
I hope you continue to love and admire beauty, for there are many wonderful things in this universe that fills us with feelings of awe and amazement.We have watched you exercise your mind and body and hope you continue to take good care of both. A healthy lifestyle will only serve to offer you opportunities to do many enjoyable things without distorting your senses and impairing your full physical and intellectual potential.
You have questioned many things and we have encouraged you to expect reasonable and sensible answers to your questions; answers based on factual conclusions. This ability to rationally analyze our world is one of the few things that sets us apart from all other living creatures, so make use of it dutifully and honestly.
Son, respect is not assigned, but earned. Earn it. It is a continuous effort with every interaction you will have. Earn it every day.
And give it.
Respect those who have earned it. Base your judgment not on any perceived notion of respect; a white collar or a position of power does not freely grant anyone any such thing Base it on character, honor, integrity, honesty, compassion, and all those positive traits we are able to display.I hope for many things for you, son. None of which will come to you through wishful thinking or complacency. They will require primarily your own hard work and the love and care of others.
Be proud of your own efforts and give thanks for the efforts of others. Recognize and distinguish those who make a positive contribution to your life and the life of others.Finally, I will not include all my “wisdom” and advice in this letter. The fine line between counsel and demand will inevitably begin to fade by my fear of your suffering and my failures as a father.
But I will always be available and accepting of you for as long as I live and I hope we have built a relationship based on trust and friendship, acceptance, mutual respect and love.I love you… unconditionally.
Sadly enough, this morning I found out By Common Consent had deleted my comment on their post and decided to close all comments after that.
So much for their statement on their Info and Contact page:
…riiiight.
Your not the only one, I think I read that Andrew at Irresistible (Dis)Grace has been semi-permanently been silenced from commenting all together. That could be vicious rumor though, you’d have to ask him
[...] delightfully subversive, whereas Living with Mormons had a slightly less positive experience. His critical response to Margaret Young’s post was apparently deleted from the comments section. Marcus and Hypatia [...]
Well, after my experiences with BCC (with run-ins with moderation), I think they just want to maintain their kind of “country club” atmosphere…comments that shake the chummy environment will naturally be pruned or deleted outright.
It isn’t necessarily bad or good (I personally have a different, more hands-off philosophy regarding moderation), but it just represents the different character of sites.
I can say that if I post under either of my two email addresses, even to this day, my comment will go into a black hole of moderation where it will never come out. BCCers will apologize and say, “Oh, I don’t know how that got there,” but really, excuses don’t really change the fact that I’m still on auto-mod.
Whatever.
Back to the topic at hand. Even though I disagree with Margaret (and it’s a dynamic I face to an extent with my parent), I think that “unconditional love” ends up being a kind of myth anyway. We have to understand that for Margaret and many other believers, the church has been incredible to them. Despite the hiccups and issues, the church has been the source of spiritual advancement and enlightenment, the gospel an anchor for values and happiness, and so on. So, it can seem like wishing the best for a child is to wish that they stay in the church. Sure, it’s easy for some one of us to say, “Well, one can be happy outside of the church…so one should be happy for their child if they are happy, healthy, and productive, not simply if they are in the church”…but as even we should know…the church is much more pervasive in mindsets.
I’m so glad you printed this. Personally, I was horrified at Margaret Young’s ‘letter’ to her son. Does she really think that her 18 year old son can’t use the internet? The woman posts under her own name, for someone or other’s sake. She’s just telling the poor kid that he will never be good enough for her with lots of fluffy, fluffy language (and let’s not mention the perfect use of the apostrophe.) Poor kid! I knew a tremendously sweet Mormon man with the same attitude towards his ‘wayward’ 18 year old. The kid helped out at the homeless shelter and was only wayward for very small (e.g. Mormon)values–he didn’t make it to 19.
But if M. Young’s kid committed suicide, I imagine another beautiful post about how she’s waiting to see him in heaven, with an equally large chorus of well-wishers.
It’s so freakin’ sad. I just about can’t stand it. Ruin your kid’s life and get tons of applause; something is wrong here.
Djinn’s remark strikes a chord with me. My parents undoubtedly feel the same way, but outside of LDSland, I’m not particularly wayward. I’m a functioning adult member of society and yet, my parents wave the failure flag. (Less so now that I got married to my long-time boyfriend–seriously, this was the least stressed they’ve been around me in a decade. I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts, since as soon as I get pregnant and don’t bless the kid or raise it in the church, we’ll probably be back to tense discussions. I hope not, but meh, my expectations have been lowered.)
I wish they’d regard raising a strong independent woman who knows her own mind and waited to get married until she found a man who would respect that about her as an accomplishment. But I’m still a heretic.
The killer thing for me is they don’t seem to realise how much their behaviour hurts their children. I went from being a total Daddy’s girl to flinching when he starts in on certain subjects, and mostly because one day he told me he regretted spending the money he used to raise me when I opposed him on something. He didn’t mean it, but he never apologised for it either. I went from believing in unconditional parental love to feeling like it had strings attached. Their perspective: That I’m merrily unrepentant and completely oblivious to how much I’ve hurt them, and that I’m constantly rubbing my unbelief in their face. My perspective: I walk on frickin’ eggshells, man, and I don’t get the same respect for just being honest about myself. They really do get befuddled, not seeing themselves as aggressors or disrespectful, and certainly not realising how they erode our trust in their unconditional love. It’s the pain from realising that being a non-believer is about as bad as if you were doing drugs or had deliberately hurt somebody, at least in the eyes of your parents. My parents still tell me they love me, but they’ve stopped telling me they’re proud of me. Sigh.
I’ve been watching a similar situation unfold with a co-worker and his fiancee. She was raised by very strict and traditional Catholics. He’s an atheist and so is she. They’ve been living together for almost 5 years and just recently decided to get married. Her parents, who at first were really excited about the wedding, decided they could not attend their daughter’s wedding based on some really screwed up rules in the catecysm (their rule book).
It’s really screwed up and religion does this. It makes seemingly rational people do very irrational things for very stupid reasons.
I’m sorry about your parents, PixelFish and I hope they’ll come to appreciate all your qualities outside of the lenses of religious dogma.