In the beginning life seemed simple, as a child I did not realise how messed up my life was and would become. We ran free in the fields and climbed mountains, hiking up in canyons, sleeping in caves above our home.
I collected animals and when the home was full of anger or violence my animals sat outside with me, I have all my life favored animal over human simply because I did not question their love and could trust them.
I loved my giant dad whom having been in the army came home with honors and many scars. I hid from myself his faults at the same time putting my anger on my mom, she actually held us together but was not often patient, she cooked, sewed she was an artist and a farmer but when she tried to teach me music would end up slapping me.
This is a story almost impossible to put into a small space.
As the early years passed we my brothers and sisters became fifteen (the living children),
ten girls and five boys, I was second to the oldest.
When I was five my father a lumberjack had an accident in the forest, he was the biggest lumberjack so he volunteered to take down a difficult tree. When the tree came down it hit the log he stood on throwing him thirty feet up, he came down hitting his head on a rock splitting it, the top skull came down over the bottom half, he was pronounced dead. 30 minutes later his heart started beating.
I explain this to perhaps give a better view of the following years, he came home after five months in a coma. His speech pattern was destroyed so when he tried to say a word it came out wrong, although it seemed he could sing words he could not speak. To me he was a giant gentle father, to many of my siblings he was a violent monster, especially the boys, at times I feared he would beat one of them to death.
We grew up in a small secluded polygamist town, the nearest "gentile".
Town was 50 miles away.
To my mom I imagine life was a never ending nightmare, She had to have truly loved him to have survived, he often had headaches and became violent taking it out on her, she did all she could to protect him and us. Just before she died and after I had married becoming a polygamist wife she explained that his accident had destroyed the part of his brain that knew her and the children so he came from the hospital to complete strangers.
The religious leaders in our town controlled everything from marriage to family survival, at one point we were taken out of the town and moved to a small town because dad was in danger of being put into an institution.
We were moved back because dad had chased a couple of us with a bull whip and people became uneasy.
The crazy thing is that every person telling a story has a different angle of what happened, even how each child was treated told by them can change the history or reality.