A: I became aware of God and Jesus the few times I attended Sunday school at a local Christian church. Later, when I was thirteen and enrolled in a Christian school, I became aware of others who had a personal relationship with God. When one of my classmates, Marsha Mosher, prayed out loud and began with the word “Father,” I recognized the difference instantly. She knew God intimately. I longed for that kind of loving expression to be authentic and real within my life.
I had been raised to revere Joseph Smith and worship my dad, Ervil LeBaron, as the “one mighty and strong,” the one on earth designated to speak for God. When I understood how I had been misled, I began questioning myself. Is God’s love really genuine and available to me? Can I really be a part of His family? Answering those questions are what helped me know God, the Father, in an authentic way and gave my spiritual expression a genuineness I hadn’t experienced before.
Q: When you first ran away from the cult, you mention the safety you felt at Mark and Lillian’s house. How did you begin to process your experience? What was your first step toward healing?
A: I did my best to fit in, and much of that was done by putting on a happy face, even when that didn’t reflect what was happening on the inside. Although I appreciated the chance to live at Mark and Lillian’s house, I don’t think I began truly healing until 1995, when I started seeing a professional counselor. The healing process has been a long journey and has taken decades. I am still on that journey and continue taking steps in the right direction.
Q: If your dad were alive today, what would you say to him?
A: I’m not going to lie —this is a hard question. I don’t believe that my dad was in his right mind for most of his adult life. Mental illness runs in our family. I believe things could have been different had he received the care he needed. As it stands now, I’m like every other person who longs for the approval and blessing of his or her father. I’d want that from my father, if he were capable of giving that to me. I would want him to say he is proud of me.
Q: Do you think of the children of Ervil and his other wives as your family, even today? Do you keep in touch at all?
A: Yes, I consider my fifty-plus siblings and their mothers my family. Naturally, I feel closest to my six full siblings and my mother’s older children from her previous husbands. That said, I have siblings from my mother’s sister-wives that I’m very close to, and I would do anything for them. I also have several siblings where the relationship is strained, and we aren’t in close contact. Our family has been through such trauma that having close relationships with everyone is all but impossible. I navigate those relationships with trepidation and continue hoping for healing and reconciliation for all of us.
I am in touch with all the family members and siblings who want to be in touch with me. However, some choose to keep their distance for a variety of reasons, and I respect their decisions. I maintain some measurable distance from a few family members, while I continue to pursue my own healing. My relationship with one of my brothers is a good example of this. He is in prison for the misguided “blood atonement” killing of my brother-in-law Mark. Even though this brother accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior in prison, I have put a healthy boundary around my heart regarding our relationship. We talk on the phone occasionally, but that is as much as I can do right now. I don’t think he knows the full measure of how his actions affected my life. I hope that after he reads this book, we may be able to cobble together a closer tie.
I know there are people in my family who will not be happy that I have written this book. Some may have a different perspective on or recollection of the events that I describe. Being a peacemaker at heart, it took me a while to gather the courage to tell my story, knowing that others would question me —and my motives —for writing. I hope they will tell their stories one day as well.
Q: How prepared did you feel going into marriage and motherhood? What aspects of each do you think you have done well? What aspects of each needed work? How do you think your upbringing affected these roles and relationships?
A: My upbringing definitely affected my role as a wife and mother, both positively and negatively. I really thought “love conquers all” going into my first marriage and later into my second marriage. I was wrong, and it broke my heart both times. I believe that my children’s father and I were both ill-equipped to enter our marriage. Neither of us knew how to create a safe space for our love to grow and develop. By the time we looked outside of our relationship for help, there was too much damage already done to save the marriage. We divorced after almost ten years and having five children together. We sought individual counseling and then later we got marriage counseling and remarried. That relationship ended after another seven years of working hard to figure it out. I’m glad for my children’s sake that we remarried, since they got to have their father present in their lives for those additional seven years. David passed away in 2016 after a short battle with cancer. He and I were able to share a few moments in the hospital right before he passed, and he asked me to forgive him “for everything.” I was able to honestly tell him that I did.
As for my role as a mother, nothing has brought me more joy or more pain. The joys come from having raised my five children and watching them now, all grown up. The pain comes from all the ways in which I know I messed up. It’s glaringly obvious to me where things went sideways in my parenting. I own up to the ways in which I have caused them harm, even with my best intentions to mother them well.
I dreamed of being the quintessential stay-at-home, attachment-style-parenting-with-a-side-of-James-Dobson mom. I did my best, until I couldn’t anymore. When my kids’ dad quit his job, I became a working mom and, of necessity, I became the provider for our family. Later I became a single mother of five children and worked outside the home full time. Those difficult years brought stress on us all. The loss of my dream of being a stay-at-home mom left me grieving for years. I lost a lot of time in the denial and depression stages of the grief process. I became detached emotionally as a coping mechanism and have plenty of regret about that.
Q: You now have a beautiful family. What do your children know about your childhood?
A: I love my children! When they were little, I wanted to protect their young minds from having to carry the weight of knowing about my family of origin. They grew up not knowing anything about my father, except what they may have overheard in bits and pieces. It wasn’t until my oldest was a teenager that I began to openly discuss the events of my childhood, leaving out many details. Most of what I tell in the book will be a surprise to even those family and friends I feel closest to. I’m hoping that my children will understand me better when they decide to read this book.