I received a nice Christmas card from Rachael, my surrendered daughter Megan’s 20 year old daughter. This is the first communication I’ve had with Megan’s family in over four months. In August Megan asked me to stop sending her children birthday presents which I had been sending for a decade. I honored her request and didn’t send Christmas presents as well.
I hope Megan explained to her children why Jane was no longer sending gifts. I’m Jane, not grandma to them. Megan’s adoptive parents are on Rachael’s genealogy chart in the grandparent position. Rachael is proud of the fact that she is descended (sort of) from people who came up the Mormon trail. It doesn’t hurt me that Rachel doesn’t give me the privilege of being her grandma. She is a fine young woman and I’m happy to know her.
Mormons are big on adoption. The LDS Church pressures single women to surrender their babies or jeopardize their child’s chance to enter the celestial kingdom. Mormon Mother Marie Osmond has produced two songs “From God’s Arms to My Arms to Yours” and “Delivery” ("I delivered you from Heaven, from God's gentle loving care /And I've entrusted you to mortals who have wished and prayed you there”) to encourage these women to give up their babies.
Marie is not exactly a poster woman for Mormon Motherhood, though. According to Wikipedia, she married young and had a bio child; then divorced and re-married in the LDS temple. She and her second hubby adopted a child, had a bio child, adopted three more children, and had another bio child. Marie had a breakdown after the birth of the last child which she attributed to post-partum depression. She wrote a book about depression, “Behind the Smile”. She then adopted another child, making a total of three bios and five acquireds.
Several years later, tabloids reported that Marie attempted suicide. She and her second hubby divorced. One of her adopted sons entered drug rehab at age 16. It’s hard to imagine that these adopted kids would have been any worse off if God had left them in their natural mothers’ arms.
PS The Daily Bastardette has the video of Mormom Mother Marie singing the songs.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
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Marie is a typical serial adopter.
ReplyDeleteCan't fix herself but sure can take on another woman's children and pretend they are her own.
She is really a confused, woman who probably is torn between her LDS perfect upbringing, and the perfect family she created, in her mind.
I thought once Mormon's married they were married forever, sealed, is this like Catholics who can divorce and remarry in the Catholic church? Annulled marriages with kids produced in the marriage, does that annul the kids too?
yts
The Mormon marriage thing is very complicated. Yes, they are married "for Time and Eternity" in the Temple. They can also marry outside of the Temple, but that is only for "this life" and kind of a disgrace. The goal is always to marry in the Temple eventually.
ReplyDeleteUnlike the Catholic Church, Mormons do allow divorce, even for Temple marriages, and remarriage IF both parties are "Temple-worthy". If one party becomes an apostate (stops believing in the Mormon church) the other can be granted an "unsealing". I am not sure what the process is to get this, but anyone interested can go to www.exmorman.org and ask; I'm sure it will be explained.
Men can have as many wives as they want in the Celestial Kingdom which is the highest level of heaven all good Mormons aspire to, but women can have only one husband.So a widower who marries again, and again, can have all his wives with him in eternity, but a widow can only have her second or subsequent husband with her in this life!
The Mormon concept of Heaven is very literal, marriage forever means having sex and spirit babies forever, in a polygamous afterlife.
Neither the Mormon nor Catholic "annulments" make the kids illegitimate. The Catholic annulment says you were never "really" married, so there wae never a real divorce, but through some additional fancy footwork and rationalizations the kids of the "marriage that wasn't" are still legitimate. Yeah, I know it is stupid, and I'm Catholic.
The kids of a Mormon temple marriage are sealed to the parents; those "born in the covenant" are automatically sealed, adopted kids and step-kids where there is a temple divorce have to be sealed in a separate Temple ceremony. If you missed out on being a Mormon in this life, they try to baptize everyone after they are dead; hence their interest in genealogy. This did not go over so great with families of Holocaust victims and others, but they still do it.
It is a weird and fascinating theology, but sadly a very stiffling life for a lot of people.