Re-Write Your Story

(Original post April 30, 2022)

I was the burnt waffle.

Erma Bombeck wrote that it’s too bad we can’t do children the way we do a batch of waffles - throw out the first burnt or doughy ones, until we get the hang of the thing.

My parents were marvelous parents. But growing up the eldest and only girl in a coach’s home had its challenges. The overriding message that burnt my waffle was I was never going to be good enough. Because let’s face it - even if I had been the all-star forward, there’s always room for improvement, right?

Little did I know I was writing a narrative from that angle, and pretty much ignoring every other angle.

Like the angle where these people were delighted with the human being they were raising, that they were grateful she was so instinctively obedient, setting an example for younger brothers that we just do what we’re told, because we’re supposed to.

Or the angle where they were relieved I included my brothers in neighborhood groups, and was the catalyst for all things interesting and wholesome going on in the neighborhood on long summer days.

Or the angle where they could mostly laugh because of my oblivion to cause and effect, which got me into scrapes that could rival Wally and the Beav.

So - ignoring all these lovely angles where there was so much humor and affection and grace, somehow, burnt waffle that I was, I only focused on the angle where there was always room for improvement, and thought my parents would never find me - enough.

Being so narrow and tight, this drove my relationship with my parents into very narrow and tight places as I became an adult. I worked - and continue to - work on rewriting that early narrative - based as much on the narrow angle I had chosen as it was based on imperfect parenting and burnt waffles.

Then I nearly died.

A few days before Christmas, my younger brother brought me a gift - a book, a la Shutterfly - which he had made for me. It was filled with pictures of our childhood, accompanying a tender, inspired poem he had written about the good example I had always been to him.

I lay there in my hospital bed, barely able to move, and watched my brother fight back tears as he read what it had meant to grow up with me in this idyllic, privileged childhood.  He finished, and as we both wiped tears away, he commented that when he read it to our nearly blind mother, as she dimly viewed the book, she could tell him the circumstances behind each photo in stunning detail.

My mother could remember each photo because she’d been compiling her own private photo album of our entire childhood in her heart and mind. She treasured being our mother, as our father treasured being our father. In all our messiness as a family, we had loved each other, and been happy together.

As the days stretched into weeks of recovery, I read that book and looked at those memories over and over again. One day, it hit me quite forcibly: what the woke world was calling my ‘white privilege’ was an intentional lie to destroy the biggest privilege I had grown up with - the privilege of having parents who loved me.

There are families of all colors, all over the world, with far less than even a modest school teacher in Murray, Utah in the 1960’s. Families who are happy because there is a mother and father who made the children there.

While society continues to try to engineer a better system of raising humans, no better system exists than to have two committed humans - one with an X chromosome, and one with a Y chromosome -  making their own humans and choosing to make sacrifices to keep them alive, safe, happy, and teach them to be virtuous.

Not everyone has this greatest of all human privileges, and there’s the rub for the woke crowd. How do you redistribute such a thing?  Well, you can’t.

So, like petty little crabs in a shallow bucket, preventing each other’s easy escape, society wants to make sure that if everyone can’t have the privilege of a natural family, no one can.

As I read my brother’s tender words about the childhood I had largely overlooked in all my burnt wafflehood, I realized all I had missed, writing that narrow narrative from the limited lens of my childhood. It was the greatest privilege to be raised by a mother and father who loved not just me and my brothers, but each other.

It was a privilege to have a mother and father who went about trying again every single day, even after the messiest days. Like lab experiments that went bad and where things blew up, there were horrific days of bad practice. But the next day, there they still were, devotedly saying something very important in simply being there: “I’m not going anywhere.”

I’m fully aware that there are far too many humans who didn’t get this privilege. But the family is vital to society’s survival and its ability to thrive.  It is no reason to throw this crucial baby out with the bath water of the failed attempts.

God doesn’t send any perfect humans except the One He sent to clean up all the messes, fix all the broken things, heal all the sickened hearts and minds. So it would seem that maybe we’re all burnt waffles, and that’s kind of the point. Whoever seeks a Physician when there’s no need to be healed?

One greater privilege still: my parents taught me “to what source [I] may look for a remission of [my] sins.” (2 Nephi 25:26). They had enough faith that when I noticed my burnt nature, I would know where to look for relief and healing.

I praise God that thanks to their example, I did. Because if your story needs editing from the right angles, you can’t do better than coaching from the Author and Finisher of your faith.