Thoreau wrote in the beginning of Walden, “I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.” I can roughly paraphrase Thoreau and say, “I have lived some thirty years among the Mormons and have yet to record the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice about how I have managed to do it.”
3 September 1984
Today my youngest child went to school all day for the first time. Every mother approaches this milestone with both anticipation and dread. I reached this point once before, six years ago, before the adoption of our third baby swept me suddenly back to square one. If it was a setback, it was the happiest one imaginable. Now, however, poised between treatment for a serious illness and hope for a plunge into a new phase of life, I would like to use the gift of uninterrupted time, a scarce commodity for fourteen years, for some written reflections.
Mormon history has always been a hot topic. From the earliest days of Church history over a century and a half ago, vastly divergent accounts of the origins and development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been penned and published. In many cases, controversies about LDS historical topics have spilled over into the national press. In the last generation, for example, disputes about the accuracy of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History and Juanita Brooks’s Mountain Meadows Massacre have been avidly covered in national newspapers and magazines.
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