It's Christmas. Read the room.

I don't know who in the Church Office Building needs to hear this. But there is no amount of messaging you can come up with that will make me ever want to study the Family Proclamation. Not in December or at any other time.

 

My parents were (and are) a burgoo of abuse, neglect, and untreated mental illnesses. They systematically destroyed each other and themselves with every terrible impulse belonging to the human mind. My mother is the only one left, and she has lost her entire grip on reality.

With what she has left of her mental facilities, she causes pain and chaos everywhere she goes. She terrifies my entire family because there is no limit to what she won't do to hurt other people. She has threatened me and my husband already. She has no place in my life now.

The week the Church was focused on the Family Proclamation, I was trying to figure out how to put a carrier block in place so my mother can't leave me voicemail anymore. Why? Because she treats my voicemail like a dumpster for all her worst thoughts and impulses towards me.

My Christmas season isn't about her. It doesn't include her. To the extent that I can, I spend as much of my waking life forgetting she exists as I possibly can.

I dedicate myself and my faith to a life well-lived, in which she has no part because she has no respect for me. 

I don't deserve to listen to others who have families who are healthier than mine talk about how their families are ordained of God. I don't deserve to be reminded that the only way my family is reflected in the Family Proclamation is the promise of divine retribution for the abusive and negligent. Not at Christmas. Not at any other time.

But if we're going to have conversations about the Family Proclamation, polygamy, racism, and denominationalism, as reflected in the Articles of Faith... Maybe don't do it at the darkest time of the year when the rest of the Christian world celebrates Christmas?!

And if planning the annual calendar of lessons so the Articles of Faith, Official Declarations 1 and 2, and the Family Proclamation don't fall in December is too hard, maybe stop basing our liturgical calendar on the order in which things were published in the Doctrine and Covenants.

Also, the Living Christ is literally right there! 

 Just dedicate the entire month of December to studying it every year. 

This isn't hard. 

Why are you making it hard?