The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom

Ruby Griffiths was born in Logan, Utah, in 1982. Her family were devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They lived in a tight-knit LDS community, and much of Ruby’s childhood was dedicated to faith and helping to raise her four younger siblings, responsibilities she navigated “with a sense of righteous purpose” (4). Motherhood was “the pinnacle of her aspirations” (4), and she longed for the day she would have a family of her own.

LDS theology considers motherhood “a spiritual calling of the highest order,” and Ruby saw bearing and raising children as “opportunities to demonstrate her unwavering faith in God’s plan and secure her place in the celestial afterlife” (4). When Ruby turned 18, she enrolled in college, but she was more interested in finding a husband than getting an education. She quickly met Kevin Franke, a handsome senior at Utah State University who was also a devoted member of LDS. Kevin was kind and “laid-back,” and Ruby imagined he would be “relaxed enough to let her take the reins without too much resistance” (5). Driven by Ruby’s commanding nature and sense of urgency, their relationship moved very quickly. After just two weeks, their family had given their blessings, and Ruby and Kevin were engaged.

The new couple got to know one another better as they planned their wedding and discovered they both played the piano. Kevin joyfully and easily played jazz and popular songs, while Ruby obsessed over perfecting complex classical pieces. When she couldn’t play perfectly, “it left a dent in her ego” (7), and she turned instead to motherhood as the thing that would “define her greatness.” She wanted “a clan” of children, and Kevin happily supported “Ruby’s grand vision,” starting the dynamic that would continue throughout their relationship as Kevin played the part of “the perpetual supporting actor” (8).

The couple were married on December 28th, 2000, just three months after they met.

Shari, the Frankes’ first child, was born on March 3rd, 2003. The pregnancy and delivery were difficult, but Ruby was pleased. Shari describes her childhood as “a fight for survival” (10) from the beginning. When she was just three months old, she had emergency surgery for a life-threatening intestinal blockage, and she was often a fussy baby. Ruby grew up in a house where children’s tears and tantrums weren’t tolerated. Children had to grow up to be strong, and “coddling” didn’t serve this purpose. Ruby didn’t comfort Shari when she cried, but “ironically,” Ruby cried often, and Shari wonders if her mother wanted an army of children “to absorb the tsunami of her raging emotions” (10).

Shari also wonders how this early lack of affection and comfort shaped her. She has a “tendency to bottle up emotions” and “present a stoic face to the world” (10) that could stem from her mother’s indifference and denial of her infant daughter’s needs. There is no way to know the true impact, but Shari sometimes feels saddened when she thinks of the love she was denied as a child.

By 2007, the Franke family had expanded to include Shari’s brother, Chad, a new puppy, and a baby sister. Throughout the text, Chad is the only one of Shari’s siblings that she names, citing a desire to protect what little of their privacy remains.

In the early 2000s, mommy blogging was “a wild frontier,” and Ruby and her sisters and friends began dabbling in the medium. Ruby’s first forays into sharing her family’s life online consisted of a recipe blog titled Good Lookin Home Cookin. The appeal of social media stemmed in part from how LDS encouraged members to “meticulously” document their lives to leave a record for future generations. However, Ruby’s “willingness to sacrifice authenticity on the altar of appearances” (13) was apparent early on. Her first blog was less about sharing the recipes she actually prepared for her family and more about creating an idealized family portrait.

Ruby insisted her children learn to play the piano, and Shari began taking lessons at five years old. Her mother would wake her up at 6 AM to practice, “barking” orders when Shari made mistakes or complained. Shari quickly learned to show only “unbridled enthusiasm” in front of her mother, but she began to realize that Ruby wasn’t “very nice to [her]” (14).

Shari began to experience stomach aches related to her anxiety and feared there were demons in her room when she tried to sleep. Ruby dismissed her young daughter’s concerns. Shari learned to adapt “instinctively” to her mother’s volatile moods. She knew she must be “pliable” and “obedient” to “earn Ruby’s conditional affection” (17). However, it was never enough. Shari reflects on this toxic relationship, musing that “[n]o child should ever have to earn a parent’s affection” (17).

In 2009, Ruby had her fourth child, another girl, and Ruby’s mother gave her slip pajamas as a gift. Six-year-old Shari longed for the closeness she saw between her mother and her grandmother, and Ruby told her they would become “friends” when Shari had a baby of her own. Shari suddenly understood that she had “to wait to be loved” (19); she would not earn her mother’s respect until she was a woman herself. She promised herself that she would begin her own family and become her mother’s friend.

After the birth of her fourth child, Ruby got pregnant again as soon as possible, even though their house was already filling up with children and chaos. She suffered a miscarriage at 17 weeks but “never allowed herself time to grieve” (2). Instead, she kept herself and her children focused on the task of maintaining her strict household. Soon, she was pregnant again.

When Shari was eight, the family moved to a new house in Springfield, Utah, a town of 10,000 at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. That same year, she was baptized into the LDS church, an experience that made her feel protected from her mother’s “tantrums and tirades.” Shari’s parents gave her her first set of scriptures to mark the occasion, which sparked an “obsession” with religion. She was particularly captivated by the story of Joseph Smith, the founder of LDS, who was a daring and “swashbuckling character” who felt close to Shari in both time and space. She even imagined that some of her own ancestors, like the Widow of Nauvoo, who fled Illinois in the 1840s, might have known him.

Shari felt a “kinship” with her father and admired his “quiet strength.” After dinner, she would often sit on his lap and ask questions. One night, she asked about tithing, the 10% of their income the family paid to the church. Her father explained that tithing was a way to show “gratitude and obedience,” and Shari said she wanted to pay her own tithing when she got older. Ruby chimed in to add that “a woman’s first duty is to her husband and family” (27), but that paying tithing on top of that is a valuable contribution. Shari was glad “to know that there were so many ways a girl could be a faithful servant of the Lord” (27).

Meanwhile, some of Shari’s aunts had begun uploading videos of their family to YouTube. She wondered what her own family’s videos might look like, but she figured Ruby “wouldn’t want people to see how angry she is all the time” (27).

Ruby was constantly angry, and her rages often teetered on “the edge of cruelty” (28). In one example, Ruby called Shari down to sing a duet with her on the piano. Shari, around nine years old, was in the middle of experimenting with makeup and “dreaded” singing with her mother. At the piano, she couldn’t bring herself to sing, and Ruby taunted her, suggesting that the amount of makeup she had on caused her to forget how to obey her mother and threatened to “smack it all off” (29).

Ruby often lashed out at her children, who lived in fear of her rages. One afternoon, Chad cut a chunk of Shari’s hair off as a joke. Ruby was “obsessed” with her daughter’s beautiful hair and immediately became furious. Shari tried to shift the blame away from Chad, insisting that it wasn’t that bad and would grow back. However, as punishment, Ruby shaved an ugly strip right down the center of Chad’s head. Shari felt a “crushing sense of guilt” (31) as she hugged her little brother and apologized.

By the time Shari was 11, Ruby was pregnant with her sixth and final child. The household would wake up around 6 AM. All the children would practice their instruments before school, have breakfast, and prepare their own lunches as an “exercise in responsibility and self-reliance” (32). The children also made their own way to and from school, taking the bus or walking. Birthdays were the only time that Ruby drove to pick anyone up at school. Seeing her in the pickup line was a special treat and “a glimpse” of the “attentive, interested, present” mother that Shari longed for (33). The Franke children made friends, but they rarely had playdates at their house. Something about their home “seemed to repel social gatherings” (33), and the children instinctually felt better playing with their friends outside.

The Franke’s didn’t watch a lot of television, but they did enjoy gathering for family movie nights, which became their “default mode of dealing with tension or seeking comfort” (34). As Shari moved through adolescence, she developed the nervous habit of picking at her lips until they bled. Her mother repeatedly admonished her, claiming that no man would want to marry her, but Shari couldn’t stop. Her anxiety was “spiraling like never before” (35), and her only outlet was her nightly journaling. Ruby insisted on journaling for all the children in compliance with the LDS duty to document and record, but Shari was the only one committed to her writing. She poured out her conflicted feelings about her mother, their difficult family life, and her experiences navigating school.

Shari was living in an “emotional desert” and took refuge in literature and writing. In particular, she became obsessed with World War II, reading over 100 books on the subject over the course of middle school. Learning about the terrible choices and circumstances people faced in the war helped put her own difficulties into perspective. She found inspiration in learning how people persevered and resisted.