It's usually something small that, if you're paying attention, tips you off to something larger.
For me, it was a casual conversation. This man - a good Mormon - started talking with me and mentioned that if he gets up early to exercise every day then no one in his family complains to him he's been "playing" all week when he wants to take a bike ride on Saturday. It hit me how many conversations I've had with Mormon friends and relations in which they express some variation on this experience. Somehow taking care of themselves or thinking of themselves is outside the bounds of behavior for a family member. It's as if doing something without the family is misbehaving; the choice of language this man used "playing" when in fact he's exercising, communicates a sense that what he's doing is unserious. Sports and other activities are acceptable if you're with the family or the kids or the church.
In the cult of family togetherness, having a private life and identity separate from your family role and identity is suspect. Yet, the same set of values and assumptions enable an individual to choose to engage in a secret life entirely away from the family and not be suspected. The family values stance of Mormonism, whatever else you can say for it, encourages a great many positive values - including open communication between spouses, parents and children. Yet, much of that openness goes one way - within Mormonism's partriarchal family, the father can withhold information from the wife and children without being questioned while children and spouse are expected to be completely open with the father/husband. As the family authority, the father is expected to protect his family from distressing knowledge, including of course, information about his unhappiness or extra-marital affairs.
A great many Mormon men successfully engage in double lives - at night they go home to their wife and children and carry on the charade of being happy. At lunch, after work, or on the weekends, these men can be found having it off in the bushes at Ox Bow park in the bathrooms at Liberty Park. In some cases, they'll even drive from rural Utah to Salt Lake for Conference weekend - a weekend during which the city's gay bars are packed to the gills with gay Mormons who will gladly give it up and ask no questions and make no demands. What happens at "conference" stays at "conference." They can lead these double lives not because they are terribly sly or cunning but because they live within a religious culture in which they are unlikely to be questioned.
A large number of young, Mormon men return from their tightly controlled missions, almost immediately get engaged, then married and almost immediately fall into the role of husband, father, breadwinner. The image of a container isn't inappropriate. They are contained - in carefully structured lives which seem designed to keep them under control, to channel their energies and attention. The roles they inhabit structure their lives and identities. I would guess at any given time, the majority of these men are satisfied, even happy, in their roles and lives. But they can and do chafe. For some individuals, it's too much and they are not provided with an avenue by which to express or even manage their unhappiness and dissatisfaction. The meltdowns, when they come, are epic. Suddenly, an apparently happy family has disintegrated.
For wives and children, these disintegrations can be horrific. Women who had believed themselves in a happy marriage suddenly discover their husband is gay or has some other secret. These women punish themselves, declaring again and again that they should have known something was wrong but they somehow didn't see it. Their identity as wife and mother, their role in the community, is revealed to have been a lie, a deception. Not surprisingly, many of these women respond with incredible bitterness.
The men from these marriage, though, are liberated. No longer careening towards disaster or leading a life of lies or feeling trapped, they are celebratory, enjoying the festivities. Life feels stuffed full of endless possibilities, a sweet nectar ready to be drunk deep. I've watched as more than a few of these men leap headless of consequences into a long delayed adolescence - in their 40s or 50s they're chasing women or men with a teenager's zeal, they're trying new things with abandon. The family they've left has self-destructed in the spectacular ways.
I think it's in John J McNeill's book Freedom, Glorious Freedom in which he observes that a healthy family self-destructs - at some point children leave and parents now have to become something new, evolve their relationship; that's how it should be. These men's families have self-destructed but in harmful and damaging ways, not the gradual gorwing up of children, but the suddenly reclaiming of childhood by someone who has felt his entire life was a life of denial. The theological position "families are forever" says just the opposite must happen - a family must never self-destruct but rather be eternally bound together.
Paul James Toscano has an essay which begins with a complaint from a young man "I hate unconditional love!" Why? Well, because it's not actually unconditional. "We love you unconditionally, we're just deeply disappointed in your behavior." The pressure to resolve things is oddly absent - we'll be together forever and those secrets and problems will be resolved by. Secrets and lie will be revealed but forgiven. Suffering will be redeemed. A lifetime of sacrificing from the family good will be rewarded. Eternity together - joyous and wonderful.
The unspoken pains and sufferings, the wistful yearning to be happy and satisfied, the sense that I have to take care of myself away from my family, the never trusting that one can be truly known by one's family, the notion that the family is forever bound together, you will eternally be the child, the parent, trapped in an unchanging role - these are the shadow of the family, unless confronted this darkness will rise up and overwhelm the family. The closeted gay Mormon father on the down low is giving into, not confronting, the shadow, he is controlled by it. His wife, brittle and clinging to her role is controlled by the family shadow. His children, troubled but unaware of why, are in the grip of the shadow. The fear that the family is imperfect, that it will self-destruct in an ugly and painful way, that the individual will fall short of the ideal, is the shadow of Mormonism's emphasis on family. Unacknowledged, this fear drives willful ignorance, it drives secret keeping. It creates suspicion that that alone time that dad is taking for himself is something nefarious and dangerous.
In a minor way, it leads the man I was speaking with to get up early without sufficient sleep so he can go to the gym without feeling guilty and without his family finding his behavior suspect. The family's light casts a long shadow.