My response to Moira:
I appreciate your feedback, Moira, and your attempts to always be positive and loving. That’s what makes the world go around. I’m so happy Grandma visited you and helped lift your spirits during a very bad time.

I remember her being concerned about your being over there alone; and her begging someone to take her over to visit you. I do not remember who she got to do the driving as she could not drive.

And now I’m getting off onto a bunny trail: I know she visited you out of care and concern for you and your situation. But she was also often there for visitors and people she was trying to help convert to the cult. Converts meant more people saved, more tithing money — and consecrations of all their wealth to the Bishop’s storehouse!

Such money was largely how Grandma and her sons managed to survive down in the Mexico-LeBaron colony. Especially was more money needed as each of her sons married more and more wives who bore more and more children. 

Given her help with the church’s conversion of new members, it seems aging Grandma Maud had no energy and time left over for her own hundreds of grand, great-grand, great-great, and great-great-great-grandchildren, and so on and on … not to mention her thousands of other relatives ad infinitum.

During the two years I lived at home, before I was married off at age 16, I recall only a few times after we moved to the LeBaron colony that she ever came by her daughter/my mother Esther LeBaron Spencer’s place to visit; even though we lived within walking distance of Grandmother Maud.

 Nor did my Grandmother Maud ever visit me, once I was married, even in my hours of need and desperation; although I lived within walking distance of her.

I may as well have not had a grandmother. But she did help Mother a lot after my father died. By then I was 18 and married — no longer living with my mom. 

When I was fourteen and we moved from the United States to where Grandmother Maud lived in Mexico, I had thought: Now I will finally have one of those grandmothers I have so often read about in children’s literature and so longed to have as I was growing up. 

But Grandmother Maud, though she had favored and spoiled my mama when she was raising her, was never emotionally there for me nor the rest of my mother’s thirteen other children, as far as I know. Not much, anyway.

For me, she never was a grandma that made cookies for her grandkids, let alone did she give us grandchildren any other gifts. Nor even hugs. She always had a big twinkling smile for me and her other grandchildren, though; whenever we saw her at church or elsewhere.

 Our Family was not a hugging-touching family. But pioneer-woman Grandmother was also simply overwhelmed and overworked, given her primitive lifestyle and her monumental duties; including being the church pianist and the colony’s piano teacher.

To put it succinctly, there was simply no way my ever-aging grandmother could muster all the time and energy needed to keep up with her exponentially growing progeny. She was already 68 years old when my family moved to the LeBaron colony; I was 14 years old then.

I had always lived within walking distance of her, while in the LeBaron colony; so she did come by three or four times, after I was married, to give me some piano lessons. She was around seventy-three years old then! Thanks, Grandma! 

But, other than that, in the four years I lived near her, and on my own, after I was married at sixteen, Grandmother dropped by one other time — though not to see her new grandchild, my first child, that I had almost died giving birth to, at age seventeen. My baby and I were simply taken for granted, as was generally the custom there!

 The reason she came by that one other time was to take back a piece of piano sheet music she had given me that she now wanted to turn around and take away from me to give to an investigator of our cult who was a pianist! I told Grandma, “No! You gave the music to me!! It’s mine now! I want it. You can’t take it back to give to somebody else!”

Grandmom was furious with me for not giving it back to her so she could gift it to the investigator of our “Church”! Getting converts — new people into God’s work — was part of her and her sons’ bread and butter. So that investigator was more important than I, her granddaughter. On top of that, she treated me as if the music still belonged to her, though she had given it to me the year before. Such “Indian trading”! 

Now I know where Mother learned this taking-back what she had given me, as if she still had tabs on it; so could turn around, whenever she wanted to, and give it to somebody else — even though I still very much wanted it and it belonged to me!

I never knew what to depend on. Then you wonder what causes schizophrenic kids? I’m at least sure this behavior did not help any. 

Bottom line: When there are lots of kids and relatives, they are not highly valued. They get taken for granted. They are pawns in the hands of the powers that be and regularly sacrificed for “the cause”!