On Sunday morning, as I got ready for church, the seriousness of what I’d done during the week hit me. I didn’t feel like going to church, but I knew if I didn’t, my mom and dad would want to know why. If I said I was sick, Lara wouldn’t just let it go. She’d do everything she could to make sure I got better.
I decided to go to church because if I didn’t it would raise too many red flags for my parents.
I thought I could just fake it, but once the meeting began, I knew I couldn’t in good conscience partake of the sacrament, but if I didn’t, my mom and dad would notice and they’d want to know why.
During the opening song, I turned to my dad. “I left something in the car I need to get.”
I wandered into the cultural hall and looked around. The hall was dark, providing a dreary setting that perfectly matched my mood. I sat on the stage and waited for the sacrament to be blessed and passed.
I could hear the meeting through the sound system, and during the prayer on the bread, I sat with my shoulders slumped and my head down. Waves of guilt washed over me. I’d heard all the warnings about how destructive Internet pornography could be, and the images I’d viewed popped into my mind. It was driving me crazy. I’ve got to stop this, I thought. If I don’t, it will destroy me.
When the sacrament was over, I went into the chapel and sat in the overflow area for the talks. After sacrament meeting, on my way to class, I ran into the bishop. He said hello and stopped to talk. I thought about asking to set up an appointment with him, but I decided I needed to get the problem under control before I met with him. He’d been my bishop since I was a priest. He’d always spoken highly of me. I didn’t want to disappoint him.
Monday was Memorial Day. I began the day with optimism that I could overcome this problem. I worked with my folks in the yard during the day. At four we went over to my grandparents’ on my dad’s side for a barbecue. There was enough family around to take my mind off my problems.
That night at two-thirty in the morning, I woke up to go to the bathroom. When I returned, I turned on my computer and once again, messed up.
On Tuesday after work, when my folks and I pulled into our driveway, Sierra and Kierra were shooting baskets in their driveway. “Adam, get over here right now!” Kierra said, sounding like a drill sergeant.
When I was a few feet from them, she passed me the ball. “Go ahead and shoot! I dare you. You’ll never make it!”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I just know.”
I shot and missed.
“No big surprise there,” Kierra said, smiling at me. “Watch this.” She shot from the same spot and missed.
“No big surprise there,” I said with a slight smile.
“You want to play H.O.R.S.E.?” Kierra asked.
Sierra, the one closer to my age, wasn’t saying much of anything, but when I passed the ball to her, she smiled at me.
“I’ll take you both on,” I said in my most menacing tone.
We had a great time. We pretended to care about the game, we traded insults, we laughed, we tried dumb trick shots, which we never made.
It was fun and I felt happy and glad for their friendship.
And then something happened. Sierra bent over to pick up the ball. Her shirt didn’t cover everything and I saw skin. Nothing bad really. It wasn’t what she did. It was what it made me think of.
Like a dam breaking, a flood of unworthy thoughts poured into my mind, and I was suddenly looking at these two innocent girls in a way that I had learned from watching pornography. They were no longer two cute girls who were fun to be with. I was looking at them as sexual objects, not girls with freckles, not girls who made me laugh, not nice, neighbor girls who were making an effort to be friends with me.
I must have thought I could keep the things I had seen on porn sites separate from the rest of my life. I didn’t know it would not only alter how I looked at normal girls and women but how I felt about myself.
I felt dirty. I felt evil. I felt warped. I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to puke up the images I had stored in my mind by watching pornography.
I felt like I was carrying a disease within me, and the only way I could protect Sierra and Kierra was to leave. “I’ve got to go now,” I muttered.
“But we haven’t beat you yet!” Kierra called out.
I ran home, changed into my workout clothes, and rode away on my bike.
Half an hour later as I was biking up a trail, I kept asking myself What have I done?
I didn’t want to sink deeper into the hole I was digging for myself. I wanted to stop watching pornography, but the truth was I wasn’t sure I could. Not with a computer in my room, and not in a job where I worked on a computer every day.
At the top of the mountain, I cried, I prayed, I made resolutions, but at ten that night, while making my way slowly down the trail, I had doubts I would ever be able to stop.
It was a cloudy night—no stars, no moon—and my flashlight batteries were nearly dead. Halfway down the trail, the flashlight went out, and I was all alone in the dark. I could barely make out the trail ahead of me.
I stopped and knelt down and tried to pray, but it didn’t work. I didn’t feel worthy to pray. I thought I’d lost any chance that God would ever hear my prayers.
I quit praying and stood up. The darkness around me seemed to be enveloping me. Not only darkness but evil. Sick images from porn sites I’d visited flashed through my mind and wouldn’t go away.
“No!” I shouted to the darkness.
I jumped on my bike and rode as fast as I could, recklessly defying the darkness, racing down the mountain in a headlong desperate flight from myself and from the depression that had closed in all around me.
More than anything, I wanted to escape the darkness around me, and the darkness within me. I wanted to be bathed in light.
My front wheel hit a rock, and I went over the handlebars, hitting my head on a rock and knocking myself out.
I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but when I came to, I sat up. My head was throbbing. I felt my forehead; it was bleeding.
I panicked, worrying I’d bleed to death. For the first time in my life, I was terrified of dying because I was not prepared to die.
I pleaded with God to spare my life, to give me one more chance, to help me turn my life around. I promised him if He would, I would never disappoint him again.
I’m not sure what I expected when I ended my prayer. What I hoped for was a way to get down the trail, but nothing had changed. If anything, the clouds were thicker, the visibility worse. Then it began to rain. I gave up any hope of making it down the trail.
I moved underneath a large pine tree and waited. Eventually my cut quit bleeding, and I went to sleep.
I woke up several times during the night. Each time I did, I thanked God that I was still alive and asked him to help me survive the night.
At four-thirty in the morning it stopped raining and started to get light enough to see my way down the trail.
My front wheel was bent, so I had to walk home, carrying my bike.
When I entered our house, I was relieved that my parents were still in bed. I guessed they’d fallen asleep before the time I usually came home. Otherwise, they would have been worried about me and been up trying to find out where I was.
I washed the wound on my forehead and the blood off my face. It looked like I might need stitches, but I was too tired to worry about that then. Instead, I went to bed and soon fell asleep.
A little before eight, my dad came into my room to wake me up. When I sat up, he saw my head.
“Adam? What happened?”
“I fell off my bike last night. I’m okay though.”
“You’ve got to have a doctor examine you.”
“I know. I’ll go this morning.”
“I’ll take you.”
“No, that’s okay. You’ve got a plane to catch, don’t you? I can get to the doctor.”
“I??
?ll take a later flight. Get dressed. I’m taking you.”
My dad took me to our family doctor. The doctor examined me and cleaned the wound. He said it probably should have been stitched up, but that it was too late now. He cleaned it thoroughly and put a bandage on it.
When my dad and I left the doctor’s office and got into the car, he turned to me and said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sure. The doctor said—”
“I’m not talking about what the doctor said. Is something bothering you?”
“What about your travel plans?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It can wait.”
I felt guilty for keeping my dad from his work. “Okay, look, you don’t need to take the day off. I can tell you what the problem is now.”
“Tell me then.”
I turned away. I couldn’t face him and say what I had to say. “It’s pornography. I’ve been going online late at night.”
“How long has this been a problem?”
I sighed. “It’s been about a week. I’ve done it four times.”
“What about before your mission?”
“Nothing before my mission. The first time I ever did anything like this was last Thursday. But it’s taking over my life. After each time I promise myself I’m never going to do it again. But I keep messing up. Dad, I’ve got to stop this. No matter how much I say I’m not going to do it again, it still happens. I feel like I’m losing all my self-control.”
He nodded. “Have you talked to the bishop?”
“I was hoping I could overcome the problem before I talked to him.”
“You’ll make faster progress with him than you will by yourself.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure I can tell him. It’s too embarrassing.”
“He’ll help you if you’ll work with him.”
I sighed. “I never thought I’d have a problem like this.”
“Nobody ever does.”
I hadn’t looked my dad in the eye since I’d admitted my problem, but now I did. We made eye contact. I could see his concern. It was reassuring to know he still loved me.
“All right, I’ll meet with the bishop.”
“Good. The battle’s half won then.”
“I hope that’s true.”
I thought we were done and my dad would take me home and then make arrangements for a later flight, and that within an hour he’d be gone for a couple of days. But the truth is, I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him around. This was a problem that a dad and his son could work out. I wasn’t sure I could talk to Lara about it. Or that, even if I did talk to her, she’d understand the temptation.
“Anything else that’s troubling you?” my dad asked.
I answered too quickly. “No, nothing, everything’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nothing that I’d need to talk to my bishop about.”
“Something else, then?”
“Nothing really important. We can talk about it after you get back from your trip.”
My dad shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere today. This day is for you.”
“So we’ll work at the office with Mom, then, right?”
“No, let’s take the day off.”
“You never take the day off.”
“Then I guess it’s about time I did. How are you doing now? You want to just take it easy and rest, or do you want to do something?”
“I feel okay. I probably won’t do any mountain biking for a while, but other than that, I feel okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“How would you like to go fishing?”
“We haven’t done that for a long time. Sure, that’d be great.”
Three hours later we were anchored in a boat at Strawberry Reservoir watching our lines, waiting for a fish to take our bait.
“These are the same fishing poles your . . . Charly and I used when we went fishing, before we were even married.” He examined his reel. “You can tell this is old because it was made in the United States.”
Twenty minutes later we hadn’t even had a bite. “Having a good time?” he asked.
I did my best to be positive. “Oh, yeah, sure. Who wouldn’t be having a good time. I mean, it’s so quiet here.”
He laughed. “You’re a lot like your mom. She didn’t like fishing either.”
“Dad, can you tell me more about . . . my real mom?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Her parents let me look through some of their scrapbooks of when she was growing up. They told me lots of stories about her. I feel like I really need to know what she was like.”
“Why?”
“Okay, look, I know it sounds like I don’t love Lara, I mean, Mom, but that’s not it. It’s just that I’m not sure who I am. At work it’s not as much fun designing Web sites as it was before my mission, and now I’m questioning if I even want to major in information systems. I mean, I keep thinking, what if I’m more like my real mom? I think the first thing I need to find out more about is what she was like and then, after I know that, maybe I’ll be able to decide once and for all who I am and what I want to do with my life.”
I didn’t know how he’d react—if he’d be mad at me, or if he’d accuse me of not being grateful to Lara for all she’d done for me, or if he’d be upset that I didn’t want to take over the family business.
“I’m going to put a new worm on my hook,” he said, reeling in his line.
That made me feel as though what I had said was so bad that the only response he could muster was to pretend he hadn’t heard me.
“You want to put a worm on your hook?” he asked me, handing me the can filled with soil and worms we’d bought from some kids in Heber City.
I shrugged my shoulders. “I can’t see it’d do much good.”
“Sometimes it does.” He sounded optimistic.
While he cast again, I gave up and reeled in my line. A minute later, after putting a new worm on my hook, I cast out and let the hook sink to the bottom.
He studied his line, looking for any sign of a bite. I was surprised when he began to talk.
“When your mom realized she wasn’t going to live much longer, the thing that was the worst for her was to realize you wouldn’t remember her as you got older. You called me da-da, but you hadn’t said her name. I remember one day . . .”
He paused. “It was near the end. I was in the kitchen peeling some potatoes, and I heard her. She was in the living room, and she was saying, ‘Mommy, Adam, Mommy. Please say it. Please say my name.’ But you crawled off and she broke down and she said, ‘Adam, please say my name! I’m your mommy. Please remember me.’”
I wiped my eyes. I was glad we weren’t facing each other.
He continued. “She loved you very much, Adam. And I’m sure she still does.”
“Lately I’ve started to think of her as my real mom.”
“You’re lucky. You have two moms. And they both love you.”
“I know. I love Lara too.”
His eyebrows raised. “You’re calling her Lara now?”
“Sometimes.”
“She’s your mom, Adam. She deserves a little respect.”
“I know, and I do. I appreciate all she’s done for me.”
“I had a hard time after your mom died. I couldn’t give you the love you needed. If it hadn’t been for Lara, I don’t know what would have happened to you and me. She’s always been there for us.”
“I know that . . . but I still need to know about my real mom. Dad, I’m not happy here. I want to go to New Jersey and stay with her parents and get my life on track again. They’ve invited me. I could work for Grandpa Eddie.”
“What would you do?”
“He owns some apartments. He’s asked me to help him with maintenance.”
Dad reeled in his line and pulled up the anchor. I reeled in my line.
I couldn’t tell what he was thinking,
if he was mad at me, or if he thought I was being ungrateful for the love Lara had always lavished on me. Just before reaching the dock, he turned to me and said, “If you want to go for the summer, then go ahead. We can get someone who can take your place at work.”
“Thanks for being so understanding.”
He nodded. “We’ll miss you.”
“I know. Me too.”
“Are you going to be able to stay away from pornography?”
“I think so. There’s a lot I don’t know about myself, but one thing I am sure of.”
“What?”
“What I’ve been doing the past week is not who I am.”
That night I called my grandfather in New Jersey and told him I would like to work with him until fall semester began.
“You mean it?” He moved the phone away from his mouth, and I heard him shout, “He says he’d like to come out here and work for me!”
I could hear Claire in the background. “Get out of here! Are you serious?”
“Talk to the boy if you don’t believe me.”
We talked for half an hour.
Dad and I told Lara what my new plans were. She seemed to take it personally. I felt bad about that.
Before going to bed, I packed up my computer and put it in the garage. Then I slept better than I had for several nights.
The next day I met with my home ward bishop. After we talked for a few minutes about my plans, he quit talking. I knew that was my cue.
My hands were sweating, and my stomach muscles were cramping. “I’ve had a few problems lately that I thought I’d better clear up before I leave town.”
“What kind of problems?”
I lowered my head, trying to get enough courage to talk. “I never thought I’d have a problem like this.”
I glanced at him, and he nodded his head but didn’t say anything.
“Last week I stumbled on a porn site.” I paused. “I knew it was wrong, and I tried to stay away, but I did go back—four times.”
“How long has it been since you last watched pornography?”
I cleared my throat. “Monday night.”
“I see. You obviously feel bad about this, Adam. What troubles you about what you’ve been doing?”
My face turned red. “It gives you bad thoughts, and, you know, it tempts you to do things you shouldn’t do.”