Mold in the Walls

We did everything by the book—on paper.

We met in college. He was a returned missionary; I was faithful and chaste.

We dated for a year before marrying, finished college, and waited until we had a stable job and a home before having our first child three years later. I stayed home to care for the house and our children. We attended church every week, paid our tithing, held temple recommends, and served in callings. We saved for retirement, stayed out of debt, bought life insurance, upgraded to a bigger house, and had a few more kids. We visited family often, sent out cute Christmas cards, paid our taxes. We went to couple’s therapy, prayed together, and read scriptures with our children every night.

Everything was perfect—on paper.

But beneath the surface, we were built on generations of unhealed trauma and dysfunction. To outsiders, we looked solid, but in reality, we were like a tiled shower with missing grout—water silently seeping into the walls, feeding a hidden mold that grew more dangerous by the day.

I was the only one showing signs of sickness.

With no visible cause, the blame fell on me. I was "too sensitive," they said. "Bipolar," they said. I needed more medications, a better diet, more exercise. When that didn’t work, they changed the diagnosis—DID, schizoaffective disorder, thyroid goiter. So I believed them. I spent years playing whack-a-mole with treatments, trying everything to fix myself. I didn’t know about the mold. The grout lines looked dirty, but old showers always do. It didn’t seem like a big deal. From the outside, everything still looked “normal.”

I went to more therapy, took more medications, changed my diet, exercised more. But I only got sicker. Until, one day, the hidden mold had taken its toll—the shower wall collapsed, revealing the rot. The decay spread through all the walls, up into the attic, the ceiling, the subfloor. Even the roof had been leaking.

Both in the house I lived in—and in my body and soul.

Like that hidden mold, generational patterns of gaslighting, spiritual, physical, verbal, and emotional abuse had seeped into the very fabric of our family and culture. Unseen, but deeply damaging. And I could see them making my children sick, too.

The more I exposed the truth, the more I was silenced and dismissed. I was labeled delusional, psychotic, deceived by the devil. A liar who believed her own lies. See, the system benefited from my blame and exile—it could continue undisturbed as long as I was cast out. Rather than supporting me in clearing out the toxins and building something healthy for my family, the system declared me the toxic one and removed me.

And that has been one of the most painful—and beautiful—things that could have happened to me.