Dayna Patterson on “If Mother Braids a Waterfall”

Dayna Patterson introduces her new poetry collection, If Mother Braids a Waterfall, published by Signature Books.

I wrote If Mother Braids A Waterfall over the span of ten years, after my mother revealed to me that she was in a relationship with a woman. The person I thought was my mother’s best friend was much more, and my mom had been hiding that fact from me for a decade, terrified of how I would react. While I was serving a mission in Quebec, she had met and fallen in love with her Kim. While I was writing letters about how hard it was to teach a lesbian couple, she was biting her tongue, biding her time. I came home, finished school, got married, and moved two states away. It was on a visit to Utah one summer, shortly after Prop 8 passed in California, that she finally told me. 

After my mother’s confession, I felt like someone had taken kitchen shears and halved my heart. I loved being Mormon and I loved my mother. I remember telling the news to my husband, asking aloud the question: Can I be both Mormon and embrace my mother’s love? Can I remain faithful and disagree with the brethren on this one point?

For several years, I tried. I deeply admire those who remain in the church, like Carol Lynn Pearson, who try to effect positive change from within. I thought I could be one of those people. Every Sunday after church, my husband and I would discuss our reasons for staying. We had a mental set of scales on which we’d weigh the pluses, the things rooting us to Mormonism, and the minuses, the reasons pulling us away. After years of this balancing game, we came to feel that leaving was the right choice for us. 

Let me shout this from the rooftops: I wouldn’t presume to say it is the right choice for everyone. I believe in the sanctity of every individual’s spiritual journey, and I don’t have any desire to convince anyone to leave or stay. Mormonism was a nourishing home for me for 33 years of my life, and leaving was a tumultuous, harrowing experience. Writing became a lifeline for me during a time of radically reorienting my ways of being in the world, and many of the poems and essays in If Mother Braids a Waterfall are the result of that questioning and searching. 

What I do want readers to walk away with is this: For anyone who’s ever felt (self-)exiled from a beloved community, I would like you to feel like you’re not alone. When I was in the process of leaving Mormon orthodoxy behind, I found it immensely cathartic to read and listen to other people’s stories and faith journeys. It gave me hope that there was life beyond the life I had always known. I want to pay that honesty forward, to impart hope.

I don’t know where my spiritual journey will take me, but I do know that I’m less afraid to ask the questions I’d shelved in my earlier years. Questions about polygamy, about women and authority, about homosexuality and gender diversity, about pioneer heritage vs. settler colonialism, about the feminine divine. I’m less afraid to grope in the dark and be mystified, disappointed, enlightened, held. 

For a variety of reasons, I find myself increasingly drawn to the idea of God the Mother, and she makes an appearance in several poems in this collection, including the title poem. I’ll leave you with a poembroidery I made out of this piece that I’d like to share with you:

Dayna Patterson is the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Her creative work has appeared recently in Gulf Coast, Ruminate, Sugar House Review, Thrush, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre and a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. She was a co-winner of the 2019 #DignityNotDetention Poetry Prize judged by Ilya Kaminsky, and she has been a Sustainable Arts Fellow at Mineral School Artists Residency. You can order her books at daynapatterson.com.