A Travesty and a Triumph of Love: A True Story

By Sandra Stacey Rivero

Raised in a biased family where wrath ruled; finally settling into the arms of her high-school sweetheart in matrimony, only to later be torn apart by a devastating divorce, came his confession of a long-held secretonly years after their blessed reconciliation and conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. A Travesty and a Triumph of Love is an odyssey in faith and learning, as one LDS convert comes to work with the Lord Himself, to find the son she never knew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449774844

Sandra Stacey Rivero

Sandra first realized a talent for writing in elementary school by writing short stories as English composition assignments. But not until joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 1984, by continuously keeping family journals, did she begin to blossom as an author.

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Copyright © 2012 Sandra Stacey Rivero

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-7484-4 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-7483-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-7482-0 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012920966

WestBow Press rev. date: 11/26/2012

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Part I How It All Began

That Fateful Day at Encanto Park

In Knowing My Family

The Sad Fall of My Family

The Love of My Life

We Finally Get Married

How We Sought Happiness

Then Came Change

His Slippery Slope Down

A Fall to Rock Bottom

Life in the Aftermath

Time Teaches

The Miracle of Forgiveness: Ours

Our Marvelous Conversion

Part II The Search

First, the Quest for Divine Requirements

At the Time of the Encanto Park Encounter

He Tells Me at Last

David’s Futile Attempts to Find Her

The Ohio In Our Lives

Our Joint Efforts to Find Her

Moira’s List

The Right House

A Landmark of a Revelation

Another Revelation Soon Followed

Touched by an Angel: A Television Episode

For Our Quest: A Climactic Revelation

The Path of My Letter

The Wait Begins

Part III

Be Still and Know That I Am God

Greater Spiritual Experiences Follow

The Return of the Festival

The Return of My Second Letter

Seized by the Holy Spirit

Part IV Rays of Hope

A Surprise Letter from the Social Security Administration

Time for Faith to Become Pure Knowledge

My Monumental Moment

Part V It Was Time to be Valiant

A Higher Level of Being

March Brings Another Return to the Park

Temptations That Need Teaching Away

Our Experience with Godly Sorrow and Greater Trials

My Monumental Choice

A Monumental Temple Experience

Faith, and the Final Test of Time

My Strident Revelation Now Comes to the Fore

From that Point On, It’s Up to the Lord

Part VI The Morning Breaks

His Blessings in our Lives

All Your Revelations Were True

A Very Special Christmas

We Come Full Circle

References

Former title: Born of the Heart.

To

The Posterity

of

My David

and all

Posterity Everywhere

SSR

Preface

This is a true story. It is not a story of the majestic thundering of an audible voice given unto audience, because life is not a cinematic movie. It is a story of that still small voice of inspiration that is given at sundry times and diverse places when Heavenly Father decides to make Himself manifest.

It is educational in a sense, that when His given inspiration, based on when ardent study of the scriptures are thus applied, we learn just how His works are made manifest when the evidence of such comes to the fore, thereby making testimonies grow as it did mine.

Because this is a true story, the parts and chapters herein are of different sizes and focus simply because the chapters of life itself are just that way..

And to protect privacy, only the names of our immediate and extended family are used, or otherwise omitted. All others have been changed.

Therefore, out of love and under covenant with Heavenly Father to tell my story to all the world, all faiths included, my story stands as concrete evidence of His might, mind and strength to bring righteous things to pass.

Sandra Stacey Rivero

Peoria, Arizona

2012

Acknowledgements

-The United States Social Security Administration, SSA-OCRO, Baltimore, Maryland.

-Martha Williamson and her staff at Moonwater Productions, Los Angeles, California.

-The Kimball Agency, Phoenix Arizona.

Shawna Ortega, Administrative Assistance [phone].

-Our three children: Kitrina Meyer, Stacey Nation, and Nicholas, for all their wonderful support, and the support of family and friends whose names were changed to protect their anonymity.

Most of all, our Father in Heaven, without whose divine guidance my story would not have been Possible.

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Part I

How It All Began

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Chapter One

That Fateful Day at Encanto Park

It was springtime in Phoenix, Arizona. Even though Phoenix has an extremely hot desert climate in which the temperature may soar to 115 degrees in midsummer, it is better known for its balmy winters and beautiful springtimes.

It was on such a day in the early spring that our Ninth Annual Phoenix Folk Traditions Music Festival took place at Encanto Park, the largest and most beautiful park in our city. Saturday, March 21, 1998, was a day that changed the rest of our lives forever, and had an effect on you, Posterity.

On this day, a certain man was to do his one-man guitar performance at noon in the boathouse, where people rent small boats to travel the waterways of the Encanto Park Lagoon. On the day of the festival, the boathouse was being used as an activity center, and this man’s performance was one of several scheduled there.

In the audience sat an attractive, well-dressed, auburn-haired woman. She was there to see the man’s performance. Her name was Donna—Donna James was how he had once known her. But that had been years ago.

After the man’s performance, Donna approached him. He recognized her. You look familiar, the man remarked.

Donna was slightly upset that he didn’t immediately remember who she was. She countered curtly, "I should! Then she continued, Don’t you remember where we met? Saul’s house?"

Shocked, the man remembered. He was suddenly filled with fear that this encounter would cost him his present marriage. He listened as she went on to remind him of the son they had conceived together so many years ago.

Donna misconstrued his look of fear as embarrassment and denial. She grew even more upset. Oh, by the way, she finally snapped, "your son happens to have a lot more talent than you ever did!" Quickly, she turned and walked away.

A few moments later, he suddenly felt compelled to follow her outside. He saw her disappear over the nearby bridge that forded one of the waterways behind the boathouse. Even though she momentarily turned to look back at him, he did not call out to her. He let her walk away.

The man drove around for an hour, wondering how to finally tell his wife about the woman who had been part of his life twenty-eight years before. He had kept this secret from his wife for a long time. He had always planned to reveal it someday, especially after he and his wife joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints fourteen years ago. He spent those years praying from time to time for the Lord’s help in finding the right time to reveal the secret to her. By the time the man returned home that day, he had come to recognize that this whole incident was an answer to that very prayer. Yes, the time had come at last to tell his wife.

My story is about far more than this man’s fear of telling his wife about Donna James and their son. My name is Sandra, and I am the wife of this man.

The man is David Rivero, your ancestor. To help you understand the scope of my story, I must take you back to the very beginning, to the root of the reason I was never told about Donna.

My story describes in detail how Satan can destroy a family by strategically orchestrating his tactics against its weakest areas. Satan uses his best temptations, which are applied at the right times and by the right people.

This, Posterity, is a story of how he almost destroyed mine.

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Chapter Two

In Knowing My Family

To begin, Posterity, I must start at my beginning and tell you all about my family. I was born in 1943, the second child of my parents, Raymond Stacey and Mary Burt-Stacey. My brother, Don, preceded me by six years. I was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, during the postwar years when prosperity in our nation had reached its peak. Phoenix, the capital city of our state, was the fifth largest city in our nation and is still the largest city in the state of Arizona.

Gracing us on the east are three smaller towns. From north to south, they are Paradise Valley, Scottsdale, and Tempe. They separate us from the city of Mesa, where the Arizona Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is located. The close proximity of the church eventually came to be very precious to me later on. Glendale, our neighbor to the west, separates us from the town (now city) of Peoria. Peoria was destined to become a large part of my life when I became a young woman.

My father’s family members made a name for themselves by operating their own construction company, begun by Grandpa Stacey. They started out by building homes before they eventually incorporated and began contracting with the State of Arizona to build schools around the state. Since we were part of such a lucrative industry, we were afforded a middleclass lifestyle. This was something my parents hadn’t had when they were young.

My dad met my mother in high school during the Great Depression. My mother quit high school in the beginning of her second year to marry my dad, who had graduated the previous spring. His very first job was as a surveyor under the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Camp Program created by President Roosevelt. This project was located near Payson, Arizona. There, my parents spent their honeymoon in a quaint little roadside cottage.

My mother joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints prior to my birth. This was largely due to the influence of Dad’s mother, Grandma Stacey, who came from Mormon pioneer stock. She was not always active in the church; as a result, she married my non-Mormon grandfather. In spite of Grandma’s periods of inactivity, though, she did manage to get Dad and his oldest brother, Uncle Art, baptized when they were young boys.

When I was born, I was blessed to have an additional family member who often lived with us: my mother’s father, Granddad. He came to live with us when his beloved wife, Nanny Burt, became gravely ill. When she died, Granddad stayed with us off and on until I was ten.

Granddad showered me with love and affection in a compensatory way after my mother became inactive in the church. Her inactivity had made her hardened of heart. Granddad’s interaction proved to be the most profound thing in my life at the time. For one thing, Granddad told me stories that I loved to hear, not ordinary children’s stories, but stories of his own childhood.

Even though he was old enough to be my great-grandfather, his memories of personal experiences, of places where he grew up, and of family members were as sharp as a tack. By listening to his stories, I learned that the Burts were a mixed-blood family of white European and Native American Choctaw ancestry from Tallassee, Alabama. The Burt family had been rather impoverished. Granddad and his brothers and sisters were often pulled from school by their father in order to work at the local cotton mill whenever the superintendent there needed a group of children for work.

Granddad’s memory of people and places proved to be significant in my later years when I took it upon myself to research my family history, particularly the Burt family, some four years after I joined the church. I must humbly attribute my own memory of these names and places to God, because after forty years I was still able to recall the names and find them on the census rolls in the Alabama state records.

There are times when I wish that I didn’t have this gift, Posterity, because there are a myriad of painful experiences that on occasion pang me still. But if I did forget them, I would not be able to retain the bitter remembrance of those life lessons that taught me to grow. Also, if I forgot them, I would have no story to tell.

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Chapter Three

The Sad Fall of My Family

Even though my parents were members of the church at the time of my birth, they turned out to be members in name only. In life they lived the ways of the world. This was how we were.

Dad’s number-one favorite thing in life was to go out each night to drink beer at the neighborhood bar with all his drinkin’ buddies. His second favorite thing was hunting and fishing trips. His job and his family ranked third and fourth, in that order. In a nutshell, Posterity, he was a man that did not particularly care to be tied down.

My mother dropped out of church activities shortly after my birth. It was a miracle and a blessing that I received my infant blessing before this happened. Having quite an androgynous personality, my mother quit her life as a homemaker about the same time the Stacey Construction Company became incorporated in order to pursue a career of her own in interior design and furniture sales. Since this move happened when I was only ten years of age, it had a profound effect on my life from that time forward.

Don, my only sibling, was free-spirited, like my parents. However, he was raised in a completely different way than I was. My parents, unlike many others, had chosen to bring us up with much bias. Don was allowed a lot of freedom of expression and had very limited restrictions placed upon him.

Even though I was just as free-spirited as they, for reasons unknown, my parents placed all kinds of restrictions upon me. I was not allowed to verbally express myself, and was certainly not permitted to express uncertainty or opposing thoughts, like he was. In this family where freedom of expression prevailed, I was still supposed to be a quiet, demure doll on a shelf, devoid of all self-expression, seen and not heard—particularly during my puberty. My refusal to comply meant that an attempt to start a normal conversation with them often resulted in either being slapped by my mother or being snapped at by my father to just Shut up, followed by a few of his famous cuss words.

I was quiet, all right—I quietly rebelled against what I perceived as total inequality of treatment. I persisted in my effort to do and say all the things Don was allowed to do and say, since I saw this as only fair. However, such behavior only served to bring even harsher repercussions.

Later on in my life, I learned in the Book of Mormon about the various groups of formerly righteous people who, as soon as they were blessed with prosperity, became hardened of heart while being lifted up in the pride thereof. As a result, they, just like my parents, ceased to live the Gospel. It was only after my first time reading the Book of Mormon that I even began to understand my parents and come to accept the way they were.

As parents, they were caustic, overly serious, and devoid of all congeniality to the point that when any expression of a jovial, playful nature, particularly by me, was sternly reprimanded. They saw such behavior as idiotic, silly, and above all, a sign of senselessness.

They were most abusive to one another. My mother was the worst. My dad would retaliate against my mother’s actual physical abuse by adamantly repeating the same obnoxious behaviors over and over again. As he was fortunate enough to be working for family, in the morning after a previous evening partying down with his beer buddies, he would often turn over in bed and not get up to go to work. He knew he was never going to be fired. All her screaming, scolding, and face-slapping that would follow failed miserably because it never fixed anything.

But then, my dad would straighten up, stop drinking, and get himself back to work … for a while. However, his bouts of sudden responsibility only lasted between two to three days to Two or three weeks. Then he would simply start to repeat the behavior again.

I grew up thinking my parents should indeed have stayed divorced, as they had been for two years when I was between seven and nine years of age. Dad was the type that didn’t need to be married at all, besides keeping a good beer-imbiber of a girlfriend. My mother could then meet her needs by marrying an ambitious, money-hungry businessman. Then, and only then, would such abuse stop.

Because of the example my parents set—especially my mother—Don, too, became abusive. I was the one he often targeted, especially when my parents were not at home. Whenever they were gone, he acted like a kind of imitation parent, or counterfeit parent, if you will, much to my resentment.

In spite of all this adversity, there was some righteousness in our lives. My parents did seem to have a sense of humor, even if it was usually held in reserve for their friends only. I could glean some warmth from their lighthearted behavior in the presence of their friends; it made me glad, for my sake, that they did have friends. That same lightheartedness also existed between Dad and Don, who had a strong bond with one another. My mother and I had a bond of a sort, but it was far more volatile than Don and Dad’s.

Although neither my parents nor my brother attended a Christian church in those days, my mother handled my religion by conveniently sending me to the nearest church to wherever we happened to be living at the time. I continued to attend church until my teens. At that point, my mother ceased to push the issue of religion any further; she thought that I had learned plenty.

I will always be grateful for the teachings of these other churches, Posterity. Besides teaching me about the Lord Jesus, they provided me with a love of and respect for all faiths, be they in the name of Christ, Elohim, or Allah, or deities of the non-Christian faiths. I cannot help but believe that I was somehow led by the heavenly Father to learn these things as part of a predetermined destiny that I was to discover later in my life. In the meantime, it was important that I knew He and His son Jesus lived.

The abuse in our family escalated, particularly on Don’s part. While I was too small to fight him back when he slapped me around, my one and only defense was to scream loud and long enough to hurt the eardrums of whoever happened to be home at the time. He was never punished for such abuse towards me. In fact, my parents condoned his counterfeit parental behavior by allowing him to behave with licentiousness as he saw fit. Then my mother would promptly punish me with a belt—for screaming.

But as Don and I got older, his growth leveled off, and mine continued. I grew bigger and became bold enough to fight him back, big time. Even though I was now closer to his size, he was still much stronger than I. Therefore, I augmented my defense by kicking him, biting him, clouting him with anything within my reach, or throwing things at him when punching back failed to stop him. I loudly put the blame on Don for driving me to violence, which I never considered part of my persona. Fights such as these would only end with my parents’ intervention. After hearing both our stories, they always ordered me to go to my room, not Don. Surely this stands as evidence that favoritism ruled our household. It continued to crop up in other ways throughout our younger years.

All this bitter rivalry blessedly came to an abrupt end one day when Don suddenly decided to marry his high school sweetheart, and thus enter his manhood at the tender young age of eighteen. I was twelve at the time.

He had clearly had a favorable start to life, despite having been allowed to drop out of high school two years earlier. He was given a financially favorable apprenticeship under the tutelage of our dad at the family company. He and Dad went on to work together their whole lives.

In turn, Don’s marriage blessed my life. Now that I was the only child at home, I was freed from bitter sibling rivalry. Even better was Sonyia, my new sister-in-law, only seventeen years old. Because Don and Sonyia lived with us for several months prior to moving out on their own, Sonyia and I had time to bond with one another. This couldn’t have happened at a more critical time in my life. She became a big sister to me in those days, and a wonderful friend later in life.

With Don supposedly grown and married, and me about to become a teenager, my mother abdicated all her homemaking responsibilities by plunging herself totally into her career. After work, she hung out at the two neighborhood taverns with her friends. She was never home anymore, except, it seemed, for the sole purpose of screaming and scolding my dad and me in a fit of rage about chores or household projects either not done or unfinished because she hadn’t been home to take care of them or delegate them. Her fits of rage inflamed our lives two to four times a week.

Sadly, in his middle years my dad settled down to house and home more now than he had when I was a small child; with my mother now a domicilic derelict, my dad’s only satisfaction was being home for his television programs, and me. Even sadder was the fact that even if Dad or I did succeed in finishing a chore or a project for my mother, she would totally ignore it and find fault with something else that she insisted was wrong, and then have a tirade about that. She often derided my dad about his quiet refusal to leave the Stacey Construction Company and strike out on his own. She wanted him to make some real money, and stop his foolishness about wanting to work for just a salary.

In a normal family setting, Posterity, she would have used that smart head of hers to figure out that if she just skipped the bar, came home, and organized the three of us to take care of chores and projects, things would have been a lot more smooth. Plus, we would be able to spend some nice evenings together, like normal people did.

But as you can already surmise, Satan and his angels were busy with us. Due to my poor status within the family, I had to develop certain survival skills just to guard my sanity. My third most important survival skill was to deny abuse and pretend the abuse was either not happening, or simply not happening to me! The second was to try to keep out of my family’s way as much as humanly possible. My number one survival tip was the best one of all: to perch myself on the periphery of our family circle, and to remain still there.

On the periphery, I felt that in my own way I could get a clear view of what life was all about. I studied it, read about it, and came to this grand conclusion: for me, the answers to life’s questions and problems were in books, not in my mother’s verbal bashings. It was books, namely magazine articles, that brought out my courage to grow and to face things head on. I cannot help but believe the heavenly Father led me to find those things for a reason. In my teens, books, mainly textbooks from school, taught me how I could make a much better life not only for myself but also for my future family. In the meantime, by the grace of God, I came to understand that I had to stay where I was, keep trying to be a good girl, and have hope for my future.

My new sister-in-law taught me a new skill: how to make my own clothes. The Lord blesses us by having good come out of the bad. It all began one evening in late summer, with my mother’s unusual elation over the dinner that I had prepared for all of us. In her ecstatic mood, she promised me that I could have some dresses for school from the neighborhood dress shop. I had already picked them out and asked her for them.

Not long after, I went to the shop with what I thought would be enough money. Because of the price, though, it turned out I could only buy three of them. I picked the ones I liked best and brought them home. My mother had a fit when she saw them. It had nothing to do with immodesty of style, because they were certainly modest enough; it was the price. True, they were pricey, but no more so than the clothes she bought for herself downtown. She didn’t like the style of the clothes, either. She claimed they were summer dresses, not appropriate for school. In that, she was only partly right; I thought they could suffice for school during the warmer months. Then she lost it. She proceeded to slap me around the room, after which she ordered me to get in the car, and we went back to the shop to return the dresses to get her money back. This incident only cemented the distrust for her that had begun to develop and that I kept for many years.

When Sonyia had heard of the incident, she reminded me of her promise to teach me how to make my own clothes if I lost a little weight, which I had successfully done. I had recently conquered my habit of drowning my sorrows in sweets at the soda shop that had resulted in my gaining over twenty pounds the previous year. Sonyia made good on her promise to teach me, which I am thankful for.

I am also thankful for the loving way in which she encouraged me to lose the extra weight in the first place. While my mother threatened to send me away to a fat farm¹ that summer, Sonyia simply painted an ominous verbal picture of how I would look by the time I reached high school, if I didn’t do something about my weight now. She warned that the slender girls would get all the boys. With that, I immediately began to starve myself on a diet of 800 calories and