If I Hate My Mother, Can I Love the Heavenly Mother?

1998:  Margaret Merrill Toscano, “If I Hate My Mother, Can I Love the Heavenly Mother?” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 31 No. 4 (1998): 31–42.

A series of questions began to occur to me: If I hate my mother, can I love the Heavenly Mother? If I hate my mother, can I love myself? If I hate God, can I love myself? If I hate myself, can I love my mother or theHeavenly Mother? I wanted to put these questions in the sharpest terms possible—love/hate. There was no room for ambivalence at this point. I had to let myself feel my strongest and darkest feelings, about mymother, about myself, and about God.