Losing My Religion

I grew up in Mormon churches. I played hide and seek in forbidden chapels, curling up under pews and relishing in the comfortable air of all of it. I sucked on dirty nursery toys, screamed "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam" with all the gusto my little 3-year-old body could muster, and shined my green shield CTR ring like a super hero. I had my first "birds and bees" talk while spinning in circles in the comfortable rocker only found in the Mother's Lounge, surrounded by my fellow Merry Miss class, now wide-eyed and speechless, unsure of how to make the shocking things we were learning mesh with the immature Blazer boys we were secretly in love with.

It was within those walls I learned to pray, learned to serve others, learned to dance. Those chapels, those familiar meeting houses with square-cubbied rooms and stale smelling kitchens, felt like home to me. So when my parents forced us to permanently pack up the only life we'd ever known and U-haul it across the country from sunny Arizona to a po-dunk Idaho town, I found so much solace in the sameness of the chapel, the solidness of the church there. The carpet looked the same. The structure, the lessons, the hymn books, the feel of the hard pew against my back was the same as I settled nervously into it and stared out into the unknown. I didn't know a soul, yet I felt I had a built-in community; I was in a sea of strangers, but I didn't feel alone.

That is what the LDS religion does well. They rally. They serve. They reach out. And growing up on the inside of that, there was so much comfort in all of those things. And then one day I walked into a chapel and felt unwelcome. And not just unwelcome, I felt I had entered into hostile territory. But let me back up.

In a Sunday School lesson during my teenage years, our teacher brought in a bunch of wallet-sized pictures of various temples spanning the globe and asked us to pick one. Where would we be married one day? Would we go the traditional route and choose Salt Lake City? Would we go with something familiar like Boise? Or would we go with aesthetics like I did, choosing the San Diego temple as the only place worthy of my wedding vows? I kept that card in my scriptures for months and then transferred it to my bathroom mirror; a constant reminder of what I was striving for, the only acceptable location for my "Happily Ever After."

And then I met Mark. He was handsome -- all broad shoulders and quick smiles. He was good and valiant and all of the things I'd heard mention of through the years, spoken by various suits behind the pulpit.

You must marry a worthy young man. Check.
He must love his mother. Check.
He must adore you. Check.
He must be a hard worker. Check.
He must love kids and be kind to others and be driven and be humble and make you laugh. Check and check.
He must be able to take you to the temple. Hmmm.

He wasn't LDS and after many a late night talk, I knew he would never be. I had to decide if all that he was, all of the very best of him, was enough for me to overlook the one thing I thought most important in finding a spouse. And it was.

I never even hesitated.

I loved him completely and he made so much sense in my life. He made me happy, and he made my world come into focus. A life without him was unacceptable. It was not a path I was willing to go down. And I knew everyone else would see that, too. I knew all of my past Young Women's leaders and my very best church friends, well, certainly they would see what I saw. And they would love me and support me and invite me to sit beside them, with a shiny new ring on my finger but without a husband seated in the pew beside me. Surely they would support my decision.

They did not. As soon as we spoke our "I do's," my world shifted. For years I had been questioning the core of the Mormon religion. The more I studied, the more my testimony began unraveling. When I brought up those questions, I was told to pray harder to the very God I was uncertain of. So very slowly I began to back away from Mormon theology and cling to the Mormon people, the Mormon culture.

I still showed up every Sunday because my religion was so deeply embedded in my identity, I didn't know how to be me without it. It was all I knew. And that seemed to be enough. I didn't relish in the teachings, but rather the community. Until that very community turned on me, and I was left broken and confused.

My non-temple marriage put on display the cracks in my testimony's once firm foundation. Overnight I went from simply being Amber, to being a member that needed fixing. My marriage was discussed in Ward Counsel on Sundays, people began to befriend my husband solely for the purpose of converting him. I was counseled on how to go about convincing my husband to be baptized, given methods to "change his heart."

I furiously pushed back. Mark was not a broken man in need of fixing. His life, our life, was not lacking because he was not a member of the church. I was not misguided because I made a choice not in line with the cut and dry teachings of  "the gospel." I was a smart girl who made a smart choice. I knew marrying Mark was the best decision I'd ever made, and to have not only that decision but my husband as a person repeatedly questioned made me angry. I screamed that I did not want to change him, but my words fell on deaf ears. I blinked and I became an outsider.

I saw the church through fresh eyes, and my heart was broken. The church of my childhood dissolved into a foggy memory. That church, the very church that claimed to be so accepting, so welcoming, so determined to bring truth and righteousness to the world, was anything but. I had repeatedly been told that the members might not be perfect, the people might not be perfect, but the gospel was. I had long since turned my back on that gospel, believing the church to be as untrue as members believed it to be true -- so the people, the members were all I had left.

When I became a project to them, friends and acquaintances alike, when people started treating me with kid gloves, when my non-temple marriage and non-member husband became the most important things about me, that was when I had reached my limit. There was nothing left for me within the walls of the very church that had raised me. So I walked away.

I have never regretted that choice, but I do miss that sense of community. I miss being an insider. I miss the rallying and the service and the safety net. It is difficult to recreate those large-scale things without a large-scale following. I miss the memories. I miss the familiarity, but I do not miss the church.

I do not miss the guilt. I do not miss the structured life. I do not miss the condescending and entitled views of so many. I do not miss being viewed as unworthy. I do not miss feeling judged. I do not miss many of the teachings I believe to be backward and narrow. I do not miss the agony I felt growing up believing I was never good enough, never pure enough. I do not miss my religion.

I know the LDS church is many great and wonderful things. I know it is filled with many great and wonderful people. I know it is strictly followed and revered by many great and wonderful believers. There is good there. But those great and wonderful things never made my life great and wonderful. They made my life a struggle; they made my life hard. They did not fill me with joy, but rather anguish. I do not wish that life on anyone.

But if all those great and wonderful things make your life just that, I will support your choice. I will not question your reasons because they are not my reasons. I will not question your happiness because it is not my happiness. But I would plead with you to, in return, respect my choice. Please know that this religion-free life I lead is a full one. It is an amazing one. It is a happy one. And isn't that what we are all striving for?

And I would also beg you to see people like me as just that. People. When someone walks into a meetinghouse, Mormon, Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise, they have consciously chosen to be there. Please just love them. Do not place conditions on that acceptance, do not make them a project, do not try to change them. Just let them be present there for whatever reasons they need. Let them find the solace in those walls that I once felt. And let them do that without judgment of any kind. They might be searching for religion or they might just be searching for a community. Please do not let their reasons or their beliefs shape your behavior towards them.

Treat them with the same respect you would the sister you stood shoulder to shoulder with in the temple. Treat them with the same kindness as the brother who passes the sacrament on Sunday. Treat them as an equal, regardless of what you know or think you know about them and their journey. You cannot know their heart but you can welcome them into your community without question. That should be the ultimate goal -- Mormon and non-Mormon alike.

I Promise I Love You, But (A Letter to a Girl on Her 9th Birthday)

To My Sweet Claire,

If you rifle through the hangers in my closet, you'll find a navy blue polo I bought at the Gap a few weeks after graduating from high school. As Gap shirts go, it didn't suck up my entire $4.25/hour paycheck earned as a meager A&W carhop, but it came close. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this well-worn shirt, aside from its age; it was purchased in 1997. It was also the shirt I chose to throw over my burgeoning belly before walking out into that crisp, predawn morning on my way to the hospital to have you plucked from my stomach like clockwork.

That shirt was on my mind as Daddy drove us; him talking about precious cargo and putting bets on your hair color, and me thinking about that silly now 18-year-old polo shirt. How I, as an awkward 17-year-old with a full scholarship as my ticket out of Dodge, could not have imagined that shirt would accompany me through the labor and delivery doors, as I waddled in to give birth to you, my spunky second child.

My thoughts should probably have been on you, but they were tangled up in a shirt. That my thoughts weren't on you didn't mean I didn't love you, it just meant I was terribly nervous to go under the knife, the only way my body lets babies enter this world.

You see, I have loved you every second of every day since you burst onto our scene. But there will be times you doubt that. You will be huddled on a bed around a giggly, intertwined mess of limbs at a slumber party years from now, and someone will inevitably pull out their baby book.

You don't have one. Not for your first year and not for a single year after that. The one you flip through might make you long for a perfectly pasted trip down memory lane like your friends have, all bound and stickered and exacto'd to perfection. That you won't have one doesn't mean I didn't love you, it just means I was not a Pinterest mom and there is little hope you will be either. Like mother, like daughter. You're welcome.

Your memories will be pictures stuffed in a box, not sorted, some edges stuck together. And that is if you get lucky enough to catch me on a good day when I finally remember my Shutterfly password and order some prints. Otherwise, they will stay hidden on a thumb drive that you may have to take down to some ancient computer store and beg the bored store clerk to help you salvage, since I'm assuming thumb drives will be obsolete by then.

And those Kodak prints will prove you had some good times; you were the happiest little wild-haired thing. But I yelled at you. A lot. Screamed sometimes. That screaming didn't mean I didn't love you. It just meant I was human, and secretly cursing whatever Karma Gods gifted me with a child as stubborn as I was. You know what they say about payback.

Well, you don't. Because you're 9. But you will, sweet child. One day, when you are bouncing a small sprite of your own on your spit-up riddled knee and wondering what you ever did to deserve a child who cries as if to mock you, well, then you will know. And I will take that beautiful child off your hands when you call grandma to the rescue, but I will also be glad you know.  Wanting you to know doesn't mean I don't love you, it just means I want all the very best things in life for you, and I know that sometimes struggling is the only way to make you strong enough to receive them.

I might be mean sometimes. I might binge watch Friday Night Lights instead of playing another round of Trouble with you. I might make you eat your green beans and never buy you Ramen. Or I might buy you high-fructose-coated breakfast cereal because I'm too lazy to make you pancakes. It doesn't mean I don't love you, it simply means we are on this journey together, you and I. I've never been your mother before and I don't really know how to do it best, do it right.

But I love you. Man, how I love you. I love you for the way you still, all 9 years of you, crawl into my lap and curl your head beneath the safety of my chin. I love how playful you are and how your giggle ricochets off your bedroom door when you are reading past lights out. And then how you stay perfectly still and silent, taking in every word of anger I throw at you when I discover your book sneaking ways. I love how eager you are for adventure and how you love to destroy the kitchen with a failed audition tape for Cupcake Wars.

I love you even when you make me crazy. I love you even when you exhaust me. I love you even when I am threatening to send you to your room until your 18th birthday.

Every mistake. Every joy. Every misstep. It's you and me kid. I will love you through it all.

Promise.

Heaps of love to you my sparkly 9-year-old,

Mommy