I wish that my story was as elegant as “finding the truth” or receiving some great epiphany about the inconsistencies in Mormonism.  Instead for me, it was about escape from an oppressive future and a current abusive environment.  I was mentally and emotionally abused as a child by my mother.  She was a severely inactive Mormon until she decided to divorce my dad to be with her lover, and needed someone to pay for the divorce.  That’s right, the Mormon church paid for my mother’s lawyer, which I personally find a little unethical, but I digress.  I was 9 years old, and that was the first time I had heard about the LDS church.  I suppose in return for their help, it was expected that my brother and I would be baptized.  Sure enough, shortly thereafter I was forced to take missionary lessons, at which time I learned about a church that believed in the 3 bubbles of heaven that were divided by books, and you had to be a certain kind of good to get past each book.  In any case, after the bubbles, I was baptized. 

 

Long story short, my mother used the church as a weapon, beating me into submission for almost a decade.  I was always in trouble, and yet never really did anything wrong.  I’m really not exaggerating—straight A student, involved deeply in school and church, completely uninterested in sex, and petrified for my eternal soul.  Yet I was deeply depressed by somehow being the worst child on the planet and prayed every night that God would fix my flawed soul so my mother didn’t have to deal with such a horrible child.  Mormon guilt paired with my mother’s own special brand of guilt tactics.  Of course we were Sunday Mormons.  Smiles for everyone at church, pretending that everything was okay, when in fact we did not have a happy household, compliments of my mother. 

 

After years of this, I began to become disenchanted with the church.  I should note here that despite the trouble at home, the constant crushing of my self-esteem by my mother and the church, my soul was in rebellion, and I was becoming a little bit of a feminist. 

 

I didn’t particularly like dating the Mormon boys.  One winner told me that his biological clock had started ticking and he knew that he needed to be married in the temple with kids, and I was it.  Real romantic.  I also didn’t particularly appreciate the church-toted idea that my future was going to be a baby factory for some guy I didn’t know just because he was worthy to take me to heaven, and that my “greatest calling” was to be a mother and wife.  Well, I had always dreamed of being a scientist, so limiting myself in such a way didn’t sit right with my dreams and goals.  I would like to clarify that I hold nothing against housewifery or those who choose to just stay home with their children.  It just wasn’t and isn’t my only goal in life.

 

Well, my mother decided that 2 kids from her previous marriage wasn’t enough, so she had 4 more, on top of 2 inherited step-children.  And I raised those kids because she was off doing church activities or laying in bed.  While I shouldered that responsibility gladly since it seemed no one else was going to look after my siblings, I also felt the pang of just wanting to be a 16 year old kid.  And raising children at 16 years old soured me on the idea of having kids young, or more than 1 or 2, an idea that isn’t exactly in line with Mormon common practice or ideology.

 

Now, I grew up in a small town, so most of my friends ended up being non-Mormons.  And they would ask me about polygamy and baptism of the dead and other such topics that are really quite weird and controversial.  I recited by rote what I had been taught to say in these situations, though these things never sat right with me.  The world wasn’t ready for polygamy so god took it away?  Well, I didn’t like polygamy and wanted nothing to do with it, so did that kick me out of the celestial kingdom?  And baptizing the dead?  What if they didn’t want it?  Wasn’t that offensive to someone who despite being in the heavenly waiting room and supposedly knowing all of the truths of the world did not want their soul bothered?  And what about my friends?  I hung out with good people who were not interested in the church, and they had very nice parents who felt the same.  Were they going to hell because they wanted nothing to do with Mormonism?  Was I going to hell for not convincing them?  It also didn’t sit right with me that some exemplary example of humanity in the forests of India was going to hell because he was Buddhist or Hindu, uninterested in Christianity let alone Mormonism.  Quietly I believed that good people should go to heaven, no matter their background, but I wasn’t about to share that with anyone.    

 

And around this time, it hadn’t gone unnoticed that God was just not answering my prayers of making me a better child because I was still a monumental disappointment to my mother, so I started doubting the truthfulness of the church and the existence of god.  As luck would have it, just as I was deciding to mentally check out, I was told god called me to be the Laurel President in YW.  I thought this was weird because I was doubting god’s existence, so why would he put me in a position of leadership to corrupt other minds?  Well, after sufficient badgering by my YW leaders, I accepted.  I did my best and started to gain some sort of testimony, mostly because it was an escape from home life, and I welcomed the reprieve.  Well, all in one day, that already weak testimony shattered.

 

As a good little Mormon obeying Mormon pressure and guilt, I showed up at an ungodly hour in the morning in church to read/discuss scriptures I neither remembered nor cared about due to early-morning-mental-fatigue-non-conducive-to-boring-book-study: seminary.  One day my seminary teacher came in extremely agitated, beginning class by baring her testimony in the weirdest way.  It went something like this:

 

“I know the church is true, and while I know that my husband will have many wives after he pulls me through the veil into heaven, so long as I am the first wife, everything will be okay.”

 

Apparently she’d just learned that she was going to be one of many wives once she got to heaven, and was evidently having trouble wrapping her mind around the idea.  That was the day I too learned that that was what was in store for me.  Gee, what a great place.  And wait a second, I have to have a man pull me into heaven…wait, what?  I can’t get in on my own merits? 

 

Mentally I had already resigned, but under the age of 18 I couldn’t go anywhere.  Things were pretty bad at home until they climaxed in the middle of my senior year: I’d turned 18 by then and could no longer mentally handle my mother’s manipulation or control, so I moved in with my paternal grandparents (whom my mother had convinced me hated me because I was “the spawn of her”…big old leap of faith moving in with them, and they turned out to be great people).  Well, I finally got the chance to stop going to church, but all the friends I’d had there shunned me, and I was told repeatedly by my Mormon “friends” that the reason why I left was because I was pregnant out of wedlock and had to get married in a hurry.  Six years later, I am childless and never married.  Go figure.  Real nice gossip column they had going on there, just another reason that validated why I felt that Mormonism wasn’t for me.  Nice people don’t do that. 

 

I’ve never felt what people called the spirit in relation to church.  In fact, the first time I felt it was in my current relationship.  I’m guessing it’s just a feeling of intense happiness.  I no longer believe in god and classify myself as an agnostic because I cannot prove or disprove the existence of a higher power, and I’m not particularly worried about it.  I’m far more interested in the diverse and fascinating history of people and evolution because those things are concrete, researchable, and scientifically testable.    

 

I’ve also never understood the urgency of preparing for the afterlife.  Now I’m of the mind that I have one life guaranteed, and I’m going to make the most of it.  In the meantime if I’m wrong about an afterlife, well I’ll be pleasantly surprised because I hadn’t planned on one anyway.  And in any case, I’m going to outer darkness for denying the holy ghost anyway, right?  What do I care about an afterlife? 

 

I will never return to Mormonism, especially after finding out so many interesting facts invalidating the truthfulness of the religion.  I doubt I will ever subscribe to any religion for that matter.  I despise the mentality that one person or group has the truth so we must all destroy culture, heritage, diversity, language, and sense of self to try to make everyone fit in someone else’s conceived box of right.  I have to say that the only thing I miss is the sense of community, and I’ve been desperate to find wholesome friends who also drink and think—haven’t had a lot of luck in Sin City.  But who knows?  This group looks promising, and it’s nice to feel like I belong to something again.