My exit story doesn't exist. At least physically. I was never a Mormon myself, yet drawn into the "loving embrace" of the church by proxy. As a kid, I had a protestant upbringing and grew up near Detroit. My parents divorced when I was 11 after years of bitter fighting. Both of them were to blame, but at that tender age my mother got custody of us, remarried and hauled us kids out to California, rarely to see my dad again. It was emotionally devastating for everyone in the family, but hit my Dad the hardest. He fought the law, but the law won. He had to live without his four children. It ruined him and he lived as a broken man. Eventually his kidneys gave out as well and he began dialysis. A few years into his illness a friend of his who had converted to Mormonism introduced him to a women by telling him. "Congradulations, meet your new wife!" Broken in spirit, he was ripe for conversion. He became a Mormon, much to my chagrin.

At 18, I volunteered for Vietnam, and left a disfunctional situation at home in California with my mother and step-idiot who had, the previous year, tried to rape my sister. When my Dad learned of this he decided to keep my younger brother with him in Michigan one summer when my brother (10 years old) went for a visit. This enraged my mother, but since her husband was a wanted man by the police in Michigan there was nothing she could do about it. My younger brother was doomed to be raised as a Mormon. Even as a kid he resisted it--at first. But the beatings by his step mother (a staunch Mormon) ensured that he eventually "saw the light" after praying for solace from this emotional trauma. He must have found it in the church despite the continued physical beatings when he acted up, because he converted "by choice".  At the young age of 11 my dear brother  was convinced that he had spoken to God and foreverafter knew that the "word" of the prophets and Latter day Saints were true.

After Vietnam I was stationed in Germany and stayed in europe for several years. From time to time Mormons (probably sent by my Dad) showed up at my door. The last time they ever bothered me was when I couldn't take there intrusion into my life any more after repeatedly telling them not to come back and I grabbed one by the tie, pushed him against the wall, and threatened to kick him back to kingdom come if he ever returned.

Now I live in Idaho. My brother's son's have gone off on their missions. I love them all dearly and never try to get them to leave the church. But they still work on me whenever possible. It keeps us very far apart in our personal lives and we will never be close as family members because am not one of them. It is sad for me. Being on the outside. Knowing they are worried for my soul. Knowing they will never know the things that I do and will be forever part of a larger problem in our country and the wrong side of what is really true.

Six months before my dad died, he gave up the church. He became a post-Mormon. He was sick by then; invalid in a wheelchair, yet his overbearing Mormon wife never let him be free. She took all his artwork and locked it in a closet he told me later. She spent the last six months of his days researching geneology despite his pleading with her that he wanted to live and not dwell on dead people and death. He had stopped trying to fight with her because he was too weak. So he called me every week in California and we spent many hours talking on the phone about things that he loved. Ernest Hemingway, hunting in the woods, traveling, science. He said that the Mormon church had abandoned him when he was too sick to teach their Sunday classes anymore. "They are there for you when they need you," he lamented, "But when you get too weak, they abandon you."

Those were a few of the last words I ever heard him say.

So I am Post-Mormon by proxy. The church continues to be an emotional scar on my life. Perhaps only God can forgive them.