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Posts tagged ‘Mormon Church’

Aug 20

Reflections, Part 7

The Deconstruction of a Marriage

Somewhere in my reading on grief, I read that in order to do honor to myself and to the relationship, I needed to deconstruct it before I could even consider moving forward and on to another relationship. This made complete sense to me.

Jon’s suicide came out of nowhere, even though I understood suicide to be a reality of being married to someone who had a diagnosis of bipolar 1.

With twenty-two years behind me, I’d been through it, raged over it in a raw form, wound up in my rose room, and found unstable peace.

Ultimately, if I was to do the honest work of moving forward, I had to take my marriage apart. I was about to make the mistake that so many people make: not fully examining the relationship before moving forward. How does someone look under the hood in this situation? You start with the facts that you know about, and then, as those facts are either confirmed of disconfirmed, you move forward with new information. You are boring through the mountain again, but this time the rock of the mountain isn’t placed on the conveyor belt and sent out to be used someplace else. This time you are examining it for content.

What I knew at the beginning was that, overall, we were friends first, and I had married a friend who would engage me in conversations that could go well into the early hours of the morning. Jon preferred sour candy, and I thrived on the sweet stuff of life. We were both adventurous and would try things, either doing them again or deciding against a repeat. He loved his pumpkin pie, and for me it was lemon meringue. It was pie, and we’d have pie instead of cake on birthdays, and it was a good thing.

I understood that he tried to cope with the bipolar as best he could and struggled with doing so in a dignified manner. I knew I was committed to caring for him as best I could, and that meant clearing the house of objects that could be used as weapons on the self. This was hard, and scary, and went along with some sleepless nights. I developed compassion fatigue. I don’t think you can understand how bad it is inside until you’re on the outside of the situation. I recall telling my mother before her death what it was really like. She asked why I hadn’t told her, and I replied that all you would have wanted me to do was to get out. I didn’t like the volatility that bipolar can bring, and yet, I knew leaving would need to be carefully orchestrated. I had sat with this thought and decision for some time. I had considered divorcing him that summer, but I made the choice to stay for the time being. I didn’t know his mind was moving towards a psychotic break that would decide things for him. He’d told me he would not endure that place again.

I came to understand that, while the marriage was not about his bipolar disorder, the mood swings, with their verbal abuse, were a part of the marriage.

In 2010 I made the decision to call him out on the anger and aggression he was showing towards me. Once he could hear it, he was able to work on it and commit to not behaving in that way anymore, and he didn’t go there again. When he began the DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) process, which includes acceptance for one’s actions, things began to level out in new ways.

What was my part in the marriage? As mentioned previously in the piece on exiting the Mormon Church, I was battling some demons of my own.

I needed to understand how everything I was dealing with affected the marriage. Being raised to be a good Mormon girl and woman had a great deal to do with a lot of who I was in the marriage. How did I enter into this relationship?

There was a great deal of suppression involved in the process.

In the first grade, it was the girl who had the pretty white and pink dress and the jump rope. She wore cute little Mary Jane shoes. I didn’t have Mary Janes, and I wanted some. They were so feminine. I thought it was normal to think that way. As an adolescent I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about boys. I glossed over it and, in doing so, sent it away to not be thought of for years.

Because of my disability and experience at church, I had written off the possibility of marriage.

I met Jon when he came to do a house call on my computer. A friendship developed, and after four years we married.

Being raised Mormon meant that I was supposed to grow up and marry a nice Mormon man. I’d hit the jackpot! I’d married a brilliant man who could have powered the world on a paper clip. It was his out-of-the-box thinking that I loved most about Jon, and he liked that I could go to that place as well.

Still, there was this thing hanging around, and it wasn’t spoken about, and I couldn’t utter the words while he was alive. I don’t get men. I’m supposed to understand men, and I’m supposed to feel attracted to them. I don’t. After his death, the guilt that I felt slowly surfaced. It took several years and didn’t surface in its full ugly form until I’d left the Mormon Church and moved on.

I felt guilty for marrying him, guilty for the sex that really didn’t work well. While thinking all of this, I was also well aware that this was not a one-sided issue. Bipolar disorders affect relationships, and in deconstructing all of this, I came to understand that I was a participant, and there was no blame to be had: just understanding. Blame and guilt are so often miscued in relationships. Looking at this with my own therapist caused me to rethink my thoughts and feelings around having married Jon. In safety, I could admit, actually, that there was no way around this: I like women.

Jul 30

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Reflections, Part 4

Note: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is also known as the Mormon Church. Therefore, I’ll use the name Mormon in this post. For definitions of terms included in bold type throughout this post, please see the Definitions section at the bottom.

In 2008, I knew I needed to listen to what Jon was learning about the Mormon Church (please read my previous post here), and so, my own journey down the rabbit hole began.

Ultimately, I began to realize that it wasn’t what I’d been taught that bothered me as much as what the church represented, and how people were treated by each other. Could I remain in an unsafe place? At this point in time, Jon wanted to quit church over academic issues. I wasn’t ready to quit yet. The struggle for me was values.

People of different races, LGBTQ people, the mentally ill, and the disabled were not treated well. Women weren’t treated well. It was a Jesus thing with me. Jesus the street preacher would not only be present—he’d be calling it all out. I’m big on calling it out. Jesus would be ministering to the people on the margins and expect that others would do the same. Where were the ministers? They were in the main crowd. I found myself thinking about how exclusive Mormonism was, and that Jesus wasn’t running a country club for the exclusive use of some. Church is a place for all who want to be present, and for those who need to be welcomed in as they are. This is when what I’d been taught really hit me: Mormonism was not the exclusive club I should live in. Jon had told me I had a privileged Mormon upbringing, and he was right. Despite the mistreatment, I had access to people most Mormons don’t have access to. My father had been one of them. OUCH.

With Jon’s suicide in 2016, I stayed put and didn’t make any major life decisions. Going to the US in 2017 would send me down a new path. I had not thought about leaving my faith of birth, and I wouldn’t for several more months. Sunstone altered my thinking. Sunstone US is the grandmother of all things that people of the restoration faiths can gather at, and several faiths come together there. Mormons, former polygamists, and Community of Christ all gather under one roof for a long weekend of exchange. I went to see friends and made some new ones. I returned home, and the events of the conference kept nagging at me in my petite mind. I had attended two sessions that touched me deeply, and one of them was being put on by Community of Christ. Finally, I wrote a letter to someone who belonged to another church. I told her, “I don’t normally do this, but I need to write this.” 

I started attending an online group for those in Europe, and I liked what I was hearing and learning. And no, don’t ask me to join your church or do anything like it. They didn’t ask me anything; they let me sit and explore to my heart’s content. Slowly, I wanted some involvement, and they were glad to have me participate.

In March of 2018, while sitting on my pretty blue bed, I realized that I’d have to leave the Mormon faith. I sobbed. It wasn’t all bad, was it? I’d learned the value of service, and that sometimes we’re stretched to do things, and doing so can causes us to grow in ways that we wouldn’t grow otherwise. I’d also learned the basics of public speaking as a very young child. I’d gotten to sing in the choir and enjoyed it. It was the culture that tore me apart, the good stuff and the negative all bundled up together, and I had to leave it behind.

What about my eternal marriage to Jon? As I thought this, the words came into my mind: “I have your back on this.” The words were clear, and I understood it was OK to leave for a new something. It still took me six months to make the move. In September of 2018, I was rebaptized as an adult, and then confirmed into my new faith. I flew home that Sunday evening and got online and resigned my Mormon membership.

At the time of the exit, I thought I understood why I needed to make the move out of the Mormon Church. Like so much in our grief and life journeys, we never see it all until we’re on the river and navigating something new, and then we turn around and gasp a “WOW! Did I really do all of that?” The answer is always a resounding yes. I’m still in the gasping place. It is a good place to be.

In 2026, I think back to the woman who sat at her dining table, who didn’t know how she’d do one year, let alone ten years.

Doing an exit from the Mormon Church was one very unexpected twist in my grief journey. I’m thankful for what I’ve learned, and thankful for how I’ve changed and grown over time.

The great thing about life is that it greets you with the unexpected, and that it teaches us, and molds us in new ways. The discoveries are the best, and the thrills are around all the corners. It’s just that sometimes we don’t fully appreciate the surprise until we’ve gotten through the hell that it takes to get to the wonderful center. Oh, and I do love my creamy centers.

I’m glad I said yes to this change. I’ve expanded in ways that have filled my life in new ways.

Definitions:

Mission: Women serve eighteen months and men serve two years, at the missionary’s expense. Missionaries are sent out to convert others to the faith. Presently, both women and men can go at age eighteen.

Leave: You can’t just leave the Mormon Church. You need to resign by writing a formal letter to Salt Lake City to have your name taken out of the Church database.

Marriage: The Church doctrine on marriage espouses the belief that a man and a woman can be married in this life and the next life. A marriage done in a Mormon temple is done for time and eternity. To leave the Church means you are no longer “sealed” together, and the bond is broken.

Baptism: Mormons baptize children at age eight. Children are not equipped to understand the commitment they are making at eight. Community of Christ offers the option of a redo, to show commitment to Jesus. It is not a requirement for membership but can be a step towards it. I had a redo as an adult and was then confirmed into Community of Christ.

Jul 23

Reflections, Part 3

Note: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is also known as the Mormon Church. Therefore, I’ll use the name Mormon in this post. For definitions of terms included in bold type throughout this post, please see the Definitions section at the bottom.

I’m nine years old, and I’m sitting in the middle of the chapel at the Irvington building in Fremont, California. I’m a Mormon girl with low vision and hearing loss. It’s a Wednesday afternoon in 1968, and the chorister is teaching the senior primary children a song about the earth, and how Heavenly Father created it for us, and there is all this nature being described in the song. All I can think of is, I’m not like the rest of the kids in this room. I don’t see and hear like they do. I think a seed got planted that day: my exit. For me, this was not an odd way for what played out in my Mormon membership to begin. It was such a simple and subtle act.

How, at the age of nine, might this have happened? Mormon doctrine on the disabled is, I think, something the church—like with race and the priesthood—would rather forget and bury deep. The problem with this is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It hits you in the face like a bold neon sign that reads: “It’s OK to hate these people.” Here is where you can focus your anger and hate, and here is where you are allowed to create the most vicious of theodicies: they got what they deserved for being fence-sitters in the previous life. If race doesn’t get you, being born with a disability will. In many ways I had to come to the second half of life (see Falling Upwards by Richard Rohr) rather early. I understood at age nine that something was terribly wrong: I didn’t have the words for it at the time, and yet I knew. It felt like the unscratchable itch. So it goes with those of us on the margins within the Mormon Church. We are placed in a situation where we must think through some essential life stuff before we should have to be thinking in second-half-of-life terms. It forces us to come to a mature world view earlier than normal. We have to sort out our values and thoughts, and then come to an understanding of how life works.

When I was between ten and eleven years of age, I was told by three girls who claimed to be friends that they were no longer going to be friends. I saw it for what it was: bullying, and wrong in the sight of God. That day, after our primary class, they got told by me that I understood it for what it was: wrong. I left the church building in tears and walked to the car where my mother waited. The damage they inflicted was done even before they began to inflict the large-scale damage that would happen until I was eighteen. BUT, it was OK because I was who I was: disabled, despite my father serving as the stake president at the time.

My adolescence was spent in loneliness, as any time I tried to make a friend, these girls made sure it didn’t happen. They carried their actions into the schools we all attended. Eventually, I reached a compromise with my parents around church: Sunday was mandatory, and nothing else was required.

Yes, the parents of the girls knew. One family condoned it, the second must have ignored it, and the third, well, when the parents of that girl met with my father, they spent too much time apologizing to my father. They said they couldn’t change her thinking. It didn’t matter; I knew how people felt about me. Very few adults took the time to get to know me. The person who did became a friend for life. 

The damage this did to me socially was that during the years I should have been developing peer relationships, they were non-existent. I thought leaving town would help—it didn’t. It made it worse.

At what is now known as BYU Idaho, certain things are required. Church attendance is mandatory. By my second year studying there out of state, I was overlooked for church participation. When I asked our bishop why I hadn’t been given anything to do, or what Mormons term a calling, he replied: “Nobody asked for you.” I moved that next semester and kept quiet with study and a service sorority, sleeping most of the weekend. By the time I graduated with an Associate of Arts in General Education, I was depressed, twenty pounds heavier, and miserable. I needed the sunny place of California once again. While Idaho created environmental depression, getting back to California and home didn’t help much. It would take a huge change to fix the depression.

Church wasn’t working for me even though I tried. I really tried to be a good Mormon. I wasn’t happy in my life. When you’re raised Mormon, that is all you know. It’s a high-demand religion. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Mormon was thought of as weird. And I didn’t know enough to explain it to the therapist.

The problem with being an adult woman in the Mormon Church is that you’re supposed to get married and start having babies. This is the entrance ticket to being viewed as a real adult woman. And full admission happens when you pop out a child. I know, it is strange. And all this is traditionally done as early as eighteen, and well before twenty-five.

Moving into my twenties and seeing family and others marry, I knew that marriage wasn’t in the cards. Not being wanted for service told me a great deal. Not being considered dating material also could be seen as “not good breeding stock.” This is a view accepted by many in society. However, disabled doesn’t mean defective. I knew it at the age of sixteen and had it confirmed to me as I moved into full adulthood.

I did serve a Mormon mission, returned, and found employment in Provo, Utah. I didn’t last a full year in Provo. I went back to California, and on to grad school for a master’s in clinical psychology. I knew from a young age that I needed to work, as I wouldn’t be baking bread and popping out kids. I’d wanted to pursue a degree in clinical psychology in my teens. I was drawn to the work of doing therapy.

After graduating, I met Jon, and we married five years later. In January of 1999, he made the official move to Germany, and I followed in February of that same year. We settled into church and life in Europe. The Germans in Bavaria are surrounded by lovely mountains, and we lived in them. Jon set up a little website that we called An alp of our own, and we maintained the site while we lived there. I loved the stars and the night sky. It was, as one church member said, “Heidi country.”

We moved to The Netherlands in April of 2000 and settled in the eastern part of the country. Good-bye, stars—and hello, flat land. It was six years later that things began to change for us churchwise.

All this time, little seeds were dropping in my life. It was time to realize that things were changing.

Jon began reading and learning about what we’d been taught our entire lives, discovering that what we were told was wrong. He struggled with what had been withheld. I put off listening at first, until I heard another woman say that to support the marriage, she needed to stand by her husband and understand what he was saying. That comment made me think about how not learning could hurt our relationship. There is no harm in learning what one’s partner is learning. In 2008, I knew I needed to listen to what Jon was learning, and so, my own journey began while talking with him and doing laundry up on the top floor of our home. I remember looking out the window and hearing him talk. I realized the truth of the words made me more sad then angry. Down the dark rabbit hole on the slippery slide I went.

Next week, I will explore what I found inside that rabbit hole.

Definitions:

Primary: The Mormon organization for children, split into junior (ages three to seven) and senior (ages eight to eleven).

Mormon doctrine: Mormons believe that we came from a previous life known as the pre-existence, where we had to choose to follow Jesus or Satan. Whites were valiant and born white; blacks were fence-sitters and did not take a side readily but were allowed to come to earth and get a cursed body. This doctrine changed in 1978. The disabled were lower than the blacks and begged for a body—even a disabled one—so that they could get to earth. The exception to this is Down’s syndrome children: they were the spirits that kicked Satan out of heaven, and so to protect them, God made them Down’s children.

Fence-sitters: See the above note on Mormon doctrine.

Stake president: Comparable to a diocese, a stake consists of eight or more congregations called wards. The stake president presides over all the wards in his stake.

Calling: An assignment of service that is given to adult members. You can serve anywhere in a ward or stake to help the organization run smoothly.

Environmental depression: This was discovered in 2010. It wasn’t dealt with as such before then.