I have a love/ hate relationship with my computer. It is my daily link to the outside world, which makes me feel both blissful and despondent at the same time. I have been without a computer at home for long stretches in the course of my career as a mother, and let me tell you I am way, and I mean waaaaay less depressed when I have the evil machine at my disposal.
Yet there is no replacement for human contact, to be sure. I have to say that the people who are selling motherhood have a KILLER marketing team, because the brochure I got showed TONS of other mothers that are your age, with sweet kids your kids age, who are just waiting to hang out with you during the day and go to the park on play dates to talk about diapers and husbands, and then have the weekly girls-night-out where you all get drunk and talk about husbands and diapers again, and its pretty much the happiest thing ever. Let me tell you people, THIS IS A LIE! At least for me anyway. I have lived here for about 11 years now, and I have made one friend. This could be because I am painfully shy or because of my unMormonness, or a combination of the two. My one friend lives across the valley from me, so we are lucky if we can get together twice a month. So this is all I have, people, this computer and the internet constitute my daily human contact over the age of 8. Some days I am grateful and some days I am seriously pissed off about it.
So this morning when my kids went crazy in their desire for sweet, yummy, chocolatey, Hot Now doughnuts for breakfast and it sent me running to this monster to look for somewhere, anywhere, that might deliver doughnuts to me, I don’t know why but it pissed me off and made me want to BLOW. THIS. COMPUTER. UP.
“I have lived here for about 11 years now, and I have made one friend. This could be because I am painfully shy or because of my unMormonness, or a combination of the two.”
None of my beeswax and I’m sure you have your reasons, but what’s keeping you in Utah?
This is a really good question and I appreciate the diplomatic way in which you asked. Utah is a really beautiful, clean, friendly place to live, and in many ways I have come to love it here. Really the main thing keeping us here is economics. My husband has a fairly good job here and a good network of people he has worked with over the years. As for the Mormons, while annoying, are generally nice people and very family oriented, which makes this a great place to have a family. I just don’t have much in common with them and that makes forging personal friendships hard. I think that if we were given the right opportunity, we would love to live elsewhere, but for now this is as good a place as any. I do, however, enjoy my God given right to complain about it from time to time. Thanks for your intrest.
All good reasons — and I admire how you’ve been able to make your peace with what may be a less than perfect situation. Sometimes I feel like if they took away my right to complain (and I’m sure they’re working on it in Washington as we speak), I’d pretty much have nothing left to say. In any case, your Utah experience is making for some interesting reading!