Last weekend we purchased the movie Nacho Libre on DVD. And I was totally flipping excited to watch it, since I missed it in the theaters just like I’ve missed nearly every movie in the theater since about mid year 1998. Having children dramatically effects your theater going ability. Dramatically people. Although this is Utah and people just take their kids to the movies anyway. For some reason parents here in the land of Deseret didn’t get instructed on social etiquette, because they feel it is perfectly acceptable to take their very small children with them ANYWHERE THEY GO. There is nothing like watching Gollum bite Frodo’s finger off while a one year old squeals from the seat behind you. The only thing close to being like it is watching Gollum bite Frodo’s finger off and having your four year old ask you to rewind it so he can watch it again from his seat next to you on the couch.

So I was excited to watch the movie, and I wasn’t disappointed. It was cute and funny and off the wall. But my favorite part was when Nacho asks his friend Steven if he is going to pray to God for help wrestling, and Steven answers “I don’t believe in God, I believe in science.” I totally didn’t expect it, but it Made. My. Weekend.

What made my Wednesday was when I was reading some news on msnbc.com. There were two articles, one about coffee and the other about red wine, and both affirmed and strengthened my belief in my religion (science), instead of a belief in, lets say, a religion with a crazy fabricated food law.

A few weeks ago, my one and only Utah friend invited me to a lunch she was having for her birthday. And although she is my only Utah friend, I am most certainly not her only Utah friend so there were going to be about 8 other people there. I am going to call her Lisa, because while that is not her name I think it has a nice ring to it. And let me say that while my friend Lisa is Mormon, her level of Mormoness is largely influenced by whomevers company she is presently enjoying. That is to say, when no Mormons are around she can party like a drunken sorority sister on the rebound during rush week. But put a few other Mormons in the mix, and she is the picture of the Molly Mormon Happy Valley Homemaker. Sadly this is how most Mormons are. I don’t know if any of you have heard the old joke: When you take a Mormon fishing how do you keep them from drinking all your beer? Take two Mormons. I wasn’t too worried about the lunch though, because who would go down the path of righteousness when they had the chance to go down the path that rocks?

Anyway, I was pretty excited about having an afternoon with other adults eating good food possibly drinking a little wine and maybe, as ladies often do when they over-imbibe at a luncheon much to their embarrassment the next day, find out who goes down and who prefers the backdoor action. Not that I actually care about other peoples sexual preferences, it’s just that I find drunken sex talk funny. When other people do it. Naturally, with my expectations being built up so high, the only place left to go was down. Down, down, down to the bitter depths of despair. And that’s where I went.

I arrived at the restaurant a little bit late, so I sat down and Lisa introduced me to everyone. There were a couple of neighbors, a couple coworkers, a sister-in-law, and another random friend. Some of these people I knew, some I didn’t. The waiter came over to take my drink order so I scanned the table to see what kind of poison everyone else was taking. This was my first mistake. There was nothing stronger than diet Coke at that table. I was in trouble and I knew it then. This was a Mormon party. I ordered an iced tea, because I enjoy iced tea and also to be a little snotty. Mormons hate iced tea. I might as well have said I’m a Lesbian Alcoholic Democrat when I ordered iced tea. It’s the same thing.

Because I was a little late, they were already deeply engaged in conversation and I couldn’t follow it all. It was something about Who Knows What and You Know Who and I Could Care Less. What I did notice about this conversation was that it was littered with very specific Mormon words and phrases, like Relief Society, Young Women’s, and Sacrament Meeting. Words and phrases that I didn’t think should be used during a party of mixed company when there is a chance that somebody there is not Mormon and might not know what the hell you are talking about. But of course this is Utah so the natural assumption is that everybody knows. And truthfully? Everyone probably did. I found this pretty discouraging. But of the few people I knew at the party, although they were raised in the church, I knew they didn’t go to church anymore and they weren’t involved with it in any way, were they? That’s when I discovered all those people had actually gone back because they now had children. I find it somewhat odd that they didn’t enjoy the church enough to keep going when they became adults, but they feel their kids should go now that they are parents. It’s like they just don’t have any idea how to raise children so they are falling back on a repressive religious system to do that raising for them. That or they just want their kids to be in the club. Well that club sucks people! And frankly I found this down right depressing.

Sometimes I worry that I write too much about my negative feelings for Mormons on this website. I mean, the Mormons shouldn’t take this personally because believe you me I have an equal disdain for all religions. It just so happens that I was raised by Mormons and I am currently surrounded by Mormons, so that gives me a lot of ammunition. Right now I bet there are about 12 Mormon church buildings within a 5 mile radius of my house, with about 1000 people attending each building every Sunday. That’s 12,000 stupid people that I see at the store, or at my kids school, or that I just drive by around my neighborhood EVERY SINGLE DAY. I don’t know that pervasive is even the right word to begin to describe it.

I may have mentioned before, once or twice, that I was born and raised in the Mormon church. I spent the first 18 years if my life being indoctrinated daily, and another 10 years after that being inactive but still believing it was probably true. When I finally did the research a few years ago and realized that the Mormon church was an extremely elaborate fabrication, I have to say I was relieved. Relieved and scared at the same time. I felt like my entire life I had been standing on a mountain that was all my beliefs in the way the world worked. And when I found out the church wasn’t true it was like the entire mountain fell away, except for the ground I was standing on, and I was out there all alone on this little sliver of earth. It was frightening and liberating at the same time. I was all on my own. I was all on my own! I had thought for so long that this church was probably true, yet I knew it wasn’t right for me, and oh the guilt and fear that caused in my life. By learning it wasn’t true I was able to take my first steps in life down a path without guilt and fear of eternally disappointing the people I loved. Plus all the worry free alcohol consumption. And masturbation. Don’t forget the masturbation.

So what I can’t figure out is, now that I’m all on my own in life without the prayers and the scripture study and the Family Home Evening, why I can’t shake the feeling that when something goes wrong in my life it’s a direct result of my pissing off Jesus and Joseph Smith by leaving the church. It’s like that 28 years of indoctrination and belief actually worked! Who’d a thunk it? So when my life follows its natural up and down course, more down than up lately, I have a hard time accepting it for what I logically know it is….Life. My car was in the shop for 2 weeks getting a new transmission, my kids are sick, and the company that both Elliott and Chris work for very nearly went belly up. Individually these things all suck. When they happen all at once its Godawful. I just wish I didn’t have to keep telling myself that the reason my family hasn’t seen a paycheck in a month isn’t because we left the church and haven’t paid our tithing.

I think that most people who were raised in a religious home have this same problem, and it is probably a large part of what keeps people involved in religion…fear of the unknown. I’m pretty hopeful though that one day all these silly superstitious fears will wear off of me. They had better, because I just can’t imagine spending the rest of my life thinking every time I stub my toe or lose my keys that it could have happened maybe possibly because I had coffee with my breakfast.

My sister and the two youngest of her crew of children came and stayed with me last week. I love my sister. She is a sweet and accepting person. She never once commented on my drinking coffee, or the wine bottles that I have elegantly displayed in a rack on my counter, both of which get me a one way ticket to Outer Darkness in her Mormon world. I love that she can be herself and also let me be me, that we can still be sisters even though we disagree about religion, a concept that is ironically foreign to many religious people. However she is raising her children to be Mormon in the strictest sense of the word. This means that around them I have to be pretty careful about everything I do, or rather everything I say, least I offend their fragile sensibilities. They cannot abide “swear words”. And by “swear words” I of course mean fart, butt, sexy, crap, and shut up. Of course.

And again, I really LOVE my sister, but I’m guessing she doesn’t have a lot of imagination when it comes to parenting because she is for the most part parenting her children in the same way we were parented. At least in the acceptiable euphemisms department, anyway. For example, my mom once slapped me across the face for using the word ‘butt’ to refer to someone’s hind end. It is for this reason that I have made it my personal mission to swear like a sailor in front of my children and encourage them to do likewise. I just don’t feel that an atmosphere of repression is healthy for children, because they will just go out and say ‘butt’ in front of their friends and that’s one more thing they hide from you, you know? I have explained to my kids that there are times when it is not appropriate to say shit, lord! and bastard! Those times being mostly when they are at school or there is a Mormon relative in the room with them. This doesn’t keep them from being confused however when some Mormon relatives object to words THAT ARE NOT REALLY SWEAR WORDS BUT THEY CONSIDER THEM SWEAR WORDS ANYWAY.

So a few days ago when we were all in the car on the way to a children’s museum and Leo was being his usual charming self, teasing his cousins and trying to get a laugh, and he said the word ‘sexy’ , I believe he was truly surprised when it caused his cousins to cry out in pain the same way they would have had he punched them in the face. So he said it again. And again. And again. And one more time. He had to be sure, it was scientific people, was he really hurting them? He got the same reaction every time: awful, bloodcurdling screams of death. So he had to throw ‘fart’ in there, because would it get the same reaction? Could it? It did.
sexy
SCREAM
fart
SCREAM
sexy
SCREAM
fart
SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM!

Finally my niece who is 10, cried out for someone to please stop Leo because her head was about to explode. So I asked him quietly to stop intenionally tormenting his cousins because it was not polite. And I tried to forget the over dramatized screaming by feeling sorry for my nieces thinking they were most likely not going to achieve the highest degree of glory in the afterlife because they had sat in a moving car while someone said ‘sexy’ and ‘fart’.

One day last week after Leo was done with his morning kindergarten session his best friend invited him over to play. I happily drove him to his friends house, and then drunk on the prospect of getting some shopping done with only one child in tow, I headed off to the store. Half way there I realized that I had forgotten to bring my purse because I was obviously a little too drunk. I turned around and went back home to get it, and that’s when my day of one child drunken shopping took a turn for the worse.

As I pulled into my driveway, I could see the backs of two people standing at the front door ringing the doorbell over and over. Because of angles and blindspots and drunkenness I was unable to identify these two figures, because believe you me had I identified these two people I would have pulled right out of my driveway and speed away, purse and shopping be damned! Instead I got out of the car and walked around to the front door, with the intention of telling who ever it was to go away because I had shopping to do with only one child and it couldn’t wait.
That’s when I was greeted by two pimply faced representatives for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

They immediately began to interrogate me.

Are you LDS?
Technically.
Do you go to church?
No. (I’m pretty sure they knew that answer)
Why not?
I don’t want to.
Do you have a testimony of the Gospel?
No.
But do you believe Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God?
No.
Oh, okay. We’d like to come back later and talk to your whole family about this, can we do that?
No.
If we give you a scripture to read would you promise to read it?
No.

They handed me a card with a picture of Jesus on one side and a scripture written on the other. I took the card and resisted the urge to tell them to fuck off!!, because, guess what assholes?, I’ve read that scripture at least 20 times, and it’s bullshit! Really, my urge to tell them off!!, it wasn’t that much of an urge because my belief in karma and humanity won’t really allow me to tell them off. That, and the fact that I’m a wuss.

For those of you who are blissfully unaware, there is a song with a similar title to that of my post used to indoctrinate young Mormon children from the time they begin to speak. I could sing it for you now, by heart, along with many other songs with themes ranging from the historical accuracy of the Book of Mormon to how the pioneer children had the most AWESOME time in the world walking from Missouri to Salt Lake City. And don’t even get me started on how Saturday is the most special day cuz it’s THE DAY WE GET READY FOR SUNDAY! Yes, it’s true people. The Mormons are trying to teach young children that their ENTIRE weekend should be devoted to church. What a fucking rip off.

I guess my main point here is I felt sorry for those kids, those fresh and pimply little missionaries, because I knew where they were coming from. It’s not really their fault, they just probably grew up singing the songs, you know?My brother served a 2 year full-time mission, and my nephew is currently serving his 2 years in a distant foreign country so karmicly speaking I couldn’t be mean to those kids because they are my brother and my nephew. And really I don’t think I need to be contributing to more negativity in the world. That and I’m a total wuss.

But then Chirs did this to their little card, and I have to admit it made me feel just a little bit better about the spoilage of my day, my inability to tell people off, about being raised Mormon, and just about life in general.

My mother-in-law was up visiting us last week. I’m sure its no surprise to you that I don’t always see eye to eye with her. Really, not ever at all. We are VERY different people, but that fact notwithstanding, I understand the important role she plays in the life of my children. When she has time for them anyway. But really people, I’m not here to complain about my mother-in-law per say. I’m here to complain about the fact that she is brainwashed by a crazy religion.

I felt we had a really nice visit with her and frankly I was relieved. But as she was about to leave, she told Chris and I that she wanted to speak to us privately. She then proceeded to tell us about a dream she had the first night she was here, wherein we were all miserable in the afterlife because we weren’t Mormon anymore. This dream was so troubling to her that she awoke after startled and was unable to get back to sleep for hours. She went on to explain that she was racked with guilt that perhaps she had done something wrong that had lead Chris away from the church.

I probably don’t need to tell you that I was pretty pissed off and sad. Not at my mother-in-law, but at this church for making her live this way. She is a good person, she doesn’t deserve to feel fear and guilt and be haunted by dreams. I wanted so badly to tell her that she doesn’t have to live that way, that it’s all for the glorification of a long dead, horny, opportunistic, megalomaniac and she needs to be free of it. But instead I didn’t say anything, and Chris just said something about how it wasn’t for us, and she was on her way.

I really wish this would mark the end of our families trying to get us to go back, but that’s just too much to hope for. I know there will be more scenes like this one for us in the future. More heartfelt pleas for us to quit stumbling around in darkness and return to the fold of the one true church. Something good did come out of this crazy dream episode for me though, it reminded me why I left in the first place.

I spent the weekend with my family and I’m still recovering people, really. I love my parents and my sister and my sisters gaggle of children very much. Even though a full 95% of what they talk about is the Mormon Church, and the other 5% are church related topics, I still love them because they are very nice people and they are very good to me and the kiddies. One, just one little one, of the highlights of the weekend was when my mother went on for a full 5 minutes about my nephews seemingly super human ability to use chop sticks. And my poor nephew, I could just see from his eyes that he was dying inside during the entire conversation, because it’s just chop sticks, people, chop sticks! But my mother is so sweet that she needs to make him feel special for every little accomplishment up to and including the use of chop sticks. How could you not love people like that? Really, how? I’m going to miss them, to be sure, but it will be somewhat nice to return to my areligious, cynical world where the use of chop sticks is really no big deal.

When my husband and I made the decision to raise our children without subjecting them directly to the tyranny of organized religion, we understood that this would not necessarily be the easiest path. We live in a State dominated by religion, a specific religion, that being the same religion that we were both born and raised in and of which exactly EVERY member of our extended families are a part. And in the face of this seemingly vertical battle against the oppressive love of people who wanted only to see us exalted and living with them throughout eternity, we made the choice that for us was the most genuine and true to ourselves.

The sad fact is that Mormons are taught that if you doubt Mormonism at all, then its because you are doing it wrong. You have an unresolved sin, you aren’t praying enough, you are currently sinning, you aren’t praying correctly, or you are again sinning with some sin on top. I’m sure our families are tortured with the thoughts of all our sins that have taken us away from the gospel and by the fact that we won’t be together with them forever in the Celestial Kingdom. Will they come visit us now, here on earth? No. But they stay awake at night crying that we won’t be spending the eternities with them. Go figure.

The truth is there was no praying error or grievous sin, it just turns out that Mormonism isn’t right for us. It isn’t what we believe, deep down in our hearts and souls, and once we figured that out we slept a lot better at night. Its turned out to be a little bit harder on the kids, at least socially anyway.

Another fact is that Mormons are taught that every member is a missionary. This means they are required to share the gospel with everyone they meet or risk losing their eternal salvation. They begin teaching this principle to children well before they teach them to sit quietly in sacrament meeting. Most of the adult members realize that it is socially unacceptable to try converting every one you know, usually sometime after they have had an hour long discussion with their first boyfriend about how Mormons are just plain better then everyone else and then punch him for swearing and sticking his tongue in your mouth. It’s the children though that, by GOD, take this principle to heart with all their might, mind, and strength. They just don’t always have their facts straight.

Its been the hardest on Sunny, maybe because she is older. I’ve heard her friends try to teach her primary songs and scriptures, and give her lengthy instructions on how to pray. She came to me rather upset one day because a friend had told her that if she didn’t get baptized she wouldn’t be able to get a drivers license. Another time I overheard this conversation,

Nameless Brainwashed Child says, “Did you know Heavenly Father created the earth and everything on it in six days?”

Sunny replied, “My dad said the earth was created from an explosion called the Big Bang, and everything on it from the process of evolution.”

At this point the N.B.C. actually became angry and half way shouted, “Well, your dad is a liar and you shouldn’t believe a word he says!”

I should have been angry with that kid and her ignorant self righteous bullshit, but really I was sad. I was sad because I was that kid once upon a time. I know she was only doing what she had been taught was perfectly acceptable by adults who should know better. And every time I think of it I am absolutely giddy that we got the fuck out.

I have been taking a little break from myself. Sounds nice in a way, huh? But actually I have had to have this break due to some life stress I’ve had of late. Life stress that’s caused by families, relationships, bills, debt, and JOBS THAT REFUSE TO PAY THEIR EMPLOYEES ON TIME. However, I will not comment further about work on the internet, because I’ve heard and taken to heart the advice of my friend Dooce.Her wise words of ‘Thou Shalt Not talk about work on the Internet’, unlike all the other Thou Shalt Nots that have been shoved in my face recently, I truly believe. And listen up people, here is why, because I trust the source! Even though I’ve never met Heather B. Armstrong in my life, I trust her more than any ancient mythological tale. I guess I trust her more because she isn’t trying to control me, or guilt me, or take my 10%…as far as I can tell.

Now I’m in the process of shaking off my stress and refocusing on my kids, my family, and my silly self as demonstrated in this little blog. The truth is its hard to stay depressed and stressed when you have a three year old running around attaching the word “bastard” on the end of every phrase he speaks, in SPITE of all warnings that the word “bastard” has a minimum age of use requirement of 5.

Last night my husband was in the hot tub with Sunny and 2 of our very Mormon, very republican nieces. My husband, who is neither republican or Mormon to a severe degree, had taught Sunny this joke, and she decided this was the perfect time to tell it. So she turns to her cousins and asks “Did you vote for George Bush?” They, this is how republican Mormon they are for a 10 year old and 7 year old, both replied, “YES!”, as proud and confident in their answer as they are of their testimony of the true and living gospel . And then Sunny excitedly deliverd the punch line “Well, THANKS FOR SCREWIN US!!!”… and at this point my husband died laughing, and the 2 cousins just sat there, confused. Finally the older one said, “I don’t get it”, and thats when Sunny had to turn to dad, having forgotten the next part, he told her “Now you say, OIL’S at $65 a barrell!!”, which she did, and they both had a good laugh. I can only imagine the complete and utter confusion my nieces experienced at this point, having never been exposed to such a blatant, crude, and anti-Dubba joke in their entire lives, ever! Afterwards the cousins still both said “I still don’t get it”… and I’m pretty sure they never will.