Why Did You Get Married?

This thought has been on my mind quite a bit recently. I can probably answer it in many different ways, at different times of my life.

As a teenager, I wanted someone to talk to. I wanted romance and honesty and acceptance. I can't say I put that into action. When I did start dating, I was clumsy and didn't even know how to initiate romance. I was horrible at it. I felt that a woman wanted sweeping jestures. Instead, I didn't even know how to do the small things right. I felt that it should come naturally, and for some things, it did. Still, I didn't do anything too well. I'm sure every introvert out there could say the same.

Hmmm. Even the struggle for acceptance when the words "I love you." finally slipped out of my lips for the first time.

After my mission, I wanted to have fun more than anything else, after that miserable experience. I wanted someone with a sense of humor and interesting stories to tell. I didn't get that with my first more serious girlfriends after my mission. I wanted someone that could break me out of my introverted shell, push me to my limits, let me grab life by the throat. I wanted adventure. I wanted broken boundaries. I wanted to feel a freedom of thought that I hadn't experienced with some of my other girlfriends I have had. It wasn't that they hindered anything, but that I hadn't found the way to express anything.

I started dating a few girls quite seriously. They enjoyed my presence. That was new to me. I was more given to the chase, and these women didn't make me feel that I had to work hard, to guess what was wanted. They were enjoyable to be around. One clearly liked me but the one I was very interested in seemed to be more distant. As time went on and I had to evaluate my options. I would love to be in an exclusive relationship with either of these women, but I got tired of guessing with one of them, so I stopped dating her. My only reservation was the one I was leaving had a very interesting life and I was sad that I wasn't to find out more, but I wanted someone that wanted to be with me, demonstrably so. The girl I chose to focus on was from the midwest, Ohio to be more exact. I really wanted to stay away from the midwest, and that wasn't a plus, but she liked me, and I liked her.

Then I got a call. "I have cookies." I have since found out that it is almost cliche for a girl to do that. Still, it was a change; a drastic change from the girl I had tried to get close to unsuccessfully, the one with the interesting stories. I no longer wanted ambiguity in my dating. I wanted clarity.

She took me to Disneyland. I'd never been to Disneyland. Or California. When we went to her hometown, I saw scenery that astounded and amazed me. In her hometown, we stopped by a lava flow. A lava flow in the middle of town! Volcanoes were here! My God! This was so different from the sand and pine trees that I thought was my lot in life.

I wanted adventure. I still do.

I don't know what anyone else wanted out of marriage, but I think after much thought, that is what I wanted. Getting married to the person that was likely to provide it is a good reason, isn't it?

RaNt (Part 4.11 §10 ¶ 3 of the Trilogy of Fear) General Conference and Mission Health

I'm going to talk about religion. If you don't want to read it, leave now.

In preparation of the first part of this essay, I want to preface this with a small setup. Much of my life I spent time consciously “dismissing” things that didn’t fit in with the way my life was headed or things that disagreed with my feelings on how life should be lived. I dismissed friends that felt differently about religion or sex or politics. I built a self-imposed echo chamber around my life because to actually listen, to have sympathy or understanding, might create a conflict.

In the past few years I’ve realized that some of my life has fallen out of the narrative that I felt I was expected to live. I became open to listening to other’s experiences and feelings and opinions. I began to understand them on their own terms and found so many wonderful new friends and new ways of looking at life.

This following video explores someone whom I would have dismissed in a different part of my life. She didn’t fit in how I felt a woman should feel. She was “other”. Now, I can understand where she is coming from, even if I don’t fully empathize. But this is her opinion and she has strong feelings about it and I completely respect that. She yearns for a divine feminine. She wants to be understood on her own level, as a woman, in a male dominated religion. My word, how wonderful, and angering, I find her words. This woman deserves to be heard, to be understood and to be respected.

This woman, like all others, matters.

For the rest of this rant, see this story on Missionary Health.

I'm going to go once more to the well of my mission. I'm going to be honest about it. If you don't want to hear what I feel, then why are you reading this? Anyway, here it goes.

I went on my mission for the best of intentions. I was thankful to God for what He did for me. I had a bad relationship with my parents for a time and going to church helped me repair that. I thuroughly enjoyed going to a church school as I could focus on my education the way I thought I should. I found some great friends, dating a beautiful woman and I just wanted to be the best person I could be, The people in my life deserved the best I could be and this was how I was told I could accomplish that.

I had a terrible time. Depression gripped me like grim death. I hated what I was expected to do as faith and religion were intensely personal to me. All I could foresee was not helping my fellow man but selling God, opening up parts of me that I didn't want to open for ridicule. Instead of the acceptance I craved, I was throwing myself into a pool of rejection. Guilt and shame kept piling up on me. Unlike the article, I did see someone about the depression. I can't remember much about the meeting but hysterical crying. I was a mess. I was told that it was suggested that I do not leave on my mission. With that, I want to refer to my first quote of the article.

Missionaries who do get sick may be reluctant to report any serious problem to an authority figure, in part because they fear getting sent home early, according to most Mormons I spoke to. Every former missionary I spoke with told me that those who leave a mission prematurely are ostracized and stigmatized. They struggle to find a spouse willing to marry them or friends willing to be seen with them. Friends and family presume you weren’t righteous enough to serve—or you just couldn’t hack it. Even missionaries who return home due to serious medical conditions such as cancer are suspect. As one former missionary told me, “You’ll do almost anything to avoid being sent home early.”

This. This kept me on my mission. If I went home, I would come home to NOTHING. My girlfriend would certainly leave me. My friends would leave. I would have to go to another school because BYU wouldn't accept me back (I had a bad last semester and was counting on Returned Missionary or RM status to return.) I still believed in the church, but I knew what my life would be like. I stayed. My depression began to consume me. I was losing weight and losing sleep and I began to hate the life I enjoyed just a few months earlier.

I was called to Switzerland. A more beautiful place on the earth you will never find. I was broke, starving and hoping that some money would come my way. I lost more weight and felt so far removed from the things I wanted to be grateful for. Eventually, I had lost enough weight and was so devastated that I was sent stateside in hopes money and a bit of positivity would come my way.

I still lost weight. I was still depressed. I wasn't suicidal, but I wanted to disappear. I wanted it all to go away.

So, I stayed out. I think I was about 50 or so pounds lighter when I returned home ( I had lost 40 before coming back stateside). The knowledge that I was happy once was what had kept me going, that I was going to come home, meet again my wonderful friends and date and get to know new wonderful people who wanted to be around me. Leaving was the only thing that kept me going, and the irony is not lost on me. I still believed, but my mission time was the darkest part of my life and I hated the idea that it would define me. I never mentioned it but a sentence at a time. Indeed, this next quote summed it up for me.

I found Mike, along with many of the former missionaries I interviewed for this story, through Sick RMs, a website that gathers the stories of ill and injured missionaries. (RMs are returned missionaries.) “I am now 48 years old,” Mike told me, “and I still have recurring nightmares about being ‘called’ back on a new mission. These nightmares are draining, feverish events that leave me cold, yet sweaty, at the same time. My mission is my deepest regret.”

I still feel I lost most of what was me during my mission. It is only now, as I approach my 50's, that I have a feeling that I am returning. That is why I'm as verbose on this as I am. I need to be honest about my life so that my friends and those around me can understand. I'm tired of being quiet about it. I want to be known.

I am thankful for those friends who have stayed by me. I no longer believe in the church and I try not to be overbearing on the matter. I realize that others had very different experiences on their mission and with the church. This was mine. I don't think anyone I know dismissed it. I know my wonderful wife hasn't. She's had to put up with a lot of things lately as I try to sort out all the things I had hidden down the rabbit hole. I can't tell her how much I appreciate all the time we sit talking about things. I think both of us have come out better for all of this.

You Oughta Know My Fight Song

Many years ago Alanis Morriset released a song called "You Oughta Know" and I liked that song. It was once panned on a radio station that I listened to as "The Psycho Bitch Song". I chuckled at the time as it being something clever, but I have long since rethought that position.

The song is reportedly about Alanis' affair with David Coulier of Full House fame. Not having been in an affair or really knowing the mechanics of that kind of relationship, there is a lot of information in the song that I can't empathize with. However, this is a song of a woman wronged. Those are genuine emotions being described. She has been used and discarded. She has every right to complain about the lack of respect and care that she has been handed. I've tried most of my life to be respectful of the women in my life, most of the time being completely amazed by them, but there have been selfish times where I didn't act properly, said things I shouldn't have. I can't imagine doing it on this level.

Recently another song has come out by another woman titled "Fight Song". Another song of empowerment (without a man in the picture at all, which is great). I have spent a good deal talking and writing to women who have come out of a patriarchal organization and I'm still fascinated by how incredible the transformation of these women are reclaiming their lives. It has given me a lot to think about and how I don't want my daughter to be in a position to have her life and goals in any way lessened by anyone or anything.

Huh. You know, I had a stalker in college. I called her that most of my time since. I've since learned how unfair that was. I know by my own experience how powerful expectations and failed results, for that matter, can work on a person and push them a bit over the edge. Yeah, I was a good date and I had that magic "Returned Missionary" label. I felt my mission was a failure because of my depression and my inability to sell God with any success. As I was pushed towards a mission most of my teen years, she was pushed to marriage and only to an RM. If you want to get to heaven, you need to do that. God, what a thing to live with. So here I was a guy right off the mission who had a good year previous to think about how to date and be someone that a woman wanted to be around. She hadn't dated much at all and I was more than willing to listen to her. We could vent our frustrations to each other. She saw me as the one. I'm sure she felt levels of panic when I went out with someone else.

It didn't end well. She threatened someone else I was seeing, not even dating really. I understand what it is like to see expectations fall around you and being impotent to do anything about it. Why it took me years to realize it, I am truly sorry. It doesn't excuse the threats, but I now understand it. I hope she found a way to be happy. I hope she realized her potential, and that her life and happiness isn't tied around the expectations of a man or of an institution that tells her how to live her life.

I hope that my daughter finds her own fight song, and doesn't put up with any male dominated crap. I want to to be happy with who she is and make the decisions for her own life, for her own happiness. I want her to be strong. I want all the women in my life to be strong. It is so much more interesting that way.

You Oughta Know
Fight Song

Do Not Remember Me as a Keeper of Secrets

For my last road trip of the season, I decided to take a slightly familiar road. I have long since run out of unique ways to reach the Mississippi River from my home. The default road has been and always will be familiar at this point. I can feel the complacency of Autumn slide up next to me and my yearning for difference starting to wane. I guess that is to be expected, but I still resent it.

I start my ride south and west along a now memorized road. I stop and take some photos of the remnants of the passage of a tornado earlier in the year; the restaurant that stood here now a memory. I curse my memory for not remembering to bring earplugs to quiet the roar of air in my ears. I stopped at a hardware store to pick up some.

Farther south I stop on the interstate bridge and take a picture of the canal underneath. That was the canal I biked earlier this year, putting an end to a 5-year desire to traverse its length. I go by the ditch I fell into the year previous on my trip along the length of the Illinois River, the source of a well read blog post of mine. I quickly turn onto a road that travels through Bradford. It holds some unique memories. On one of the family's trips to Nauvoo, we stopped to let Hayden play in a playground there. For some reason, it has burned itself into my memory and I feel compelled to visit it on occasion. This road is also unique in that it sports one of the few tree-covered stretches of road in Illinois. It also holds some unique abandoned buildings and some amusingly named rivers. I pass the church where the police have a speed trap and I continue my journey towards Nauvoo. I stop briefly at a road along the bluff where Hayden and I coasted down to the valley, hitting 70 mph from a stop at the top of the bluff.

I go to Nauvoo with some bittersweet memories. Tracy and I have tried to spend at least some time there every year of our time in Illinois. We had anniversaries and camping trips with the kids. I watched the Temple site go from a hole in the ground to a new temple. I spent a few weekends as a tour guide during the open house and Tracy and I had the opportunity to go through as Patrons once. That becomes hard to do once you have young children. Mostly we came to camp at the state park there once we became parents. When I arrived, I made my obligatory trip through the state park as it had changed slightly from earlier trips. I pulled the bike into the parking structure and changed into my street shoes. I took a trip around the temple, taking pictures along the way. I then headed up the street for my real goal, my present to myself, ice cream from Grandpa John's. I know I've eaten here before but I can't recall ever eating ice cream. I ordered a raspberry shake and vowed to send a photo to George in our continuing saga of shake pics. Don't ask. Another persistent memory I have of Nauvoo is when I traveled here once with my parents and my dad ordered a beer, Coors, from a restaurant that no longer is in town. He was told that he was on the wrong side of the river for that as Coors is only found on the West side of the Mississippi. Even in a town on the river, I felt the other side was still prohibitively far away. Funny how some things stick with you.

As I sit on a bench eating my shake, a treat that is getting rare in my post-diabetes life, I contemplate my last camping trip here. I was in the middle of one of the most challenging times of my life. My faith was slipping away because of the studies I made of church history. I had determined that it wasn't intellectually honest of me to avoid all the negative histories of my faith. These were histories written by faithful members but I discounted them because they didn't fit the way I wanted to view the church. I had known some of this for a very long time, but I never let the implications sink in. I didn't let the truth of it all to register because of what I used the church for. I had known that Joseph Smith was polygamous. I had known that he lied to Emma and the Church about it. I had read a decade earlier the text of The Nauvoo Expositor, the paper that Joseph destroyed and eventually led to his death, and found no untruth in it. Still, I didn't let it register. Only recently did I study about his coersion of families and women as young as 14 to marry him. If you were a female and served as a nanny or foster-daughter in his home, there was a good chance a sexual relationship would occur. I couldn't help but read Section 132 and its treatment of women as reward as something more and more foreign and unwilling to accept. I knew that if what was documented by faithful members at the time was happening to me, I would have Joseph arrested. It was an inescapable conclusion for me.

I had read about the origin of the temple and Joseph's connection to Masonry. I had read about the origin of the endowment and it's connection to Blue Lodge Masonry. Much I had already known but it didn't fit what I needed, what I had desired from the church, so it didn't register. Even now, the subtle untruths of the reconstructed city of Nauvoo grated on me. The avoidance of calling some of the buildings after their purpose irritated me. The Seventies Hall was a Masonic Temple. Joseph had tried unsuccessfully to get a master lodge in Nauvoo and so the endowment was established in the church's temple.

The unjust persecution of the church became something a bit more understandable. There was disenfrachisement of the native population and having a militia in Nauvoo as large as the standing army of the entire US was something that would worry me too. No, it wouldn't incite me to be a mob member but I also understand human nature a bit more than I used to.

I remember on that trip looking over to Tracy at some point and saying "Do you know all that went on here?" I don't recall a response, but it became so difficult for me to be there, I didn't forsee many trips to this place in the future.

So we weathered the storm that was our marriage for a year or so. We are now at a better place and I can believe in the person I've become. I'm sitting outside the temple completely comfortable with that arrangement. I'm saying goodbye. I don't know if I'll be by this way again. I don't need to be by here again. Aside from memories, this place has no hold on me any longer. I grieve a bit. This place loomed large in my life for some time. Now, it is a place on my travels through life.

After a short stop in Ft. Madison where I enjoy some quiet time by the river and watch trains crossing the bridge, I head home again. Life goes on, and so must I.

*Title of this post is taken from an adaptation from a line of the poem Movement Song by Audre Lorde, for no reason in particular.