A Christmas Sweater

I've recently undergone a faith transition out of the LDS (Mormon) church. While some things are LDS specific, I hope this helps anyone who is going through a rough time spiritually. It's the story that I wish I told my family, but even though they're supportive and understanding, I didn't work up the courage to tell them without the distancing power of the internet

If I’m being really honest, then this all started when I went to the temple for the first time. Not because like too many others I found pain in the ceremony. I was excited to be there with my parents, and a lot of the actual words slipped right over my head. What I remember most was an incredible sense of peace. I think it’s because I received my endowments prior to joining the military, rather than getting married or serving a mission. All through boot camp, when things got tough, I would lie in my rack and try to remember the beautiful sense of peace and calm and friendly people dressed in white who didn’t make me feel awkward or uncomfortable when I didn’t know what to do. I decided that I wanted to be a temple worker. I wrap the warm comfortable memories around me like a sweater and I make it through boot camp.

Moving forward a few years, I meet all sorts of people in the navy, including my new husband. Outside of conservative Utah, I hear about different viewpoints. Some I agree with, some I don’t, some make me think. Then I get pregnant. I get a lot of hateful feedback from the chain of command that doesn’t want to move me from sea duty to shore duty. For the first time in my life, I hear that motherhood isn’t the greatest thing on earth. Instead, it’s selfish to my shipmates and lazy on my account. Never mind that I wasn’t just sleeping around on the ship, or that my husband and I have been married for a decent bit, and have never been stationed on the same ship. I recoil from the haters, and cling more to the church, where people tell me congratulations. But now my beautiful warm sweater of church has a few tears.

Pregnancy does something to me apart from rearranging my insides to accommodate my growing child. I realize that pregnancy is something that is incredibly intimate. Someone at work talks about one of the presidential debates and mentions abortion. I realize that don’t accept what I’ve been told all my life anymore. Instead, I think there is not a man on the planet who should have any say at all about abortion except the father of the child, and even then his say is minimal. No one who hasn’t been pregnant knows much involvement it takes to create another person.

I go to get sealed in the temple. I’m surrounded by happy bubbly early-twenty-somethings in white dresses. Five months pregnant and I barely fit my temple dress. I wonder if I should tell them that marriage is more than a beautiful day with family and a white dress, then I decide they’ll ignore any advice I have to give. I’m in the sealing room surrounded by loving family members and missing my youngest sister, who isn’t endowed and so can’t be there. Later, I’ll realize how horrible that requirement is. With my husband sitting next to me instead of a future possibility, I realize that putting all the burden on him to get us to heaven is ridiculous. We work together. Always have. We got each other through a tough training program because we work together. I promise myself to him, and wait expectantly for him to promise himself to me. He doesn’t. I wonder if he even noticed.

I’m growing. Not just my belly making my temple dress too tight, so I decide I won’t go again until after the baby is born. My worldview is growing, changing. Things I never thought to question are suddenly looming in front of me demanding answers.

Then I become a mother. It’s not the highest calling of womanhood. It’s certainly not the equivalent of the priesthood. It’s tiredness and crankiness and without joy. First I wonder what’s wrong with me that I don’t love my own child, but then I wonder why I was told that I would automatically. I’m not expected to love anyone else automatically. I take care of her because I have too, and wonder why I was told this was supposed to be the pinnacle of my existence. I know there are women who are called to be mothers. Since I am not, I wonder for the first time since Young Women what my spiritual calling in life is. I remember the beautiful peace and calm of the temple on my very first trip. I wonder again if I could be a temple worker, but I can’t anymore – not because it’s two hours away and I’m in the military, but because I have a child at home. Cutting off a spiritual calling because of fulfilling another spiritual calling? It makes no sense.

Then my husband is out to sea, and I’m alone with a newborn and working long hours myself. At two in the morning when she is fussy, there is nobody I can call to come over. So I follow a strong prompting and I give her a blessing as her mother. It feels right. It feels beautiful. Suddenly, I have a stronger connection to my daughter than I’ve ever had before. I know my spiritual calling, but I don’t name it even in my heart, because as a woman it’s wrong for me to want.

But I’ve already grown, and I can’t make myself shrink again. I try. I try to keep wearing my old sweater of the church, even though it doesn’t really fit me anymore. There are a few tears, and the seams are getting lopsided from being pulled too hard. The sleeves are all stretched out as I try to make them just a little bit longer. I know it doesn’t fit me, but I don’t have anything else to wear.

I look around for other sweaters. I try a few different church, but they don’t fit me either. They don’t keep me warm and comforted. My faith in the truthfulness of the church dissolves, and I finish my time in the navy, and all of a sudden, I’ve lost my two biggest communities. I’m naked little me in a very large world.

Left all alone with only myself, I accept who I am. I accept myself even though few others will because the church doesn’t recognize matriarch as a calling and I’m too young, not even thirty yet. But that’s what I am. Not a mother, like I was told to be, a matriarch. I feel a craving to bless people, to officiate in the priesthood ordinances that are my birthright, but I can’t. Even though I recognize this calling as from my Heavenly Parents and am finally ready to act on it, there’s no one that I know who’s religious enough to want a blessing who recognizes that I can give them.

It hurt so much to give up on my favorite old sweater. I haven’t been able to throw it out yet, and I look at it with longing sometimes, remember what used to be. But I just can’t keep forcing myself inside, trying to convince myself that there’s still a bit of warmth left. I’m working on making myself a new one, but I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s a long, slow process. Meanwhile, it’s December, and the cold Washington rains come pounding down almost non-stop. What I really want for Christmas is to find my spiritual community where I will be accepted as I am, where I can wrap myself up in warmth and loving kindness for people who might not fit somewhere else.