Someone on the DAMU boards made a happy comment about the lucky young generation of ex-mormons; how they have so much more hope and so much less to be bitter about.
That, and discussions with ex-mo friends that have been percolating in a slow automatic drip, made me realize that I escaped from the church relatively unscathed.
I broke away at 20 years old. Of the Big 3 life decisions — college, marriage, and parenthood — I only made the first one while in the church. Even parts of my college choice showed that I was starting to break away from the church: instead of choosing the major my parents wanted me to pick — music, a womanly pursuit and a good major, they figured, for a SAHM — I chose something else.
All of the things I’m seeing in my TBM friends’ lives, and some of the things that are wreaking a messy aftermath of havoc in my ex-mo friends’ lives, are things I didn’t have to deal with.
The church never got to touch my budding college sex life, so I got to start out at an amazing level of awesome. On a smaller level, the church never got to have a say on which day or which place I got married in or what I wore or didn’t wear, or what we got to say in our vows. I think that the actual wedding details are not a big deal; a wedding is unimportant compared to a marriage. But our life on the big level, the marriage level, wasn’t touched by the church either. I partly got super lucky in this because my husband, although he was raised in the church, was raised completely different than me as far as church goes, and he had had a foot out the door his whole life. It wasn’t just a foot out of the door as far as spiritual belief, but about an entire world frame. He was a feminist, a humanist, and a utilitarian rationalist when I met him. Being with him put me light years forward and let me work out my Mo-problems in a very safe stable place.
And thank the flying spider spaghetti pig monster, we didn’t have any babies! The Mormon viewpoint that I didn’t shed, though, was that at some point we would have babies, and good people ought to have babies. I’ve recently been able to let that one go. I felt various pressures to have babies, and Mormonism cast its shadows on my mind, but in our practical non-church life actually having a baby was an option we never even came close to.
I’ve often been told how lucky I am to have gotten out when I did, but I never realized how free I am. I’M FREE! Very free.