Love & Sects IRL pt.2
A while back, I posted the story of how my wife and I started dating, how my Mormon family cracked down on us, and how I had to escape into the night to start a new life. (Find that Here)
I’m finally back with part two.
I was surprised to discover, at the end of my teens, that I am a stubborn person; staunchly never-say-die. This served me well when my family was denying me privacy, and trying to force me apart from the girl I loved. My stubbornness made me creative and adaptable in pursuit of my emancipation and reunification with Amanda. Unfortunately, I was also committed to staying in the church.
What I had been through should have been enough to drive me out. Before I moved out, my bishop had invited me into his office. He compared my girlfriend, a whole-ass person with feelings and agency, to a pebble in my shoe that needed to be removed! There wasn’t a Mormon authority figure in my home town that hadn’t been primed to see me as a prodigal son at best, a pariah at worst. But when I moved to West Virginia, the members were not so sanctimonious. They were generally poorer, less educated, and more forgiving than the ward I left. I felt okay.
I got a job working the grill at McDonald’s. It wasn’t much, but it was stable while the US economy was crumbling in 2008. By that summer, Amanda had graduated, and I was staying in a camper outside her mother’s trailer. We spent all our free time together. We watched scores of DVDs, and tried to stay cool. We were “living in sin,” by some estimations. We were never going to stay “chaste” long enough to qualify for temple recommends, so we started planning to be civilly wed.
During this time, we had no real contact with my blood relations. Reconciliation was okay not something I was sure I wanted. Against my better judgement, Amanda and I decided to speak to my family at Stake Conference. There were hugs and tears; not the sorts of apologies we were owed, but they took us to Olive Garden, and were affable enough. I felt okay.
It was a Wednesday in mid November that I told my mother that Amanda and I would be married that Sunday after church. My mother informed me that she and father couldn’t leave church early to watch the first of their children’s weddings; their callings as second counselor in the bishopric, and Primary president were just too important.
It was a *very* humble affair. No decorations, few guests, donated cookies for refreshments. Amanda’s family, all non-Mormons, made it out to support us.
I found out later that my mother had called up our bishop the night before, and asked him to not perform the ceremony.
We existed in the lazy bliss of new marriage. We got our first apartment. Our bishop gave us his late mother-in-law’s old car. We started to rise in the ranks of our ward; Amanda in the YW presidency, me bouncing between teaching Elders and Deacons quorums. We continued trying to patch things up with my side of the family. They were still chilly and judgmental, but “family is forever,” right?
At the time, the church was still making civilly married couples wait a year before they could be sealed. As the months ticked down, we wanted to get ourselves ready. We got our (rather underwhelming) patriarchal blessings, we took a temple-prep course (that really didn’t prepare us), and we paid off our outstanding tithing debt (which we couldn’t really afford).
My parents were unwilling to drive an hour to visit us, so we would brave the mountainous road, and go to their house on an almost monthly basis. During our visits, Amanda, always a voracious reader, started borrowing the books of the “Work And The Glory” series. While the books are written from a faithful perspective, they mention things that Amanda had not been told about during her conversion. In fact, when she asked her Mormon friends if Joseph Smith had been a polygamist, they lied to her face.
When the day of our endowments and sealing arrived, Amanda was already squirming from all the cognitive dissonance. Her shelf was unstable. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but I watched the shelf break.
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I thought I only needed one more chapter to wrap up our faith transition story, but this will have to spill into a part 3, coming soon.