A dear friend went to dinner with me this week and reminded me of these qualities. My first response was to say, “I am tired of being resilient and strong. Can I skip a couple of years and come back to it?”
My friend laughed and said she understood that, too. And she does. I have truly extraordinary friends. It is a constant surprise and a wonder to me, because I don’t feel like I deserve them and I’m not sure I always even understand what friendship is or what one does to deserve it. Having many wonderful friends has been something that has come to me after my daughter’s stillbirth in 2005 and even more since the divorce in 2020.
I am surprised about friends like this because I feel like I have become more and more excruciatingly honest as I’ve aged and as a Mormon, I believed that telling people honestly about my weaknesses, my real messy feelings, my doubts and my dark moments would make me LESS likely to have friends. Mormonism preaches perfection and it also has a culture that encourages people pretending to perfection when they can’t actually achieve it (which no one can, though by God I tried!).
Mormons really and truly believe that being close to perfect will draw other people to investigate and eventually join the church because they want to be perfect, also. And hey, we have a formula to get you there. It will take six hundred items and six million years, but boy will it be worth it! (Also pay ten percent of your income or you won’t go to the special heaven.) Look at the ad campaigns that Mormons run, or the movies they produce, or the books that sell in the church-operated bookstores. All about people with the tiniest of problems so they can fix them easily enough and move onto perfection. Messy, nasty problems not allowed here. We’re not like that. We have “the truth.”
But if you actually look at the ads that work? I suspect they are always about real humans who happen to be Mormon. And that is what I was trying to do when I wrote The Bishop’s Wife. Maybe the only reason it sold was because the readers were rubber-necking and enjoying watching all of the weirdness of Mormonism. But I didn’t believe that when I wrote it and mostly don’t now, either. I think people liked Linda because she was a real human being. She fought with her husband at times. She struggled with her kids. She had an unresolved tragedy in her past. She argued with other church members. She did infuriatingly illegal things (as all fun amateur sleuths do).
Non-Mormon readers liked the book because it was so damned relatable. No perfect people here. No Stepford Wives trying to fake you into believing some unreal version of reality.
And Mormon readers liked it (the ones who read it and did like it) because they’d never seen a real depiction of Mormonism before. Because that’s not what Mormons say about themselves.
(The Mormons who hated it hated it because they thought I was sharing dirty laundry and they thought it would be a better missionary tool if I wrote about how perfect Mormons are in real life and how they definitely never commit murders. But hey, those people can write their own books and try to get them published by a national press and get reviewed by the NYT. Enjoy!)
Art isn’t about perfection, actually. It isn’t about you learning all the skills that you will need to create a perfect depiction of humanity. Art is messy and that is what makes it beautiful. If you knock all the edges off, it’s less beautiful, not more so.
And here I go back into friends. I don’t think my friends care if I ever write a best-selling book again. They may or may not have ever read one of my books. They may or may not think my crocheted wall art is amazing. They don’t love me because I’m working on being perfect or because I sacrifice so damned hard for “the truth.” They actually love me because I’m so messy and so honest about it. So raw, so unrelentingly honest. I refuse to tell the clean version of my past or my present self.
Yes, I’m strong. Sometimes.
I’m also sensitive and broken and I am desperately depressed. A lot. I can’t always say that I want to be alive. Or even that I want to want to be alive.
I love fiercely. I will do anything for my kids. I will throw myself in front of a train for them. Or drain my bank accounts for them. I will make myself hurt so that they don’t have to. I know I made some very bad mistakes, but none of those mistakes were made because I cared more about myself than about them.
I’m resilient. I don’t give up. I just signed up for a handful of races that are super short this year because I’m still working through a long-standing Achilles injury. I can hold pain like no one else. And this isn’t always a good feature of me. But it does get things done. That’s not why I signed up for races, though. I did it because it’s a sign of me showing hope in the future, that this injury IS going to get better and that I can get people on my team who are smart enough to help me move to that future.
I suspect people love that about me, too. That as much as I bitch about how much I hate this life, I am always ALWAYS trying to make it better, for me and for everyone around me.
(Link to The Bishop’s Wife: https://www.amazon.com/Bishops-Wife-Linda-Wallheim-Mystery/dp/1616959541/)
You hit the nail on the head for me. I love you for who you are for real. I love how real you are. I love how honest you are. I love that you make sense to me. I love that for me, you are my representation. I have few of those so far because I'm not really sure what I'm doing. But if I "grow up to be like you", I'm not going to be mad about it. I'm also not going to take that for granted. I'll have an inkling of what it took to survive to be you. And I will know I'll be ok because like you, i have to be and will find the way to be, come what may. If for nothing else, but to prove them wrong... whoever "them" happen to be, at the time. I know how modest you are and how carefully you do not wish to be idealized, but I also thank you for daring to show up real for me. I know there's others like me reading. Others who need to read.
You are amazing, Mette. Never doubt that.