I Love Mormons

I have so many complaints about the Mormon church, but the truth is, I still think of myself as Mormon. I took my father’s last name back after the divorce, even though the main reason I’d changed it when I married was that I hated him and didn’t want to carry his name. But he died only a few months before the divorce started, and now his name doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it used to. It means my brothers and sisters, and it means me as a child. It means how I grew up. It means the kind of Mormonism that defined me, not the Mormonism that exists today.

Yes, some of the edges have been knocked off of Mormonism. I’m glad about some of those things. I don’t have much nostalgia for the days of polygamy or even the days of my teen years when older married men hit on me with impunity by telling me that they imagined I’d be a second or third wife in heaven or when it was legal again. I don’t wish back the days when Mormons were openly racist and defended it as “God’s will,” nor do I wish for the days when disabled people were said to have been “less valiant” in the pre-existence, which is why their only chance for a body in this mortal life was a broken one.

But there are things I wish back. There used to be an entire world of Mormon folk art that has been pushed away year by year by the very correlation that was supposed to make us less cringey and acceptable to other Christians. The idea that other Christians (especially the evangelicals with which current Mormons are making their political bed) are ever going to accept us as one of the group is sadly amusing. But my childhood was filled with “road shows,” and as a kid, I imagined that I’d write those for a wider, wordly audience. That was part of my initial idea of the kind of writer I was going to be. A good writer. But also a Mormon writer. 

I’m proud of learning to sew and to quilt by hand at my mother’s side. I have many fond memories of afternoons and evenings spent underneath a quilt while my mother and grandmother talked about adult things. I have fond memories, as well, of when my mother decided I was old enough to learn to quilt myself and she gave me a chair at her side. I don’t have the wedding quilt she made for me anymore (we wore it out and whatever remained of it was left at the marital home), but I made quilts for my kids and quilted them by hand as she taught me. I wasn’t as good as she was and she wasn’t as good as my grandmother was, but that is somehow how it goes from generation to generation.

I am much better at crocheting and knitting than either of them were, however. My oldest sister taught me how to knit and I was terrible at it for at least a decade, dropping stitches everywhere and making nothing that was usable in any way. When people see me knitting now with my eyes closed or while answering phone calls at my financial job, they are always astounded that I can do that. Yes, after thirty years of knitting, it has become easy for me. Even patterns are often easy, if I know them well. 

Crocheting I had to reteach myself when I was in my twenties, working on a king-sized sunflower afghan that I still have. I can see the mistakes now, where I turned the pieces upside down and rightside up willy-nilly (as my mother would say), but I still love it. It’s beautiful and is often displayed on my bed or my walls, which is where many of my pieces are. I crochet things mostly out of my head, using yarn that I like after decades of feeling uncomfortable with color and how it made me stand out. A Mormon woman doesn’t draw attention to herself. But I do now.

I love many Mormons. I love many parts of Mormonism. I still love The Book of Mormon. At least on some days. I have a whole series of books I’ve written as fan fiction that are published and well-loved by certain groups of Mormonism. I don’t think of it as scripture, at least not in the sense that I believe it was written by ancient American peoples on gold plates. I think that Joseph Smith was an author, as I am, and he wrote what fit into his time period because we can’t write anything else. But I think there’s an art and a beauty in it–along with prejudice and horror. I wish the book had its proper place in American literary history. Maybe it will get there. Or maybe I’m just plain wrong.

I also love the down-to-earth Mormon people I know. My Uncle Worthy used to say sometimes that he was “the only worthy one in the whole damned family” which got a laugh, but the man always had a foul mouth on him. He grew up in rural Idaho among pigs and he knew how to curse a blue streak. I named my oldest son after him, and even if he hates the name and refuses to use it, it’s the most Mormon part of him. And he’s allowed to reject that even if I don’t.

I love my oldest brother, who helped me financially through my divorce. Sometimes his super duper Mormonness drives me crazy. Other times, he tells me stories about the service he has wanted to do all his life, and which he retired ten years early to achieve, and I can’t help but see that Mormons are good people. They will work all day to help someone else. And get up early the next day and start it all over again. They will work until their hands bleed, and keep going after they put gloves on so the blood doesn’t stain anything important.

Mormons are the best people. Some of them still claim me and I suppose I claim them. Most days. 

I think the Mormon church as an institution makes them worse than they would be without Mormonism. It makes them more prejudiced and it encourages them to do less careful thinking and it steals their pennies. It turns women into servants of men and often does lifelong damage to them as it did to me. But it’s like an old broken-down house that I grew up in. I still drive by it sometimes and go and look around, remembering the good stuff and the bad. I’m not always glad that I turned out who I am, but it’s true that I wouldn’t be this person if I hadn’t been born Mormon. I literally cannot imagine who I would be. Not me, in any way, shape or form.

Some days I wish I could erase Mormonism and all its history from the planet. But not most days. Not today.