the summer i was a CA was the summer i first stopped going to church. since some of us always had to work sunday, we would essentially scavenge for wards to attend with whoever was also not working. i went a couple of times, but it was the first time in my life that i was sitting in sacrament meeting and i thought to myself, "i don't belong here." maybe it was the ward we went to most often, with those shiny perfect people on a level of tryhardness and beauty that i would never approach in the shiny and perfect business building that felt nothing like church. this is a time in my life when i was really, really screwed up. dh was in the mtc and the night after he was supposed to have flown out (he was actually delayed), i walked up to the mtc front gates after midnight and paced there and had a panic attack while sobbing (the same thing that happened the day he got endowed, actually, except i was by the field house). so i wasn't in the best place anyway.

fast forward to the summer of being engaged. dh and i lived in the same apartment complex and were in the same ward. we went to church a few times and then pretty much stopped. that ward was horrible. the thing i remember most about going to that ward was how amazingly beautiful my new engagement ring diamond sparkled in the dim lights of the room where we had sacrament meeting. we soon got shoved into the marriage and family prep class. interesting to note that i was not a feminist in my final form yet, and the first sunday of marriage and family prep we talked about men being the head of the household and i distinctly remember commenting and saying it made perfect sense because the priesthood has an order and a wife is a counselor to her husband just the say uchtdorf is a counselor to monson. (i was obviously still struggling hard with cognitive dissonance and going through all the ways i could calm my feminist self with traditional lds answers.) pretty quickly, though, the class became people going on and on about their lovey dovey gospel stuff and dh and i were definitely like "how bout we marriage and family prep at home instead," and we did.

we blamed our absence on wedding planning but really we were just enjoying the quiet of the apartments during church, and my relief society president was having none of it. she obviously thought i was a poor wayfaring lost sheep drowning myself by the wayside and assigned herself to be my visiting teaching companion. i remember her actually saying one time: "the hardest part for me about the gospel is that you can't force people to do the thing they should do." that really didn't bode well for her since she was weeks away from serving her mission, which i'm sure was an 18 month dark period of severe depression for her as she tried to berate and force everyone she met to do what she thought was right. but first, that summer we were engaged, she practiced on me.

she would schedule our appointments for whenever she felt was a good time, without consulting me. there were a couple times i was legitimately busy, as my mom was making trips down from out of state to do wedding stuff with me. but she would never budge, and she would always call and text me without stopping until i told her i'd be there. she was usually rude right to my face. one time she called to say she was coming over early before our appointment (don't remember why). i told her i was in the middle of something so i would come meet her where we had agreed. well she came right over anyway and let herself into my room without asking. i reminded her i was going to meet her in a bit and she said, "no we're going to meet right now." she wanted to say a prayer and so i told her, let's go into the front room (our room was a pigsty and also my personal space which i hadn't invited her into). she said, "no, we need to pray in here, i'm not comfortable praying out there." so we did.

she was the embodiment of everything i hated about mormon people. i would only meet more of her in the place we lived as newlyweds, and that was the end for me. i guess ragging on mormons as a lifelong mormon is kind of liking ragging on women when i'm a woman--internalized religious prejudice. but i don't know how to grow out of it and shake it off. i don't know how to go back to church, something i've thought about doing constantly, without thinking about what that type of mormon is thinking. i told dh on sunday that the reason i didn't just start going back like i was thinking of doing is i didn't want to give those nagging self righteous people in the congregation the satisfaction, like they would pat themselves on the back because they thought it was their nagging and backhanded comments that helped us come back into the fold like they were trying to force us to do.

the worst is when people say it's dumb for someone to leave the church "because they were offended." i didn't leave the church, per se, because of the cruel, manipulative, disrespectful people i've met in my wards. i left because i saw them blatantly presenting themselves as the epitome of what a member should be, and that in turn made me realize and question things about the church. it's like when they say that acting christlike and being an exmaple will draw people to the church--it was the opposite of that. they were doing what they thought the church told them to do and that's what drove me away. groupthink is the first thing to spit you out and point fingers at you if you don't go along with it. and that's what i can't reconcile in my heart.