Rick and I were sitting in the bishop’s office, holding each other’s hands and our Book of Mormon, on our first Sunday in our new ward. The bishop offered us a handshake and a prayer, and settled behind his desk.
“Brother and Sister, welcome!” he said. “Tell me about yourselves.”
We’d been together for five months — engaged within a month of meeting and married four months later. I was a substitute teacher. Rick was working construction. We lived in a tiny apartment, with no health insurance and a combined savings of $300.
“Are you aware of the prophet’s counsel on having children?” the bishop asked, looking directly at Rick.
Not allowed more intimacy than a kiss before being married, Rick and I were one month into a more carnal relationship. We blinked at him awkwardly. The bishop stared at Rick with commanding eyes.
“Heavenly Father will bless you,” he said. “The prophet urges us to not delay.”
I was pregnant by August.
A week before our wedding, I told Rick he shouldn’t marry me. I wasn’t sure that I could be a devout Mormon wife and mother.
The church had an explanation and a rule for everything. My life was prescribed to me by men. The penultimate goal: a temple marriage. The ultimate goal: a gaggle of children to indoctrinate.
The church has manuals for each year of childhood. They are full of saccharine lesson plans on how to pray, what to eat, read, watch, wear. How to be a neighbor, a friend, an obedient servant of the Lord. How to spend time and money, stay sexually pure, repent of sin. How to become worthy.
Doubt was the devil’s work, and it had festered in me since I was a small child. I felt suffocated by the rules, but I knew no other way.
“You are the one for me,” Rick insisted. He thought the Lord would fix me.
By our third anniversary, we had two baby girls, 15 months apart. Each night in bed, Rick read aloud from the Book of Mormon while tears leaked into my ears.
When I gave birth to my second daughter, I knew I could not teach my children to be Mormon. Rick finally recognised my suffering, and we broke free.
I quickly discovered that leaving a world of blind obedience was, in a sense, like death. Every part of my life had been dictated by the rules of Mormon men. I didn’t know my own mind. While my girls were learning to crawl, I was frantically trying to find a sense of self, but it was impossible to grow up faster than my babies.
I did the easy things first. I bought tank tops and colourful underwear and shorts that did not skim my kneecaps. I drank coffee. I sampled gin and vodka from tiny bottles. I spent money on Sundays. I dared to say the word “fuck” out loud.
Firsts happened in the bedroom, too.
We were new to the neighbourhood when I bumped into the woman next door, who insisted I come by that evening. She was hosting a ladies’ night with other moms on the block. If she mentioned it was a “passion party,” I was too innocent to catch on.
She greeted me at the door with a hug and rattled off a list of wines. I had never had wine, so I just pointed at an open bottle. Glass of red in hand, I sat, then noticed the woman across from me, flanked by her mother, holding a huge gyrating dildo with metal rows of beads spiralling inside the ropy shaft. Next to me, an Avon lady-looking woman with an open suitcase full of fake penises waited for me to settle. My soul left my body when the dildo made its way into my lap.
Everyone can see me holding this penis and this wine. Someone’s mom can see me.
We were all given plastic sticks with a swipe of birthday cake-flavoured lube to suck off. Then we took turns stumbling to the powder room with a Q-Tip with a tingle cream swiped on the end, to be applied to our clitoris. I applied the cream with an obedience not unlike what I once used to navigate secret temple rituals.
Someone’s mom has been in here, touching her clit.
My clit was on fire as someone poured me a second glass of wine. Eventually I found myself in a home office alone with the saleslady and her suitcase.
I did not order the beaded dildo. I did order my first vibrator ― not out of bravery, but out of obligation I felt to the woman selling them. I was following the rules of the party.
My sex education had consisted of a variety of lessons at church. Our teacher gave us gum to chew, and then asked us to spit it in the trash. Without our chastity, we were told, we would be used-up gum that no man would choose.
I learned that losing my virginity before marriage was akin to murder. My cousin gave me an Albertsons sack of Harlequin romance novels, which I read and hid from my parents. The sex scenes filled me with shameful desire and a sexual vocabulary limited to “his shaft” and “her mound.”
Once I was home, I told Rick about the party: the comfortable way moms and daughters passed around vibrators, cock rings and butt plugs, none of which I had ever seen or understood just a few hours before. I realised how vast the work would be to grow myself up.
As our girls began preschool, my desire to know the right way to mother was all-consuming. Is it OK to let them play with a pretend coffee maker? Should preschoolers wear a two-piece swimsuit? A sundress with thin straps? Is it bad to take the Lord’s name in vain if we don’t believe in the Lord?
The older my girls got, the deeper my yearning for those glossy church manuals grew. Mormon children are taught to speak in front of the congregation each month. Perched on moms’ hips — their breath hot in our ears with the right words — we spoke: “I know this church is True.”
With that knowing came all the answers we’d ever need, given to us by worthy men.
Without God’s plan, “I don’t know what I’m doing” was the incessant white noise in my mind. I was trying to teach my daughters a language I had never heard before.
We completed our family with a third baby girl while I white-knuckled through their obsession with Lady Gaga (“Disco Stick”) and Flo Rida (“Blow my whistle, baby”). I let them wear sundresses. I felt out of control, with no sense of the consequences of my choices.
Knowing my own mind was slow work. I learned I like pinot noir and black coffee. I learned I could skip cake-flavoured lubes.
We barrelled into the tween years. I confided in my mom friends, and they assured me they felt stressed too. They worried about grades, carpool and vegetables. But I wanted to know… should kids wear eyeliner? Watch “Grey’s Anatomy”? Drink Starbucks? Wear a top the size of a sports bra to school?
Sex and relationships in the teen years has been a hum of low-grade panic. I want someone to take over this part. I want to be their guide. Surely, there is a space between no plan at all and already-chewed gum.
A few months ago, I was having dinner with a friend who is more conservative than I am with kids younger than mine. I told her I was considering buying my teenagers vibrators. She gasped loud enough to draw attention. She couldn’t imagine a worse idea. But I’m not sure. I want them to know their own bodies — to enter sexual relationships from a position of confidence and understanding. My friend was scandalised.
“They’ll get one for themselves — as adults,” she said. She’s sure I’m crossing a line. Am I going too far? I haven’t decided. But I’m starting to understand that the right decision isn’t in a manual. It’s the one I will make.
Our kids are now 20, 19 and 14. I’m no longer Mormon, and no longer a stranger to myself.
I thought I was leaving my Mormon heritage behind. Now, I realise I’m not unlike my pioneering ancestors, dragging their belongings across the plains to a new life. Modern parenting is the new frontier. I still envy their certitude, the way they were free of the burden of answering their own questions. But the manuals of men no longer contain my answers. Like every mother out here in the wild world, we must write our own.
Meg Poulin is a freelance writer and textile artist based in Connecticut. She’s passionate about telling the truth about motherhood. Despite her revolt against her Mormon roots, she still wears aprons, bakes cakes from scratch and embroiders while watching TV. She is currently helping her three children move into their own wide worlds.
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