Posted by:
Naomi
(
)
Date: September 04, 2015 12:27PM
Hey everyone, I took a break from RfM for a while but I think I'll give it a shot again. I was always a good Mormon girl, from pioneer ancestry, and pretty much all my relatives are Mormon. I went to BYU, went on a mission, and got married in the temple (though we were never very compatible). I'd always had questions, but I put them on my mental shelf, figuring that I'd find the answers someday.
Then one day I stumbled onto RfM. Bam! the whole thing collapsed and my world turned upside down. The whole thing was a lie and reality wasn't what I'd been taught to believe. I kept attending church for almost a year to try to figure it out. My TBM husband went inactive because he couldn't handle the comments I whispered to him during the meetings. (In typical Momon passive-aggressive fashion, he didn't tell me the reason for his inactivity until years later.) We ended up getting divorced, of course.
I was in the Army National Guard and got deployed to Afghanistan. I met my soulmate there. He identifies himself as Muslim but we have a lot of similar ideas about religion. We wanted to get married, but there were bureaucratic problems with the visa process for him to get to the US, so eventually I decided to go back to Afghanistan to get married. I converted to Islam to get married. There's really no other way I could have done it. I don't really believe in any religion, but I think that at least Islam is better than Mormonism. I took an online quiz that said I'm actually a Deist, and that's probably the most accurate label for my current beliefs, if you have to put a label on it.
I came back from Afghanistan pregnant (I planned it that way). We knew we wanted to have a family together, and I'm starting to get a little older and didn't want to wait any longer. I hoped my husband's spouse visa would be approved within the 9 months before our baby was born, so we would be together for the birth. It didn't happen. After trying everything, contacting the embassy, senators, media, and online petitions, an international reporter in Kabul, Afghanistan picked up the story. Our son was a year old when she went to the embassy, in person, to get information for her story, about us and another female soldier marrying an Afghan interpreter. The next day, both cases got emails from the embassy saying that our visas were ready.
Recently we had another baby, and we're happily raising our kids in our mostly post-religion family, in spite of nearly all our relatives on both sides being religious and living in Utah county.
So, if you took the time to read all that, what's your story? How did you leave Mormonism and where are you at now?