My road out of Mormonism hasn't been a straight one. It has been a lifelong process, and meandering as I've traveled through from where I've been to where I'm at presently.

I was born to an LDS father, and a Protestant mother. My mother eventually joined the LDS church when I was six years old, and it was then my parents were sealed in the Oakland Temple.

My father's family were among the earliest Mormon pioneers. One of my third generation grandfathers was bodyguard to Joseph Smith, and a courier during their rough beginnings. He died before he could join his wife on a wagon train going west to Utah, from heavy persecution resulting in their being driven from one town to the next and so on, until his body gave out at the age of 66. Other ancestors included one who immigrated from Wales to Utah in 1862. That was a second generation grandfather who although married twice, was not a polygamist. His first wife died in childbirth with their tenth child, and he remarried and had ten more! Both his wives were daughters of polygamists - so there's at least one set in my ancestry of third generation grandparents who were. That gggrandpa was sent to Ogden from Salt Lake City by Brigham Young after he arrived from Wales because Young didn't need another tailor in Salt Lake, they already had enough. So my gggranddad became Ogden's first tailor! He eventually left the church before he died, but stayed on in Ogden for the rest of his life.

My mom's religious forebears were both Jewish and Protestant. She and my siblings (and my children,) are fully Jewish because we descend directly from Jewish mothers going back centuries. It's a paradox to me to be fully Jewish while not even knowing I was for a good part of my life. Yet, I've always felt Jewish, even though I didn't understand that I was Jewish until after reaching adulthood.

But leaving Mormonism began for me as a teenager. When my parents divorced (temple marriage,) I was 16. Very disillusioned, I became agnostic during my late teens. Only to return to Mormonism at age 19. I decided belief in God was better for me than Agnosticism. Being Agnostic didn't work for me, and I felt like my life had no meaning. Returning to the LDS church helped me at that time escape a cigarette habit and a drinking problem. My Mormon father and his brothers were alcoholics during their lives, and I believe it may be hereditary - the gene that is. Being LDS was no escape from life's problems. In many ways being LDS made them more pronounced, and put everything I was doing wrong under a magnifying glass, because I could never be perfect enough. No matter how hard I tried. It was self-effacing to try and be a good Mormon. My faith went through waning phases throughout my early adult years.

Then the bottom fell out for me while living on Staten Island, while raising my children in the Mormon church in the early 90's. I left in the spring of 1994, after some bitter persecution by some of the members that was just ugly and unwarranted. One of my best friends from church during that time was a NYC firefighter who told me (he'd been a Catholic convert to Mormonism,) that he knew either the church was 100% true or 100% false because he'd never seen a church persecute its own members as much as it did and does. Having lived through it, I knew what he meant.

After leaving with my children who were still very young, we embarked on attending several denominations in the Staten Island borough - including Episcopal, Evangelical, Unitarian Universalist, United Church of Christ, and finally the Moravian Church. We stayed with the Moravian our last couple years on Staten Island because they were the sweetest bunch of church going folks we had the pleasure of knowing, and stayed there for their classes and worship services until I moved my family up north to Buffalo where the closest Moravian church was Toronto. That was too far for us to travel each week, so we began attending the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of LDS, today known as the Community of Christ. That's where my children were baptized in 1999. (The Moravian church grounds where we attended had been filmed during The Godfather funeral scene years before - it is a beautiful and pristine cemetery and the church was right inside the cemetery grounds!)

Both my parents died in 2000. Both had been inactive LDS for the last couple decades or more of each of their lives. But both still believed in it up to their deaths. Out of nostalgia I went back to the LDS church - having left the RLDS church in 2001 for personal reasons I won't get into other than there was a lack of moral leadership in that church I didn't wish my children to be subjected to. The return to LDS was for a very short time after the death of my parents. By 2004 I had become totally disenfranchised yet again (after the first round in 1994.) And subsequently left this time permanently in 2005. I had my records removed at that time from Salt Lake City, and my daughter's with me.

I recall the last Relief Society meeting I attended in 2005 when the RS president was giving the lesson, who was also a student of medicine studying to become a surgeon at our local university. She was older, like myself, with nearly grown children. She threw out to the roomful of women there that day, "Do any of you ever question the tenets of the gospel from time to time? I know I do...." There was this awful long, very long silence in the room and no one said anything. The silence became very uncomfortable, and she finally broke it by saying, "Well neither do I." And that was the end of that discussion. I recall feeling fearful of saying anything out loud during that silence for fear of being branded an Apostate for questioning. After that meeting, I realized there must have been some others that felt the same way as I did, including the Relief Society president. And yet no one dared speak up for fear of being ostracized.

That was my last meeting I ever attended. And it's with R-E-L-I-E-F I've never looked back since leaving. I've been to law school while living in Buffalo, and while studying law I also took time studying the university holdings on the history of the LDS church. That was during my early years in Buffalo from 1997 through 2001. Reading Fawn Brodie's "No Man Knows My History," and other books (before the Internet as we know it today,) is when I truly began to see the darker side of Mormonism, and the side we weren't taught growing up in the church.

After leaving Mormonism for the last time in 2005 I didn't feel as much like a fish out of water as I had back in 1994 when I'd left it before. But I still felt an affinity for worship on the Sabbath, so I found other faith homes to worship at. For us the last Christian faith fellowship wasn't actually Christian but Messianic Jewish where I attended from 2006 through early 2011. Then I recognized signs there of a cult, not dissimilar to Mormonism. So I left it too. Having been made aware of classic cult religions because of being born LDS, I have no delusions of getting sucked back into something else as bad as that was.

Nonetheless, I've always been spiritual. And exploring the Jewish side of my family tree has led me into Judaism. That is an intellectual's religion. I still have a need for fellowshipping and still have a dependence on God so there I've stayed since joining. I didn't need to convert because i was always fully Jewish anyway, thanks to my mom's side of the family. My great and great great Jewish grandmothers are buried in the Jewish cemetery in Salt Lake City, Utah! My Jewish ancestry stems from Germany, where many of my ancestors were killed in the Holocaust, and others escaped. One of my cousins was an expert witness to authenticate the Diary of Anne Frank. Another was Max Born, Nobel physicist and grandfather of Olivia Newton-John. Another cousin who lived during the Holocaust escaped to then Palestine and became the AP director for Israel from 1942 through 1968. He covered three major Israeli wars during that time including the Arab conflict in 1948, and the Six Day War etc.

Some of my Jewish ancestors were book printers of the Talmud and Hebrew prayer books going back into the 15th and 16th centuries. That was cool to find out. I've met a Jewish cousin living in Israel as we're both genealogists, having embarked on my genealogy since 2011 - he'd been doing his just several years longer than I have. He was a docent for the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv for a time. Genealogy is much more interesting than the LDS uses it for ie, baptism for the dead. In fact there was a public outcry when it was discovered they were baptizing Holocaust victims in proxy. The Mormon church was sued over that and lost.

My leaving Mormonism has been an odyssey. I still have family that are LDS. They live with blinders on. How else can they believe with all the evidence to the contrary? I have many cousins who've left like I have. One (retired civil engineer) has shared that it was a wonderful rich heritage, but filled with folklore. It's good to know I'm not the only one in my family who has left because truth matters.

My feelings are cold toward the church structure today. It doesn't allow for questioning or challenging church authority whatsoever. It wasn't always that way. The independent questioning Mormons are a thing of the past. Because they've already left the church, and will continue to until there are only those with complete tunnel vision and blind allegiance - that's about where it is today. It's sad to see the church crumble before my eyes, but then it was only a house of cards to begin with. A false religion built on a pack of lies. Other than what was plagiarized directly from the KJV bible in Joseph Smith's upstate NY farmhouse, everything else about the church is bogus on its face.

Smith was a charlatan and a gold digger. I've worked in Consumer Frauds for New York since 1989, and upstate since 1997. I've seen first hand how cons work, and Joseph Smith's is no different from any other con on the face of the earth except for how widespread and the fact it's a religion. But a sham at that. It's the strongest, richest, most powerful church built on United States soil since its inception. So the fraud is far reaching. Yet it is crumbling because the truth is unfolding as more become educated to historical fact instead of fiction.

I still believe in God! I cherish the family values I was given growing up LDS. I've only rejected the religion itself. So it wasn't all bad, and in fact there was much good I learned as a Mormon female. But at the same time it has taken me a lifetime to find my place in the world that isn't Mormon. Kind of like being born Amish is how I've identified at times having left Mormonism. It was such a cultural distinction to be Mormon, that it does tend to stay with us long after leaving. But I am still free on the other hand to be myself without the rigidity of the church enforcing its views and dictating how I should live. I no longer live with that stigma, and boy does it feel wonderful to be free from all that. Having a cup of coffee or tea is no longer a sin, and if I want to have a drink or occasionally cuss, so what? I self monitor myself; I don't need a church to do that for me.