Fall/Winter 2005: Belief

Wedding Gift

By Janene Thomas

I knew this would happen, had known it for years. I used to cry about it, wake up in the night and worry about it. Rant about it. Now I tell myself it's not that big a deal. My oldest daughter, a sophomore at Brigham Young University, is getting married. The problem is she's only twenty. The problem is she's known the guy for nine months. He's twenty-one, just back from a two-year mission to Mexico. The problem is I did the same thing myself. I was Mormon then and very young, and life seemed simple and safe. Getting married was easy. Later is when the hard part came, but this is something they don't tell you at church. Now I look at my daughter and think that she is living my life. I want to save her from my mistakes. I want to tell her that faith is fine, but faith is not enough.

When my daughter calls me in Portland, Oregon, she's 800 lonely miles away in Provo, Utah. "Mom," she says, "I love this guy."

"Hey," I say, "so what? You hardly know him. Relationships have a way of fizzling after a few months, a few years. Look at my fine example."

"Mom," she says, "I'm not you. I can make this work. If we love each other, what can go wrong?"

"Plenty," I say. "It's not as easy as you think, but who am I to tell you what to do?" We hang up and I think, well, maybe. Maybe she's right. Maybe I am just old and bitter and divorced. And maybe she is in love and maybe love will conquer in the end. But I've been there and it makes me nervous as hell. So here we are and she's going to do it. She's going to marry a man she barely knows before she's had a chance to know herself or know the world. I wish the Mormons would quit encouraging young women to tie themselves to a husband and kids. It's horrible advice--that's all I can say--and I wish they'd quit giving it to my daughter. But they have and she's bought it. She's going to the Mormon temple to marry a returned missionary and make a family and live happily ever after. Still, this isn't the only thing that's keeping me up at night. It is also this: my daughter's getting married in the Mormon temple, and I can't go. Not unless I'm ready to start being Mormon again, and fast. And I'm not. No way. The day I left the church, I knew this would happen. And, knowing this, I left. Mormons marry in the temple, a building different from their neighborhood churches. Only card-carrying Mormons can enter the temple. Only Mormons with recommends, slips of paper, signed by their bishops, testifying to their worthiness. Mormons with recommends are in. Everyone else is out. My daughter's in. I'm out. So what to do?

I make a plan and pick up the phone. "Listen, here's the plan," I tell her. "I'll go to Europe the week of the wedding and not be there at all. It would be horrible to be at the temple, locked outside like a criminal, while everyone else goes in. Mormonism doesn't make sense to me. Does this mean I quit being your mother, that I am not invited to your wedding?"

"You don't believe the stuff that goes on in the temple anyway," she counters.

"I don't know how to believe something I don't believe," I tell her.

"I'm not telling you what to believe," she says. "But if you're not Mormon, you can't come in. Can't you just be supportive, mom, can't you just let it go?"

"I'm sorry," I tell her. Neither of us knows what else to say, so we hang up, and I'm left there alone with the phone.

A few days later I try again. "Hey," I say, "how about this? I'll just come to your wedding anyway, just breeze right by the desk in the temple where they check recommends. I'll take a seat with the rest of the family and we'll see what they do."

"Jeeze, Mom," she says, alarmed. "You can't do that. They'll haul you out."

"Imagine the headline," I say. "'Ex-Mormon mom jailed for attending daughter's wedding.'"

"Okay," she says, "I know you're joking and I gotta go so I'll talk to you soon."

"Love you," I say and hang up. Trouble is, I'm not joking all that much.

Eventually a third plan occurs to me, but it doesn't even make it to the phone. I scrap it myself. I could go to the bishop, tell him I'm sorry I left, that I want to be Mormon again. I could say I'm ready to pay tithing and quit drinking coffee and wine. I could promise to marry my boyfriend and repent of the sins I've been collecting like baseball cards. I could ask for forgiveness and a recommend. Maybe the bishop would let me go to the wedding if I promised to reform. Maybe. Inside, though, I know this will not work. If I could put the genie back into the bottle, if I could find my faith again, I might. But I cannot. That is how it works. When I was Mormon, I thought I had the truth. Now, I know I didn't. And once you know something, that's it. There is no going back, not even for your kids.

I need another plan. It comes to me, as usual, in the night. In the morning, I make the call. "Hey," I tell my daughter, "here's what I'll do. I'll sit outside the temple on a bench by the fountain and wait while everyone else goes inside. I'll wear a nice dress, but on its bodice I'll stitch a scarlet 'A' for 'Apostate'."

"Mom, will you quit it already? It's not my rule," she says, and she's beginning to cry. "It's not my rule and I know you're a good person and I want you to be at my wedding. Even if you can't come inside, I want you to be there, outside, waiting. You have to come," she says and now she's crying for real. "You're my mom and I can't stand it if you're not there."

"Okay," I tell her because she's crying and suddenly I am too, and she means more to me than anything in the world. "I'll come," I say, "and I'll sit outside and wait and smile and it will be a beautiful day."

And so this is what I am going to do. I will go to the temple and wait outside while my daughter goes in with her Mormon father and all his Mormon family. In my mind I see her father's new wife playing the mother's role, zipping up my daughter's white dress in the bride's dressing room while I am outside admiring the lawn. And when my daughter and her new husband shyly exchange rings and share their first kiss as husband and wife, I will be outside sitting on a bench by the fountain under the June sky. And men and women holding hands will be going into the temple and coming out, and I will sit there alone and think about my daughter. As a baby, she yelled "gimme get up!" from the confines of her crib when she was learning to talk. She climbed the tall steel slide at the park when she was only three. She played piano, from "Twinkle Twinkle" to Bach. She ran for student body president in high school--and won. Her life and mine have been intertwined for twenty years, and all these things I will think of outside on the temple bench. On her wedding day, this will be my gift to her.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2005 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2005 Oregon Council for the Humanities