On Anger

Chapter 2, Letters to a Leaving Mormon

The white painted brick inside the church building nursing room was smudged with years, nondescript colors from toddler fingerprints that could not be wiped fully by the volunteer families that cleaned the building on Saturday mornings. 

The brown-orange carpet frayed along the metal edge between the linoleum of the bathroom stalls and the room where I nursed all three of my babies over the course of my young motherhood. I knew this room well enough that the underlying smell from the adjoining bathroom was nostalgic as much as it was maddening. The nursing room, the size of a closet and without a door to separate it from the bathroom stalls, was empty except for two worn fabric rockers that were some hazy shade of tired pink, handles broken and springs inside uncomfortably apparent. A mirror on one wall allowed you to greet yourself upon entering and a crackly speaker in a corner of the ceiling projected bits and pieces of the Sacrament Meeting you were no longer a part of. I know that not all of them are this dismal, but I have breastfed children in enough meeting houses to know that all church nursing rooms are some hue of cloistered rage.

For years I had attempted to quell my anger at the Church I’d called home all my life. At the pinnacle of this crisis of faith, I spent almost every Sacrament Meeting with a fussy newborn, and sometimes a toddler who should have been napping, in that toilet-adjacent nursing room. By my third baby, I was confident enough on occasion to stay in the chapel and nurse my daughter while I sat in the pew, but still worried about modesty and offending someone, I would often retreat to the nursing room.