On figuring out what happens when you are past young mother royalty phase
Like, I have a lot of hope, but am also having a real hard time
Eighteen days into the new year. I used to be a resolutions kind of gal, but mine have yet to formulate, though I am holding out hope that they are just floating on the periphery of all this snow and are slowly making their way to me.
My birthday was at the beginning of the month. This is my last year in my 30’s. I am not scared of aging, a lot of it delights me as much as it continues to surprise me. As I approach my 40’s though, I cannot get a line I heard in my early 30’s out of my head. As much as I know the line doesn’t matter, doesn’t have to be true, is just a soundbite—it haunts me. In my early 30’s, I was already trying to find ways to exit the church, but didn’t see a clear way out while remaining intact. I did, however, listen to podcasts like Mormon stories when no one else was around. I think it was there that I heard the line from a woman who talked about turning 40 and feeling like her only skills were working with craft supplies and a glue gun. Her children had all gone to school and she was relatively on her own, but felt infantile in her ability to enter the real world.
I’ve been quiet around here (sorry for that), in part because I have been sifting through my own mental and emotional health, and I’m always surprised by how much work I am still doing to rebuild my world and myself post Mormonism. I share the line above, about the glue gun, because in large part, I think the implications of that line is where most of my Mormon conditioning happened, and why, in my 39th year, it feels like such real work to regain grounding in my personal life.
I am madly nostalgic for little kids and babies. I sincerely loved raising young kids. My three kids are now all in school, and I won’t lie in saying that I relish my personal time. I delight in the freedom of being in charge of only one person (me), for six hours during the day, but I struggle to find purpose and reason because in so many ways, a nearly 40-year old woman was invisible and irrelevant growing up in the church. Mothers, in particular, young mothers felt like royalty to me. My young women leaders were pretty young mothers. In talks at conference, I heard so much about raising children and the children in topic were almost always young. All my young women lessons, BYU marriage classes, college talks and even the last advice given to me by my mission president at the end of my mission were all directed toward those years when I would be young, pretty, married and with small children. (I have so many friends who I watched experience the disillusionment of not getting married or having children while in the church, and from what I know, it is a whole other kind of absolute hard, but I will let them speak to their own experience—share in the comments too if you like).
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