I should have known better than to think that I could sleep in this morning. It's been a while since I was here on a Sunday, apparently I forgot what that entails.
So as I said before, my mom's a religious fanatic. Actually, make that all-caps. FANATIC. Mormon fanatic. Maybe things wouldn't be so bad if it were a different religion. But it's not.
Sunday mornings, in her quest to get the kids out the door, my mom has always resorted to yelling at the kids. What a great way of starting off the day that's supposed to be spent reverently and with your family. So what happens when she yells at the kids? The kids yell back, of course. So the morning of acrimony begins. Once out the door, there will be more skirmishes, both in the car and once they get to church. She must like this, as this game has been going on for almost 20 years..
I'm sure none of this helped my feelings for the religious experience involved. I've known that since before I was 12 that the Mormon church wasn't for me. But that didn't stop my mom from trying. After I told her that I didn't believe the church anymore, she made me go until I graduated from high school. I think a lot of it involves looking like a good Mormon whose children go to church, like they "should." I've never really asked her, and I doubt that she'd give me a straight answer. I don't think she could admit it anyway.
In order to get me to do things with church, my mom resorted to bribery. All mormon kids (the good ones, anyway), go to what is called "seminary." No, this is not where we learned to become ministers. From ninth to twelfth grade, you're supposed to go to church at 6am to read the scriptures in an organized, classroom-like way. Every school day. You can imagine how gung-ho I was about this idea. The church was 20 minutes away, which meant that I had to get up at 515 to make it there. 5:15 am. As a fucking freshman in high school? You gotta be shittin' me. I still can't believe I did it.
Yes, I did it. My entire freshman year. Though it was a waste of my time, it did have its benefits. Well, one anyway. In order to bribe me into going to this bullshit, my mother bought me a CD player. A 5 disc Sony carousel CD changer, in fact. $200 for going to church every day. As Sally Struthers might say, that's only pennies per day. Too bad I lost all interest in going the subsequent years, maybe I could have put together a nice component system by the time I graduated high school.
The bribes didn't end there. And they only got worse. As a kid, we had chores to do. All of them got ignored except for washing dishes. We each got assigned 2 nights a week to wash dishes. And I got the shaft. My night was Sunday night, right after our inevitably large meal. Maybe my mom orchestrated this for her church bribery, or maybe I got assigned that night only because I was the oldest. Either way, it was a bad draw.
In the Mormon church, 16 year old boys bless the sacrament, which in the Mormon church consists of broken up white bread, and little cups of water. It's sad, but I can still remember part of the blessing:
"O God, the eternal father, we ask thee in the name of thy son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this [bread,water] to the souls of all those who [partake,drink] of it."
Can't remember the rest. Anyway, once I was 16, guess what the newest bribe was? If I would bless the sacrament, she would do my Sunday night dishes for me. How fucking unbelievable is that? She knew I didn't believe in the church, and yet she wanted me to bless the fucking sacrament? I still can't believe it.
Just because it was ludicrous doesn't mean I turned it down, though. I had to sit through the sacrament meeting either way, and I figured that I might as well get out of doing my dishes. So that's where you'd see me on Sundays. At the front of the meeting, waiting to give one of the blessings on the sacrament. The amusement didn't end there, though.
The mormon church services, including sunday school, run about 3 hours. Don't get me started on that. After giving the blessing, I frequently had adult mormons coming up to me in church and asking me whether I "prayed to have the spirit with me when I said the blessing." Shit, I didn't pray when I was giving the blessing. I just read the little card that they put in front of me.
When I was 16, I saw something in the Mormon church that was absolutely tragic. It's one of the things that completely broke the Mormon church in my eyes. There was a girl at church who was absolutely beautiful. Not altogether surprisingly, she got pregnant. I think the only reason that I know that is that I knew people who went to school with her. Because I never saw her at church. Ever. Shunned, that's what she was. At a time in her life when she needed people to support her, the church, ostensibly an organization for supporting people, not only wasn't there for her, but disowned her. It still pisses me off when I think about what they did to her. Religion aside, it wasn't right.
So I guess even though I am always awakened by fighting between my mom and someone on a Sunday morning, things could be worse.
I could actually be going to church.
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