Join At Your Own Risk

I don’t know what all to say about the Mormon shit that happened. There was this one girls camp where the young women’s leaders gave all of us girls a name and identity when we got there, like my name was Caroline and I had 6 children or something. We were all supposed to be pioneer family’s who traveled to Utah. Anyway, at every meal, we’d be given a note that said something like, there’s a plague that has gone around your camp. Your youngest daughter, Emily died and your husband is ill. Shit that was really sad. Anyway, the more we got into the game, the more time we’d spend crying. We were only 13 or 14. Finally, there were just a few of us “left” and we were supposed to decide amongst ourselves who got to "live” and who had to "die" and what we wanted the survivor to tell our family back home before we “died.” Then we had a big funeral and all the girls were crying and putting flowers on the mock graves and stuff. Very morbid.

At the time it seemed like it was a cool game to get us to feel closer to our Mormon heritage and to teach us how hard our ancestors lives were. But now that I’m out of it, I just think, what a mind fuck.

A couple years later my mom left my dad and moved me and my sisters to Las Vegas when I was 16. Then she married another guy who had another family who wasn't Mormon. So we all kind of got out of the church at the same time and never went back.

I always felt like the church people were just being nice to me so I'd keep coming back to Church. Every once in a while I see Missionaries on the street and I want to throw something at them, but I keep myself calm. Life's too short.

// posted by Andy @ 7:56 PM