Being a Mormon Missionarionette, Marriage, and My Imaginary Boyfriend

Being a Mormon Missionarionette, Marriage, and My Imaginary Boyfriend

April 22, 2019

I don't know why, but I'm thinking about my mission, and about marriage, and relationships, and God, and it's like a nosebleed-- unstoppable until sufficiently reclotted in my brain, so I am going to dribble bloodily all over my blog until I figure out what I'm thinking, and my thoughts reclot themselves.

When I was 21, I was a Mormon Sister missionary in Japan-- a Shimai Senkyoushi in the Tokyo North LDS Mission to be very exact about it. I was young and strong and beautiful, although I had no idea at the time-- looking back at pictures I am astonished I was every so clear of eye and bright of brow. I was as lovely and celibate as a Laurel, entombing myself in lovely twisting wood to preserve my virtue. Maybe that's too pretty of a way to put it. I was young and serious and chaste, mortified to be of flesh and up to my split ends in a project to mortify the flesh, one day of knocking on doors at a time. It was a time. And Japan is a place.

I remember arriving at Narita airport. I was with my group of other recent Missionary Training Center ("the empty sea," I quipped, to myself. Is it quipping if there is no interlocutor? What is the sound of one brain quipping?") We were all alight-- we had introduced ourselves to our fellow airplane passengers with, forgive me, missionary zeal. We chatted them up, beamed at them, expressed our earnest and incandescent interest in them. A middle aged lesbian heard me introducing myself as a Mormon missionary to my trapped-hamster-in-the-headlights neighbor, and came and squatted next to me in the aisle.

"You're Mormons?"

"Yes!" (Beam, beam, radiate, irradiate, irritate...)

"I'm a lesbian. What do you have to say about your church's beliefs and actions towards the LGBT community?"

The elder sitting next to me turned green. He made the universal gesture that means, "how bout you field this one, sister."

No problem-- Mondai nai, Elder!

I waxed poetical. I told her the same story I had told myself, frantically, bloodily, ever since that first time I made out with my female best friend in 9th grade. God is bigger than we are, I beamed. "We don't understand why he makes us as he does. He loves us all, of course, and life is weird and there is infinite variety in brains, bodies, souls, and lived experiences. Nobody is perfect, and we're all messed up in different ways. But being imperfect doesn't excuse us from having to fulfill God's will for us. Gender is an eternal and fixed idea, and marriage resulting in babies is the highest purpose of our existence, and the main aim of our religion. It is up to us to accept what we don't understand, and mould ourselves, through Christ's grace, into the shape that will allow us to fulfill our highest purpose. It's hard and painful, but it's rooted in God's love for us." Goodness, it seemed like a neat little package… If this, then this. That, therefore that. Pinioned by my own logic. It didn't seem cruel at the time. It seemed difficult, but no worse than any other random and painful conundrum in life-- why does god allow the good to suffer? Who knows? (Crowley and Aziraphale shrug.... "Is it ….Ineffability?")

So that was the first missionary conversation of my mission. (Hmmm, I'm now realizing that may have been something of a Chekov's gun. The competing themes of fairness vs kindness, queerness, marriage, makin' babies, god's plan vs. god's love have crescendoed painfully through my life. At the time just a note, like the first beautiful but unsettling notes of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring. Eventually a cacophony and a traumatized stampede for the exits, and hopefully eventually, in retrospect, an artistic accomplishment, with great set pieces by Picasso.)

The curious lesbian on the plane was kind, she smiled at me. "Thanks for explaining your point of view," she said. I beamed at her-- megawatts of zeal irradiating my smile.

Is that kind of conversation possible now, almost twenty years later? I'm sure I said hurtful and terrible things. But I said them in the most loving way I knew how. And she responded so graciously. She could have screamed in my face-- the church, by then, had actively worked to dismantle civil partnership protections in California. It pulled no punches-- the AIDS crisis was revenge upon Sodom and Gomorrah, it was better to be a dead Mormon than a gay Mormon. But no-- she was kind, curious, gentle and utterly unconvinced.

When I sum it up like that, that interaction was practically the best sort you could hope for as a Mormon missionary!

I remember the bus ride from the airport to the mission home. The rush of the white painted Hiragana letters on the street (spelling out the quotidian "tamare" or "stop!"  I learned later) looked hopelessly indecipherable. Billboards, flashing lights, pamphlets, traffic signs-- all of it shapes and loops without conveyance of meaning.

Traveling in other countries before then, even where I didn't speak the language (like the week I spent alone, blissfully planless-phoneless-maples except for a Steve Ricks guidebook, and my credit card with a $1000 limit, meandering through the golden narrow back streets of Barcelona), hadn't been as disorienting as that. In Italy or Germany I could lean on cognates and a common alphabet.  In Japan there was nothing to lean on, or stand on. Just the pure workings of gravity as you topple over the language cliff. There was no handhold in the language, and those first few days felt like trying to catch a branch as you fall into a ravine. I developed a language migraine like a bubble in my brain, and it lasted the whole 18 months.

Eventually, once the initial disorientation and nausea had worn off (like Ender re-orienting North and Down in the practice battle room in Ender's Game), I mastered the simpler forms of Japanese writing-- the syllabaries Katakana and Hiragana, and the elementary Kanji characters (literally elementary-- I had a kid's textbook. I got up to about a 3rd grade Kanji level while I was there)-- and studied my grammar books --religiously, hah.

I came to love the mighty brain-wrinkling struggle of learning Japanese, and I took some pride in getting really good at it, in spite of the mission folklore about the missionary girls being dumber than a bag of pig feed (and being so incompetent that they accidentally transform themselves into heavy pigs, by gorging themselves on hormone-laced pig feed rather than the mission-issue hot cereal. We were all told this story with a chuckle-- "pay attention to your kanji, girls!" Anyway. More tangents than Tokyo alleyways.)

I had some weird and wonderful linguistic adventures in other languages too, not just Japanese. I learned enough Brazilian Portuguese to teach the standardized missionary lessons and translate between Japanese and Portuguese at church, and had a couple of weird days teaching in my truly rudimentary Russian to some lonely ex-Soviets in a dark high-rise. They weren't interested in becoming Mormons-- really, almost nobody was-- but they were eager to talk to a fellow foreigner and practice their English and encourage my broken Russian.

But generally, there was no warm welcome for mormon missionaries in Japan. The specter of the religious terrorist gas attacks were still fresh in everyone mind's, and a decade earlier, a generation of free wheeling missionaries and their scandalous behavior (see: the legendary Ammon Project) had worn out all of our welcome with the few Japanese Mormons who persisted. So, no. I didn't persuade many people to join the church. And the ones I did, I now feel a little squeamish about. That man who read the book of Mormon in one night-- he was not mentally all there. I brought him to church, so proud we'd found a "golden investigator"-- someone willing to join the church-- and the long-time members groaned in frustration. I was hurt and offended on his behalf. "You don't understand," they explained. "These people have problems, they find out they can get some help here, and they come and they are a drain on our limited resources. We don't want projects, we want people who can help build the community, not just leech off of it." One visionary builder was the half-Iranian woman who loved the Jesus she met in the Book of Mormon. She and I would talk for hours about mythology and archetypes, about Joseph Campbell and universal truths, about the prophets and revelations. She wanted to be baptised, and submitted to the worthiness interview before hand. She was told by my 19 year old district leader that she had to renounce her Iranian and Muslim family in order to join the church. She was hurt-- she told me: "The gospel you and I talked about is not the same gospel the church leaders are talking about." There was another young woman who wanted to be baptized because she had made many Mormon friends but then was told that she couldn't attend the congregation where her friends went, because she lived outside of that geographical area. I remember her hurt face. "If I can't be with my friends, why would I do this?"

One guy came to church because he thought he could have sex with my companion since she was a cute 21 year old foreigner, like the wrecked-looking Eastern European prostitutes we ran into at parks. One guy came to church because his wife was about to have a baby and he thought religion was something people with babies should have. She was unimpressed that he was spending evenings away with young foreign women, and he was unimpressed once he heard about tithing. Really, he asked. 10% of my income? For real? You guys really give that much of your money to the church? Not just to other charities? He was stunned, and a little worried about us personally, and didn't want to hear any more about the church. He still invited us to the cool birthing center where his wife and new baby stayed for two weeks post partum, nursing and napping in tandem with a dozen other new Japanese moms.

But anyway. Japan.

I had actually been there to visit, twice before. Each time I had left going, "well that was interesting, I've seen Japan, and I never need to go back!" But I had magically ended up assigned to Japan, in a weird synchronicity. The kind of thing that makes me believe there is some order to the universe but that it is, as Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman put it in Good Omens (wow, twice quoted in one ramble!) God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

To all of our shock, I was sent to the same mission as my boyfriend. It was a little embarassing to have a boyfriend and go on a mission anyway-- the BYU culture at the time was puzzled. If you've caught a man already, why go? Just stay home and get married. To be single at 21, and to be a returned sister missionary-- those were marks of cultural oddness. Probably you were likely to vote democrat, watch foreign films, or engage in other unsavory practices. So to add to the mild awkwardness of the contradicting ideas of Boyfriend & Mission, I got called to go to my Boyfriend's Mission. It mingled some ideas that are not meant to be mingled. When you go on a mission, you are supposed to put aside all romantic entanglements in order to focus on the work. You can write letters, once a week. No phone calls. No cute stuff. When you get back, go get married right away. But for the two or so years that you're a missionary, you are not to allow any of that romance stuff cross your mind. Even though marriage is the central doctrine of the religion, do not think about it for the next two years.

So it was a little squirmy that I lived in his same apartments, saw his thorny cursive in the missionary record books. I saw his relics with a kind of eerie eroticism-- a superstitious romantic weirdness that I couldn't identify but was fairly sure didn't belong in a mission experience. Is it destiny? Are we going to get married? What does marriage even mean, beyond just a mutual commitment to serve god and make a good Mormon family?  I was a pious Mormon missionary. I could only let my mind wander towards marriage by imagining early morning prayers together and gathering up a robust year's supply of emergency food. So many insta-taters and pinto beans.... But whatever it was, marriage was what it was all about-- it was the whole point of being a living Mormon. Get married, make babies, make a life good enough that God will love you. How hard could that be?

We wrote back and forth, sent postcards and little packages. Some of the older missionaries had known him, and the Japanese Mormons remembered him, and even knew his grandparents who had been the first Hawaiian-Japanese couple to be married in the temple in Hawaii, and who later served as mission presidents in Japan.

But half-way through my mission, he fell for somebody else. (My family ran into them at Carmina Burana at BYU, in the cavernous 60s foyer of the Fine Arts building. Ugh, the gut-punch. Carmina Burana is mine! I saw it in Welsh, in Wales, at the tender age of 7. It rewrote my DNA. Chicky-babe was, apparently, wearing a lot of eye shadow, which deeply offended my family on my behalf.) He sent me a Dear Jane letter. I was flattened. Bleached. Ennervated. I went numb. I went dead. I took off his silver honu necklace. The other missionaries were worried about me.

I hadn't realized how much the idea of him was buoying me up through those weird, physically challenging and emotionally humiliating months of riding bikes in skirts and talking to strangers about my cherished but problematic religion. I had imagined he was with me, and his letters were full of cheerful admonishment to read the scriptures, obey the mission rules, and pray. Also, he dropped sweet flirty lines that promised I would someday be attractive again, be loved, and not just a weird church automaton in a bike helmet, with a shiny bike seat impression worn into my skirt. Someday, I could have someone taking care of me, a partner of my own choosing, not an assigned companion, and we could chart our course towards a celestial marriage as we wished. When that support, that dream was gone, I had to find something within myself to carry on.

I cried witchy tears-- just sand, no salt water. And carried on, riding hundreds of miles on bikes through the Japanese countryside, frogs and cicadas and trains noisy in my ears. I wore out shoes and bags and scriptures, filled journals, wrote letters, struggled to understand rudeness (admiring someone's bracelet is rude) and politeness (refusing an offer of a gift over and over is polite), honne and tatemae-- the inner self and the façade. I was groped and grabbed, over and over, on the trains and busses-- so much that it wasn't something I ever thought to bring up with the leadership. We figured it was just part of life and shrugged it off. Don't make a fuss, feel gross for a bit, and move along. Without his love, the world was dimmer, harsher. Bones ground to powder, all color sepia. The future was blank and frightening as the unknown can be when you are young and you don't yet know that you are strong.

One night, my companion and I were at an apartment where a big group of sweet Brazilian girls lived.  Lots of Brazilians and Peruvians with a teensy bit of Japanese blood came to work in Japan in the tech factories. Some of them were Mormon before coming to Japan, and many converted while they were there, and made a lovely community of brave young people trying to live somewhere, make money, and be good. They made great food and wore tight jeans and laughed and fought and worried about their families at home and came to church-- it was a cultural relief to be able to be unrestrained and loud with them. They took pity on me, one girl texted my dad for me-- it was the first text I'd ever seen! I thought texting was dumb and would never catch on. Another girl gave me Nivea crème for my skin, and another girl dyed my hair a strange auburn-black and cut a hard line of bangs across my tall forehead. I appreciated the darker hair. I didn't like standing out so completely in a crowd. At 5'4" I was a head taller than every other woman on the train, and the only blond for a hundred miles. A tiny glimmer of something like racial awareness stirred in my white American heart-- being racially and culturally different, all day every day, is exhausting. And having people sneer at you, say you stink of foreigner, suspect you of stealing, and pretend to misunderstand everything you say-- that's not fun and it makes you tired and angry. But harder to explain but just as exhausting is the double take, the overt admiration, the fetishizing curiousity.

But this night with the nice Brasilieras--we had a feast-- savory sausages on mashed potatoes... in hot dog buns. I don't understand it, but it was the most delicious thing I'd had in months. The spiciness, the savoriness, the greasiness-- antithetical to the umami tofu and green onion fishiness of Japanese food. One of the girls-- was her name Briana? had prepared a church-ish lesson, since we were there as missionaries, not just so socialize (although my companion scandalously removed her sheer nylons, which made me very anxious that we were all breaking rules, because this was so comfortable and lovely to be treated kindly by kind people, so surely it must be wrong). Maybe-Briana's lesson was about eternal marriage-- giggle giggle-- and how we should know what we wanted. I was still heart-blasted, but I accepted the colorful piece of stationary she passed over to me across the kotatsu. On the top I wrote the title: My Imaginary Boyfriend.

I filled up the little lined paper. Cute primary colored cartoon animals cartwheeled in the margins. All the girls, sitting scandalously crosslegged on the floor, chewed our nails, and considered. Who would we trust our hearts to? How high could we set the bar? How badly did we want to escape the loneliness? We read them out loud, to each other. It was as intimate as a blood-brother vow, as if we opened our veins, spat in our hands and shaken on it.

Imagining a faceless man-- a partner in life-- it was a moment of power for me. I could imagine someone who treated me kindly. I could imagine someone who would come out onto the dance floor with me. I could imagine someone who I could share my faith and my life with.

I folded it up, and kept that little piece of paper tucked into my temple recommend in my wallet. It was in there for years. The words were still visible, the ink didn't smear. The cutesie bright animals still cartwheeled. The fold grayed and softened. The words were unchanged but the paper transformed.

At first, it was an emblem and a sign to me. I could set my sights high. I didn't have to settle for someone who didn't laugh with me or read good books. It was a checklist of what mattered to me. Then, like any sacred text, it transformed again. I consulted it when, just a few weeks after I returned from Japan, my boyfriend reconciled and proposed to me. Was this him? I asked the paper. Is he my imaginary boyfriend? I decided, yes. If I ignored the part about the dancing, it was a token of the fatedness of my marriage. It was all meant to be after all! It had been hard, but we'd come through! Eternal marriage bliss, here we come!

As our marriage matured, the little paper sometimes congratulated me (you've found him, it's destiny!) and sometimes chastised me (how could you abandon your principles and allow yourself to be treated this way?). Sometimes it was an embarrassment-- when our bishop in Hawaii passed his hand over our heads and declared our temple recommends null and void for our vocal opposition to Prop 8-- I put the temple recommend away. But somehow, the Imaginary Boyfriend paper remained in my wallet, behind my drivers license. It was a relic of a different person I had once been, a different belief system that had defined my entire world view. Eventually it was a strange message from a previous incarnation of myself, as alien and discomfiting to discover in my own handwriting as though I had discovered my own face in a Victorian Daguerreotype behind grimy museum glass.

At some point, I can't remember if it was before or after Matt's death, it wasn't in my wallet anymore. I don't remember much from that time. (Small tangent! Apparently humans are generally resilient, and return to whatever their happiness set-point is no matter how their circumstances change. Double amputation or winning the lottery? Doesn't do much in the long-run to change how happy or miserable you are. Except for if you are widowed. That permanently lowers your happiness-set-point. Good times!!!!)

It resurfaced recently, during my move from Utah to Oregon. I was time traveling, trying to sort nearly forty years of photos, journals, sketchbooks, schoolwork, ticket stubs and correspondence. They were all in a jumble in piles around me on the floor-- one pile for each person. Kid's fading kindergarten drawings and broadway programs from 1997, funeral programs and birth announcements. The bright little imaginary boyfriend paper made its way to the top of the pile and I was stumped. Do I put it in Matt's pile? His daily calendar books from the Cattlemen's Association and photos from his trips to Guam and the Marianas, his honor's thesis and portfolio from college and his Aikido rank advancements... Or do I put in the pile of my stuff-- the relics of my young womanhood, like the scripts of the plays I did and letters from my mission.

I reread it and it made me wistful for who I had been-- that beautiful young girl who had no idea that she needed to imagine herself-- build a mould for her own mind and body to grow in to.

But the question was, as I sat on the floor, sorting and packing all that rubbish, was-- is that little My Imaginary Boyfriend list about him? Or about me?

I don't know where I've put it.

It will resurface, and remind me of who I was and who I wanted to have. But the idea of it's been nibbling away at my brainstem, with no clear message. I keep thinking about it, but it's an indecipherable character, full of meaning but with nothing crossing the boundary to understanding.

So I got back from my mission at Christmas, with a weird knee and back injury from riding a crummy mamachari bike, and exhausted, but feeling like I'd returned from the whale's stomach. One more semester to finish school, scraping through my last few classes, and we were married in April.

I went into that marriage with a script I had built on my mission-- who I wanted to be, and who I wanted us to be as a family. Who God wanted us to be, and who we had to be, to be good Mormons. Life plodded on-- college and grad school and moving from place to place-- first jobs, then kids-- leaving the church, moving again, changing careers...We were very...married. Life ticks on.

There isn't really time in a marriage to sit down and challenge those early hopes and moulds-- thoughtfully rewrite our dreams. We were too busy making to-do lists-- get milk, take the recycling to the transfer center, check the bank balance, follow up on the kid's doctor appointment... You know, marriage. It was constant, so it was normal.

Then, suddenly, I wasn't married anymore. He made an exit from the marriage. He had been edging towards the exits for years. It seemed impossible that he'd actually leave.

It's a really strange thing to be married, and then not be.

I have other widow friends who think of themselves as still married-- especially from Mormon marriages, "sealed for time and eternity" in Mormon temples. They are still married people-- just married to someone who is dead.

But the second he was gone, I knew I was alone. It's a strange thing, to be single yet have a family. To have kids, but no partner.

That had never been the plan. But life doesn't follow plans, or submit to three act structures. I've been unmarried for almost three years now. And it has given me an unexpected gift: the space of imagination. Imagining what my senses want-- what colors I want around me, what fabrics I want to feel on my skin. What smells do I love or hate, what food do I enjoy? That was a radically healing meditation in the first few months after Matt's death. What do my senses crave? Crusty English muffins or Rocky road ice cream, ice cold mountain streams or sulfury hot springs-- it was radical self love to ask myself-- what do I want? And then give that to myself, without conferring with anyone else, without asking for permission, without the hope and then heartbreak that someone else would give it to me.

I have been given a weird gift of space-- of having been a married person, and then getting a chance to step way back from it. I find myself being a curious observer of marriages. How do they work? How do they erode? What is the purpose of being in relationship? I am fascinated by my friends' marriages. What is this project of partnership? How is anyone doing this? And why??

Little acts of imagination are broadening into an open plane-- a vista of imaginative possibility. And the thing that is emerging is not an imaginary partner-- not a lump of clay for me to put my expectations and hopes onto. But openness, potential, and empowerment, not bound up into any one

clay-footed person. The world is a open golden plane-- deep prarie roots and ultra violet skies. And it expands in all directions. The purpose of this life is not to bash and beat ourselves into a shape that is acceptable to God-- maybe the purpose is to love ourselves in order to love the universe. I can imagine myself in my life, with the potential of relationship ribboning through the landscape like a seam of gold. Or coal. Depending if you want finery or heat I suppose.

I'm dating now-- an astonishing man. Not imaginary-- far more interesting than I could have imagined. My big kids eye him warily but subtly try to impress him, and my little one thinks he is her personal climbing gym and hammock. I am taking shaky new-foal steps into that new imagined landscape-- the life I want to build. And I think there is space for partnership within it. It will be something different though. Not something to bash myself into a new shape for-- not the defining purpose of my existence, or the measure of my worth before god. It can just be something good, something helpful. Something that adds to my happiness, and expands my imagination, rather than contracting it to a narrow imaginary point.