I am not always sure what I dream while I’m awake.

On the one hand, I would definitely identify myself as a dreamer. Vishnu knows that my feet are never on the ground — gad, I hardly even have any metaphorical feet at all! It’s all in my head: it’s either in the clouds, or burrowing headlong like a power-drill bit hoping to burn out past six feet under. I never operate on foot. I used to think that qualified me as a dreamer (probably largely because I was always told as much). But I think maybe I’ve learned something about every-day dreamers — they’re actually pretty grounded.

I think this dreamer self-identification is perhaps I just yearn to be recognized as the fulfilled, complete person who possesses the strength and the grace to epitomize the romantic ideal of pursuing and reaching my (worthy and one-of-a-kind) desires. I want to be the person that I admire, but I want other people to admire me. This is a problem (for me, at least; I think other people can handle it and even have it both ways). It causes conflict in the dreaming scheme of things. In the end, I am the kind of person who’ll operate on my own, forget what the world wants, and just go my own way. But in the beginning, I vacillate.

Maybe this dreamer identity ache is just that I want to be able to quote “Imagine” resolutely, without any wistfulness, and be “in” with the dreamers. But whatever I am, sometimes I feel like I AM the only one.

I grew up in an environment that resulted in self-squashing all hopes and dreams. I think what my parents wanted to promote was being happy with the mundane grind of life, but what they ended up grinding in instead was that greatness is predetermined by a mostly unalterable combination of genetics and life situation, and most people just don’t have what it takes to be extraordinary. Dreams are therefore useless. I was force-fed this, and it’s stuck with me.

My husband grew up in an opposite environment. His mother, especially, thinks that anyone she meets is extraordinary. His parents taught their children they can be anything they want, and they all believe it. It kind of annoys me sometimes (I’m such a horrible Grinch). To paint a broad-brush caricature, they’re all walking around, delusional, thinking that they can be astronauts. But when I’m not being small-hearted about it, I’m achingly wistful for that kind of weightless optimism: a deep rooted hope and belief that if you really try, you can make it.

Threadless shirts teach me life lessons and make me cry, and this one symbolizes what I think my husband is (yes, my best friend’s a flying ostrich!) and what I’ve started to think I can be.

This year I took two little international trips; one to London, and one to Japan. I realized after we climbed out of the train into Paddington station that this was something I had always dreamed about when I was younger, but I never seriously thought it could happen. I made plenty of dreams, but I did it without the expectation that they’d ever come true. I wondered, then, how many dreams I’d had that I have forgotten because I was sure they’d just never happen to me.

I realized, I make dreams expecting to watch them die.

It is hard for me to breathe life into my dreams. My overall dream is to be happy with what I am. I’m a searcher, not a settler. I feel like I should settle. I want to pick one thing and make it mine. I want to pick one job. One place. One favorite outfit. One day of the week where I always clean the bathroom. But I just don’t work that way. And because I don’t work that way, I think I don’t work. But you know, maybe I do. Anyway, I dream about not fighting myself.

I’ve already fulfilled many of my dreams. I don’t give myself credit for many of those, but in the past several years, I’ve fulfilled dozens of big and little dreams. I’ve learned a language. I’ve excelled at advanced mathematics. I’ve created an inimitable relationship with the person I love. (The myriad ways I’ve fulfilled and re-filled this dream, especially, are astoundingly profound for me.) I’ve moved out of Utah, and not just out, but to the place I always dreamed of living when I was younger. I’ve run one mile without stopping.

Some of my not-dead-yet dreams, all long-term and far out of reach for me: I want to get a job I usually enjoy (I actually have a job like that right now! So far so good). To visit France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Australia, South Africa. To figure out some way to live in Japan for a little while. To arrange a few songs for my instrument and sell the sheet music, or at least have it performed somewhere. To go to grad school. To run a 5k. To be able to perform crane pose in yoga, and as long as I’m reaching, crocodile pose too.

To hold on to these dreams tomorrow.

Someone on the DAMU boards made a happy comment about the lucky young generation of ex-mormons; how they have so much more hope and so much less to be bitter about.

That, and discussions with ex-mo friends that have been percolating in a slow automatic drip, made me realize that I escaped from the church relatively unscathed.

I broke away at 20 years old. Of the Big 3 life decisions — college, marriage, and parenthood — I only made the first one while in the church. Even parts of my college choice showed that I was starting to break away from the church: instead of choosing the major my parents wanted me to pick — music, a womanly pursuit and a good major, they figured, for a SAHM — I chose something else.

All of the things I’m seeing in my TBM friends’ lives, and some of the things that are wreaking a messy aftermath of havoc in my ex-mo friends’ lives, are things I didn’t have to deal with.

The church never got to touch my budding college sex life, so I got to start out at an amazing level of awesome. On a smaller level, the church never got to have a say on which day or which place I got married in or what I wore or didn’t wear, or what we got to say in our vows. I think that the actual wedding details are not a big deal; a wedding is unimportant compared to a marriage. But our life on the big level, the marriage level, wasn’t touched by the church either. I partly got super lucky in this because my husband, although he was raised in the church, was raised completely different than me as far as church goes, and he had had a foot out the door his whole life. It wasn’t just a foot out of the door as far as spiritual belief, but about an entire world frame. He was a feminist, a humanist, and a utilitarian rationalist when I met him. Being with him put me light years forward and let me work out my Mo-problems in a very safe stable place.

And thank the flying spider spaghetti pig monster, we didn’t have any babies! The Mormon viewpoint that I didn’t shed, though, was that at some point we would have babies, and good people ought to have babies. I’ve recently been able to let that one go. I felt various pressures to have babies, and Mormonism cast its shadows on my mind, but in our practical non-church life actually having a baby was an option we never even came close to.

I’ve often been told how lucky I am to have gotten out when I did, but I never realized how free I am.  I’M FREE! Very free.

“I need to work out more. I’ve stopped working out as much now that the weather is getting colder. And eating veggies, I need to do that more. I need to stop worrying about my body so much. I really need to work in the yard. It’s such a mess. I need to be less negative.”

<soft laugh>

“Are you laughing because I said I needed to be less negative and I was being negative?”

“Well, you have to admit, it IS kind of funny.”

I stepped into a Mormon church today for the first time in almost two years.

(The last time was a Christmas Sacrament Meeting at my parents’ ward. My mother told me that my sister would be performing and “although sister would never say so” to me, she would be sad if I didn’t go to see her. I rolled my eyes at the passive-aggressive guilt tripping. I knew it was about church and not about my sister because she’d had a non-church performance a couple days before and my mom hadn’t made a peep. I asked my sister about her church performance and if she would like me to go. She said she didn’t care, it was a lame choir number, but she’d like me to go because it was a family event. I was conflicted but I ended up going.)

This trip was for a birthday party abuzz with the cackles and whines of three year old children. It was touted as a costume party, and although I guessed the “costume” part was for the kids, I am inured to social constraints where costumes are allowed, so I showed up in full pirate regalia. The only other adult in costume was the birthday boy’s dad (one of only two dads in attendance, by the way, except one from the bishopric who poked his nose in between meetings).

They took all the kids outside in the cold rain to sing happy birthday and light the three candles on the cupcake. I was pretty sure that was more of a health hazard than keeping all the kids warm indoors and blowing out the three tiny flames. But I lit a fire in my own kitchen this week, so it’s probably just as well if no one listens to my pyrochial advice.

But the bugaboo was the party favors. Frog toys for boys, necklaces for girls. One of the boys asked if he could have a necklace, and the mom host said, “no, the boys get frogs and the girls get necklaces.” I’m sure he won’t be scarred for life, and maybe I’m oversensitive, but I think it’s setting a trend that will reach into more important things in life. We see items and activities as belonging to one gender and we start to forget we can change that. Longer queues for women’s bathrooms — there are several social fixes to that! But we just lump it.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink he talks about how women weren’t in major symphony orchestras until fairly recently. Around the ’50s, the German symphony implemented a screened audition for the first time, because one of the applicants was related to a judge. The instrument was trombone. When they heard the last applicant, the conductor immediately jumped up and said “we want him!” But him was a her. (Turns out they wouldn’t have invited her if they’d known. In the invitation letter, they addressed her as “Herr” instead of “Frau”, but she thought it was a meaningless mistake.) The conductor was terribly upset and had a hard time taking back the elated praise he’d just given her when he couldn’t see her. They ended up taking her, but they demoted her as soon as possible and she had to take it to court. Now most serious symphonies have instituted screened auditions, and now suddenly women are filling orchestra chairs. This might seem far away from frogs and necklaces, and it is. It’s a greater victory by a huge magnitude to be rewarding female musicians by merit than to give a kid the “wrong” gendered toy if he asks. But it’s worth it to watch the little things we do that betray our mindset towards the bigger picture.

When I was growing up my dad would ask me every night if I had brushed my teeth, said my prayers, read my scriptures, and flossed. I don’t think I ever lied in answering.

My dad oft told us kids about one of his mission companions, henceforth to be called Elder Dental Dude, who flossed like Jesus would be looking him in the mouth tomorrow. Elder Dental Dude made quite the impression on my dad, and my dad made quite the impression on me: toothiness is next to truthiness. We went to the dentist as often as we watched Conference.

Fast-forward. When I got into college I eventually stopped reading my scriptures, and praying every morning and every night, and fell into a terrible depression, and my dental habits started to dwindle. Flossing fell out of the picture entirely. I brushed my teeth most nights but if I was already in bed, I skipped it.

After I surfaced from my depression, there were a few months of no insurance, and then many many months of procrastination. I went two years without a cleaning, and long after my church guilt was gone, my dental guilt was alive and strong. I felt like a bad person every time my mouth hurt, any time I waited too long to buy a new toothbrush.

For some reason, my night routine growing up resulted in a weird marriage between praying and brushing. It’s weird how it’s permeated my life and weirded me out and messed me up. This marriage ends now.

When we switched to a new dentist last month, I decided to bite the bullet and go in and get my teeth taken care of. The people at the office are awesome and Sol and I both really liked it. But we discovered our dentist is a Mormon (through the little matter of his alma mater in his front desk biography). I tell you, the spirit of Elder Dental Dude will not die. It’s still trying to exhort me. STOP ADMONISHING ME TO BRUSH AND FLOSS. Dental spirit begone. I’m determined to get back my stellar tooth habits and totally divorce it from my worth as a person. It’s just a smart idea, a good thing to do, and I can do it to take good care of my teeth, not my soul.

Today I found a wallet in a parking lot and took it in to the customer service desk of the nearest store.

Good thing I was raised Mormon, or I would have taken the credit cards and done frivolous things with money that isn’t mine. Maybe I would have built a mall. I would have at least gone to a mall.

I realized last week that I am not actually a very bad person. I was feeling some conscience pangs over some minor goading I perpetrated against my semi-arch-nemesis the week before. I was determining how not to do it again when I suddenly realized it’d been a week since I’d done something actually wrong. I had been sinless for days. I’d been guiltless for days.

For a moment my mind tried to grope for yesterday’s sin of omission, for that morning’s transgression, for that afternoon’s wrongdoing. And it came up blank. BLANK.

My mind has never gone fishing for guilt without catching something and gutting and roasting it over a spit. A number of things could account for this fishy absence of guilt:

a) I don’t actually sin much anymore
b) I just don’t feel guilty anymore
c) Jesus washed away my sins and I forgot ‘em like he done told me to
d) I’ve had a lobotomy

I used to functionally believe that my level of guilt indicated my level of depravity. I changed my formal beliefs, but the guilt stayed. It was drastically reduced guilt, with smaller severity, shorter longevity, and fewer causes. It made a world of difference. But I still had guilt in spades. (Just little spades like the 2 and 3, instead of the Queen.) After a couple years, the best evidence was that guilt was wired into my cognition patterns. Being guiltless seemed infinitely improbable. Option B above seemed as likely as option C — which is to say, not bloody.

I’ve never really agonized about the commission sins, but the omission ones haunted me. I never brooded over wanting to kill people, it’s more like I’d have cold cereal for breakfast and then cry over unmade pancakes. I didn’t feel unworthy to live because I was evil, I felt unworthy to love — to be really truly fully loved as much as possibly possible — because I wasn’t perfect.

It’s like I had a recurring Office Space nightmare where my friends were sentenced to at least four years in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison and then the judge would turn to me and dictate “Chandelier, you’ve led a trite and meaningless life, and you’re a very bad person”.

I think the key that re-opened this Pandora’s box and let a cagey Hope fly out was letting go of the sins of omission fixation; the fear of a trite and meaningless life. And believing “you are perfect enough.” And maybe I finally watched The Philadelphia Story enough to believe Nom de Cypher telling Kate Hepburn that it’s lovelier not to be a goddess.

My youngest sister is beginning school at BYU. She’s trying to figure out her GE requirements, and how to get all that annoying learning out of the way, so yesterday, she calls me up and tells me “mom asked me to ask you how you got out of taking math in college”.

You could almost hear the circular churn of the can-opener in the background; almost hear the disgusting squirm of worms inside the food storage can.

Math and women is a major issue for me. It’s definitely a focal point of my feminism, and an issue that extends far beyond the particular problem of women in Mormonism. I have a low tolerance level for discussing this issue with my family. It can be expressed like so:

(m * w)^-2f = t

where m = math, w = women, f = exacerbation factor, t = tolerance level. The result is that the higher f is, the closer t gets to zero.

More often, however, it is expressed less like that and more like this:

ARGH!!!

“Argh” really lacks mathmatical elegance, but it kind of has a piratey elegance.

In third grade, I learned that I couldn’t do math. My parents came home from a parent-teacher conference and told me the news. I thought that I couldn’t do math for the next, oh, (2⁴ - e) years or so. I was sure I was bad at it, it was a matter of fact. And I thought it ’cause I was taught it. I was taught more that I couldn’t do math more than I was taught math.

Math became anathema to me. I created little hate poems on “anathemathematics”, my coined portmanteau. I was placed in remedial classes from Jr. High on (which was horribly embarassing for me; I excelled academically in everything else, and put all my best eggs in the smartypants basket). When I was auditioning for music teachers in high school, one of them heard me play and said “you must be good at math. You play very mathematically.” It was intended as a complimentary, although it didn’t seem like it (and if it doesn’t seem so to you, you probably don’t like Bach, or you don’t see any beauty in math). I said “no, no—I hate math! I’m terrible at it.” And I did hate it. I loathed it.

I had a miraculous math teacher in high school. I’m not much a believer in ministering angels, but I suspect she is one. I was at the top of her class, but I didn’t change my mind about my math abilities. And then I went to college, and took a math class—a logic class—for fun, not realizing, I suppose, that it was math and I was going to fail it. I ended up with a big fat A. It was the most interesting and exciting class to me; I loved it. I went on to take the next class, and I ended up filling my advanced language requirement with math (though I covered it up on my transcript by filling it again with Arabic).

And still my mom thinks I can’t do math. We weren’t exactly close in my college years, but if she had listened to a word I’d said, she would have known about this class, about how much I loved it, loved my teacher, loved my textbook. About how suddenly I rocked at math.

If she ever did know, she’s forgotten, and the really sickeningly maddening thing is, I think I’ve started to forget too. I’m studying math at home, for fun. I bought a textbook off Amazon for less than $5, and DH is creating a curriculum and grading my assignments. The first night, though, I had some sort of mental and emotional breakdown; I started screaming and crying and throwing irons and toasters in a frightening fit that scared the shit out of poor Sol, who hadn’t realized that violent despair is part of doing math.

The ironic part is that I usually crunch numbers to calm myself down. I only became consciously aware of this habit about two years ago, and now I know it for a telltale sign of stress. Whenever I’m particularly stressed at work, I’ll jot down a few math problems and play a few number games with myself. During my last year of believing in the church at BYU, I did math problems at a frenzied pace throughout the three hour block of church: when I found my dusty scripture case after my apostasy, I pulled out dozens of folded sacrament meeting programs and Sunday School and RS handouts with numbers scribbled all over them.

I haven’t chronicled the half of the gross entanglements of the Great Math Debacle, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. I’m frustrated and upset that this happened to me, but what I’m really afraid of is passing it on.

I told my sister “Tell her I didn’t get out of it. I took it and I loved it.”

For Mother’s Day I called my mom on the phone. The conversation started with mom asking if I’d damaged some of my antique furniture. She asked how my house is decorated, and then she talked some about my sisters. The call ended with me saying I love you, Mom, which she punctuated with a goodbye click.

That night I had a vivid, freakish nightmare. My mom set the house—her house—on fire with me (and my husband) inside. I was trapped in the room I grew up in, but Sol was living in the next room. All my fine little things were burning. I cried and screamed and called to Sol to help me put out the fire. He came in and we shut the door. I said “fire needs oxygen” and we looked at each other and he said “yeah, fire needs oxygen” and we smiled, comforted in the fact, bonded tightly together by the knowledge. The fire died out, and as the room went black my mother peered in the window from the dark, pressing her face to the glass, checking to see we were dead.

DH’s sister (the terrible bitch, not the nice one) got married last year at 19 and is now several months pregnant, ready to bring Jesus Jr. into the world. I’m almost not exaggerating about the baby Jesus part. Over Christmas, she told us with serene certitude that Jr. “is a good baby” and “he will never talk back to his parents.” My BIL and I snorted with derision, and then SIL’s husband said, in his spiritual voice, “I never talked back to my parents.” BIL and I were torn between dying with laughter and crying for the baby.

SIL sent an email to the family about how their family education is coming along. She said “we’re both working on our bachelor’s. Then Dave will continue his education by getting his master’s, and Ashely will continue her education by becoming a full-time mom.” (She always refers to herself in the third person in these emails.)

As of right now, actually, she’s taking a break from college at BYU until the baby comes, and then, supposedly, she plans to go back and finish her bachelor’s. DH and I have a bet about whether she’ll finish at all. I say she will, he says she won’t.

This “full-time mom” line is really tripping me up, though. She didn’t say stay-at-home-mom. SAHM doesn’t necessarily convey that working moms are part-time moms. She had to choose full-time mom, for its extra-righteous veneer.

Why didn’t she say “DH will continue his education by getting his master’s and becoming a full-time dad.”? I really want to reply with something like: Is he not going to be a full-time dad? Is parenthood not part of his education? Are you not a real parent if you work? No? Oh, I see, you’re just not a real mom if you work.

I’m not a mom at all, but I know full-time moms who work outside home. I take huge, huge issue with this LDS mothering is the only way shit. Maybe because my ovaries are telling me I want to spawn, and if I do, I think I’ll be a working mom, and I’m crying with guilt about it already. I am years away from having children. This is messed up. I am messed up.