crux. in Drifter in Zion

36 looms around the corner. It rests on my shoulders like dead weight. Sexist of me, I know, but I used to think it was men who undergo a mid-life crises - buying big boats and outlandish vacations and new wardrobes to reinvent themselves. I don’t like boats or pricey vacations, and I’m the last to worry about my fashion sense, but I’m definitely facing an inner crux: spiritually, mentally, physically.

PHYSICALLY

On a good day, I look more pink than pasty, but my eyes will always be lazy, my arms flabby, thighs thick, and my face chubby. I only wish I was comfortable in my skin. I wish I didn’t avoid the mirror, or feel the need to apply makeup in low light. I wish I liked how my clothes fit, how my curves represent motherhood - womanhood…or something profound, but I feel passé and awkward and unsure of how to accept my new wrinkles, the white in my brow, or how God-awful I look in photographs.

“You aren’t very pretty,” she told me, and it’s a broken record in my head. After all these years. A broken-freaking-record.

Fine. I’m not pretty.

But let me be okay with it.

MENTALLY

There’s a shit-storm going on in my head.

SPIRITUALLY

In my younger years I was always so certain(to an irritatingly holier-than-thou degree) about Jospeh Smith and the Book of Mormon. I knew “with every fiber if my being” the Church was true, and by 21, I felt a firm commitment to serve a mission.

Sometimes I miss that girl. She was naïve. She believed because she was told to, because she didn’t know differently, because falling into line was easiest.

Things change.

I text my brother the other day to ask what I’ve wanted to ask - needed to ask, “Do you think the church is true?”

He replied, “I think the church can give good direction for families.”

I felt relieved.

S and I struggle daily with staying or going. I never thought I’d be here. I never, not ever, thought I’d not believe.

But I don’t.

I can be honest about it now. At least here.

It is strange and terrifying and life-altering. I so wish it was something I could get back - the security of belonging, of knowing it was perfect, of feeling my forever was planned and certain.

I wish it was simple.

It’s not, though. None of it.

And the only thing holding me together is my little family. The only thing keeping me from tipping off the ledge, again, is love - of wanting to protect them, being with them, holding them as long as possible, because when it’s gone…when I’m washed and buried and six feet under, what then?