Milk Before Meat

I’ve always been a big fan of meat.  My lifelong favorite is beef but I’ve recently acquired an affinity for some types of fish, especially in the form of ahi tuna and sushi rolls.  Life experience has taught me that I am most definitely the type of girl that would like to just eat the meat and avoid the milk altogether.

Since hearing that HBO’s Big Love will air some parts of the mormon temple endowment ceremony, I have been giving some heavy thought to this milk-meat concept.  I know I have not talked much about my ex-mormon-ness on this site.  Etienne has done a wonderful job of showcasing the myriad of fucked-upedness that can occur with membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as well as the life-affirming redemption that can come from leaving it.  But, see, as a convert to the church at the ripe-old age of eighteen, I have my own fucked-upednesses to discuss.  One of the primary of these is the milk-before-meat theory.

They tell you, when you are meeting those really hot missionaries in a park without the permission and quite much to the objection of your parents, that the church is this beautiful thing.  You learn of eternal families, “The Spirit” and of keeping your body clean by steering yourself away from the evil drugs and alcohol.  This all sounds so beautiful, especially when your first true love tells you that he will only marry a woman, some day, that is worthy of a temple marriage.  Well, since you marry who you date, I took the very important hint that it was time for me to get right on that.  After all, I would need a date to the prom.

Fast forward a couple of years to my temple day.  THIS was the day I was waiting for…I would get. the. MEAT (no, not that kind of meat, you pervs).  I was shocked at my carnivorous experience.  It was WEIRD!  The temple ceremony was filled with hand-raising, hand-lowering, hand-touching, sheet-wearing, password-memorizing, weird-clothes-wearing, old-lady-stinky-breath-smelling, old-lady-new-name-getting, video-watching, sheet-hole-finding, bloomer-buying and just plain weirdness.  I can’t help but now think that this may have been something that I would have wanted to know before buying into this whole shebang.  I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO TASTE THE MEAT!

In my previous “state of mind” I would have been very disturbed by HBO’s decision to air the meat.  It would have broken my heart.  It would have been something that I would not have been able to understand.  Now, I can only applaud HBO’s massive set of balls.  I think back to the time when I made the life-altering decision to convert to mormonism:  the resources were very limited in the eighties and I relied on my heart to guide me.  I used very little brain (which they will tell you is the exactly perfect thing to do).  I asked a lot of questions and was told that I would need to digest the milk before the meat.

Today’s idealistic, stupid teen (or anyone else investigating mormonism) most definitely has the benefit of the internet.  One can find the entire temple ceremony, the historical inconsistencies, the painful “testimonies”, and the truth about polygamy within fifteen minutes.  I’d imagine that has done a nice bit of damage to your run-of-the-mill investigative process.  I do feel sorry for those hot missionaries, in a way.  But Big Love is something different altogether.  You get to see the stories of this family.  You get to see how the “fundamentalists” are intertwined with the mainstream church.  There is Barb, who is so “normal” next to Nikki who so wants to be “normal”, next to Margene who so could have been “normal”.  All of them stand so steadfastly next to Bill, the patriarchal, condescending dufus who really is just trying to rule his family with righteous dominion while he holds it all together.  You get involved with these characters before you get to see the insidious way the church messes with their lives.  And now next week we get to see the start of it all for Barb.  Perhaps the first moment she ever thought, “What the FUCK have I gotten myself into?”.

Oh, Barb, I can SO relate.  I ate the meat, I married and stayed with an asshole, I dedicated my sense of self-esteem, for a time, to a ridiculous religion and I took a tenth-grader to the prom after my mormon boyfriend, again, decided that he could not possibly date someone who was so worldly.

Condoms, bananas and Led Zeppelin

So, #1 had her first official date last night.  I can’t recall ever being as nervous about letting her go somewhere.  All I could think about was what it felt like the first time a boy touched me anywhere on my body and the endless front-seat-of-his-car makeout sessions in my parents’ driveway.

It’s not that I don’t want her to date and make out with boys and go to dances and hold hands in the hallway.  It’s just that right about now, I fear my openness about sex is going to backfire on me.   I’m always the one who gets myself into trouble for saying too much when it comes to sex.  My job encourages me to talk about it…I mean, come on, when you are exposed to the very private act of birth with so many couples and so many “interesting” experiences, you can’t help but need and want to talk about it.

The approach I have decided to take with my children about sex is complete honesty.  When they ask, I tell.  Sometimes when they don’t ask, I tell.  I don’t want them to go out into the world wondering what sex is really about and start exploring it just to find out.  I don’t want them to get married without first having sex with the person to which they are committing their lives.  I don’t want them to think that sex is “bad”.  I want them to see it for what it is:  a beautiful expression of love and something that is supposed to feel good.  But when they go out and do start exploring sex I don’t want them to not be able to talk to me about it.  I want them to use birth control and I want that to be available to them.  Let’s get real.  Most of them WILL have sex when they are teenagers or in their early twenties.

So with that thought in my head, and the knowledge that “the boy” is a senior who has already dated on a long-term basis, I decided that my daughter should have some condoms and know how to properly use them.  At first I was afraid that, as the right-wingers say, she would see this as me giving her permission to have sex.  She knows me better than that.  She knows that I am smart enough to realize that she is the only person that can possibly give herself permission to do that.  She is armed with a comprehensive knowledge of the mechanics, biology and dirty details of sex.  She definitely knows what sex can bring into one’s life, both good and bad.  She has listened to me talk about the fact that sex can change a relationship for the worse.  And now she has seen me demonstrate condom use on a banana.

I think some may question my wisdom and sanity but as a person who has watched many teenagers give birth I would ask you to consider the wisdom of telling a child to be careful without actually showing them how.  In the heat of the moment, do you really want your child to not have a condom and not know how to properly use it?  Have you ever been caught in the heat of the moment yourself?  Has sex ever brought upon you some unwanted consequences?  I wish I had the power to change EVERY parent’s line of thinking on this.  Your children, when they are teenagers, have the power to influence their own lives for good or bad.  Don’t give them a reason to use that power to prove to you that they can make stupid decisions on their own.  Don’t push them far enough away to make them want to rebel against you in destructive ways.  Don’t give them permission to date but then fool yourself into thinking that because they don’t have your blessing, they won’t have sex.  Arm them with your values about sex but don’t believe for one second that they will make the exact choices for themselves that you would make for them.

*stepping off of very large soap box*

So, not too long after showing her how to properly roll a condom over a banana, carefully leaving a reservoir at the tip, I sent her off on an official date.  With a boy wearing a Led Zeppelin hoodie (who was taller than both Jeff and I), in a car, with a purse full of condoms.  Then said to myself, “Oh my God, what have I done?”

Falling Into Life: A Gay Exmormon’s Journey

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Where’s Moesey?

What I’ve been up to:

http://www.clickondetroit.com/video/18796928/

Channel 7 Detroit News

My house is a mess, the laundry is piled up, my kindergartner got suspended from school for biting and I am SO tired.  Being part of the opening of a new hospital is a rare experience but being part of THIS is once in a life time.  I hope we can make it everything  it’s trying to be.  I do wonder about how we can sustain this vision in an economy such as this and especially about the ethics of all the physical beauty and luxury when there are millions and millions of people without health coverage.  But if we can do this, if we can demonstrate that a health care environment focusing on wellness can ultimately reduce dollars spent then we really can, as our mission statement says, “Take Health and Healing Beyond the Boundaries of Imagination”.

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Mormons think they have the answers for everything, including how to “cure” and “repair” gay people…

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Chapter Nineteen – Sandy Grackle: The Second Coming and Going of My Mother

The day I got back from my mom’s funeral, Rex, my partner, told me he had a premonition that his mom would die in two weeks…

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Chapter Eighteen – Regaining Strength!

I had been controlled by fear my entire life! Fearful of a silent, vengeful God. Fearful of this Satan character who, with his legion, was waiting around every corner to drag me to hell…

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Chapter Seventeen – Just a Little TLC…

As I was losing my religion I met Tom…

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