Sunrise Meadows
My childhood street was somber the majority of the time, but you’d often hear children running in our broken-down park with rusted, metal playground equipment. You could hear the creaky swings from my window. As a young girl, I didn’t worry about much. I find myself, now as a 20-year-old, constantly in battle with myself and my identity. What do I stand for? What can I bring to the table? What do I represent?
I spent a chunk of my years in Sunrise Meadows — a mobile home park where my grandparents resided. Later, my single father and I moved just a few houses down since he needed extra help from my grandparents, who never doubted their efforts in assistance. We also wanted an upgrade from our tiny apartment in downtown Salt Lake City, where drunken college students and mysterious train horns didn’t suffocate the silence of my father’s college coursework (he lasted one semester at our local community college).
I was an easy child. In Sunrise Meadows, I lived next to my best friend Hannah and we would mind our own, running around the neighborhood morning to night, battling dragons, writing songs, playing Webkinz and making home movies. She was a year older and had three brothers and a sister: Jonathan, Matthew, Luke, and Mary, named after the biblical verses that her parents so praised. I vividly remember sitting at Hannah’s sticky table (brothers), the house chattery and loud as I was eating a snack. I bragged, as children do, to her mom about how my father and I love music so much that we check CDs out from the library and upload them onto our iPods and burned new CDs from them. Hannah’s mom scoffed and said, “Your dad will probably go to Hell if he steals.” This was the first moment I had a glimmering moment of uncertainty, attempting to soak the tear back into my eye at the thought of my dad not making it to Heaven.
My grandfather is and always has been a very devoted member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon), but one that kept it to himself. He encouraged me to attend church on Sundays but was never outwardly disappointed when I chose to stay home and catch up on That’s So Raven reruns. But when I went, I did love it. We sang songs, drew pictures, Picto-Chatted and ran around the church gym. I also got to see Hannah and all the crushes that I knew for a fact I would marry one day (Tyson, if you’re reading this, it’s unfortunate we never worked out). I would walk into the chapel with golden curls, a blue, flowy dress and my staple, sparkly headband. During the sacrament, the church would allow members to “bare their testimony”, meaning they can come up and read a scripture that stuck out to them, share an experience where they felt the Lord’s presence or just tell stories about the trials within their families while trying to make ends meet. Being the attention-seeking, theatre kid I am, I would walk up the stairs and recite a random scripture that had no relevance to anything I represented. Church had boring white walls and a weird musty smell.
I have a plethora of photographs of my grandfather and I all dressed up before church. My grandmother never went, nor did my father, so church felt like something Grandpa and I could do together. It was a reason to leave our little corner of the world and eat Lucky Charms out of a ziplock bag as we sang Hymns that we (I) pretended to know.
We lived in a poorer part of Salt Lake valley. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how strange it was how many lower-class and immigrant Mormons attended. Of course, Mormonism is a disgustingly whitewashed, corrupt religion, and even worse, the reason so many marginalized families likely attended our church was due to the flood of missions being served all around the world. Without getting too far down the rabbit hole of decolonizing my mind, being raised religious likely raised questions for a young, peculiar girl who just wanted to sing songs with Hannah and her brothers and have a day with Grandpa.
My grandmother was raised in the farmland of Provo, Utah in the ’40s and ’50s, meaning she was also raised vastly Mormon. Growing up, she and I would sit in the living room, always decorated properly by whatever season or holiday was taking place, and she would tell me stories about the cedar chests Mormon women would traditionally receive when they were young. They would add little trinkets to it throughout their adolescence that they would utilize on and beyond their wedding day, which was expected to be shortly after high school graduation. I always wanted my own cedar chest too, but not because I thought I would get married — I was set on being a pop star and never thought twice about settling down early like most women did in Utah. I have my family to thank for encouraging me to dream.
Grandma told me stories about how her family would spend Sundays at church, but as time moved forward, and as she experienced struggles of her own, she found her faith beginning to dwindle in the unjust system surrounding Mormonism. My grandmother has always been spunky and courageous. From the stories she’s told me, it seemed like she never gave a “rat’s ass,” as she would say, about what other people thought of her, most particularly when deciding not to go to church. My grandfather always respected her decisions, as he did mine. Throughout the years, I lost faith in most Mormons, but not him. He used religion as his personal form of compassion, and I can’t blame him for the world he was born into. He used his practices as a form of self-reflection and never challenged those who didn’t. The respect my now non-practicing self, father and grandmother have for my grandfather is strong.
I wonder frequently if my grandmother and father felt conflicted growing up. I think having my father as my biggest inspiration both shut down my recent confusion and enabled it. If my dad didn’t believe in God, why was he supporting me to participate? He was raised Mormon, but there’s a blurred line in the stories I’ve been told, between church Sundays as a young boy to smoking pot in the high school parking lot, calling bullshit on the scriptures. I wonder if there was a defining moment he “rebelled” or if his faith was never truly present.
Hannah and I would walk door to door in our neighborhood doing different church “charities” as young girls. We would help clean the older folks’ homes and clean their gardens. It was a tradition for pre-teens in the church to help out the neighborhood and local non-profits weekly. We would spend Saturday mornings baking bread to run to Mr. and Mrs. Turner’s later that day. It felt communal. It felt like we were doing good.
I would spend that evening watching South Park with my dad and eating Little Caesar’s in our living room, huddled with my favorite blanket and favorite stuffed animal, Barkley. Our house had a Bob Marley tapestry and posters of the Ramones. I would wake up in the mornings and hear muffled music and a faint smell of incense coming from the living room.
At school, there were a lot of other kids who were Mormon. Unlike most states, this is normal. Just this year, a friend of mine, Angela, who I knew back in elementary school told me a story I couldn’t recall. In the playground behind Granger Elementary, I told (non-Mormon) Angela my favorite book was the Bible because it “changed colors.” Eager to find out if this was true, she went home and begged her mom to buy a Bible so that she could see this magical book in all its glory for herself. To her dismay, she told me she was upset with me for years, as the Bible she received did not, in fact, change colors. While hilarious, this discussion made me question how seriously religious I was and made me feel even further away from the mysterious, adolescent version of myself. Maybe I did care. Maybe I did believe. Maybe it wasn’t just a social activity but maybe these church ideologies and magical beliefs really did manifest within me.
In my adulthood, when I would drive back through Sunrise Meadows to visit my grandparents, I had this perception that I was never too religious and I never really believed in God, but as it was clear from this conversation with Angela, I was just as brainwashed back then as the girls I met in high school that I pitied as they went every day thinking that not only do they have a Heavenly Father watching over them and listening to their prayers, but that the church was teaching them how to be good people. I would giggle (likely as a defense in my religious healing) as they grew up, went on missions and came back to their high school sweethearts to then become Man and Wife, but evidently, I was one of them too — at least I once was, although I still find my mind factoring Heaven, Hell and God into my daily thoughts and contemplation until I snap out of it and say, “Oh, yeah. Not something I actually believe in.”
I spent one summer at Girls Camp near the end of elementary school. There was one girl I was fascinated with. I spent the whole camp next to her as if she were my new best friend. “She is different,” I thought. I couldn’t pinpoint why she was different but she was, or at least the way I felt around her was. We walked to the campfire once, holding hands.
While I will never know the true thoughts running through my head as a child, I remember those gut feelings. I do recall a later day in our mobile home painted the color of butterscotch candy when I journaled about my faith as I heard Hannah’s brothers playing just outside my window. I wrote, “Is the church true? God, if you’re real, am I sinning?” I pushed the feelings away that I had for that one girl and that one camp for a long time — or any girl for that matter. From my father stealing music from the library to the girl I’d never again see but never forget, I knew I was either going to Hell or I wasn’t going anywhere. With this acceptance, I never went to church again.