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You must be truly inspired! 🙂 I had never even considered the home school analogy in reference to teaching them at home spiritually, but, I can completely relate to it. I was home schooled along with my four siblings, and I have also home schooled my oldest two children (7 and
for the past several years. So that really resonates with me. Thank you!Thanks everyone for your kind words and support. I know my family is very concerned, and as many of you pointed out, they can’t even begin to see the full picture unless they are willing to look at the issues in depth like we have. I have to admit that the poem my mother posted bothered me because I know it is right. What we as parents do while raising our children has a huge impact, and since my disaffection, I am so scared for my children. I felt so secure in my beliefs and what I was supposed to do everyday of my life, I had my nice checklist that made me think everything was under control and I was doing what was right and setting the best example for them. Now, that is gone, and I don’t know how to give security to my children without the church, and at the same time, I know I don’t want to use a lot of what I was taught at church in my teaching them. I guess I’m trying to say that I feel lost right now in the parenting area, so, that poem hit a really sore spot for me. My children are young now, but, I am still scared for the future. Anyway, thanks again for the support.
Well, I talked to my husband about me drinking, and he doesn’t think I should do it either for the reasons I talked about. I guess I just don’t like the part of me that feels so smug that I have never taken a drink, and I have that ‘holier than thou’ attitude about it. However, because of my family background with drinking, I have no desire to drink at all, I am just not sure how to get past that attitude part of it. I think I just have the attitude that ‘I am smarter than all of those who drink’, because I’m not setting myself up for those situations that I have seen in my family caused by drinking. And because I haven’t known anyone, including my husband, who is able to drink moderately all of the time, I don’t see the value or possibility of only ever drinking responsibly. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Thanks everyone. As I’ve thought about this more and read your comments, I think that what I am feeling more is that I need to take a drink not because I want to break the taboo, but to show my husband that I am more accepting of his choices that he has made, which includes drinking. It has been a VERY sore spot in our marriage for a long time, since I was TBM for so long after he lost his faith, and now, after reading all the comments, I realize it would probably be detrimental to myself and our marriage for me to do it just to make him feel more comfortable. I honestly could care less about drinking for myself, I have never been one to care for any kind of ‘buzz’, even taking medication after surgery doesn’t sit well with me, I don’t like feeling out of control of my body at all. I guess I am just tired of the automatic ‘annoyance’ that creeps in as soon as I am around anyone who is drinking, and I was thinking that maybe if I just took a drink, that would end my self-righteous smugness and it wouldn’t annoy me so much. Yes, I absolutely believe in metaphysical experiences, although in my current state of mind, I have no idea how they happen, if God helps them happen, or if I create them. I’ve had several experiences which seem completely independent of anything that I could have done to ‘create’ them myself, maybe I was just extraordinarily lucky, (according to my husband) 
Thanks everyone for your opinions, you all have been very helpful. I do want to give money to help those in need, I definitely feel that is something healthy and right for everyone in life to do. I have a difficult time with the business ventures of the church, because I feel like if we have that much surplus, we could be making a much bigger difference in helping the poor and needy then say, investment in a mall or real estate. Does anyone know if the church has ever made a strict command of 10% being tithed to the church? Or is that just an unspoken rule? I was thinking about it, and realized in all my upbringing, I was always taught you just pay 10% tithing, it was always by default to the church, but I never heard anything indicating that it had to be paid to the church to count. I could see myself paying some tithing to the church for ‘my part’ in building maintenance, etc., and the rest to other organizations that are not interested in making money through business ventures. Anyway, I appreciate everyone’s comments here, they have really helped broaden my perspective.
I grew up with the same mentality as mentioned in the original post. If we dared drive anywhere, fly anywhere, or do anything not related to church, some horrible consequence, car accident, plane crash, etc. may happen, and it would be because we did not keep the Sabbath Holy. For some reason as I grew up, I learned to associate fear of death with not keeping commandments. I’m not really sure why, as my parents didn’t go around saying we would die if we did this or that. Anyway, after I was married and my DH had started his disaffection, I ended up in counseling by myself with a non-church counselor. It was one of the best things I ever did. I explained to him my fear about the Sabbath, and he basically helped me get the courage up to just try something, anything, on the Sabbath, and see what happened. So, I went out and put gas in my car on a Sunday. Welcome. I hope you find this forum to be as useful and uplifting as I have. It is a great place to come talk to people and work through what is going on in your life with the church and others. It sounds like you have been very mindful of your spouses feelings the past couple of years. But, there does come a point when you have to talk. My DH dropped it all on me in one day, we have both agreed that probably wasn’t the best choice. One of the parts I regret of my husband’s disaffection is that he did not feel like he could talk to me at all when he was going through it. Looking back, it would have made a world of difference if he would have sat down with me and had a ‘heart to heart’, in a way that I would have felt like he was asking me to help him, that he needed me to help, he didn’t want to go through it alone. Even if the outcome was the same, it would have been much better to have gone on the journey with him at the same time. Right now, I am going through it by myself. He has already been gone from the church for 8 years, and I am barely beginning, and it is difficult.
Keep the communication open, and let your wife know that no matter what you love her and value who she is as LDS, I would bear testimony in whatever way you can of the common things you do believe in, but let her know what else is bothering you. Now that my husband and I have started talking about some of the issues, we find it easiest if he just mentions casually that he has a hard time with the whatever history or doctrine, that he read about it in X place, and he doesn’t see how it fits in with X doctrine. Then he just leaves it out there for me to mull over. No expectations of what conclusions he expects me to come up with.
Good luck!
Thank you for the suggestions. I am going to have to think about this one for a bit. I am living out of the country right now, in a branch with around 40 people that have been members for around 10-15 years, mostly older adults. Any U.S. family, or TBM looking person that shows up is put in a calling pretty quickly, since the locals are still getting the hang of it. The youth here are converts, and are VERY quiet, (an understatement), I have a few that literally do not say one word during the whole class. Now that I think about it, maybe they can’t tell what I’m saying, I am assuming I have some kind of an accent, since I have a hard time with their accent. Anyway, my point being is that I feel somewhat obligated to teach them the TBM way, since they are brand new, and many of them don’t even know the basic stories of the scriptures. It’s just that as I teach the stories, I feel more and more disgusted that I ever thought those stories were actually real. Today for instance with my Adam and Eve lesson, I went through it and ended up with 15 minutes left in class with all of us staring at each other. 😆 (Oh, and yes, the SS teacher asked me to start at the beginning of the manual, I guess they just ordered them, I think they only had one manual for GD.)
Anyway, still thinking about this one…thanks again for all your thoughts.
Thank you everyone for your comments and support. I haven’t been on in a while, since I had family fly in for a week, but I’m here now. I appreciate all the suggestions, and I’m still trying to figure out a way that I can talk to my husband about how I am feeling about the church. I guess I just need to give him a chance and see how it goes from there. As far as our daughter being baptized, right now we live pretty far away from all family (out of the U.S. for a while), so, while we have told people that he doesn’t want her to be baptized, I haven’t really felt any pressure from family to do anything. My daughter wants to be baptized, but not until we are back by family, and I don’t think it has really hit home to her that her dad won’t let her. I’ve told her that she will probably have to wait until she is older, but, it hasn’t sunk in yet I think, with all her older cousins getting baptized back home. At this point, I feel like I want to throw out all the doctrine I was ever taught that is exclusive to the church, and only focus on the teachings of Jesus Christ. However, then I start questioning what those teachings even are, since I have read some on the history of the Bible, trying to find out why we use the KJV, and that didn’t help me at all in feeling like the information in it is accurate. Throw in there that my DH wants us to be an Atheist family anyway, and I just end up feeling mentally overwhelmed and exhausted whenever I try to make sense of anything religious.
These are the two things that I feel I believe at this point:
I do believe that God answers my prayers, even the small ones, but, I’m not sure how that fits into my belief that I don’t believe that he wants to micromanage us. It doesn’t seem like he can do both. If he is involved on that intimate of a level to answer my detailed requests, then I would think he would also be very specific about what he expects from me as well.
I also believe that Jesus Christ was a divine person on the earth, here to set an example for us, but, I’m not sure that the Atonement is what I thought it was.
Anyway, sorry if this is a lot of rambling. I guess this is just a hundredth part of the continual conversations going on in my head right now.
