I'm Dogzilla!

I first encountered the church about a year after my dad married my stepmom. I was maybe 7 or 8 when he married the waitress he cheated on my mom with. That waitress turned out to be a lapsed Mormon. She had been excommunicated for living in sin with my dad. After their marriage, she convinced my dad to take the missionary discussions. At the same time, I remember my uncle desperately trying to convince my dad to be a plain old Southern Baptist, and to this day, I’m not sure which choice would have been worse.

Anyway, my dad was baptized about a year or so after he married my stepmom and within a few weeks, he re-baptized my stepmom. My sister and I lived with my mom, so this was no skin off our noses. On occasion, when we spent a weekend at dad’s, they’d make us go to church with them, but it seemed fairly routine and wasn’t a big deal to us. It was just church.

Then, due to circumstances irrelevant to this story, my sister and I were forced to go live with my dad and stepmom when I was about 11 and my sister was about 14. Suddenly, we had gone from living in a fairly permissive, open environment to a very strict environment with a lot of rules. It was a very sudden shift from one end of the parental spectrum to another, and the adjustment was difficult for everyone. It took us all a couple of years to settle in. My sister and my stepmother never really did ever get along and still do not.

Two or three years later, I had gotten caught fooling around with a boy and found myself, at 14, in very, very hot water with the Morality Squad. The parental units had sicced the missionaries on me again, for probably the third or fourth time since we first went to live with my dad, and this time, they were successful. I would have been embarrassed to join the church while my sister still lived with us; she would still be making fun of me now, 25 years later. But she was almost 18 by this time, working full time while still finishing high school, so she wasn’t around very much. And for a change, they’d sent sister missionaries and I could relate much better to girls than to boys. Eventually, I accepted their challenge and took the plunge. Mostly, my reasoning was, if I had to serve three more years of my prison sentence with the mormons, then the only way I’d have any semblance of a normal teenager’s life would be if I was a mormon too. At least then, dad would let me out of the house for YW activities. As it was, I wasn’t even really allowed to go to football games with my nonmormon friends. I’d finally talked it over with my sister and she agreed, that if I could stand it, the smartest thing I could do would be to just play the game by the rules laid out for me and get along best I could until the earliest opportunity presented itself to move out on my own. (This is exactly what both of us did.)

About a year or so later, my 30 year-old-stepbrother, who lived in Colorado with his wife and three children, was booted out of the house for cheating on his wife. He had long since moved out west after joining the Air Force at 18 when my parents were married, so I’d never met him. I don’t even know if he showed up for the wedding. I don’t think he did. Suddenly, I had a big brother, which I’d never had before. I thought it was cool because I had always wanted a brother.

Now, my sister was working a lot at the time. She still lived there, but we never saw her. There were two bedrooms upstairs. It was a weird house. You’d go up the stairs and the hallway would just sort of open up into a big room, which was my room. There was one bedroom upstairs with a door and a lock on it. My stepmother decided that my stepbrother should have the room with the locking door, because he was an adult and therefore, deserves to have some privacy. Basically, she hung me out to dry… rather, dangled me as bait, it seemed. Even though my sister and I shared the open room, since she worked so much, I was pretty much up there alone with him all the time anyway.

The first night he was there, we stayed up watching Saturday Night Live after the parental units went to bed. The stepbrother gave me a foot massage. Remember, I had no brothers, had not spent much time around boys my age even, and had NO IDEA what would be considered inappropriate behavior and would would be appropriate. I saw nothing wrong with a little footrub. After SNL, I went up to bed. Stepbrother went to his room and closed the door. My sister was closing the restaurant she worked at, so she wouldn’t be home until around 3 a.m. That night, my stepbrother crawled into the bed with me every hour, on the hour. I fought him off all night long. I was pretty sure THAT was inappropriate.

The second night, my stepbrother did the same thing. And again the third night as well. Because I was not a virgin, and was not afraid of sex, I finally submitted to him out of sheer exhaustion. I knew he’d never leave me alone and I’d never get any sleep for the rest of tenth grade if I didn’t just screw him and send him back to his room. So I did. But it didn’t stop with that one night, of course. For him, it was just easy access to sex. He didn’t even have to go out to the bars to pick someone up. If my parents left town to go to the temple or something, they — as far as they knew — had a convenient babysitter to look after me.

Finally, the stepbrother bumped into some girl at a convenience store, knocked her down, and wound up with a new girlfriend. As soon as he met her, he started leaving me alone, which was fine with me. I never told a soul what had been going on because I’d heard Spencer W. Kimball talking about how I should prefer death over the loss of my virtue. I knew if anyone ever found out what I’d let him do, that I’d be in big trouble. He was a priesthood holder and had been married in the temple. At least he took his garments off to violate me. I think he was only wearing them as a condition that he could live with us. As if my parents couldn’t trust him only if he WASN’T wearing them.

Months later, I was MIA Maid president. It had fallen to me to be in charge of the latest YW/YM fundraising dinner. I had this great idea where I’d decorate the Sunday school classrooms as fake airplanes and invite the membership to “Fly to Hawaii” for a luau dinner. I set up one of the priesthood guys to pretend to hijack the plane and take it to Mexico instead. When my passengers disembarked, my MIA Maid group served them a Mexican taco dinner, instead of Hawaiian food. (Pretty cool fundraiser, if you ask me. I believe it was a huge hit, but I don’t really remember.) I remember spending months on preparation for this fundraising night and had ended up recruiting about 30 ward members to help me with various tasks that needed to be done. But I was in charge and ran the whole show.

The night of the fundraiser, my dad was already at church for meetings or something. My stepmom and I were getting ready to leave and she sat me down and explained to me that one of my stepsisters had ratted out my stepbrother and she knew everything that went on. She told me that she wouldn’t and couldn’t keep it from my dad, so I’d better catch him and tell him before she did… knowing full well I was about to spend the next four hours hosting a fundraising dinner for the entire ward. Of course, I never even saw my dad that night; I literally had other fish to fry… well, tacos.

Near the end of the night, as I was vacuuming the main corridor (because my clean-up volunteers had ditched me hours ago), I saw my dad and stepmom walking down the hall toward me. My dad looked as mad as I’ve ever seen him. He grabbed me (hard) by the arm, opened the bishop’s office door, threw me in, and slammed the door behind me without a word. I knew exactly what I was expected to do.

The bishop looked at me, mystified. I burst into tears. He sat me down and held my hand while I told him the whole story. He was nice to me, but I really don’t recall anything about the conversation, including the part where he told me he had to conduct a Bishop’s Court. He explained that there were four courses of action that could be taken. 1) I might be excommunicated. 2) I might be disfellowshipped. 3) I might be put on probation. 4) Maybe nothing. (Does that ever really happen?) I’m still not sure what the difference between disfellowshipping and probation is because it amounted to the same thing: you can’t give prayers in meetings, you ought not bear your testimony, you can’t hold a calling, you can’t take sacrament. Basically, every outward behavior you use to show that you are an accepted part of the group is stripped away from you. While no formal announcement is made, people ask why when you refuse to give a closing prayer in Sunday school class. Your lack of participation is noted and occasionally, openly questioned. Especially when you are publicly released from your little calling.

The Bishopric met after my Court, and told me they’d knelt together and prayed as a group about how to handle the situation. They’d received revelation that the best course of action was to excommunicate my stepbrother, but that I should be put on probation. (They’d held a separate Court for him, but this ain’t his story, now, is it?) I was told that I needed to repent, but not for what I should be repenting. I was told that I would be on probation for six months and if properly repented, then reinstated to my previous full membership privileges. Maybe they didn’t excommunicate me because the bishop knew what a poor money-manager God is, and that He really, really needed 10% of my babysitting money, which amounted to maybe a dollar or two a week. (I can’t believe these bastards will take money from children.)

About eight months later, I realized the six months had passed and I was still getting uncomfortable questions and weird glances from adult members. I cornered the bishop in the hallway one day and asked him if I could be reinstated. He told me that I hadn’t forgiven myself yet (for what?) and when I had, he’d know, and then he would reinstate me. I went back to my dad and told him what the Bishop said and asked him what I should do. I can’t remember what his advice was, but it must have amounted to “do nothing” because that’s what I did. A couple months later, the Bishop reinstated me and later, called me to be the Laurels president, which I probably was throughout high school. Or I traded off with the other girl in my class who was also a natural-born leader and tended to be a little Miss Know-it-All as well, who knows.

After I was graduated from high school, I knew that college would be my only way out of this stupid religion that had held me responsible for my own rape. I managed to acquire a scholarship to summer school between my junior and senior years in high school and then again the summer after my senior year. I put myself through school, so I purposely didn’t even consider BYU or Ricks. Too far away and I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford to travel back and forth from home to school. (They had lousy, non-accredited journalism programs anyway, and I ended up going to one of the best J-schools in the country.) But also, I had no intention of extending my misery another four years with a bunch of virgins who were totally judgmental about who I am or what I’d been through. I didn’t want to hear any more about being damaged goods or not being good enough. So I went to a state school in the Midwest, in the state I grew up in, and shortly after graduation, moved myself to another state 1,200 miles away from home, where the Mormons don’t know me.

I basically ignored the church and was furious with anything Mormon for a good ten years or so. Finally, when the depression and anxiety from untreated rape trauma became too much to bear without the benefit of therapy, I managed to get some help. I sought counseling as soon as I had a job that offered the insurance to cover it. Through that counseling, I learned that I had done nothing wrong, I had nothing to forgive myself for, and God really doesn’t believe that girls are responsible for their own rapes. In fact, I learned that it was pretty heinous and reprehensible that this many authority figures in my life had been so successful in convincing me that I was crap and had no value or proper place in civilized Christian society. I finally learned not to hate myself so much for how some sick and twisted individuals projected their dysfunction on to me and tried to make me feel like I was the bad person. I learned the difference between thinking and feeling.

Up until about two years ago, I didn’t care if I ever heard from or stepped into a Mormon church ever again in my life. Then these gay missionaries landed on my doorstep. Twelve moves, three states and six cities after I left my hometown, they tracked me down. I have long held the belief that John Walsh (America’s Most Wanted) should team up with Mormon missionaries to find all those missing people. Between the missionaries and the Victoria’s Secret catalog people, I believe you could find Al Capone and the contents of his vault. Anyway, the gayest missionary I ever saw in my life asked me why I wouldn’t come back to church. Rather than unloading this story on a total stranger who CLEARLY was going to be having issues of his own with his beloved cult, I realized that the best way to stop the neverending nonsense of being tracked down every so many years, was to finally resign. Around the same time, I started surfing the internet for a basically bullet-proof resignation letter.

I never managed to write or send one in. The Fabulous Missionary had brought over some High Priest from the ward (as a chaperone because, as as single woman, I STILL cannot be trusted to be alone in a room with men), who managed to pass on the message to the local bishop here that I wanted to resign. The bishop — whom I never met — called me one day and we talked about it over the phone. I assured him that I wasn’t offended, I wasn’t tempted to sin, and I wasn’t just trying to avoid paying tithing. My reasons were personal and doctrine-related and why did he have to know all about it? He blew me off for another six months and then, in what must have been a semi-annual desk-cleaning flurry, found a letter he’d intended to send to me confirming my desire to resign. It stated that, if I was truly sure that’s what I wanted, all I had to do was nothing and in 30 days, I’d get a letter from Salt Lake saying I was finally free from the Cult that held me responsible for getting myself raped.

I did get that letter, finally and through the course of looking for support, I discovered this site. I finally shared my story with people who didn’t try to tell me that I’d brought my own woes upon myself, that I’d done nothing wrong. Finally, I really have forgiven myself and stopped believing in a God that would punish a girl for believing what she was told.

In fact, I don’t believe in God at all anymore. The more searching and reading and thinking I did, the more I realized that the only thing I can really count on is my own experience. What some guy tells me from behind a pulpit is always going to be suspicious to me. The more I deconstructed the Mormon Church — in order to find some peace with religion and spirituality in general — the more I realized that the same epiphanies held true in regard to Christianity as a whole. Then I started looking at eastern philsophies and even into paganism and Wicca. My spiritual views now are probably closest to Wicca + Buddhism, but I pretty much claim atheism and based my spirituality on communing with nature and living a wholesome, giving life. I try to make my life meaningful by helping other people without being asked, and without ulterior motives, by simply giving my time and my self to those who understand the gift I am giving.

Thanks for reading all the way down here!

– Dogzilla