Most healthy marriages have some good
times and some bad times, some happiness and some heartache, some adventure and
some disappointment. I will always be grateful to my husband, John, for
choosing me to be his wife in the first place and for continuing to see the
good in me 25 years later. He has been consistently patient, loving, kind, and
empathetic through all my years of struggle with mental illness and other
health challenges. I will be forever grateful that I made the decision to marry
him also. I have tried to be as patient and loving toward him as he has been
with me, but I still have a long way to go and I learn a lot from him as we
continue our life together.
I
will briefly share our story again with a few extra details. We met in 1993, while
serving as full-time missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints in the Pennsylvania Philadelphia Mission. We discovered that our parents
live about five blocks away from each other in Orem, but we never met each
other prior to my first area in the mission field. We served in some of the
same areas and knew many of the same missionaries and members, but we never
actually served near each other during our missions. He was the assistant to
the mission president during the final two months of our mission in 1994 and
discreetly arranged to have our seats assigned next to each other on the flight
back to Utah, since we went home on the same transfer. We even have pictures
where we are hugging our individual families in the background of each other’s
pictures at the airport. We started dating soon after returning home and ended
up getting married in the Bountiful Utah Temple almost exactly a year later in 1995.
John
was very busy working full-time and attending school full-time at Utah Valley
State College for the first three years of our marriage. I stopped working a
few months after we were married because I had “all day” sickness during my
pregnancy with our daughter. She was born nine months and six days after our
wedding in 1996. Our son arrived a little less than three years later in 1999. Those
were busy years for us and, occasionally, I noticed that John and I weren’t praying,
reading the scriptures, or attending the temple together very often. I
rationalized that it was just because he was so busy and I assumed he was praying
and studying on his own, just like I had been. However, there were nagging
doubts about that through the years that followed. My depression and anxiety
became much more serious after our son was born and dealing with those
complicated circumstances consumed most of our extra attention during the years
between 1999 and 2010. During that time, I retreated to our bedroom much more
often and John began to shoulder more of the household responsibilities. He
also chose to start another company so that he could work from home and be more
involved with raising the children.
By
fall 2010, I had completely withdrawn from life. My social anxiety had become
so distressing that I rarely left the house and I didn’t even attend church,
although I wished I could. John tried hard to be a loving and understanding
father and husband through all of this and always took the children to church
because he knew it would ease my feelings of guilt. During 2011 and 2012, we
decided to change the type of anti-depressant I was taking one more time and
then, later, increased the dosage as well. That change helped me to redevelop
the habits of attending church and the temple, reading the scriptures, and
contributing more to the care of our home and family.
Unfortunately,
in March 2012, my right hip, leg, and foot became inexplicably numb and tingly,
so I had several MRIs and other procedures to figure out what was causing it. In
addition, John finally told me in August 2012 that he didn’t believe in God or
anything related to Him in our religion. He continued to attend church with the
family, but it caused me a great deal of distress. However, I felt like he had
been loyal to me during my difficult years of depression, so I was going to
stay loyal to him with this new situation in our marriage. In January 2013, I
was officially diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis after it was confirmed with a
spinal tap. That was disappointing and unsettling news, but we were grateful to
finally know what we were dealing with. John was very supportive and helped me with
some of my Copaxone injections at home for the three years following my diagnosis.
Those
two life-changing events could have sent me spiraling back into my deep
depression. However, I worked hard to be diligent with walking and continuing
the other habits I had practiced in the previous two years. They became my
anchor as I slowly grew more devastated about John’s unbelief in everything I
held most sacred. Then, in September 2013, I had a strong impression that I
needed to know more people in my ward (church congregation) and neighborhood. So
I gradually started visiting women close to our home and then, as I gained more
confidence, I gradually visited women in other congregations and neighborhoods
also. I have now visited approximately 500 women and it has changed my life forever. I
visited women on all parts of the faith spectrum, was able to help several
other women who were suffering from depression, and developed some very close
friendships. Through that process, I was gradually able to stop mourning about John’s
change in beliefs and developed even more respect for the good person he still
is.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf spoke in the April 2015 General
Conference and his words resonated with me. “Being grateful in our circumstances is an act of faith in God. It
requires that we trust God and hope for things we may not see but which are
true…. True gratitude is an expression of hope and testimony.
It comes from acknowledging that we do not always understand the trials of
life but trusting that one day we will. In any circumstance, our sense of
gratitude is nourished by the many and sacred truths we do know: that our Father has given His children
the great plan of happiness; that through the Atonement of His Son, Jesus
Christ, we can live forever with our loved ones; that in the end, we
will have glorious, perfect, and immortal bodies, unburdened by sickness or
disability; and that our tears of sadness and loss will be replaced with
an abundance of happiness and joy, ‘good measure, pressed down, and shaken
together, and running over.’… How blessed we are
if we recognize God’s handiwork in the marvelous tapestry of life. Gratitude to
our Father in Heaven broadens our perception and clears our vision. It inspires
humility and fosters empathy toward our fellowmen and all of God’s creation.”
(“Gratitude
in Any Circumstances,” Ensign, May 2015).
In
fall 2015, I decided to go back to college when our daughter started attending
UVU after her high school graduation. Then, in fall 2016, we decided to build a
home with main-level living across town, since my MS symptoms were making it
difficult for me to climb the stairs several times each day in our current home,
which had a four-level-split floor plan. Making all those construction decisions,
combined with the financial stress of having a mortgage again, brought more
tension back into our marriage. Things improved once we moved into our new home
in March 2017, but we started to grow apart again later that year. My schooling,
combined with a few visits I still tried to make each week, kept me a little
too busy. John has always been a very hard worker and sometimes his work
schedule kept him extremely busy as well. I made the decision to withdraw from
school in fall 2017, so that I could try to start writing this book. We also
decided that marriage therapy was something we would finally be willing to try,
since nothing else seemed to be working. Neither of us wanted to separate, but the
silence and distance growing between us often made life feel very lonely for each
of us, even though we were both still in the marriage.
After
ten therapy visits, we were feeling much closer. We started walking together
while holding hands and occasionally went on other dates as well. Meanwhile, I
was working on gathering information for my personal history, since writing
this book quickly became a daunting task. That gradually turned into family
history, which gradually increased my time in the temple exponentially. I also decided
to go back to UVU in summer 2018 to finish my associate degree in behavioral
science. In addition, I decided to attend a few classes at the UVU institute of
religion to earn my diploma for that as well. The combination of all those activities
gradually caused distance to creep in again. This time, there were more conflicted
feelings surfacing within me because I was more invested in religious learning
and worship than I had ever been before.
Both
of our adult children stopped believing in a similar way as their dad and that had
been particularly difficult for me through the previous five years. Around the
same time in 2018, our daughter started dating someone more seriously. Her dad allowed
them to sleep together in her bedroom, but that was extremely difficult for me.
I felt that he hadn’t given me a choice when he stopped believing, since he had
already decided by the time he told me. I also didn’t feel like I was given a
say in the matter with our daughter and her boyfriend. I understood that he was
trying to do what was best for everyone involved, but it just triggered a lot of
my previous conflicted feelings. That was a very low point in our marriage.
In
2019, our daughter and her boyfriend told us on mother’s day that she was pregnant.
I tried to be supportive, but knew we needed some more marriage therapy. This
time, I asked John to choose the therapist and he decided on one who specialized
in betrayal trauma. He hadn’t purposely betrayed me and I knew that, but on
some level it still felt like a betrayal. Our daughter’s pregnancy added an
additional dimension to that complicated swirl of emotion.
I
graduated with an associate degree in November 2019 and continued to immerse
myself in family history and temple work. I felt a lot of peace when I was in
the temple and I needed that with everything that was happening with our
daughter. We continued marriage therapy and our daughter gave birth to a healthy
baby boy in January 2020. She had an unforeseen c-section, which caused her to
not be able to return immediately to college like she had planned. So we have
spent the past seven months together with her sweet baby and it has been such a
healing time. The pandemic ended up closing the temples and churches, which brought
my full focus back home. Our marriage gradually began to heal again.
As
I look back, our patterns have been very cyclical and I shoulder my share of
the blame. I’m grateful that I have gradually become less rigid in general and
have finally realized that I can’t micro-manage or manipulate John with my
faith (even though that wasn’t my conscious intention). I’ve learned that we
are each only in charge of ourselves and we can only improve or change in the
ways that we are currently able to. We also share a great desire to make a
positive difference in the lives of people around us and that is very
fulfilling. So I now focus on that, instead of our differences in religious
belief. Life will always still be a mix
of happiness and disappointment, but we have made it 25 years and that is a
huge accomplishment. I’m planning for at least 25 more.
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