30 days and 2 years

30 Days.

Here we are, 30 straight (not sober) days of blogging! Woot. Thanks for the challenge Daniel... I have gained a lot from it and only cursed your name a few times, swear.

From the looks of things you all want me to chill and meditate for the next month ( I did not in anyway influence this outcome ;) with a dead tie on the 30 day photo thing BUT I did attempt the 365 day photo challenge a few months ago on FB and got about 75 days into it so I think I'll try that one a bit later,  maybe in conjunction with a photogenic 30-day challenge, like the "make something everyday" or "clean something everyday" challenges, for proof.

2 Years.

September is my birth month and it also now happens to mark the years of my life outside of the Mormon religion. I stopped paying a tenth of my income to CoJCoLDS (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) in September of 2009. I had my emotional/mental rift with the church about 6 months before that but the very tangible monetary factor halted in 09/09.

I was going to try and make a break tomorrow and neatly shovel all of my ex-Mormon baggage into a neat little pile and decorate it with flowers etc for you to peruse at your leisure but otherwise ignore it myself. I have decided against this now. I am not healed. I am not new and sparkly and whole and transformed. I have worked through A LOT of shit over the last 2 (and a half) years but there is plenty more to go. I don't think it would be wise to try and hide from it. I have this urge to tuck it under the rug because it would make a bunch of OTHER people a lot more comfortable.

There is also this urge to gloss over the REALLY dark stuff and dress it all up to look presentable to the believing community so that they (if they are still lurking) would see how brilliant it is to be out of the church and may even venture out for themselves. Whilst I am so glad that I am out and I will never ever go back... life goes on and it is not always easy.

My partner (Rockstar) and I have each been on HUGE personal journeys this year and our relationship has scraped through by the skin of its bloody teeth. I mean it. That was fucking rough man.

But here we are on some kind of high again and I can't help but feel very optimistic about the latest hurdles we have overcome because they were sooooooo huge (and they're not all entirely surmounted yet) and there is a very real sense (at least on my part) of victory atop a panoramic mountain; flag in hand; bright sun smiling back at me.

Thanks for coming along for the ride. I think I can safely guarantee you another year of drunken posts and unwanted revelations. 2012 looks set to rock the house! Plenty of 'end of days' action to be sure... Big sloppy Irish kisses to you and yours.

Love and chest bumps,
Bikinimaureen.

Fat Cats

Just a quick one today. I have been reading over some very interesting posts on 'Truth Hurts: Not the searching after, but the running from' -  There is a 4 part series there that goes into the financial world of the CoJCoLDS (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; or the Mormon Church). 

It is well worth a read. Mostly I hope that my Mormon friends will read it. Again, not to make them feel bad/stupid/whatever but just so that they can be informed. I remember teaching classes at church and telling the class what tithing was spent on, boy was I misinformed!!!

And for my non-member friends - I think it might be illuminating for me to reveal Rockstar and I have paid more than $100,000 to the Church in our lifetime together. I can only imagine what we could have done with that money to provide for our little family. Living the advice to marry young and pop out (I accidentally typed poop out! haha) babies; as students mind you!!! kind of left us poor and very busy! Not much time for questioning beliefs. Makes me feel sick. But we figured it out in the end, phew! Yay for being able to sponsor a child in Ethiopia through an organisation we trust (Childfund) and yay for being able to provide for our little family without siphoning off our 'increase' to the Fat Cats at CoJCoLDS.

Hmmm, not such a short one after all.

One Year On

mid-Happy Birthday song...  cake decorated a la kids
(oh! do you love my hitchhiking dinosaur shirt? he's off to one of my favourite places - Vegas!) and uh, that's me dancing to the song btw.

It is my thirty-second birthday today but I am also marking another milestone; it has now been a whole year since I last paid tithing (10% of my income) to the Mormon Church. I noticed this when I went over my finances for the 2009/10 year and discovered a difference of about $700 between what the Church says I paid and what my records say I have paid. Hmmm, so I will look into that and I think I will go back further in my records to check that out. Besides that oddity it was quite satisfying to see such concrete evidence of my departure from the Church.

I have not as yet received anything official from the Church to acknowledge that I have removed my name. I am going to re-send my letter, along with the tithing query, along with, wait for it... a letter from Rockstar! He's decided that it's actually taking too long for them to excommunicate him and he wants out.

So, where am I one year on?

I had an amazing aromatherapy full body massage today at my local organic day spa and as soon as I laid down on the massage bed I just melted away. The music, the soft bed, the peace... and then the awesome massage. I felt very happy. A few thoughts flittered through my mind while I was there, one of them was how wonderful it is to feel free to think whatever I want. I can read about anything that I am interested in, talk to whomever I choose and make up my own mind about how this world works and what might be beyond it. Early on this idea freaked me out a bit but now I find it to be extremely liberating and calming. I am the one at the helm of my life and it feels great!

So I am 32 in earth years and 1 anno libertatis!      


(Daniel, dear linguist friend of mine, have I bastardised the latin or does it work? See Daniels comment below for the reasons I have changed anno liberta to anno libertatis! Thanks Daniel)

pizza faces

looks like Canaan thought I'd need some help 

Money Matters

Not sure if I've told you all this before but it bears repeating. I/we discovered that the approximate amount of tithing that we paid to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints since T and I married 10 years ago approximately matches the amount of 'bad debt' we currently have.

Now, some of this money will have gone to very worthy causes.. percentage? I don't know. Some of it unfortunately will have funded other types of things, things which I have only heard about since leaving the church.

So, I am looking at ways to recoup those losses. Returning some funds to myself. Apologising profusely to the LGBT community. Redirecting my available funds to better causes. Forgiving myself for being uninformed about the Church's activities.