Mom's unsolicited advice and opinions, part 1 : Life's Leaps

I wanted to leave my kids a series of writings on my life, my thoughts, and opinions in the raw.  They may or may not care, but I think there are lots of things I may never say to them.  Life flies by fast and it's hard to say everything, much less those things that are close to your heart.  Hopefully with a series of poorly edited and rambling writings on this writing blog, they will someday stumble across it and my hope is  that they waste at least an entire afternoon reading it.

I moved to Utah in 2006 after meeting Dan on Yahoo Personals.  We dated long distance for about 6 months.  Dan flew to Alabama twice to go camping with me and meet my family.  I originally put up my dating profile in Utah after giving up on dating in Alabama, too much redneck, too much football.  Also, I had always wanted to live in Utah.  I was born in Salt Lake City but when my parents divorced, I never got the chance to grow up in Utah.  Instead, I visited my Dad a few weeks a year and fell in love with Utah.

I expressly stated that I wanted to date someone Non-Mormon on my dating profile and Dan was my first match and first contact.  He had also requested to date someone Non-Mormon.  He had put up a dating profile because living in Spanish Fork, Utah it's hard to find someone to date who isn't Mormon.  Dan is x-Mormon or X-Mo. He grew up in Hawaii and was raised Mormon but his parents divorced and he moved in with his Dad to Wisconsin when he was 15.  As he tells the story, he came across a book called Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and the story really spoke to him.  Mainly in that he realized he had been living in a sheltered mindset (growing up Mormon) and there was a much larger world to explore out there, complete with lots of other ideas and philosophies.

After my first marriage crashed and burned, it was really important to me to not date someone religious or of a conservative mindset.  Although you would like to hope that you could love someone who had vastly different world views from yourself, in a perfect world that would be smooth sailing.  However I found it to be a very big challenge.  Not to mention  if you were to throw kids into the mix.

My x (who was Catholic and a Rush Limbaugh poster child) and I used to have the same revolving door argument, one of many many arguments, about raising kids and religion.  He would always say that you have to teach kids about God when they are young so that they grow up believing.  The second point he would follow that with was that kids must go to church to learn morals.  No matter what I said to him he would always say that,  like a robot or canned response.  I felt like kids could be raised by example and good parents and being a good person does not require belief in things unseen.  Being a good person is real, it's today, and the results and feedback are immediate, not dependent on a far off celestial kingdom that may or may not exist.   That marriage was just never going to work, we were exact opposites and thankfully we walked away and did not have kids.


Fast forward to 2006 again.  I decided to quit a really good job at a Pharmaceutical company in Bama to move to Utah and live with my then boyfriend of 6 months that I met on the internet.  All my co-workers, friends, and family told me I was insane and they were probably right, I didn't try to argue it.  I was just ready for a change and ready to walk away from the residual pain in B'ham from my failed marriage.  It seemed like a scary thing to do that might help me forget the past and start a new future, it was totally a leap.  Dan seemed like a great person, I liked him quite a lot, and I was very hopeful that things would work out for us.  Even if the relationship failed, I didn't think I'd be left any worse off than I was.

 That might be my first bit of advice to my kids, take leaps, even if they are scary, don't be afraid of change.  Not every time, but more often than not, life rewards you when you do hard things that are outside of your comfort zone.  Also, if you happen to try something scary and fail, don't let that deter you from taking another leap in the future.  If you don't try, you might never know how good life could be.

I would not say that Dan and I dating and living together was smooth sailing.  We had some amazingly fun times and some really bad times.  Dan had been a bachelor for 10 years and was nearing 30, as was I.  We each came with plenty of baggage.  We were two people set in our ways, him probably even more than me.  As a bachelor that had his own house and life, it was a challenge for him to integrate me into his life and for me to find a place where I fit in his life.  We struggled for 2 years to try and make it work.  In the mean time, we were having a blast traveling all over the West on Dan's Harley, hiking, biking, and camping.  It was truly the epitome of the best of times and the worst of times.

We found out we were pregnant with Sara almost 2 years into the relationship.  I had not planned on having kids and was unsure about the whole endeavor.  Dan on the other hand wanted kids very badly.  After lots of discussion we decided to get married, have a baby, and see where it led us.  It was another leap, something scary and unknown.  Because we are happy and have 2 awesome kids, I think I can safely say now that it was not the easy road but it was another case where life ultimately rewarded us for leaping into the unknown.