More Time

I'm running out of time

But that's not right.

I'm really running out of energy. The right energy.

Growing up, we sometimes make up things to get the sweet stuff, like, 'I have a dinner tummy and a dessert tummy' to try explaining that we didn't want any more dinner, but we had plenty of room for the ice cream. I feel that way about my life sometimes. I don't have any energy for the stuff I don't want to do, but I can stay up all night reading or something. Right now my baby is asleep on my bed and he didn't get a shower today. Not a huge deal, but he did go swimming, so he has chlorine on him. He ate crackers and a cookie in bed, so there are crumbs everywhere, plus my tool bag from playing keep away, a mostly-clean diaper that I took off before we went swimming, a book he was reading to grandparents, and clean laundry that still needs to be folded and put away.

My husband has been gone for almost a week and I feel like I haven't gotten anything done that I wanted to. The room is still a mess, there is still laundry everywhere, and I feel like a failure.

The thing is... just existing in the morning is exhausting. Just running around after my kid is exhausting, not just physically, but mentally, I am responsible for this child, his mental and physical well-being. Before having kids, I could go to the store and NOT think about things. Walk into the store, grab a cart, grab things, buy things, leave with things. I probably wasn't going to be kidnapped, so I could rule out that, and as long as I kept my giant wallet in my cart right by my hands, nobody was going to grab it from me. Plus, I didn't let anybody get close enough to try it. With a kid, I have to worry about where he's going, what he's next to, if someone gets close to him. Even being home, with nobody else around, I'm worried about him falling down the stairs or getting into the trash when I turn my head, something happening to him. I'm conscious of myself without thinking, but I have to force myself to remember him, constantly, and it's mentally draining.

I take a nap near the second half of the day, not the middle, but sometime around 2-3 because that's when my brain shuts down. It doesn't matter how early I am awake or how early I go to bed, I am exhausted around that time and will remain exhausted until I collapse into bed.

My energy for reading, for typing, or for watching YouTube videos seems never-ending though. I feel bad that I can't transfer that energy, the energy that would let me play Skyrim all night, or read a book until 3 in the morning, but I can't. That energy exists in a place untouchable by my real duties and obligations.

I've had to allow myself the privilege of relaxing and taking a break. I have to coach myself through the day, which is humiliating, but it's all in my head, so thankfully nobody else can hear me telling myself it's totally ok to take a nap today, or eat a muffin instead of a piece of fruit. Totally ok to drowse a little and let your child wreak havoc on the room. I can get ready to go swimming, get my child ready, Skype friends and family, make that hard phone call. Sometimes I have to grit my teeth and just do something, but there's nothing wrong with a little self-love. Treat yourself like you would your best friend. When you see that you're struggling, give yourself a break. You'd tell your friend to do the same, maybe even force them, so extend yourself the same kindness. Think of yourself as a friend, project your actions onto a friend and see if you'd still judge them so harshly.

And if you do, maybe counseling is the next step in your self love process. That's fine. We all need help and there's nothing wrong with a therapist when you need to fix your relationship with somebody, even if that person is yourself.

Crisis of Faith

I've been going through a crisis of faith recently, doubting the existence of God, or rather not wanting to believe the logic of what I was dealing with. While I was dating my husband, I realized he came with a lot of baggage. He was frequently angry over little things, didn't have a good relationship with his parents, and frequently went 3-6 days without texting, Facebooking, or contacting me in any way. Obvious red flags.

Originally, it was just supposed to be a fun fling, something just for physical purpose's sake. Then we went down to meet my parents (on their request) and my Mom asked me if I had prayed about marrying him. Since we had dated for 2 weeks, I said no. With regards to religion, I'm LDS, which means we pray to God for inspiration about important things because He knows everything and, as such, would know how to deal with whatever situation is at hand. It took me a long time to pray about it because I really didn't want to get married, but I finally did. The answer was to marry him. I was confused because I felt God wasn't respecting all these red flags going up in my relationship, but, again, God knows better, so I went forward with something I figured was going to resolve itself eventually.

Almost 3 years passed before I humbled myself enough to really search for an answer. During that time, we fought almost constantly.

My husband is a good man with a good heart. I have to get that out there before I go on. He really is a nice guy, but he's been abused and hadn't come to those terms before the events I'm about to mention. He cares about me and has never abused or cheated on me, nor do I think he ever will.

We had a son during that time, and the stress of being a mother and being tied to someone so needy when I'm so independent and anti-social was so frustrating, but the straw that broke the camel's back finally came when he moved away for a month. We've never been close, so the fact that we didn't see each other every day made it worse. I chalk it up to the fact we weren't friends before we got together, it was something that just kind of happened, then God said, 'Yeah, wife that' and made it permanent. We don't 'click' and communication is NOT our strong suit since we communicate so differently, it's like we're speaking different languages. I'm not talking about how I normally talk one way and nobody else comprehends I'm even speaking a language except 2 people, no, I'm talking about how I'll present something and he interprets it completely differently, reacts to what he thinks is happening, then I'll react to him without knowing why he's reacting that way, and we blow up repeatedly until we're too tired to fight anymore. We are rarely on the same page and I say rarely, not because I can think of any times where we've been on the same wavelength, but because I'm pretty sure it's happened, it just isn't coming to mind. The conversation does not 'flow' between us, so when you remove face-to-face contact, it pretty much grinds to a halt. We only talk about surface level stuff, we only progress when one of us is depressed; then we go down the path of maybe friendship until the other person is pulled out of their depression and BOOM! back to surface-level again. A month apart made it so much worse.

Another facet to this conversation is that I am a largely sexual person and my husband is not. I placed a large part of my identity into my sexuality as a person and defined myself by my sexual nature. I am not flirtatious (anti-flirtatious, I hate being flirted with and I hate flirting), but I am sexual. My husband, on the other hand, prefers cuddling and gentle touching. This has been a huge trial since, as an LDS person, we are taught sex before marriage is inappropriate and dangerous, particularly because those feelings of intimacy are supposed to be reserved for marriage. I struggled with this growing up because puberty and hormones hit me as hard as they can hit a person (and societal shaming made me uncomfortable admitting I had sexual feelings, leading to repression and subsequent abusive relationships where I could act on my desires without feeling guilty) but was constantly comforted with the thought that this was temporary because all guys love sex, and whoever I married would be thrilled to have a wife eager for sex.

So, at this point, I'm sexually frustrated in my marriage and feel 100% neglected by God because I'm in this situation in the first place. I was promised something, right? I was promised an end to my suffering and even though I wasn't perfect, I hadn't actually 'done the deed' so where was my reward? I had 3 situations I was considering, and only 1 of them could be true.
1) God loved me, knew everything, and placed me in this relationship specifically to help me grow. Things were tough now, but they would be better.

This is the most comforting because God exists, He loves me, and my trials have a purpose. All the bad stuff happening just happened because I wasn't spiritually close to Him, which I wasn't since reading the scriptures and praying wasn't high on my to-do list. 

2) I tricked myself into thinking God said I could marry my husband. As plausible as this sounds for the religious people reading, I prayed about it every day afterwards and even on the day of my wedding, pleading for a sign to know whether or not this was the right thing. I had gut feelings of nervousness, but I needed something more, something more tangible that could be linked to heavenly intervention and not 'I've got a bad feeling about this' that comes because I'm a commitment-phobe.

In this scenario, God exists, but did not care about me making the biggest mistake of my life, and so did not intervene, which would mean I didn't want to worship Him or listen to anything He had to say since He didn't care about me or my life.

3) God does not exist and I had lived a lie my entire life, especially trusting my future to gut feelings and random bursts of synapses.

This one sucks because who wants to find out there isn't an all-knowing Being Who loves them and watches out for them daily? I was raised to believe I was a Child of God, a god in miniature, a growing god, and to find out I was just a meaningless human with a meaningless life and the good/bad in the world were relative? Horrifying.

My friend saw me struggling (read: having a panic attack) and offered to give me a comfort blessing. A comfort blessing in LDS terms is when a priesthood holder (male) asks for inspiration on the part of the person they are blessing. I accepted, thinking it could only help the matter. In the comfort blessing, he said that God loved me and was aware of my trials and they had not gone unnoticed. I would find love and affection in unexpected places and I should look to the future with hope, not fear.

A lot of other stuff was said, but the thing that hit me hardest was when it said I had to fix my relationship with Heavenly Father by approaching Him through Jesus Christ. At first, I was confused because I thought I did that by ending my prayers in His name, but as I thought about it, I realized it meant that I had to develop a relationship with Christ in order to further my relationship with my Heavenly Father. I had never considered this before. Growing up, Christ was someone Who suffered, bled, and died for us, but we didn't necessarily pray to Him, and people were always saying vague things like, 'Give your burden and sins to Christ!' but as a person who can't imagine things (seriously, can't think of what my son or husband or even best friend looks like right now) I have no idea what that means. I can't picture what my face looks like, let alone handing my burden to someone I've never seen an actual picture of.

So I decided to do research. I went to church and listened to the talks, actually listened, and a woman said if we actually trusted our Heavenly Father, we would do what He says without complaining because we would have faith that He knows better than us. Ok, definitely not something I do. I'm more a grudgingly-do-something-until-I-see-the-benefits type of person. I'll follow orders, but I'm not going to skip while doing it unless I see the reason. While driving home, a phrase stuck in my head, 'Deny yourself of all Ungodliness' and I decided to research the topic when I got home. You can't exactly type those things into Google, so I looked on lds.org for help. It pulled up a lot of talks, but I only read the first 3. I can't remember which one is which right now, but I remember two of them talked about how this life is not meant to bestow happiness, but everlasting joy. Happiness is something temporary, like eating Nutella or taking a hot shower. Everlasting joy can ONLY come from following the Gospel of Jesus Christ to death.

Another interesting concept was that Christ was always the Master of Himself. Even when He was throwing the money lenders out of the temple, He was in control of His anger. There was no hormonal function that was stronger than His will power. I instantly thought of my crazy hormones and how randy I'd be for basically the entire day, every day, for 20 years. I don't say this lightly, I was literally consumed by sex and it touched EVERY corner of my life. I was constantly holding myself back and forcing myself to play innocent when guys would make dirty jokes because I didn't want to admit I understood what they meant and could make a better one. I don't remember much about high school because the classes were so easy, I spent basically the whole time thinking about sex. It's where my mind went, and if it didn't go there, I was so bored, I fell asleep. I don't think any of the people who told me how lucky my husband would be realized how deep I was in it. I think they thought, 'How sweet! She actually thinks she wants sex.' when really it was, 'AHHH!!! She's a sex monster! Hide your sons!'. But really. At this point, I had been praying for over 18 years for some kind of control over my hormones. Different spurts of reading scriptures, trying to pay attention in church, go to the temple, fervent prayer when the temptations overwhelmed me, I felt I had turned over every stone looking for Heavenly help in the self-control department, but it had never happened. I had never been strong enough and, for some reason, I had never had Heavenly help in suppressing those urges, and had given up trying. Mostly I kept it from getting out of hand, but otherwise I let the monster do its thing. The revelation of control hit me harder this time and I craved it... I can't really say more because I'd be in tears (specifically thinking of when I was 12, but it happened multiple times a year) begging for release from this darkness... so while I can't say I craved it more, I can say I started wanting to control myself completely again. 

I prayed about it and Heavenly Father basically said that He had never given me the end goal of marriage and that was the folly of others who were trying to get me to keep the law of chastity longer. Instead, my battle was similar to an addict where it was a struggle for the rest of their life. I've compared it to a lot of things when explaining this to others, but I'm going to go with the hopefully inoffensive smoker analogy. A smoker can do what they do and clean up all signs so others don't know about their addiction. They can be as secret as they want to about it. It's easy to start, but it's so hard to quit, as many addicts will tell you. Even if they become successful, the smell of something burning will set them off for the rest of their life, even the secondhand smoke becomes something they have to avoid. Heavenly Father has promised that all wrongs will be rectified in Heaven and the spirit that possesses our body upon death will possess our body in the next life.

This means a smoker who still smokes will still have cravings for it, even if they don't have a body anymore because their soul is conditioned to seek that comfort, even if it does nothing for the soul. They've gotten into the habit of addiction and those things are a lot harder to kick without the body dulling the spiritual pains. For me, the addiction I have is sex. It's so bad, I can't have a normal sexual relationship with anybody and I have struggled to find meaningful relationships with others that don't have a drop of sexual tension. This is really hard, especially when the other person is a guy. I've tried, and it's not impossible, just really hard since that's where my brain is conditioned to go first. HOWEVER, there is hope for me. If I spend the rest of my life fighting my natural urges, I won't have to deal with it when I die.

Might sound like, 'Ugh, that's too bad! I'm so sorry for you! What a drag!' but really, I was relieved to have a deadline at all. At first, it was like I had finished running a race, crossed the finish line, everything I was supposed to do, all the boxes ticked, where's my trophy? But the trophy never comes and I have to keep on running. Instead of being able to concentrate on running, I'm looking around wondering where the heck my prize is. I crossed the finish line, didn't I? I was promised a trophy and to be able to stop running, I went through the tape, so why am I still moving? The answer is because I just passed a milestone, not the actual finish line like everyone said. I'm not alone, not unloved, not forgotten, not ignored, not irredeemably sinful, I'm just not done yet. With that in mind, I can focus on the race and on the running, not on the supposed prize I missed out on.

My husband, snuggle-bug and asexual as can be, is the perfect spouse for me. Part of one of the talks mentioned how marriage isn't supposed to be easy, and your spouse is supposed to make you better. Most people are better because they love their spouse so much, they want to be better for them. They push each other to be better. I think, in my case, that me and my spouse are together specifically because we don't take each other's crap. My husband doesn't let me push him into sex and I don't let him push me around with his abuse. If he was with a stereotypical girl, he'd walk all over them or they'd get a divorce. Either way, he's not getting better, so he's not learning Christlike control. If I was with a stereotypical boy, he would either keep up with my libido (HA!) or never admit he found me exhausting because it hurt his manly pride. Either way, I'm not learning to control myself because my husband would indulge whatever drive I threw at him. I could never have been like Christ if I had married anyone else. I was specifically put with my husband, not to experience temporary happiness in marriage, but to finally learn to control my urges and control myself while I was at it, to become as Christlike as I can. This might sound sad, but bearing in mind that earthly existence is only a few seconds in the eyes of God, how bad is it really? Sure, temporarily sad I didn't marry my best friend, but on a grader scale, we're both going to be SO MUCH BETTER by the time this is all over. My marriage is my personal refiner's fire tailored to make me as exquisite as I am meant to be. I can either take this change for perfection, or moan about how we don't communicate effectively. I can have a conversation with most people, but most people can't push me to change the way my husband does. Most people think I'm pretty awesome the way I am, but my husband sees ALL my flaws and doesn't let me get away with any of them, which is pretty great if your eventual goal is perfection and life eternal, which mine is.

The third and final piece to this puzzle is Jesus Christ and His Atonement. Obviously repentance is a huge part of this, and I'm not saying it's unimportant, but I know a lot about it already and how it's supposed to work, the steps, most everything. I don't know exactly everything, but having been a lifelong member, plus a missionary, plus reading Jesus the Christ about 15 times on my mission, I have a pretty good idea about sin exchange. The point is that I had never considered cultivating an actual relationship with Him. I thought He was always listening over Heavenly Father's shoulder, that I didn't have to talk to Him in order to be heard by Him, and the Old Testament is always going on about how God is a jealous god and we can't pray to anyone else over Him, so Christ was someone I invoked at the end of prayers, but otherwise unattainable for a relationship, like Heavenly Father was standing in the gates of heaven and communication to the other side had to go through Him. So, after asking a lot of people their opinions about how not to offend God, I prayed to Christ. I called Him 'Brother' throughout the prayer because it felt awkward to say His name every 3 seconds when I wanted to address Him and also a little bit like swearing. That first prayer was amazing. I told Him I couldn't take this sexual energy and tension anymore and He had to take it because it was killing me and the relief I felt was instantaneous, like a bolt of lightning hit me and all the sex just melted away. I still haven't found a satisfactory and natural way to end my prayers to Him yet because it feels weird to talk to Someone, then end in Their name, like...He already knows I'm talking to Him... but I go with it since that's the form of prayer I was taught and I haven't come up with a better one yet.

So there we go, start of my spiritual journey, the beginning of the beginning, the moment I realized I had to die to experience peace, but that didn't mean I couldn't strive for it. Some people would look at it as a tragedy that I couldn't be married to my best friend and my husband and I joke we have an 'arranged marriage' that neither of us wanted in the first place. Kind of horrible if you've been brought up in a culture of 'love marriages' but for us, it's our reality and something that happened and couldn't be helped without offending the powers that be. So we're both going to do our best in this life and if we happen to fall in love along the way, awesome, and if not, we'll both be perfect at the end so we get our pick from the cream of the crop. The priesthood 'binds on Earth and in Heaven' but there are temple divorces and although they're not ideal, I don't think God will force me to stay married to my fire if we don't work out. So either we fall in love or not, but either way I end up perfect, so it's a win-win for me.

I still feel like this explanation won't work for some people out there... people who look at me with pity in their eyes that I don't have this magical and epic love connection with my husband and all I can say is people went through arranged marriages ALL THE TIME in the OT, NT, and probably in the BOM too. Marriage is rarely about starting from love and more about coming from similar backgrounds so you can raise the kid in the same faith and starting from a place where having a family is plausible. It's romantic to marry for love, and I'm not knocking those marriages that have that. I think it's beautiful and amazing and wonderful that you have something like that. I can't personally be jealous though because my husband is a good man and I can grow from our relationship. I have learned so much about myself with him that I couldn't have learned with someone else. I have always been very comfortable in my identity (most parts of it) and unwilling to change. If someone had a problem with me, I just didn't talk to them anymore because they obviously weren't ready to deal with me. That's who I was. Now, I'm much more flexible. I'm looking to God for more answers. I thought I had all the answers, I had a plan, I had life figured out, and I didn't go into uncomfortable situations willingly. Now I'm married to an uncomfortable situation, and I'm growing! I'm growing so much, and it's forcing me closer to my Heavenly Father and it's amazing that He trusts me enough to put me in this situation when I could easily have decided to claim atheism, gone with the easy divorce, and married someone more... congenial.

This is a trial and I'm grateful to have it. It's hard and there will be times when I want it to end, but for now, I can see the end goal, I can see what He sees, for a brief moment, and it's a perfect me. A me in control, a Christlike me, a me that doesn't struggle to have a normal conversation with someone that doesn't involve genitals. That is my future, if I am brave enough and strong enough to seize it and it's thanks to my Father in Heaven, Who trusts me when I really feel like He should know better by now. Eventually, He pulls me through.

I hope this helped some of you who are struggling, maybe even with the same thing. If not, it was cathartic to get it out there and who knows? Maybe one of you is in a sexless marriage and feels abandoned by God and cheated out of a promise. Maybe this will inspire you to give Him one last chance. I promise He's listening, even to the weird things.