How A Dildo Party Helped Me Leave Behind Everything I Knew And Find My Place In The World

Rick and I were sitting in the bishop’s office, holding each other’s hands and our Book of Mormon, on our first Sunday in our new ward. The bishop offered us a handshake and a prayer, and settled behind his desk.

“Brother and Sister, welcome!” he said. “Tell me about yourselves.”

We’d been together for five months — engaged within a month of meeting and married four months later. I was a substitute teacher. Rick was working construction. We lived in a tiny apartment, with no health insurance and a combined savings of $300.

“Are you aware of the prophet’s counsel on having children?” the bishop asked, looking directly at Rick.

Not allowed more intimacy than a kiss before being married, Rick and I were one month into a more carnal relationship. We blinked at him awkwardly. The bishop stared at Rick with commanding eyes.

“Heavenly Father will bless you,” he said. “The prophet urges us to not delay.”

I was pregnant by August.

A week before our wedding, I told Rick he shouldn’t marry me. I wasn’t sure that I could be a devout Mormon wife and mother.

The church had an explanation and a rule for everything. My life was prescribed to me by men. The penultimate goal: a temple marriage. The ultimate goal: a gaggle of children to indoctrinate.

The church has manuals for each year of childhood. They are full of saccharine lesson plans on how to pray, what to eat, read, watch, wear. How to be a neighbor, a friend, an obedient servant of the Lord. How to spend time and money, stay sexually pure, repent of sin. How to become worthy.

Doubt was the devil’s work, and it had festered in me since I was a small child. I felt suffocated by the rules, but I knew no other way.

“You are the one for me,” Rick insisted. He thought the Lord would