Nonfiction, Allison Billmeyer
When I think about home, I think about Mormons, about landscapes punctuated by white spires rising taller than any of the other buildings in town, about the bigness of the sky stretched above me, and the way the mountains felt like a warm embrace, holding my childhood within their arms. I am not Mormon, and neither is anyone in my immediate family. Still, I am from Pocatello, Idaho, which is located snugly in what is colloquially called ‘The Jello Belt’ (a cheeky, self-aware nod to Mormon’s fondness for ‘salads’ concocted out of green Jello accompanied with carrots floating in the center). My parents were both born and raised Pocatellians, but I spent my first nine years living in Arizona, Kansas, and Wisconsin.
Moving home to Idaho came with almost learning another language. I heard my Mom refer to someone as ‘LDS’ in a whisper on the phone. I thought that it had something to do with drugs because it sounded so close to ‘LSD.’ Later, I learned it’s an acronym for Latter-Day Saints, the moniker most Mormons prefer using. In our first year back, a neighbor invited me to the ‘steak house’ on a Wednesday night, and I was excited at the prospect of being fed a steak dinner. I was disappointed when I realized I’d been invited to their church building, a stake house, for something called ‘mutual.’ We learned about financial responsibility and budgeting on this particular night. A woman who grew up with my grandmother asked us what we could all potentially budget for, and the girls echoed as if they were singing in the round, ‘My wedding, my wedding, my wedding’ and ‘my mission, my mission, my mission.’ I say ‘college,’ and this is met with near silence.
My first three years back in Idaho were spent safely tucked away in a different kind of oppressive environment- a Catholic School. The school was small, with only about twenty kids in each grade. In religion classes, the priests made digs at the local Mormon population, mainly about their close allegiance to Joseph Smith; this is not Christian of them; they don’t emphasize Jesus Christ enough. My mom tells a story about being a kid on the same playground and a group from the public school walking over to beat up the “Catlickers’. This is a standard tension in Pocatello, the non-Mormons vs the Mormons. My dad didn’t like them because they were mostly Republicans. My Mom didn’t like them because they hated women and gay people in a way that was more blatant and obvious than the brand of Catholicism we subscribed to as a family that mainly consisted of drinking lots of wine, decorating the house with elaborate crucifixes, venerating Mother Mary, and going to church on Easter and Christmas.
On entering public school, I learned very quickly that being labeled ‘immodest’ was the worst thing you could be called as a middle school girl. Wearing shorts that didn’t cover your knees and shirts that didn’t completely cover your shoulders brandished you as a ‘slut’. I felt embarrassed when my Mom went to a parent-teacher conference wearing a black maxi dress with spaghetti straps. I asked her to change clothes because I worried my teachers would think I was ‘trashy’ if my Mom dressed like this. I would ask her not to drink wine with her dinner when I had friends over. I had the feeling that my family, small as it was, wonderful as it was, was not good enough. That something was not right about me and where I came from.
I wore the appropriate length of skirts. I banned ‘Oh my God’ from my lexicon of speech. I stopped making the sign of the cross when we said prayers before our choir concerts because the sign stuck out like a sore thumb against all the other kids’ carefully folded arms and somberly bowed heads, beginning every prayer in an unoriginal, “Dear Heavenly Father’. I parroted the kids around me and said things like, ‘I want to wait until marriage,’ ‘I don’t think I’ll ever drink,’ and ‘I believe in God.’ I did not believe any of these things. I spent evenings watching ‘90s and early 2000s rom-coms with my Mom, and the women in those movies never waited until marriage. I wanted my life to be like those movies. My mom drank wine in a way that didn’t feel sinful; it was just a thing to have with dinner; it was sophisticated. I didn’t understand how a God could exist in the way I’d been told because if he did exist, then why did bad things keep happening? Why did my dad get sick and die? Why was being gay bad? Why would being in love be a bad thing? It didn’t make sense. I swallowed my questions, and I kept my desires to myself. I told myself, ‘When I’m older, I won’t live here anymore, and no one will care whether or not I drink, have sex, or vote blue.’
It was a give-and-take feeling. I was thirteen; I was uncomfortable all the time. I gave because I wanted to be accepted. I wanted my friends to like me. For their parents to say, “Allison’s a good kid’. But I also wanted to take; to show off my knees, knobby and bruised as they were. I reveled in my small rebellions, ordering a hot chocolate from Starbucks to pretend it was coffee to the horror of my 8 am Algebra class, watching R-rated movies on Netflix, wearing a two-piece swimsuit to the pool in the summertime, and writing in my journal long diatribes about how much better I was then this stupid small town of stupid small minded people. The impulse to run away was as intrinsic as breathing. I learned about an arts boarding school in California and applied without first telling my Mom. I left Pocatello at fourteen, hopeful for a more unrestricted environment.
My system was immediately shocked. Within my first week, a senior boy attempted to grind with me at a school dance, friends dragged me along with them to smoke cigarettes in the woods, and I watched while they gave each other stick-and-poke tattoos using the ink from cracked-open gel pens. I started to like the way curse words felt inside my mouth, and I said ‘fuck’ to an excessive degree, peppering it into every possible conversation that I could. We had a fake election on election day, and only two of the 200 students voted for Mitt Romney. Students around me were openly, happily, and joyfully out as Queer. I stopped feeling judgmental gazes directed at my bare shoulders, lightly sunburned in their newfound freedom.
Being Mormon-adjacent became a personality trait for me. People found it fascinating that I had lived in this bizarre bubble of religious hegemony. They loved to hear about all the things that Mormons couldn’t do. No ‘hot drinks,’ but hot chocolate was okay. Iced coffee was not allowed, but Diet Coke was okay. Some caffeine was bad, and others were good. I still did not feel sexy, and I did not feel cool. The cloud that Mormonism had cast over me still followed, even hundreds of miles away. I thought I could shed it by saying ‘shit’ enough times, by drinking tea in the morning, and by talking about sex even though I was far from having it.
My first kiss, I was pushed against a tree, and the boy’s mouth was too wet and toothy. I walked back to my dorm, and I felt swallowed by shame. My friends back home would chastise me for what just happened. That wasn’t romantic. That wasn’t good. This boy was my boyfriend for one whole day before I told him I did not want a boyfriend. He responded by sending me an angry barrage of Facebook messages calling me a ‘cheap escort’ and ‘easy’. One night, he followed my friend and me down a dimly lit path after dinner, grabbed my arm, and twisted the skin in opposite directions, giving me a ‘snake bite’ while he demanded I speak to him. My friend yelled at him to leave us alone, and he ran off into the dark shadows of the trees. I became paranoid and anxiety-ridden after this incident and started spending more and more time alone in my dorm room. My small group of friends thought I was making too big of a deal out of this, and they mostly stopped talking to me, having found my newfound anxious bite unappealing compared to my homespun dorkiness from earlier in the year.
I came home, and my lips zipped up the ‘shits’ and the ‘Jesus Christ’s’ as my hemlines grew longer too. That summer, I went to theater camp with my predominantly Mormon friends. We rehearsed the ‘Junior’ version of The Little Mermaid where all of us mermaids wore nude-colored unitards under our seashell bras and where Prince Eric and Ariel did not kiss at the end, despite the entire plot of the musical hinging on a kiss. Everyone was surface-level nice to me, which came as a relief after spending the last month in school being on the receiving end of ‘silent treatment’ mean-girl bullying. I decided I didn’t want to go back to boarding school. I wanted this comfortable niceness every day. I cried in my living room when my Mom told me that she’d already paid my tuition deposit for the next year and I would have to go back to California.
I spent the rest of the summer tagging along with my Mormon friends, trying my best to fit in for night games in the park, watching Lord of the Rings in someone’s basement, and eating ice cream cones while sitting on the curb. I always had crushes on Mormon boys in the summertime. They never went anywhere beyond painfully sad and chaste flirting because they would never actually take me on a date. No one was allowed to date yet; besides that, I was not good enough. I was not a member, and they would never consider it. This lifelong trouble, conundrum, and struggle of not feeling accepted led me to say, ‘Yes, I believe’ when the missionaries were conveniently invited over to a friend’s house, and I ‘might as well listen to their talk’ because I was already there. I went to church after sleepovers, and I wanted to believe. Everything could be so much easier if I did. I could have a nice boyfriend with one of my summer crushes, get married young, have kids young, make casseroles and no-bake cookies, wear long skirts, and never leave my hometown. I thought I could be loved if I went along with this.
I felt uneasy at church, though. I looked around at the roomful of people who were so captivated and firm in their belief that this was right, and they all looked dazed to me, their eyes a little bit more removed from the present moment. They would get up and bear their testimony, and they all repeated the same phrases over and over again, “I believe that Joseph Smith is my prophet and,” “I believe that The Book of Mormon is true.” Many of them would openly weep as they spoke. In Sunday school, the teacher told us that she was not comfortable with her children being friends with non-members, and I thought about myself and how I was doing my best to change this.
I told my mom the week before going back to school that I wanted to convert to Mormonism. She was driving us home, and Sara Bareilles’s ‘Brave’ was playing on the radio. I could tell she was exasperated, annoyed, and even disappointed, but my Mom has always been good, and she resigned to let me explore this, telling me, “I’m sure you’ll figure it all out.”
I went back to California and took a van into town on Sundays for three hours of church while the rest of my peers were busy sleeping in, watching movies on their laptops, and bumbling into town to hang out in coffee shops to gossip. I felt committed to masquerading in this newfound faith, wearing t-shirts under my tank tops and saying, ‘Oh my Gosh’ and ‘Heck.’ I wrote a particularly deranged essay for my English class, using The Book of Mormon to argue against Voltaire’s Candide. But the appeal of Mormonism started to wear off quickly. I couldn’t find evidence that it was possible to live an artistically fulfilling life while also a religiously zealous one. My complete snapping out of it came during a Sunday school lesson where the teacher instructed us to go through a newspaper and ‘cut out the bad media’ to show how ‘of the world’ everyone else was. Someone had cut out the movie showtimes, and I thought, “I can’t be an artist and be Mormon.” I stopped attending church then. Art was always going to be more important to me. My mom was right; I figured it out.
After high school, I returned to the Mountain West to major in theater in Utah. I was still adjacent to Mormons but less concerned with what they thought or what they did. When I was twenty-one, I called my Mom to tell her, “I’m bisexual,” and she started laughing on her end of the line, “Thank God! I thought you were gonna tell me you wanted to convert to Mormonism”. The future stretched ahead of me, unknown and comfortably my own for the taking. I could be whoever I wanted to be.
Now, almost a decade after my near-descent into Mormonism, I watch ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ and 'The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’ and feel homesick. Living in Chicago, I miss hiking, eating fries with fry sauce, and being closer to my family. I wish I could scrub the ideologies of Mormonism out of my childhood and erase their stain from the landscape that I love so much. Visiting Pocatello, I sit in a coffee shop to write and notice that people have tattoos and are wearing tank tops. I wonder if they were always here and I just hadn’t noticed or if the Mormon church is slowly losing its tightly knuckled grip on Southern Idaho. I hope it’s the latter; I want to come home.
Allison Billmeyer (she/her) is a writer and occasional actor currently based in Chicago and originally from Idaho. She's been published by Hobart Pulp and has a Substack titled 'good salt'. When not writing, you can find her begrudgingly working in restaurants and taking herself on walks that she wishes were hikes. You can find her on Instagram @allison.billmeyer