Kurt shook his head. “Linda, I will love Kenneth with every part of my being for all of eternity, but that doesn’t mean I will treat him the same. I can’t just pretend he hasn’t done this.”
It was about what I should have expected from Kurt. I started to tear apart one of the rolls I’d buttered, which was entirely unfair to the long strands of beautiful gluten I’d worked so hard to create with my kneading. “He’s just as much our son as he ever was. He’s a good person.”
“Yes, he is,” said Kurt mildly. “But God is a god of order. There are rules in heaven, as there are in any place of order.”
Again, I didn’t want to argue this point with him. So instead, I said, “Kenneth also came to tell me that he’s engaged.”
Kurt’s eyes widened. “To get married?”
I smiled for the first time in this conversation. “Yes, to get married. Her name is Naomi Carter. She’s also resigned from the church.”
“Ah,” said Kurt.
Was he going to ask anything about her? I could only tell him what Kenneth had told me. I hadn’t even seen a photograph of her.
“She’s in med school,” I said. “She wants to be an OB/GYN.” I was deliberately avoiding her family’s polygamy for the moment. It wasn’t like me to do that, especially to Kurt, but everything had changed between us in the last few months. None of our old marriage habits worked anymore. We weren’t strangers, but there was now an unspoken contract for how we interacted and avoided conflict. We both followed the rules because we still loved each other and wanted to keep from inflicting pain. So all the pain got held inside.
“Well, that sounds good for both of them. She’ll have a steady career if they stay in Utah. Are they planning to stay in Utah, do you know?”
This was like the kind of stilted, polite conversation I had with my parents on the occasions when I called them on the phone dutifully to make sure they were still healthy and alive. The night before Mother’s Day, the night before Father’s Day, and Christmas Eve, so that the actual days were unspoiled by the bad taste in my mouth my extended family left me with. We were all politeness now, no recriminations about the past and how they had treated me after my divorce, more than thirty years in the past.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t ask him that.” Kenneth hadn’t said anything about leaving Utah, but there were a lot of ex-Mormons who were happy to get away from a state where Mormonism was so much a part of the culture and politics.
“Well, I hope they are very happy,” said Kurt. There was clearly part of that wish left unsaid.
“But . . . ?”
He shook his head. “But nothing. I hope they are happy.”
“You hope they’re happy, but you think it’s unlikely if they both have left the church.”
Kurt looked down at his plate, took a long drink of water, and then set down his glass deliberately.
I said nothing.
Finally, he offered, “I just meant that I don’t know how a marriage will work if the two people in it can’t depend on each other absolutely for commitment.”
It was hard for me not to feel that this was an indictment of me for being disloyal to the church, as well. But I took a breath, and focused on our son and his marriage again. “What do you mean by commitment?” I asked. Was Kurt going to say that he thought only Mormons could have good marriages? Because that was demonstrably false. Our divorce statistics were not that different from the rest of America.
“Well, when someone has been baptized and has made certain promises to a church, and then they turn their back on those promises . . .” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.
“Kenneth was eight when he was baptized. Do you really think that’s old enough to make a promise for the rest of his life?” I asked.
“He said he was ready. He was very certain about it,” Kurt said.
I wanted to roll my eyes at him. At eight, most children just wanted to please their parents. It was one of the reasons I didn’t like it when children bore their testimonies in Sacrament Meeting. They were just too young to do any more than repeat what they’d been told. They hadn’t had spiritual experiences of their own. But in Mormonism, eight was supposed to be the “age of accountability.”
“And he wasn’t eight when he went through the temple. He was nineteen,” Kurt added.
Yes, but nineteen is still a teenager, and that was a kid in many ways. “People can change their minds, you know,” I said. It didn’t make them incapable of committing themselves to other things.
“Yes, they can. But it doesn’t bode well for marriage.”
Did Kurt see me as a covenant-breaker, too, because I’d been divorced before? “There are covenants on both sides,” I said. “When one side breaks them, the other side is free, don’t you think?” I felt strongly that a covenant had been broken between the church and members, including LGBTQ Mormons—for example, the covenant to treat people with Christian kindness.