Why I Came Back.

Recently I read an article on a Facebook friend of mine's newsfeed. I'll admit I did a naughty thing. I read the article which was somewhat, possibly, influentually, anti-mormon, then I posted a thoughtful rebuttal someone else did on that article and then immediately defriended that person.

Like a noble coward I fled!

I don't like disagreeing with people (I suppose people other than douches rarely do) and I couldn't take the inevitable backlash that could have resulted from defending my beliefs. I am very sensitive about my religion, dammit it hurts to not be taken seriously, or not thought intelligent because you believe in angels and God! But of course that's pride talking because I shouldn't care if others judge me. And I suppose to a certain extent I fear my faith being shaken. But here's the thing, there was a time in my life where I was shaken to the core and still lived. This is the miracle I choose to believe will carry me through even nasty Facebook comment battles and friendships where there are differences of opinion on the matter.

First of all, lets get one thing straight. There is such thing as Satan. And I believe there are such things as lies. I feel like everyone is welcome to their opinions, but to each child of God is the gift of discernment between good and evil. Without getting into any specifics, I also believe that each person has an inherent light of goodness in them, but that they can be influenced by evil. Again I'm not talking about specifics or people who are not me or people who are not part of my church! I have come to love more people outside of my religion than in, so please don't think I'm taking on a holier-than-thou attitude.

Second of all, here is the story of my descent into my own personal hell and how things happened that you may or may not think is a miracle and why I decided to come back:

A new apartment, new full-time job and a new boyfriend the fall after I graduated at BYU. My self-esteem sucked a lot (read my old blog entries, barf, and then you will understand) and I thought all of these things were exciting and good.  My mother had died about 3 years before and I considered the progress of my grief process to be coming along swimmingly. Soon, however, the job turned out to be extremely stressful as the recession hit. I was expected to produce things that were beyond my control and resented not being recognized for the truly amazing person I was. Then, my "boyfriend" decided that he just couldn't control his manly impulses for my ravishing beauty and intelligence and slowly lead me down the path of not-so-awesomeness. Around that time I also found out that my fat, lazy, tv-watching roommate was passive aggressive. Cool.

Depression engulfed me like the quick-sand did Buttercup in the Princess Bride. I held my breath and desperately searched for someone to help me out. I prayed for death in fear of the trauma of suffocating. I still tried to go to church, but I knew the others could smell my sins on me. Rejected on all sides (even that of my Bishop at one time...yeah, that didn't continue a complex in me....) I prayed one night to Heavenly Father that if He didn't send me a way out, that I would take another. It is still hard to this day looking back at my darkest hour without compassion for my little, scared, broken self.

The next morning I checked my 10-year-old hotmail account (which was very rare) to find an email from my college mentor telling me about an Assistantship in Costume Design that had just opened up at the University of Memphis. I applied and was offered the position only an hour after my phone interview with the entire faculty.

I'm sure you think you totally know how this all goes. I totally turned back to God and now I'm a good Mormon girl, thank goodness that's all over! Yeah right.

Memphis was a new world to me.  I had never felt such freedom to reinvent myself. The thing about Stapley/Bailey women is that they get better-looking with age and with my new confidence and refreshing naivete you better believe those Southern boys took notice. Old habits die hard though, and my ability to put myself into submissive/abusive relationships shone as I dirtied up the grad pool with my seduction and grudge holding.

Fail.

To a certain extent I felt that being Mormon thus far in my life hadn't helped me one bit. It had really only made me feel guilty and miserable. I new the things I was doing didn't follow everything I'd been taught, but I chose to continue and not care. My ideas changed though as angels in disguise came in the form of a few people. My roommates, V and M basically saved my life. I couldn't have had better or more wiser friends to guide me through my first year follies. Kind, generous, and though I know I drove them crazy, they were so patient in teaching me how good a person can be in their hearts no matter what they believed. Then there was Jenn. I know you're reading this, I will not forget the day you told me my skirt was cute and bustled your way into my life. You told me President Goodale was a good man. I decided to trust you and I owe you forever for guiding me to him. With my distrust of Church leaders even just talking to him was crossing a major hurdle. But he didn't speak to me like other leaders, he didn't try to bore into my soul and try to take what I was not willing to give. He listened and loved me. That's all I needed, what I had felt God had taken away when He took away my mother.

Then came my relationship with D. He wasn't really my type, he was really Southern...I will never forget during a fishing trip him shooting a shotgun with his shirt off....Anyway! He had been away from the church for 9 years! But he was making his way back. And as I built a relationship with him, we both decided that's what we wanted to do together. Though different things had taken us away from these things, I think we both remembered a sense of peace, or rather, Home-ness that the our beliefs in God provided.

Well, he broke up with me and when I got back to school you better believe I took it out on the grad pool yet again because I really, really, really liked drinking alcohol and making out with charming guys who thought I was pretty. But President Goodale knew that was me lashing out against pain. Its amazing how much strength a person acquires to get through a trial know that someone truly understands how you feel. So I stopped.  Then I met Ryan, we got married, we moved to Utah. I then began a whole different struggle, but at least this time I wasn't alone and I chose just the right one to help develop an eternal me.

Miracles are subtle and they are people. Sometimes people leave the church or God because it is too painful to believe that He would let us feel such pain or betrayal. But we feel! The very thing that shapes our thoughts and actions I believe was given to us to expand our compassion and see so much deeper into others in order to love them! I thought I would never heal from many of these experiences, but as I am patient (totally not perfect.) I start to see how the shape of my life has turned me in to a deeper soul. The more I see, the more I see, its incredible sometimes.

But then there are days that I don't see it and I have to try to remember all the while feeling slightly resentful that I've been blinded again. But time and time again the good things return. How could I deny that my soul is full?

How to Stay Inside Your Own Head

Hope.

A four-letter word I am allowed to say, but can at times be just as distasteful to me as other choice words.

Hope can be a wonderful thing.  It pretty much applies to everything in life, whether you're religious or not, probably because the human condition dictates that we strive for better things when we are sad.  There is a beauty in polarities, a force that is vibrant and certainly real.  However, its not always the best feeling to have your hopes repaid in kind by the insidious, opposite disappointment.

In past years I've been hesitant to participate in things that require much risk.  I've felt that hope was a weapon Heavenly Father used on me to "make me stronger".  I didn't like it, so I veered away from those lessons.  This made me kind of a recluse.  I developed a more severe social anxiety and I pretty much hated anyone that was happy or comfortable with their life.  I know much of this started with a certain past relationship where I learned what happens when you hoped too high and risked too much. Finding my way back to friends and the Church has been a bumpy road to say the least, but these experiences have required me to be more introspective to survive emotionally.  My hope is that, like the delightful Bear Grylls, I can help even one other person navigate through total and utter despair.  Maybe come out of these dangerous emotional wildernesses still intact.

Lately I've had two chances to get my hopes up.  One is trying to have a baby.  Since I had to wait for the equivalent of forever to get married, I'm not completely surprised that the Lord is seeing fit to delay us having kids too.  That is only said with the tiniest bit of bitterness, but seriously, my mom had 8 kids, what's the hold up body?  Every month I've been getting my hopes up only to feel a sense of failure along with cramps and backaches. As if being sad weren't enough...being a girl sucks.  Just like getting married, I know that this is a righteous desire, heck its a commandment!  And yet I, along with countless other women over the millenia, have been stuck asking the question, "how am I supposed to do this thing You want me to do?"  Even though I am depressed for about a week, I can't help but start hoping for it to happen the next time. I've been hesitant until even now to tell people that we're trying because you can't really say anything to help somebody who has a perpetual disappointment that neither of them can control or change.  No need to make it awkward for everybody....

So along with the vacillation between hope and despair on the baby front, I recently auditioned for a play.  Oh, but Becca wait, aren't you a costume designer? Long ago in a place that was actually here, I once aspired to be an actress studying theatre at the prestigious BYU.  But 'twas not to be.  For many other reasons, I'm sure, besides my fragile self-esteem I was lead to a different career path.  One that I love of course, but having been onstage before, its hard to completely get the urge to do it again out of your system.  Well, during a break I happened to browse through facebook and saw that auditions were being held for The Rabbit Hole.  I decided right then that that was my chance to venture out and try to do something that had at one time made me happy.  Though having a rudimentary knowledge of the play I knew it was a subject matter close to my heart.  So I told no one (except one trustworthy friend) and I marched on down to do a cold reading since I obviously had no monologue prepared.  I was pretty surprised to even get a callback, but I was making sure to keep my hopes in check through the process.

It was interesting how the circumstances around those days led me to this thing at that moment.  When I got to callbacks I was surprised to feel no expectations about the outcome and was kind of thrilled/dreaded that I would get a chance to stretch my acting legs again in front of a group of people.  During the welcome speech, the director explained how she was going to switch us around for readings so "don't try to get inside [her] head." That struck me as the most valuable thing any director has said before an audition, because I realized how often that happens not only with auditions, but I pretty much have done that with God for like...probably my whole life?  I have to admit that I did get pretty bummed partway through the audition, realizing how out of my league I was and how terrible I thought I was doing.  I sat there trying to gauge her reaction and figure out who her favorites were.  Then I remembered that she told us not to do that exact thing!! It was SO hard to just chill out.  So I started trying to enjoy the company of the other actors, admiring their performances and thinking more about the rich subject matter of the play. It worked out, and although I won't have much to show on my resume for this experience, it got me contemplating the whole hope thing even more.

Because even though I actively tried to keep myself from hoping too much from the audition (being cast and being considered the most awesome ever, apparently...) it was still there.  That pesky little bugger that I knew would bring me pain in the end. "Why," I asked myself, "would God lead me to these decisions (I felt that way, ok?) if it was only going to make me sad??" Although I had exercised considerable control over my emotions, a HUGE benchmark in the course of my adult life, it all still ended with the same result; disappointment and a vague emptiness where my hope had been.

Well, perhaps this lesson was presented to me so that I can quit trying to get into God's head.  I worry about if this or that is a punishment because I think bad things or that I'm not good enough in general.  But having been on the other side of that director's table (as a techie) I've seen how hard it is to disappoint people, but also have that belief that you need certain people in a certain place for things to fit.  Its not about being good or bad, its just being the right player for the vision.

So how do you ease the transition from hope to emptiness?

It seems that the end of hopes and dreams have always been gouging out little caverns in my tender little heart.  Perhaps this is where a lot of my depression comes from, walking around with a half-empty heart.  Does the hope/despair pendulum really help me become a stronger person?  In response to this self-asked question the answer came in two answers.  Either I need to fill the gouges immediately with something else (think of how a dentist puts a filling into your tooth only minutes after he's drilled out the decay) or to not get gouged at all.  I love metaphors, obviously.

I tested this out. I'm not sure I will ever be a person who doesn't  let their heart get gouged.  I think that's a perspective thing that I am far from mastering.  I can say, however, that I've had some relief walking away from that audition immediately filling my heart with faith/hope that the director will orchestrate their vision to its potential.  This is made infinitely easier knowing and trusting the director in real life which means I won't be offended that I'm not chosen for one reason or another.

Trust is obviously still lacking in the "life events" arena in my life, so I believe its still going to be a struggle to fill those gouges with hope and faith to believe the Lord knows what He's doing.  I know I'm not a big help in figuring out how NOT to be disappointed in life, but its a start knowing where to start and how to try. Desire to desire to be good is a good place to start, right? I think if I keep trying to fill my life with more good things and reviving my faith in people is the tool to filling my vacant heart, I might actually go somewhere in my relationship with God.

Hope might not be so bad after all?

The Olive Tree

I won't say I've come a long way from the young woman who decided to make up a blog about her family of one, but I've definitely been on some kind of path.  I remember when I started this that I was somewhat pessimistic about my marriage prospects and therefore may have been slightly derogatory to those who were married.  There is NO way I could have known what marriage was all really about, but after two years of living through it, I still think my earlier posts stand.  There are some really lame married people and I don't have to be one of them!

That being said, I'm guessing there are probably slews of blogs out there denouncing my particular opinions on basically everything, so I'm going to forge through and welcome those with a similar mindset to this one.

Marriage is hard.  That is an understatement.  So many people around me are ending there marriages so not even the stigma of being divorced is damming the temptation to just give this thing up.  There are so many enticing "freedoms" outside of the commitment and it is easy to let one's mind wander into these dangerous caverns.  Yesterday my facetious musings to the husband called Ryan that although polygamy was instituted as a means of procreating more efficiently and thus fulfilling His plan of creation, I argued that women should be allowed to have multiple husbands as it would fulfill it just as well since God's purpose is for His children to have joy!  More than one guy to take out the garbage, fix things, one to enjoy some interests, another others....I felt like my argument could be completely justified.

This is not the plan, and really that's ok.  In my mind polyandry would just be a detour of the inevitable growing pains a marriage goes through.  If you don't struggle in marriage from time to time, you're probably boring or passive aggressive; neither of these things interest me.  Today I thought, "well, I suppose this is supposed to be hard, but why? Wouldn't it be so much better if the person you married fit you like another puzzle piece.  I know some people brag about this being the case, but that's just sickening and untrue.  As my mind began to ponder on these things the allegory of The Olive Tree started creeping into my mind.

You're all like "but that's about missionary work, haven't you even ever heard that EFY song sung at someone's missionary farewell? You obviously don't know anything about stuff!"  Long ago I asked Ryan about allegories and metaphors, mostly could one story symbolize more than one thing?  He answered, yes of course, that everything on earth was symbolic and while we can't just go assigning our own meaning to everything willy nilly, that there are some truths that transfer from object to object.  So when I considered why this particular allegory washed through my mind, it slowly began to flesh itself out.

So the story starts out with the gardener wanting to keep this old tree.  In order to do this he has to graft it with a younger "wild" olive tree or it will wither away.  My first thought was that marriage is much like the grafting of two trees.  Now, I'm not going to say who is the old good tree and who is the young wild one in our relationship, but it is nonetheless imperative that these two trees be joined together or neither will be able to bring forth good fruit.  Here where it gets painful, that gardener has to prune and nourish that tree.  Ya'll know what pruning is, right?  That gardener goes in a chops of certain branches here and there in order to show that tree where to grow.  This way the nourishment gets to the most important and fruity branches instead of going everywhere and there not being enough for everybody (every branch...).  I'm not going to go much further into the allegory than the grafting/pruning part because these symbolic actions themselves are the most pertinent to what I want to convey today.

I supposed I haven't explained why its so hard being married to Ryan.  Its because we don't always want the same things.  He doesn't really like my music, tv, reading, theater, kind of a lot of things that I've come to identify myself with.  When he rejects them, it is like he is rejecting me!  I think this is when I first asked the Lord, "why would you lead me to this man and make me feel good about marrying him if we don't even like a lot of the same things about life?!"

To which he answered,"I'm pruning you."

Maybe sad songs, reality tv shows and bawdy theatre culture are the wild branches this natural woman wants to grow. With each rejection from my husband comes a cut.  I do less of that thing, I find less pleasure in it.  There comes a time of depression where I feel a real loss of what I used to be.  But then, from a chosen few around me, comes the nourishment.  A sudden project that ignites my passion for sewing and designing, finding pleasure in making a fancy meal and instagramming that shiz, maybe re-reading the entire Alvin Maker series written by the peerless Orson Scott Card!  Even revving up the ole' blog to express my feelings in hopes that any of my paltry insights could help anyone even if its from laughing how silly I am!

God is the gardener, Ryan is a tool.  Had to put that double entendre in there or I wouldn't be me ;)  It's ok, I'm pretty much a tool to Ryan too and as we grow together it is going to hurt like hell snipping and chopping each others' souls all over.  But eventually, all that careful shaping will guide our branches to bear fruit as we cultivate what is best that we both have most in common: The desire to be like our Heavenly Father and to love others.  Those are the strong branches that will have to win out for our joint grafted tree to be healthy and alive forever.

And that's all for today, but really, I hope I remember this perspective for at least a little while :)

Ok, I'll do this.

The Becca Family has officially become the Klepko family. Here's to the rest of my life people mispronouncing my last name and accusing me of being a compulsive thief or the first half of a pink stomach medicine. But really, considering that I married a really good one, his last name could have been Pooper-Scooper and I would be happy. I could even hyphenate to become Becca Bailey-Pooper-Scooper.

Funny to look back on all my little pity party posts and waves of genius poetry. I was really inspired as ya'll can tell (I'm a true mid-southerner now), and I now know not what I will use as fodder for future sonnets! But I suppose I will come up with something. I have been writing in my journal a little more lately, but its super personal so, STAY OUT! Jk, jk. Isn't that what blogs are all about, so other peeps can know you on a deeper level than the occasional Facebook post?