874: Under One Roof
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"Hi everybody, Ira here. My voice is weird today. I feel fine." Heather loved being Mormon, till she and her husband split up. After that, she says, people in the church treated her and her kids differently. She realized she would never have the perfect Mormon family. She was still a believer, but she started secretly doing things that members of the church aren't supposed to do. She was loved with men she wasn't married to. She drank. But on the surface, she kept up appearances, lived a double life for years before she quit the church. A double life with occasional moments where she thought she might get found out. You know, as a Mormon person, you're not supposed to drink coffee, and that seems fairly innocuous, fairly simple, but I was slipping and I was drinking coffee, and I had gotten myself a coffee before I picked up my kids from school, and they were young enough that they wouldn't understand or get it, and my friend saw me and waved and started to walk over to the car. So you come out of a coffee shop? No, she just saw me in the car pool line standing there, but I had a hot coffee in my car, and it was fall, and that meant if I enrolled the window, the smell of coffee was going to waft out right in the smacker in the face, and so I started to panic, and I enrolled the window, and I can remember the panic, and you just learn to lie so easily and so quickly. And I think I said, "Oh, I'm not drinking it. I just love the smell, and fall. Don't worry. Don't worry. I just love the smell." And she accepted that and said, "Oh, I do, too. Isn't it so tempting?" And we both just kind of sat there. Like, obviously, I didn't buy a coffee for the smell. You know, it was just a conversation that was completely fake, and we both engaged in it. And so when she said, "Oh, it's so tempting," did you take it as we're saying, "This is our secret. You know, I love you. We're good." I took it as her saying, "I'm going to pretend to believe your lie, because it's an easier path for both of us." And I think my kids probably did that a lot, too, pretended to believe my lies. This is actually why I wanted to talk to Heather. Our Saturday is about how different members of the family perceive the same events differently. And what was happening inside Heather's family during those years seemed such an extreme example of that because she was trying to deceive her kids. She was raising three daughters on her own. Raising them in the church, she says to be the perfect, pure vessels of Mormonism for their future husbands, her words, not mine. This was partly because it was the only way she knew how to be a mother. But also, Heather loved her own childhood growing up in the church, and she wanted to give that to them. And Heather wasn't just a believer. She's the gun-out, try-hard, can-do believer who became Relief Society President in her ward, which meant that she ministered to the women in about 150 families. Heather stood at a pulpit every Sunday, teaching Mormon doctrine. And she did that, knowing that her kids sometimes saw her break the rules. But for example, after her divorce, she stopped wearing the special Mormon undergarments that adults are supposed to wear. Her kids knew that she didn't wear them. Because they would see me change, and I wouldn't have them on. And do you remember any moments where they saw this, and they asked? No, they never asked. They never said a word. What do you make of that? I don't even know what to make of that. First, I feel like they probably felt confused. And also, I would think resentment, because I was a strict mom, and I held them to the standard of appearances at church, and I was, you know, I taught from the pulpit. I taught gospel doctrine, and then for them to go home and see that the words coming out of my mouth did not match, like the simplest of actions, like the type of underwear I was wearing. Do you think that they weren't saying anything? Because it's just one of those things when you're a kid sometimes where you don't even know what it means, but you just know, like, don't go there. Yeah, I think that's exactly what it was. I think it was laden with meaning, and so they knew not to ask. Mostly, Heather tried to keep things on the down low from her kids. She kept a bottle of vodka, hidden in the house, high on the third shelf of a closet with sweaters and other clothes that she assured the girls didn't go into. And she says there were no visible clues of her secret life in the house. Until my business partner bought me a curig. The little coffee maker, the counter coffee maker, and I immediately went out and bought a tear with, like, all of the herbal teas and hot chocolates, because those are kosher. And I made sure that those were on display, and, like, for years, every time someone would come to my house, the first thing I would do is, like, gesture to the curig to the coffee maker and say, "We love this for hot cocoa for the kids." Like, I would lead with that, because it was just such to me a blaring, you know, symbol of rebellion and slipping. Where were the coffee pods hidden? They were deep in the pantry, and, like, honestly, it's a cheese-it, multi-pack box, because, like, the kids lunches, you get the bigger boxes, and you could just take out all the single serves, and you just put them in it. And then, was this scheme that, like, once the kids were off at school, you were home alone, and you could put the little carrot capsule in and make yourself a coffee? What would you do? I was doing it first thing in the morning. You would do it first thing in the morning? Yeah, I was doing it first thing in the morning, and they could smell it, and I don't know how to explain it.
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