Hello and welcome to not so Molly Mormon podcast. I'm Katie. Thanks for being here.

So before I begin, you might hear some bird chirping

in the background. Can you hear that? Currently, there is a very, very loud and talkative bird right outside my window and

it's not stopping, but I really wanted to record this, so hopefully it's not too distracting.

It's just nice little bird chirps in the background.

So today's story for this minisode comes from Amanda. Thank you for sending this in Amanda.

She writes, I didn't really have the easiest life as a child. There were three kids in my family. I was the

youngest. I have an older brother who was the middle child and an older sister.

My parents divorced when I was eight years old after 24 years of marriage.

My parents both converted to Mormonism before I was born. My mom is easily brainwashed and throughout my life had a history of joining Colts.

This was the one that stuck. My dad on the other other hand, is a free spirit. He was active for

about five years and then went back to drinking and smoking weed. Both are still very important to

him to this day. When I was eight years old, my parents divorced because my dad had an affair.

He was unwilling to repent and was excommunicated. The weird thing about

that is still to this day my dad defends the church and believes that it's true even though he

doesn't follow any of it. You know that's so strange. I've encountered people like that as well

that aren't active or they clearly in their actions and their daily life don't live

as though the church is true but then they defend it when you say something about it.

The mental gymnastics or maybe just lack of really critically thinking about it is astounding to me,

but I know what you mean. I know people like that too.

Okay, back to the letter.

It was difficult growing up Mormon coming from a quote-unquote broken home.

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