Anyway.
Coming off of a mission is hard. That's no secret; they even make movies about it, and during the last three months of my mission every returned missionary in Laredo started giving me sympathetic looks and telling me to "give it two or three months and you'll be OK. It'll get better."
Well, it's been two and a half months now so I suppose that means I've met a sort of finish line, and I do feel more "normal" (whatever that means, because I will admit that I'm not sure) than I did. I don't know, it's a hard transition to explain, and if you've been through it yourself you already know what I mean. But to those who haven't returned from a mission, try to think of it this way: you have a specific purpose that you live for, a specific community and culture you belong to, standards and rules that you pride yourself in striving to live up to, a challenging work load that brings you some of the happiest and most heart-breaking moments of your life--and then it's gone. Your purpose is, more or less, what you thought you wanted two years ago. You are in a culture that is at once familiar and foreign, the community you remember moved on in your absence, you are regularly expected to break the rules that you dedicated yourself so long to following, and you go from a very adult world of responsibility to an almost childish world of school-yard drama and the slog of college life. It's confusing. You don't feel like you know who you are anymore. You look around at your old things and dreams and wonder why they mattered.
Or, at least, that's how I've been feeling.
And things are finding their way to a balance, a decrease in my floundering like I'm drowning in a kiddie pool. I don't know who I am yet, but I know who I want to be. I don't feel like I fit into college life so easily as I did before, but I hang on with hope to the transitions after graduation as a chance to start fresh and figure life out in an entirely new arena instead of tripping over myself in the old one.
But--I use too many metaphors and move too slowly to my intended topic.
You see, there are things that have helped me adjust and things that have not. Cold is not helpful. My roommates' weird boyfriends are not helpful. But music is, and family is, and rediscovering myself as a fiction writer is. (Putting my act together as a blogger might be helpful if I get my act together long enough to find out...)
And then there's family history.
To give you a bit of background, I've always been vaguely interested in genealogy. My family history is an interesting one, and I remember asking parents and grandparents about who my ancestors were and what they did.
But when it came to "doing it", I was always at a bit of a loss. In young women's and other church programs, the lessons about family history usually meant lecturing us about how we should be doing it, then having us fill out the same darn 4-generation pedigree chart over and over again.
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| Yep. This old thing. I've done this SO many times. |
Which didn't do much for me. There are plenty of family historians in my family so I didn't even have to work to get this information, just copy what was already written.
When I was eighteen or so, I saw a poster for a "family history workshop" day that my stake was holding at a nearby church, and eagerly signed up, hopeful that someone there would tell me what to do, how to get started. I was disappointed to find that all of the classes were geared towards people with a lot more experience than I had, and filled with in jokes for people about thirty years older that left me feeling a bit left out. I left early and decided to just let it alone for a while.
What finally got me on the right track was actually the last companion I had on my mission, who before she left was a genealogy major at BYU. It turned out that there were a lot of people in Laredo who are in need of that kind of talent, so we ended up with several individuals asking us to help them get started. I felt a little intimidated, but she volunteered to show me the ropes, and we went to the library to get onto the LDS church's family history website.
She picked out an ancestor of hers for us to work on, a woman named Mary English who had no information in the site about her parents. We couldn't find much about her until we searched the records for her daughter, and found a census record. Information wise, this proved invaluable-it turned out the reason so little information on Mary English had arisen was that the information in the system (claiming that she had died in England) was incorrect; she was born in Canada and died in the US. But seeing that census record did more for me than that.
It's hard to explain exactly what I experienced. Searching for the information was a puzzle, it was fun. I felt like a detective, teasing out the smallest details, looking for inconsistent information and clues. But seeing the census record made it real. Reading it, we saw that she and her daughter were working as servants, and realized that this was taken a year after her husband had passed away. This was a job she and the oldest daughter had taken to support a family with six younger children. But Mary English herself would pass away just a year later. And for just a moment, looking at this page and putting the details together, I felt like I knew her. I felt a connection to this woman, even though she isn't even my relative and doesn't have any connection to me. I actually started tear up a little, overcome by this sense of a glimpse into someone else's life.
And that's when I started to get into family history.
I'm glad I started with such a powerful moment because the work I've been doing on my own family tree has been decidedly less exciting; I'm not "discovering" new people to enter into the system or finding awesome sources like that census. Mostly I'm cleaning up the records in the system website, clearing out duplicates, fixing cases where people are listed a being married to someone who died before they were born and other errors. Not glamorous work by any means, but I feel good that a large section of my family tree has become tidier and better organized. In fact, if you were to go through my family history you would find this trail-blazed swath of individuals with properly standardized names and dates and without duplicates covered in little "edited by jennifer16" marks.
Since I've gotten back, I'm enrolled in a family history class and I try to spend a little time on it every week. It's been... nice. Something that helps me feel grounded to where I am, because I'm making sense of something very personal. And for me (and pretty much any member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), the connection we feel with family is something very sacred, so it's also a way of holding onto the Spirit that I felt as a missionary.
There was a "temple walk" event a few weeks ago on a Saturday morning at the Logan Institute of Religion. It was part of an event called "temple week" where they were encouraging people to do family history work and to make visits to the temple--they had a few devotionals and gave out "angel moroni" shaped cookies (which were delicious). Not a lot of people came to the temple walk, but enough that they split us up into four groups. We walked to the temple and back, then had hot chocolate--it wasn't anything particularly fancy, though the testimonies shared during the walk were nice.
It was a cold day, the sky clouded over. Have I mentioned that I hate the cold now? I'm getting used to it, a little at a time. It's not as painful as it was when I arrived. But it's taken on a symbol as a negative force--the "anti-mission", the unforgettable difference between here and there, between Logan and Laredo, between what seemed at the time to be an Eternal summer and what now seems like a never-ending winter.
But. I braved the cold anyway, and I was glad I did.
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| Logan LDS Temple-- I took this photo during the temple walk |
After all that had been racing through my mind, part of me expected to have some sort of epiphany or revelation. It was, after all, the first time that I had gotten close to a temple since I left the Missionary Training Center in Provo, and I was standing on Holy Ground. I think part of me was hoping that just being there would make sense of things, somehow.
That didn't happen, not exactly. There was no new insight or understanding. But it felt peaceful there, under the grey sky, looking up at the crenelated walls of the temple. I just stood there in silence for a moment, and found that I wasn't wishing I was anywhere else or worrying about who I was supposed to be. I was just there.
It started to snow, and the snow was beautiful. It got colder and I didn't really mind.
