Over the past forty-something years, life has taught me a lot. I learned how to be a mother—and a wife to a man who was emotionally distant and never truly present for me. I took on the weight of marriage and motherhood far too young, long before I even knew who I was. The emotional toll of that—of constantly giving and never receiving—left scars I didn’t even recognize until much later. Through it all, I kept learning—about resilience, heartbreak, and what it really means to find your own way.
It started early. My controlling mother made the decision for me to attend a Mormon college 1,500 miles from home. What I wanted—to stay in my small Midwestern town, go to school nearby, and become a nurse—was brushed aside. I’d dreamed of being a nurse since I was a little girl, carrying around plastic doctor kits and patching up dolls. But that dream wasn’t hers, so off I went.
That’s where I met Hubby #1.
In the Mormon world, everything is fast-tracked: marry young, have babies, support your husband, and raise your family in a tidy, eternal unit. At just 19, I stepped into that life—naively hopeful, but deeply unprepared. I did love him, in the way a 19-year-old thinks she understands love. But what I didn’t understand was myself, or what a real partnership was supposed to look like. The Church told me how to live, how to be a wife, how to keep a home and raise children. I was following the blueprint. But inside? I was disappearing.
I ended up with beautiful children, but I was breaking apart. I begged him to go to counseling. He refused—his “psyche” didn’t need any fixing. Mine, apparently, did. He encouraged me to go alone. So I did. And eventually, I fixed it the only way I could.
I left.
I divorced him.
That should’ve been a moment of freedom, but instead, it came with an avalanche of shame. Not quiet shame, either—spoken, pointed shame from people who claimed to love Christ. “Shame on you,” they said. For breaking the eternal family. For walking away. For choosing my peace. I had people turn their shopping carts around to avoid me in the store. I’d never felt so judged, so alienated, so painfully alone. And from people who preached love and compassion.
The bitterness started growing in me like a weed. I wanted nothing to do with religion—any of it.
The years that followed were messy. I was a single mother still bleeding emotionally, still carrying the weight of abandonment, rejection, and all that wasted time. I tried to reclaim the youth I never had. I partied. I numbed. I did things that were reckless, unhealthy, and sometimes dangerous. I told myself I was just making up for lost time, but really, I was just trying to feel something—or maybe trying not to feel everything. It was a deeply self-destructive season, and I know now how lucky I am to have made it through in one piece.
Then came a Christmas Eve I’ll never forget.
The kids were with their father. The house was quiet. I sat alone in the dark, lit only by the soft glow of the Christmas tree, sipping wine and drowning in silence. But somewhere in that quiet, something cracked open in me. I don’t know if it was the stillness, the exhaustion, or the wine—but I finally let go. The bitterness. The shame. The pain. I released it all.
And in that release, I felt light. I felt something like joy. Something I hadn’t felt in decades.
I saw myself clearly for the first time. I wasn’t that frightened, abused 16-year-old girl anymore, living under her mother’s control. And I certainly wasn’t the compliant 19-year-old wife taking orders from men in suits in Salt Lake City. I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t hopeless.
I was free.
And with that freedom came the wild, wonderful realization that I could become anything.
Anything.
Molly's Not-So-Secret Diary 