Should I move to Utah?

This blog is going to be extremely truthful and honest about the freeze we received from Utah and I'm not talking about the below 20 degree weather. 

We uprooted our family and everyone was in shock and thought we were acting on impulse or just woke up one day and said "hey let's move" but the truth is we'd wanted to move out of Fresno since day one, I'm pretty sure it was the root conversation surrounding my husband and I's very first date. Over the years and through each place we moved to we always circled back to moving out of state and after we had our daughter the feeling intensified. We wanted safe, family friendly, room for growth, opportunity and we'd just gone through the rockiest point in our marriage and wanted space from anyone and everyone. My husband found schools he was interested in around salt lake city and we used his birthday to travel there with our little girl and we immediately fell in love with it. I felt like god brought us here 100% and wanted to use us to reach people here. I felt relieved because we'd already traveled all of California and could not afford anywhere there other than Fresno Ca which was where we were trying to escape. We'd also traveled all over Texas but my husband and I were not feeling it. 

So we visited in March and moved here in May, as I said family and friends had a lot of feelings over this understandably. My husband and I had spent the last 6 years researching and dreaming over moving while our family and friends only had 2 months to process through this. Our little Emily was about 22 months old when we moved, and it broke her grandma's hearts. It broke us too but we were comforted knowing this was gods plan. We have gone through some of the hardest times of our lives here and been tested with every ounce of our souls and fought everyday to get back up but I think the hardest part that I was and still am not prepared for is how hard it is to be a christian in Utah. 

We knew moving here that it would be predominantly LDS but holy cow we were not expecting to have sister missionaries knocking on our door day 2 of moving in here. I want to talk about this subject very carefully to not hurt anyone's feelings or start an argument but I also want to write freely which will be very challenging. So here it goes..

I started my journey off here eager to be a disciple of Jesus and to be bold and make friends and not be fearful of judgement or rejection. But here's what happened... Every dog park, kid park, mommy meet up, even the mommy support groups here are saturated with LDS which is no big deal right? Well it becomes a big deal when the 2nd or 3rd question in a conversation is "what ward are you from?" and when I explain to them I'm not LDS I get exiled from the conversation. It's even stickier because Im christian, and in the LDS faith they are taught that they are also christian so as I try to tiptoe around the fact that they are not one in the same the conversation usually dwindles off into a "well have a good day, it was nice chatting" or if we get as far as to exchange phone numbers I usually won't get a response so basically it's impossible to make friends here. It makes sense to me now when converted people I've met have said that they joined the LDS faith because they wanted friends or because they didn't want to feel secluded. So whats my overall take of Utah? It's freaking lonely.

After many many attempts at finding a Christian bible based church we did find one that we like, and it's been great connecting with fellow christians which is what god calls us to do BUT it's not all we are called to do. We aren't suppose to seek friendships with only like-minded people and My husband and I both feel a calling to be disciples of Jesus; at one point we opened our door to all the neighbors in our complex and every Friday I'd clean the house and order pizzas and have cookies and drinks and be so ready and eager to welcome people, but weeks turned into months of no shows. And we eventually stopped trying that. I know that isn't what jesus would do but holy cow it's hard to keep trying. 

It's a cycle honestly, we invite LDS members into our home or out for play dates and just try to build a friendship but it always circles back to an invite on their part "hey come to our church's event, it's just across the street" and I can say "thank you so much for inviting but I'm not interested" and then I wont hear from them again until the next church event rolls around and they want to invite us so they run outside while I'm walking my dog and they act like they were on their way out, and just bumped into me. They strike up a conversation and are so friendly but it always leads back to "hey sister Bautista, come to my church". And you see I want to invite neighbors and people in my community to church too and I have in the past but it ends in the same awkward conversation walk away. 

It stinks, because you want to build a genuine friendship with someone before you invite them BUT unless you accept their faith and church invites you are never going to be a friend to them or a part of their circle. That may really tick people off but this is my personal experience here in Utah. So there's that cycle. 

So, should I move to Utah? Should "I" move to Utah!? My personal answer to that is no. Not unless you're 100% ready to defend your faith and beliefs, to get the cold shoulder when you do or unless you're already LDS or ready to convert. 

I've heard horror stories of children growing up here non-LDS and being left out of everything including things like sports, birthday parties or sleep overs. As parents; I'm not sure we are prepared for that, my children will be raised as bold, jesus loving christians and the kids in our church share openly about their faith; as young as first grade you will see or hear of kids arguing over the truth of Jesus which is AMAZING but a christian child will always be the odd man out in a classroom and ganged up on and eventually shunned or left out for it. It's absolutely heartbreaking. Kids in our church have been totally accepted by LDS families but then shunned within a few months if they do not get baptized or start attending the Sunday Service in their church.

 Is that what Jesus would do? I personally have invited kids and families over or even offered to babysit neighbor's kids and because I'm not LDS I'm turned away. 

It brings me to this question...if LDS is "considered christian" then why cant our christian children play with your LDS children? Why can't we have a genuine friendship aside from the invites to church? 

We've been here now for 1.5 years but we are feeling the need to move again.

Who am I?

I think you can be a completely different person based on what stage or chapter of life you're in at that given moment. So who I am today is not much like the girl you may have known in high school or college. When I think of the question "who am I?" the first thing I want to say is I'm Adrina and I am a wife and mother. People often identify with their profession I believe; I joke that I am a full time hustler but the truth is I have to be because I don't have a profession, I'm in a season of my life where a career mom just doesn't fit right now and to be honest I struggle with that, and it's okay to struggle and to not be okay with that because I will grow from it.

When I was 21 years old I decided to drop out of college to follow my now husband to Chicago IL to pursue his goals and dreams, yeah that lasted all of what...3 months tops..? Sure if I could go back in time I'd tell my 21 year old self let that man go pursue his dreams and you stay here and finish up yours. But that was not god's plan for us. You see we went to Chicago and things were not the way we thought they would be so when I got a call from home saying "I'm going to get surgery and I need your help" my butt jumped on a plane, I literally sold the snow coat off my back to pay for a return flight home. My now husband landed a mobile job and a month later he moved in with my family too. We lived there for 3 weeks before we realized it wasn't going to work and that's when we signed our very first apartment lease together. We built a warm little home for ourselves there and stayed for a whooping 6 months. Are you guys seeing a pattern here? We don't stay anywhere very long.

Just around the time our 6 month lease ended there My husband popped the question and I said yes, we started wedding planning and moved into our first town home. So many good memories in this home, lots of parties and sleep overs with friends and all nighter gaming because yes we play video games. But also it was in a not so great part of town right down the street from where I grew up, our car kept getting stolen, multiple break in attempts and lots of guns popping off through the night; I legit think our neighbor turned into hulk every weekend when the clock struck midnight we heard pretty much everything that went on.

 I want to say we lived there for 3 years, got married at the end of the 3rd year and then moved into a house on the "nice side of town". Just 2 month after signing our lease I found out I was pregnant with our first. Had a pretty hard pregnancy, lots of SPD and physical therapy needed. We celebrated with friends and family at our gender reveal finding out "It's A GIRL", I was in shock and thought surely I was having a boy. That was not god's plan for me though, everyone said "girls are more fun" and heck yeah they are, this child came into the world on July 10 2016 at 9lbs 2 oz vaginally and the epidural FAILED guys. Holy COW it was painful, I tore of course and almost 3 years later my body is still a mess below the waist, I now go once a month or as needed to receive a vaginal injection (as in a shot in the front butt) with steroids and lidocaine to numb the pain. Basically I have two options; wait it out and have more children and pray my body repairs itself after a second vaginal birth or have surgery to repair that has an 80% chance of infertility. So injections it is....

In May 2018 we uprooted our family and pets and skipped over to Salt lake County Utah. Moving to a new state was exciting, and I know, I know you all are asking why Utah? Guys I don't know why Utah and not Hawaii okay, Hawaii wasn't god's plan for us. No, but in all seriousness my husband and I had been researching good places to raise a family as in less guns, drugs, gangs and more things like unicorn festivals, sidewalk chalk art, museums and parks. Of course we kept in mind schooling opportunities, career growth and what really sparked our interest was the seasons. We don't have seasons in central California, and we thought it'd be so cool to live somewhere it rained, snowed and actually got cold....we thought.

Our first year here has been full of challenges and tests but I can say I have grown so much from it all and my walk with Jesus and prayer time is strong than ever.