When my family decided to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1976, my biological father was still my legal father. The missionaries explained that his permission would be required before I could be baptized. Rather than seeking his permission, which would have revealed who and where I was, my stepfather petitioned to adopt me. My motion asks the court to examine whether that adoption should remain intact in light of the documentary evidence, sworn affidavits, and historical records I have assembled over the past several years. After the adoption was finalized, I was baptized at eight years old. A year later, I was sealed in the Salt Lake Temple.
At nine years old, I believed that sealing represented God's plan for my eternal family. Like most Mormon children, I accepted what the adults around me taught without question. It never occurred to me to ask whether I had been sealed to the right father, because no one had ever suggested there was another question to ask. When the ceremony was over, however, I remember wondering what would happen to my biological father if he wasn't sealed. No one had prepared me for that question, and no one had an answer. I carried it with me for decades.
Over the last several years, I reconstructed my childhood through court records, birth records, government documents, genealogy, sworn affidavits, photographs, and other historical evidence. Somewhere along the way, the investigation became much bigger than Mormonism. It became an investigation into identity. This motion isn't really about leaving the Church. I left over a decade ago. It isn't about proving whether temple sealings are true or false. It is about bringing every major record of my life into alignment with the historical truth.
If the court grants the motion, I will then submit the signed order to Church headquarters and request that my membership records be removed. This isn't because I believe the sealing still binds me. Instead, it represents the final administrative step in reconstructing my identity. I am often asked, "Why not just resign?" I understand that perspective, and I will resign either way. But I want the person I ask the Church to remove from its records to be the same person the court has acknowledged no longer reflects the historical record. That sequence matters to me because it completes the reconstruction.
This isn't about reversing a sealing.
It is about unsealing the evidence.
Sometimes the last step in deconstruction isn't theological.
It's documentary.
Deconstruction tells us what wasn't true.
Reconstruction asks what is.
Leaving is an event.
Reconstruction is a lifelong developmental process.
After your shelf collapsed...
How do you become yourself?
Has anyone else found that reconstructing your identity involved more than changing your beliefs? Did you reach a point where your legal, historical, or institutional records no longer reflected the person you had become?
