The only constant is change...

I don't believe that I ever set out to leave the church. When I was a child other than my family the church was the only constant in my life.
My parents had a very volatile relationship, whether this was the fault of one parent, the other, or both, I cannot say. My father was one of eight children, born to a Baptist minister from Arkansas. I never knew my paternal grandfather as anything other than the person in the bed in the back bedroom of my grandmother’s house. I ask my mother once what was wrong with him and her only comment was that the day he could no longer have sex with his wife he went to bed and never got up. I do not know what actions caused this bitterness in her and I cannot say that she hated him because I have never known my mother to hate anyone. What he thought about my father becoming a Mormon I will never know.
My father has always been an enigma to me. My oldest sibling believes he suffered from severe ADD. I, through my experience working with physically and mentally disabled people, feel it was closer to Bi Polar disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder. To me, as a child, he was the embodiment of fear, which is sadly ironic because I later came to the realization that he was in fact afraid of me. It is only as an adult removed from his physically and verbally abusive, fear mongering countenance, that I can objectively say, his inability to control himself was probably the root cause for his obsessive need to control everything and everyone else around him. I use to wonder in the time after my parents' divorce, if he wasn't just the resulting figure in a cycle of abuse, again this is something I can only speculate. Regardless of the reasons and because of them, my father had a tendency to quite jobs and lose jobs frequently, which in turn led to the continuous uprooting and moving of our large family.
When my parents divorced for the final time, my freshman year of high school, I had never finished a single grade in the same school. There were even times that I didn't finish a grade at all because we moved to completely different geographical locations. This constant upheaval in home, school and friends, made the church all the more necessary to my identity, as all Mormon churches have the same structure, teach the same lessons, read the same books and sing the same songs.
I wish that I could tell you that there were specific circumstances or experiences that caused me to lose my faith, but how exactly does one lose something they never had. The analogy that a blind person does not know what it is to see has never seemed entirely appropriate when applied to my feelings or concepts, it was always more like a dog does not know what it is to be a cat. Some things are what they are because that is what they are. I was a little sister, a big sister, a daughter, an aunt; I was a Mormon.

When the only constant is change, how do you change what is constant..