The economy crashed and I reinvented God

Last week at the Zen temple in Salt Lake, a guy hit on me. He asked me for my “life story” (ok dude, only at a Zen temple is this a valid pickup line). I haven’t figured out a succinct way to explain my current project of having a baby. My jumbled attempt to explain my unconventional situation left him very confused about whether I already have a baby (I don’t) and whether I’m married (I’m not). (Kudos to his persistence, though: despite his confusion, he still asked for my number at the end of the conversation.)

Let me give it a shot, then, again, to explain my current project, just for practice. Last fall, I decided I wanted to have a baby, even though I’m not partnered with anyone. I have a lovely sperm donor and a fertility doctor and god willing, I’ll be pregnant by the end of 2025 or sooner.

There now. That’s straightforward enough.

My life is unconventional, but it doesn’t always feel unconventional to me, because mostly, I’m just trying to find the most direct route from point A to point B: from where I am to what I want.

Architects have a name for this kind of dirt trail I’m on: desire path. The shortcuts humans instinctively take, despite the perfectly good sidewalk right there.

Allow me a brief digression into Mormon history. Lawrence Foster wrote a very good book in 1984 called Religion and Sexuality. The book details the social effects of the economic catastrophe of “the Year Without a Summer,” the summer of 1816, which saw massive crop failure in the eastern United States due to abnormally cold temperatures which were likely due to a volcano erupting in Indonesia (look it up; I’m neither a historian nor a climate scientist, but it’s all very interesting). Because the crops failed, mills came completely to a standstill; poor people couldn’t buy food; and thousands of people left New England. In this upheaval, three American-born religions emerged: the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneidas. The Shakers practiced celibacy, the Mormons polygyny, and the Oneidas were a free love group. Curious, these three Americana religions, emerging about the same time in about the same place with dramatically counter-cultural sexual practices. Foster argues that though the answer each of these religions asserted was different, they were all trying to respond to the same question:

When the environment fails and, therefore, your economy fails, and your social structures follow the falling dominoes….what do you do?

What do you reinvent in the ashes? How do you get from point A to point B, from shaky ground to stable ground? It wasn’t enough, anymore, for many New Englanders to follow the old ways of a stable family farm with a traditional mom and dad and 8 kids. You needed something new, something more expansive, creative, divine.

I like to zoom way out on my life sometimes and look at where my desire paths, my attempts to get from A to B, fall into trends that are way bigger than me. Desire paths aren’t just one person taking a shortcut one time. Desire paths are the result of lots of people coming to the same conclusion as each other and walking the same path over and over until it’s deeply worn.

I don’t have hard data (I am also not a sociologist! I’m just a poet, you guys), but the vibe I get lately is that more and more of my friends are getting divorced or building polyamorous communities or not getting into relationships at all. Maybe I just managed to befriend the most bohemian group of people in Utah County. But really, I think something big is at play here. Correlation: some of my friends own houses; a lot of them don’t. Simply because they can’t afford it, even though most of my friends are college-educated, some of them with many advanced degrees. With Lawrence Foster’s book in the back of my head, I can’t help but feel that there’s a connection between dramatic economic shifts and the transformation of traditional social structures from the norms of my parents’ generation.

Well, here is one hard data point: according to this website, 54% of the customers of one of the major U.S. sperm banks are single women. There are a lot of us single women carving similar paths. If my own story is at all indicative, this wasn’t the original plan for most of us.

In the pre-2008 Recession, I thought I was gonna have it all someday. (To be fair, I was also twenty, and literally everyone thinks they are gonna have it all when they are twenty.) I fully anticipated an interesting husband and a house that I owned, and also, the babies would be very cute, and motherhood would be nice. And fulfilling. We would build “family life” in the traditional way.

That is not the reality I got, at any level (no mortgage, no babies, no husband).

Sometimes, when I’ve contemplated living alone the rest of my life, having half my income eaten by rent long into old age, and always being the person who is second priority to others’ nuclear family obligations…the grief is like a wildfire that just struck the house, and the oxygen is gone from the room in a flash.

So again: what do you do in the ruins of your expectations? What do you do when you thought society, and the economy, and the environment, and your life, were going to be one thing, but they ended up being another?

One thing you could do, the founders of Mormonism, Shakerism, and Oneidaism assert, is reinvent God.

Here is an incomplete list of the gods who have ruled my life, defined my reality, made the weather:

The clean god of picture-perfect Ensign magazine families: thinking that with enough pastel shirts and children with neatly braided hair, I’ll finally feel like I’m worthy of joy.

The jackpot god of bank accounts: imagining that when the number is finally big, I’ll find security and rest.

The white wedding dress god: whispering that life begins when one promise is made; love is completed when you make just one right choice.

These gods promise easy paths and straightforward paths and almost daily they have failed me.

I’ve walked my own desire paths a dozen times: unconventional, non-normative routes to get what I want. I skipped college to move to Germany (twice). I sold my car and walked everywhere for two years. I married a guy my grandma described as “an odd duck” (and who was twice my age). I’m not gonna claim that these things always worked out 100% in my favor. Desire paths are always dirty and dusty, and sometimes they take you through the woods and brambles. The suffering that came from not walking on the paved sidewalk was sometimes excruciatingly painful. I still remember being eighteen, curled up against the radiator because I was freezing in the middle of winter in northern Germany, where it got dark at like four in the afternoon, and I hated everything, and I was agonizingly lonely, and all I wanted to do was turn tail and go home. It was like that a lot in every unconventional path I took: lonely, cold, and feeling like I’d catapulted my life into a disaster I’d never recover from.

If I had a nickel for every person who said, “You’re choosing to have a baby by yourself? In this economy?” I probably wouldn’t have to worry about the economy. They are not incorrect. 2025 is shaping up to be really bad for a lot of people, and I think 2026 is only going to be worse. I’m bringing a baby into this? Why???

I don’t exactly, man. I am in the middle of the god-reinvention-project. It is 1819, metaphorically speaking, and I am still in the messy middle of questioning every religion, every god that was handed to me, and God the Father has not yet appeared to me in the grove.

(Alternatively: it is 1847 and I have yet to come up with the theory of male continence wherein they should avoid ejaculation in order to increase the properties of amative love and complex marriage. OK, that’s probably not the direction I am going to go.)

I’m having a baby in this economy. I’m having a baby without a partner. I’m having a baby because I want a baby and because the sidewalk was taking far, far too long. This is void. This is freefall. This is “the crops are failing, and the farm is failing, and I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going to happen next, or if it will hurt. It will probably hurt.”

In the shattered failure, in the hurt and the disaster, here are some gods I imagine I could birth into the world.

The god of hope: things will get real bad, but they also will get really, really good. I don’t need to be beautiful, or clean, or put together, to find joy. Hope that joy is possible even in the dirt and the disaster.

The god of devotion: that my devotion to a baby I might create is a heavier weight on the scales of the universe than any economic collapse. Devotion that draws us onward in the face of impossible odds.

Welcome to my new(ish), Substack. I decided to make this a sort of pseudo-journal about the experience of trying to have a baby as a single person. Maybe eventually my notes and jots will become a second book. The writing is first-drafty (I wrote most of this in one sitting, without an editor), but the topics, I hope, are always interesting.

If you’ve enjoyed my writing so far, and you enjoyed this piece, it would mean the world if you forwarded this email or shared the link with a loved one.

My first memoir, Sovereign, was published in February. If you read it and liked it, would you pretty please leave a review?