How I ended up as a Native American Jew/ex-Mormon

Technically speaking, I am a Native American Jew/Mormon. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t too many of us out there. Native American Jew is one thing, but a Native American Mormon? Those are pretty rare. So how did this all happen? How did I manage to be a Navajo, raised Jewish with a Bat Mitzvah and with a huge family that resides in Utah? I’d say my mom is the one responsible. She is full Navajo and was born in Paige, Arizona. However, as the 7th child to a nomadic family, she was put up for adoption as a newborn. She was adopted by Ellis and Ora Larson, a husband and wife from St. George, Utah. Seems pretty normal so far, right? Well Mr. and Mrs. Larson were Mormon, thus before adopting my mother, already had seven children of their own. Even at the age of 50, Ora Larson was ready to adopt and bring into her home another child, my mother. There in Utah, she was raised in a Mormon family. However, at the age of 21, my mother was ready to get out of there, which I don’t blame her. St. George is basically a red dirt desert with too many Wal-Marts. At that age, she was way behind of the typical Mormon tendencies….getting married in the Temple and popping out babies. So she left for Los Angeles; she moved from a town of 10,000 to a metropolitan city of 3,000,000 full of booze, homosexuals, and Hollywood…terrifying any Mormon mother. In Los Angeles, she enrolled as an undergrad at UCLA (I apologize, but unfortunately my whole family is of Bruin descent) where she eventually met my father, a Jew from Redlands, California with only one sibling. At this point, my mother had abandoned her Mormon upbringing and was fine with raising me Jewish. I had the Bat Mitzvah, went to Hebrew school and went to services….only for the important holidays of course.

While I love my family in Utah, since that was the family was I raised with, I am, no offense, relieved to have skipped out on growing up Mormon. I have two cousins my age, who are both married already and pregnant with their first child and I just can’t imagine myself doing that any time soon. Mormons live a completely different lifestyle, one that is hard to understand by many.