This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The LDS Church recently released an essay on the Mormon doctrine of a mother in heaven, or specifically that Heavenly Father has a spouse/mate/wife.

The announcement drew the usual holler and bother from nonbelievers, ironically including people with deep faith in other things equally (or more) fantastical.

Being Mormon, I'm OK with the idea of a mother in heaven. Indeed, I'm banking on it. Only a mom in heaven could possibly keep me from getting what I got coming at the Judgment Bar.

Heavenly Father: "Now, on the matter of you putting liquid soap in the sacra-."

Heavenly Mother: "Oh, leave the kid alone. He takes after your side of the family."

A celestial family is a central Mormon doctrine. We — most of us anyway — believe that there's an eternal purpose for gender. It naturally follows that that's so for the family.

"Families are Forever" was a big selling point years ago. An early forerunner to the modern stick-family caricatures, the "forever" bumper stickers were everywhere in Utah.

But is this really how it works in heaven? According to Mormonism, you can't get into the Celestial Kingdom without an eternal marriage. If you don't have that someone special next to you, too bad.

It works this way in other faiths as well. Suppose the spouse you love more than anything is a committed atheist. Given the behavior of religious/atheist people, it's hard to imagine such an arrangement actually working well on earth, but it does happen.

What's heaven going to be like without your earthly soul mate? If you spend eternity yelling "Hallelujah!" at the feet of Jesus, but you're also sad because your earthly companion isn't there, then heaven will at least partially suck.

But eternity is rather a long time. Maybe love in heaven works like it did in high school, and after enough time you won't really care that your former spouse/earthly mate is somewhere boiling in a vat of demon urine.

Mormons buy into the idea that our darling children and our loving spouse will be together forever, that we'll all get to live in some enormous celestial mansion with a housekeeper sent up from one of the lesser degrees of glory.

Life will be just one great big eternal Family Home Evening, just like a Norman Rockwell painting but with lots of clouds and streets of gold.

This may not be what we actually admit when pressed, but it's how it works in our heads when we're sitting on a pew with well-behaved children. I'll be Dad. You'll be Mom. And our kids will be gathered around us, glowing with well-behaved love. Forever.

Maybe. But other LDS doctrine gets in the way here. For starters, they won't be your lovable kids in heaven. They'll be adults with their own kids who will also be adults with their own … and so on.

And another thing: They aren't your kids in the first place. They're Mother and Father in Heaven's kids — in other words, your brothers and sisters. You're just borrowing them to find out what kind of a parent you are.

I wouldn't stress about it too much. Thanks to free will (which has never been free) not many "families" are going to make it to heaven intact forever anyway.

I'm the only one in my immediate family who is still LDS. That means — according to scripture and any number of General Conference talks — my family isn't forever.

I try to look on the bright side. If you want me to behave, you're going to have to find something else with which to motivate/promise/scare me.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.