On Friday, my five-year-old had an appointment at the children’s hospital. His orthopedist tends to run behind, so I cleared our schedule for the whole morning. We have a few rituals that come with going to the orthopedist: the kids always want a donut and a can of grape juice from the hospital cafeteria, and they always beg me to take a ride on the train, and I always tell them no. This week, since I knew it would be fruitless to try to rush back for preschool and playgroup, I asked the kids if they wanted to take the train to the doctor. (read more…)

Marla is a Utah native and a professional writer and editor. She is just weeks away (fingers crossed) from completing a master’s degree in English. She loves running, biking, reading, writing, and lurking on the Segullah blog. She blogs at mindofmarla.blogspot.com.

I went to the Victorian exhibit at the BYU Museum of Art a few weeks ago and couldn’t take my eyes off one of the paintings (click to enlarge):
What you’re seeing is unmarried, dowry-less women being auctioned off to the highest bidders in an ancient Babylonian market. The women have been lined up according to their beauty—the most beautiful woman is standing on the platform; the least beautiful sits on on the far right. According to Herodotus, whose writings on the market inspired the painting, the money earned from the purchases of the beautiful women was used to pay men to take the least beautiful women home. Examining the figures and their interactions in this masterpiece is like watching a movie—from the faces and gestures of the men in the crowd to the reactions of the women at being put in the order they were, there’s a wide variety of attitudes and thought processes happening here. That the painting is the size of an entire wall made it easy to live in the scene for a minute or two, asking myself (as a coincidentally unmarried, dowry-less woman) what it would feel like to be placed somewhere in that line. I saw a little of myself, at one point in my life or another, in each woman. (read more…)

Southern Virginia University has an intriguing little calender on their website: Typical Ups and Downs of College Life.

For your reading pleasure– February:

* Feelings of claustrophobia and depression set in with winter
* Potential increase in alcohol and other substance abuse
* Challenges with love relationship at home
* Valentine’s Day brings out loneliness, isolation

Do you even want to read March?

* Anxiety regarding finding roommates for next year
* Excitement and/or disappointment regarding spring break plans
* Midterm exam stress
* Concern over summer employment
* Concern over winter weight gain

As I perused the list with my oldest son and laughed at the tragi-comedic (yet accurate) outline, I thought how comforting it would be for a struggling freshman to read it and sigh with relief– “It’s OK, I’m normal.” (read more…)

Today’s interview is with Neylan McBaine, talking about the newly created Mormon Women Project.

LG: How did get started with The Mormon Women Project? Tell me how your own unique background and personal experience influenced your desire to explore LDS women?

NM: Growing up in New York City as the daughter of a professional opera singer, it never occurred to me that my Mormonism would force me to subdue the passions, talents and interests that made me a unique daughter of God. In fact, as a child and teenager, I participated in firesides in which my mother spoke about balancing it all: work, family, church service. I understood that my own mother — by only having one child and not having a temple marriage — wasn’t stereotypical, but rather than being ostracized for those variances I instead saw was the Church, as an organization, holding my mother up as an example of an accomplished, contributing and faithful representative of our people. And for me, in the environment in which I grew up, there was no one way to be a Mormon women: our Manhattan ward had the family of eight kids living in a three bedroom apartment and I knew a host of large families in the suburbs outside the city, but I also knew the woman who had gone back to business school when her children were in elementary school and had worked her way to being a managing director at Goldman Sachs. I knew the New York City Ballet dancer who had her children after her career was completed. I knew women who worked on Masters degrees at night school after their children were asleep, and mothers who strapped their children to their backs and explored every museum in the city. (read more…)

I was so busy corralling my children down the grocery store aisle that I almost ran into the old woman in front of us. Four children under age five made us quite a spectacle in the big city where we lived. She smiled at us and patted my arm. “Treasure every moment, dear. Time passes so quickly.” I could only smile weakly and reply, “Starting when?”

If you have little ones at home every day seems like a hundred hours long. But around First Grade somebody hits a cosmic fast forward button and before you know it they are passing the sacrament and taking Driver’s Ed and you are standing there with a bewildered look whining, “I swear she was just starting preschool about five minutes ago.”

I imagine in another five minutes I will have children leaving for missions and getting married. Five minutes after that I will be a wrinkly grey Granny planning trips to see my grandbabies. (read more…)

Or just thoroughly confused?

I can’t stop thinking about the lesson in Gospel Doctrine a few weeks ago that was all about Eve. About whether she knew what she was doing when Satan tempted her with the fruit of that tree. About if she was truly tricked, or if she just knew in her womanly heart of hearts what she needed to do. And as one person said in class, what she needed to do was “take one for the team.”

(read more…)

Systems are resistant to change.

This is one of the fundamental principles of systems theory (a paradigm for looking at people’s lives). Our lives are intricate webs of relationships and forces – home, church, school, community, family, friends.  A shift in one area, relationship, or routine sends ripples across the whole system.  So in essence the system tries to maintain it’s balance because negotiating a new normal requires a lot of energy and resources.

Basically everything around us enforces the status quo. It begs to be static.
It’s why bad patterns cycle over and over again. It’s why relationships stay dysfunctional. It’s why although people express a desire for change, it often never materializes. It’s why we set the same new year’s resolutions every year.

It is a lot of work to change.

(read more…)

I have a tattoo on my left ankle.

A crucifix, blue-black, one inch long. A punk crucifix, anti-religious, if anything. Homemade, in 1988. President Hinckley hadn’t yet made his pronouncement against tattooing, but even if he had, it wouldn’t have stopped me. In fact, I would have been all the more eager to grab a needle.

My kids hate the tattoo. They’ve had a dozen or more lessons on bodies-as-temples, and they’re pretty freaked about the “graffiti” on mine. Every few months or so, they notice the ink on my ankle and remind me that tattooing is wrong. And whenever we pass the Laser Tattoo Removal billboard on I-15, one of the kids inevitably comments, “That’s for you, Mom.” They don’t like their mother wearing a mark of disobedience. (read more…)

*Previous installments of Sam and Sally can be found here and here.

*Sally and Sam Seymore took your advice (or ignored you) and went and saw the Bishop together. In talking to them, Bishop Smith understood that Sally and Sam had problems beyond differing feelings about the church. He also realized these were problems beyond the scope of his training. He suggested the two of them go to counseling together. (read more…)

If I won an Oscar (which I won’t I am no actress) I would have to say I got where I did because of the love of a good man. While it sounds so not PC, it’s true.

For me marriage and family life has been liberating, not confining. There is a power in fidelity - in having some one’s constant support. Knowing someone has always got my back.

At 33 with 3 kids, I feel totally comfortable in my own skin, which to me is a testament to my environment. We all acknowledge the process of child development (and credit parents for their role in child rearing), but what of adult development, who gets credit there? Generativity is Erikson’s longest stage of psychosocial development (adulthood), it extends for a good 50 years. As it’s name denotes, it is where you generate and give back, it is where you define yourself in terms of work, family, community, accomplishments. It is where growth and personality development take place, it is where we become who we really are as the world knows us.

As my numerous years of semi-successful gardening can attest, plants don’t thrive without water, good soil, and light. Family life is my greenhouse.  Honestly, since I have been married I have become wiser, more successful, more confident, I even think I look prettier. Maybe it’s  just the process of growing up and becoming more at ease with myself, but I think it would be arrogant to suggest it has just been a natural progression or a result of my own actions.  Whatever I have become or accomplished in the last almost 11 years has not been simply of my own doing, it’s been my husband’s too. (read more…)

I. A few years ago I was visiting my children’s elementary school, catching up with a friend of mine who teaches there. She asked about my older children who used to attend there and I told her they were mostly doing well, but recounted a difficult experience (now long forgotten) we’d been through with one of them. As I explained my frustration over being experienced enough to know what was better for my child, yet not being able to “make him” make the correct choice about something, another teacher caught our conversation in passing and piped in,

“That was the other plan.” (read more…)

I’d cried through all my Kleenex.

My brother strode up to the podium in the temple chapel and pulled out half the contents of the tissue box. Settling next to me he divided the stack and whispered, “Put as many in your pocket as you can. I’ll keep the rest for you.”

Mopping my face, I grimaced, “I won’t need them all!”

“Oh you will,” he replied, “I’ve seen enough in the last few days to know you will.”

Three days before I’d held my mother’s hand as she writhed in agony and then finally grew still. As her features stiffened and her body grew cold I lay on her chest and sobbed; sobbed for regret and unfilled promises and the wish for just a little more time. (read more…)

You’ve all experienced this to some degree…
to judge or be judged.
I remind myself today
that
We are all fighting a hard fight.

About others, we do not know the whole story.
Others do not know the story of our struggles.
A good friend told me that she tries to keep this thought in mind:
Treat everyone as if their heart is breaking.
(in most cases you are probably right)
so here’s to refraining from judgment
and remembering that when others judge us,
they can’t see the whole picture.

Laguna Beach, 1993. As fierce wildfires fueled by 70 mph Santa Ana winds swept through the Laguna Canyon and hurtled towards their neighborhoods, several families in our Laguna Beach ward found themselves literally racing to escape the 200-feet-high flames. When it was over, the fire had claimed 366 homes, and, though most of our ward members’ homes were spared, one family, the Hansens, only had time to grab a few photo albums and run before their house burned to the ground. At the next fast and testimony meeting, *Brother Jones, a former stake president, stood at the pulpit and testified that at the crucial moment when the flames bore down on his house, he had commanded the fires to turn back, and thus, because of his righteous use of the priesthood and his faith, his home had been spared. Meanwhile, the Hansens sat in the congregation, faces blank. (read more…)

Right around the time when I was starting to get into the rhythm of the speaker’s talk, my 2 year old lost it. His brother, having stolen the black crayon, affected a wide-eyed innocent look that I scarcely had time to enjoy before I whisked the 2 year old out of the chapel. We walked around the building to cool off, playing our favorite game (Find Jesus in The Painting; it’s a classic!) The closing prayer delivered, the chapel clearing, I delivered the babe to nursery and went back to find my husband and 6 year old. They were still on the pew, engaged in a mutual emotional meltdown. Icy, red-eyed stares with a side order of growling, and the 6 year old in tears. (read more…)