I shot a message to a mutual friend about it, basically shrugging and saying, ‘I tried’, and this friend said something along the lines of, “That’s okay. He’s boring. We’re more fun anyways”.

And I wondered. Am I? Fun, I mean? Or am I just a cliche?

I mean, let’s take what I did yesterday. I’m a stay at home mom with one child at home, and she’s 4. Which means that she’s old enough to get her own breakfast, but young enough to spill it. Old enough to play by herself, but young enough to want me to play with her. Old enough to go potty, but young enough that she might not flush all the time, or she might do something creative with her toilet paper. In short, she’s old enough to not really need me every minute of the day, but young enough to still need me paying a modicum of attention to her.

To fill the days she’s not at preschool, we used to do soccer twice a week. That didn’t work out, so we now have our Tuesdays and Thursdays utterly open and free. You’d think that would the time I would be able to make up creative and exciting things to stimulate her mind and mine, but I confess, yesterday I mostly spent way too much time catching up on Downton Abby while she built towers out of playdough containers and poured cold cereal from one container to the next.

Not exactly exciting, or fun. Actually, the day was kind of… boring. (shhhhhhhhhh, don’t say it out loud)

And the idea of a stay at home mom sitting in her unmade bed watching what is essentially a high brow soap opera (at least I think it’s highbrow–I mean, they have those cool accents and everything) is SUCH a cliche, it makes me cringe. I did take my daughter to a play area in the afternoon to blow off steam, and we had a busy evening when my son got home from school and the after school schedule kicked into gear, but the truth is, right now my days with my daughter are slow. And I know that this is a good time, and I’m certainly not complaining, because I do know how short-lived these days will be.

I’m just worried that in the process of becoming a home-maker (something I’m not really very good at anyways. Just ask the pile of clean laundry stacked on my bedroom floor) I’ve become…boring.

And while boring isn’t the worst thing in the world (right? Or is it?), it still isn’t exactly something I ever aspired to be. And I’m not even complaining that my life is boring, because it isn’t. My life is rich and full. I just wonder if I, as a person, would be recognizable from the girl who once sang on stage with an East Germany grunge band in an old burned out weapons factory.

That was an interesting day.

Are you a fun person? And how do you keep it that way?

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I’m surprised this hasn’t come out in all the media hype about us. I mean, we worship Satan as the brother of Jesus Christ, we wear magic underwear, and we think we’re all going to have our own planets some day, but with all of that, not a single news outlet has exposed the worst part of Mormonism.

Our traditional cuisine. It’s atrocious.

My mother is not a great cook. She dutifully strived to cook us decent meals growing up, and she has some good recipes up her sleeve, but by and large, she’d rather be doing a thousand other things than cook. She has neither the patience or interest for it.

But she would (and still does) make a grand effort for Sunday dinners. That’s when she would pull out the wedding china, which included salad plates. She would hand one of us kids a head of lettuce, and we would peel the lettuce and put a leaf on each plate.

That was for the jello.

Yes, my mother would make jello (which I actually like, but we’ll get to that later), and put a beautiful red square on a lettuce leaf.

Does this make ANY sense?

Most of the time the jello was pretty harmless–strawberry or raspberry with frozen berries, pineapple, and bananas in it. Also, my mom is actually pretty good at making jello, and most of the time it came out nice and jiggly, rather than sloppy and melty, like mine tends to. But then sometimes she would pull out all the stops and make her green jello with pineapple and cottage cheese.

Cottage cheese. With the jello. INSIDE the jello.

Again, it’s not bad, if you’re grown up eating jello with things in it, like I have. (It wasn’t until I went to college that I learned that the only kind of jello most people ate is either in a funny shape or made with vodka.) But still, it begs the question: Cottage cheese + jello—who thought that up?

(For the record, jello shots made with vodka taste way worse than jello with cottage cheese. I didn’t figure out that people weren’t eating them for the taste until after I had a couple. I mean, hello, somebody could have at least WARNED the Mormon that they were trying to get drunk on the jello. I was totally unprepared, coming from a world where EVERYBODY brings jello to a party.)

Once, I was at a Mormon home where the salad was shredded carrots, pineapple juice (no pineapple, just the juice from the can), and raisins. Healthy, cheap, and colorful. All good things. And it wasn’t terrible-I mean, I like carrots, and I like raisins, so it wasn’t hard to eat, or anything. But isn’t there something better to do with raisins than douse them with pineapple juice?

One of the things that is exciting about becoming a world wide church is that there are things at our potluck that are not unholy combinations. A family from Mexico moved into our ward, and she made some awesome homemade enchiladas for our last ward potluck. They were gone before you could say pass the salsa.

What is your favorite unholy food combination?

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I worked for Rick for 2 years. I was his Personal Care Attendant, or PCA. When I walked into his apartment for my initial interview, I was taken aback at what I saw. The job description I had read said, “Adult male seeking assistance with dressing, bathing, and light housework”. Nowhere did it say that the adult male couldn’t walk or talk, or made funny noises. I was unsure of how to proceed. It didn’t help, either, that the woman who was interviewing me was insulting Rick left and right.

“Yeah, this RETARD needs a lot of help, you know?” she said, patting Rick’s leg. He laughed.

“He’s so STUPID, he can’t even feed himself!” she went on, giving him a fake punch in the arm. He laughed harder.

I was stunned. HOW could she make fun of somebody who was so obviously impaired? It blew my mind.

She wasn’t the only one who would do this to Rick. Often, when I was working and I would meet Rick’s friends, they would refer to him as the retard, or the idiot. He always thought it was hilarious. I couldn’t figure it out. Finally, though, I got my answer.

Rick is always getting interviewed by some person or another, and in one interview, he talked about growing up as a disabled child in a mainstream world. Rick’s body may be impaired, but there is nothing wrong whatsoever with his brain, and his parents saw that. They fought and fought to have Rick enrolled in public school, all this at a time when doctors thought Rick was better off being put in an institution and forgotten about. Rick said that when people finally got to the point where they could joke about his disability to his face, he knew they were his friend. He decided joking about it was better than people ignoring him, or, worse, being scared of him.

All of this is a really long winded way of coming to the point of my post (or the Mormon point, at least). There are a lot of reasons why Mormonism is taking center stage lately. The Book of Mormon musical and Mitt Romney being an actually viable candidate for president are the two biggest, obviously, but there is no denying that we are getting a lot of press. Some of it is good,some of it is wretched . But some of it is, to be honest, kinda funny.

The kinda funny are the ones I’m most hopeful about. If people feel comfortable enough to laugh at us, to include us in the joke, maybe it means they are getting more comfortable about Mormons. It reminds me of Rick. If people are including us, does that mean they are less scared of us? I don’t know. But I hope so. And while I kinda hate the stuff I’ve heard about The Book of Mormon musical, it can’t be denied that it has given us a good reason to stay in everybody’s face.

And I did read somewhere that somebody asked the writers of The Book of Mormon musical if they feared a huge backlash from the Church, if we would rally and protest and throw rotten eggs at the actors. They said, “Nah, the Mormons are too classy for that.” Yes. Yes we are. Instead, we will just bombard you with messages to show you exactly HOW classy. We are that cool.

How do you feel about the uptick in news stories about Mormonism?

P.S. Here’s a video about Rick, if you want to see what he looks like. This is probably going to derail the whole discussion, because Rick is that awesome, but I still want to talk about Mormonism. Rick probably would too, as he was baptized in Sept, 1997.

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All of this means that today and yesterday (when I could have blogged, but didn’t) we have (all) spent a large amount of time indoors. Which means that last night, my husband and I were reading as our kids played around after dinner. And while perusing potential reading material, my husband came across my old journals.

It was like the man struck gold.

He read for HOURS. At one point, I tried to physically pry the book from his fingers, but darn if the man isn’t stronger than I am. He claims that he was enjoying them, and not in the “Oh my GOSH this is hilarious! You actually DID that? You are SUCH A DORK!” kind of way, but in a “I’m catching a glimpse of the inside of the soul I fell in love with more than a decade ago” kind of way. And I believe him. (Sort of. Kinda. Almost. Well, at least the “I was in love with you more than a decade ago” part.)

But the journals make me cringe, for a lot of reasons. One, because the stuff I wrote that I thought was incredibly insightful at the time now sounds, well, lame. Two, it is so full of unnecessary stress it makes me want to reach back to the hysterical 21 year old and smack some sense into her and say, “My heavens girl, CHILL OUT!” Three, it makes me secretly fear that in fact, I haven’t changed much from that ranting woman who sometimes can’t see the forest from the trees, and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t needed a good “CHILL OUT!” pep talk recently. That’s the main reason I don’t read my journals much. Because I fear that I’d recognize the woman in them, and wish she was somebody else.

My husband disagrees with me on all counts. He says he CAN see a progression, changes in my life, my attitudes, my happiness. Fortunately, he particularly noted a change in tone when we started dating (“Wow, babe, you were REALLY gaga for me! Awesome.”) and (again, fortunately) a particular brand of dopey-ness when we got engaged (“Yeah, you were totally in love bubble mode. Majorly twitterpated.”) So maybe I should trust him and hope that for all of her angst-filled tortuous nights, somehow that 21 year old girl pulled herself together. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see it, though.

Do you go back and read your old journals? Do you try to find patterns of growth, or do you see patterns of stagnation? Or have you requested, as my MIL has, to have all writings burned at your death?

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That said, I’m not her daughter, I didn’t grow up in her home, which means that her daughters and I sometimes parent differently. Not anything drastic, but there are battles that my SILs pick that I don’t. I mentioned that to my MIL, that there are some hills I’m just not willing to die on.

Then she asked me a question that I’m still thinking about, years later.

“What hills ARE you willing to die on?”

I had to sit and think about it. What are the things that are most important to me? What are the things I’m willing to fight with my kids about?

“Going to church”, I said. That was all I could come up with, mostly because at the time, it was the biggest battle I was having with my kids–they don’t want to go, they don’t want to bathe, they don’t want to put on church clothes, they don’t want to sit still in Sacrament meeting. And yet I push it, we battle, sometimes with tears on our way to the chapel (which, you know, makes for a SUPER spiritual Sabbath).

Now, we battle homework and piano practicing and bedtime and washing your hands after you pee and not spoiling your appetite with 2 dozen Oreos before dinner. But other than the normal routine nagging of parenting, I don’t know that I pick a lot of battles. My other MIL (yes, I have two–that’s another post entirely) has a favorite saying about parenting: Be careful which battles you pick with your children, because if you pick a battle, you have to win.

My kids are still young. Ages 9 and 3, so we’re not battling cell phones, dating, modesty, or serious academic issues. We’re not battling drugs, pornography, friends with bad influence, drinking.

Not yet, anyway. But I’m fully aware that someday in the future, probably much sooner than I’m comfortable with, these battles will land on my front door. How do I know which ones to pick?

I sat in an Institute class once where we were discussing the virtues of modesty. The predictable points were made, how you should establish modest dressing habits early, how girls need to know how boys are affected by the way they dress, and how they need to shun the styles of today, etc, etc, etc.

I appreciated it when a mother of a teenage girl spoke up and said, “You know what? Our girls are really trying hard. It’s not easy to stay modest with today’s fashion. And my daughter came to me and asked if she could wear skinny jeans. I told her no, that they were too tight. And she started to cry. She said she was just trying to fit in, that she didn’t wear the immodest tank tops and the halter tops and the low jeans and whatever else girls wear today, that all she was asking was for cute jeans that still covered her backside so she could look like a 16 year old instead of a 40 year old mom. And you know what? I let her wear those jeans. It’s not like she was asking to wear those new JEGGINGS or anything!”

I silently applauded this mother for recognizing her daughter’s need, and for picking her battles: slutty top that shows cleavage, nay. Skinny jeans that everybody else is wearing that covers her butt, yay.

And I did neglect to reveal the fact that I have a pair of jeggings in my own closet, and that I think they make my legs look smokin’, thank you very much.

But I’m sure that other mothers in the room disagreed with her, that skinny jeans shouldn’t be a part of a modest girl’s wardrobe. These are mothers that are willing to die on that hill.

What hills are you willing to die on? How do you decide which battles to pick and which ones to let go? Do you find you are more willing to pick battles with certain members of your family, and have you picked battles with older children that you’ve decided aren’t worth it with the others?

I heard Julie Beck say once that we as mothers are “Lionesses at the Gate.” Tell me which battles you fight to protect the fortress of your home.

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The result of my procrastination is that I’m in a fair amount of pain, and can’t really do much running. This is too bad, not only because the weather is finally getting to the point where running outside doesn’t feel like a punishment, but because I have recently discovered that when it comes to maintaining the shape of me, I have to do more. It takes more effort to keep the same results. I work harder, and often, I accomplish less.

I think that means I’m old.

Last night, I was moaning about my leg, and my husband was moaning about HIS legs. He was recently diagnosed with bursitis, a painful inflammation in his hips, and he had his own round of physical therapy a few months ago. So there we were, moaning about our aches and pains, and we laughed, because 10 years ago, such a conversation would have never taken place.

A good friend of ours, who is just over 50 and is active and energetic, is getting TWO new hips next month. TWO! He’ll have to use a walker for a few weeks after the surgery, and then spend his life explaining to the TSA that his concealed weapon is actually in his hips.

Yup, old and creaky. That’s us. I always think of myself as a young woman, but I’m realizing that, um, no, I’m not really as young as I once was.

I suppose there are some good things about getting older. I dress better than I did in high school. My hair is cuter, and my make-up is better. I see things a little clearer, and have a better understanding about the way the world works, and more compassion for the people in it. When my 3rd grader comes home despondent about how kids at school weren’t playing fair at kick-ball, I say a silent prayer of gratitude that I don’t have to worry about who to play with at recess anymore. And my husband points out that if for any reason he ever has to navigate the dating scene again, somebody should just shoot him to put him out of his misery.

I was in the changing room at the Y last week, getting ready to swim with my daughter, and a woman there was lamenting her posterior. Her own 4 year daughter old had told her that her butt was flappy. “I have a flappy butt!” she cried, turning to me, half laughing, half despairing. Well, I couldn’t help but check out her backside, and indeed, it could be described as flappy. But she pointed out that she was 42, had given birth to 4 children, and could still run a 5k in 26 minutes. We agreed that she should be grateful that her body worked as well as it did, and that she was as strong as she was (And she did look strong. I mean, can YOU run a 5k in 26 minutes? I can’t). In essence, she understood that while she was getting older and her body didn’t look like the way she wanted it to, she was still a vibrant, strong, beautiful woman.

But as we walked to the pool together, she said to her teenage daughter, “Hey, will you watch the little ones? I need to swim some laps, to work on my flappy butt.”

How do you feel about getting older? Is it difficult, or liberating, or both? What things do you miss about being young, and what things are you looking forward to?

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I want to be tan.

I want to be a serious writer. Or a serious speech therapist. Or a serious something .

I want conversations like, “What are you doing? Are you sticking a rubber-band up your nose? You ARE sticking a rubber-band up your nose! WHY are you sticking a rubber-band up your nose?” to be less frequent in my home.

(Yes, that was a word-for-word transcription of the conversation that just transpired between my husband and my 8 year old son.)

I want to be on top of things better. I want to have emails like, “Where were you?” or “We missed you!” or “I thought you said you were coming” not be so frequent in my life. I want to NOT show up at a friend’s door with a smile and a checkbook and say, “I’m here for the Pampered Chef party!” and have them say, “Um, Heather, that was LAST Saturday. But hey, that explains why you weren’t here.”

I want my son to stop sticking things up his nose.

I want to never have to wipe my children’s tears as they tell me about the mean things people say to them. And this week, my niece was involved in a serious skiing accident that may change her life forever, which makes me want to wrap my children in one of those big hamster ball thingies so they never get hurt by anything or anyone ever.

(But you know what they say. Nobody likes a blonde in a hamster ball.*)

I also want another baby.

And a convertible.

I don’t know if I’m going to get any of those things. I’m too fair to ever get a tan. I’m not disciplined enough to be serious. And clearly, I can’t stop my kid from sticking things up his nose.

I’m probably never going to be on top of things the way I want to be. By virtue of choosing mortality my children face dangers and pain on every level every day. And because of my issues with my kidneys, I’ve been told I will never be able to give birth again.

And we probably can’t afford a convertible.

Not getting what we want is kinda hard. My 3 year old often cries when she doesn’t get what she wants, and my 8 year old, who has grown out of crying for the most part, is not above whining. Since crying and whining is sort of inappropriate for a grown-up (at least in public, and high-pitched whining is out altogether), where does that leave the 10 years old and above crowd?

I’m going to venture a guess and say that all of us have faced disappointments, big and little, in our lives. It’s a part of being human. Things don’t work out the way we want them to, people don’t act the way we wish they would, jobs don’t pan out, cars break down, loved ones get sick. It happens to all of us.

How do we deal with it? The gut-wrenching disappointments especially. What’s the best way to respond? What’s the best way to cope? How do we move past not getting what we want, especially (and here’s the kicker) when it’s something that falls under the category of a righteous desire?

I’m not sure if that phrase is an oxymoron or not, but it sure sounds fancy and makes me feel like it’s okay to want things.

Anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts about disappointments, and how to deal with them. In the meantime, I’ll be out pricing convertibles.

*ht: Veronica Mars. It’s a show about a teenage detective. Like Sabrina the Teenage Witch, only different.

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Let me back up. I’m not in the habit of reading men’s magazines. I’m not even sure I could name any magazine for men, except for maybe GQ, but only because I’ve heard GQ mentioned in regards to men dressing well (i.e, “He’s SO GQ!”).

(What does GQ stand for anyway? Gentlemen’s Quarterly? Genetic Quality? Gun Quest? Going Quorting? Oh, wait, courting starts with a C. My bad.)

But I was hanging out at my son’s Tae Kwon Do lesson, and there it was, sitting next to last week’s newspaper. I had already read last week’s newspaper, and the Esquire was the only thing to read. It also smelled really good, so I picked it up. The headlines on the cover made me laugh, so I flipped it open. Then I laughed some more. I laughed so much that the lady next to me asked what I was laughing about. I shared with her the letters to the editor section, which, along with regular letters, included “Highlighted context free excerpts from letters we will never print”. And because I know you’re just as curious as I was to know what kind of letters would be so bad you couldn’t print, I offer you the following, quoted from my not so good memory:

“I strongly recommend that you interview and then photograph my two children.”

“You can’t buy the shoe, you have to be the shoe.”

“By the time I was 24, I was the most celebrated mink designer in the world.”

“If you’ve never checked out the National Federation for Pole Dancing, I suggest you might want to.”

There was also the hilarious interview with William Shatner about his new sitcom, and not once was the man asked about his search for happiness or inner fulfillment. They talked about science fiction and bad waiters.

So I sat there, reading, laughing, enjoying the surprisingly witty writing, and smelling the awesome cologne pages (wow did that magazine smell good), and I thought, ‘Why don’t WOMEN write like this?”

I know lots of funny women writers, so I know that men are not inherently funnier than women. But I can’t remember a single time I laughed out loud reading People, or OK, or any of the other supermarket tabloids/hairdresser/airplane magazines I’ve read over the years. Mostly, it’s about make-up, hair, shoes, jewelry, and Brangelina. And interviews with celebrities include asking them their inner peace or character development, with not a witty story of bad waiters in sight.

So yes, my feminist ire was rankled, because I thought, “How come nobody writes funny magazines for women?” And then I was trying to figure out what it says about us that magazines aimed towards women have almost no humor at all. We all know that magazines are all about glossy images, celebrity gossip, and marketing manipulation. This magazine was no different, but why can’t we have a laugh or two thrown in? Seriously, what’s UP with that?

If you have come across something like that out there, please let me know. Otherwise, who’s in on creating a funny magazine for women? ‘Cause I’m thinking that there’s a huge untapped market out there. Plus, we can put MEN’s cologne tester strips instead of women’s perfume. I know it sounds weird, but trust me, I guarantee that will make them fly off the shelves.

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But then there’s the small child to take care of, and 3 broken DVD players (seriously, how can I have THREE broken DVD players in my house? It says so much about me, but exactly what it says I can’t think about because I’m too busy worrying about what it says about me that I’m still working on Christmas gifts that have to be shipped across the country a mere 10 days before Christmas).

So I set my shoulders, gritted my teeth, ignored my child and all the noises she was making, taking a mental note that I’d clean up any disasters later.

Then my computer froze, my work was lost, my son came home from school, needing food and transportation to an activity. There is no dinner, no snack, and he has to walk to his activity in the freezing cold because I have finally pulled out our portable DVD player and my 3 year old was watching Snow White with only her shirt on and we didn’t have time to wrestle her into her clothing before above-mentioned son had to be where he needed to be.

So, to sum up, I worked for 2 hours on a project that is lost, I’m late with this blog post, DH had to pick up dinner (I voted for Burger King, he’s making home-made soup—guess who was in a better mood during the dinner discussion), there are envelopes strewn about the hall from my daughter opening up every christmas card that came in the mail today, and there is a volcano of Fruit Drink Mix from the cannery spilled ALL OVER the kitchen because the above mentioned daughter was having fun with food storage while her mother was actively ignoring her in favor of making a digital photo project for her grandmother. Also, she is still half naked, and I have to go pick up above mentioned son because it’s too dark for him to walk back, and hopefully we’ll all get dinner before I have to head out to a Christmas book group where oh yeah I haven’t read the book.

So I apologize for not having something profound and moving to say. But if anybody else’s Christmas season is making them feel a little frazzled, just know that I HEAR YA, SISTER! and that sometimes, I wish I could curl up on the couch with a DVD half naked, too.

Okay, maybe just curled up in a fleecy blanket with hot chocolate topped with a scoop of ice-cream would suffice. I don’t need everything, you know.

How are YOU managing the stress of the season?

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During this time, a good friend of mine started investigating the church. Again, it was an unexpected turn of events, since I never even considered that he would join the church. I introduced him to the church through various activities, but it was more along the lines of being friendly than actually trying to actively convert him. He made the decision to take the missionary discussions on his own, and within weeks of taking the discussions, he was baptized. He was, as they say in the mission vernacular, golden.

When I told my parents that he was getting baptized, my father said, “See, you didn’t need to serve a mission, Heather. You’re doing enough good and spreading the gospel right where you are.” I felt it was high praise indeed, and my friend’s baptism has been the one bright shining moment in my otherwise rather dull missionary career.

Last week I got a message that he has taken his name off of the records of the church, and while he appreciates the Mormons, it just isn’t a good fit for him. He has since joined a church where he feels more comfortable, because, he told me, as much as he tried to make friends, he always still felt like an outsider at the Mormon church.

This makes me sad. Not because I fear for his salvation—that’s between him and God, and I told him as much when he asked if we could still be friends—but because his stated reasons for leaving seem like they would be simple to overcome with some good home teachers, some dinner invites, and a welcoming Elder’s Quorum President.

But maybe it’s more than that. I know that he struggled with the Book of Mormon, only because so much of even the basic religious information that Nephi refers to in the opening chapters–the twelve tribes of Israel, the exodus, the story of Joseph–was something he knew nothing about. Not coming from a particularly religious family, he didn’t grow up with these basic stories (and he didn’t have a family obsessed with musicals and sisters who have memorized all the words to the show Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat). When we tried to read the Book of Mormon together, we barely got through 3 verses at a time before he had another question about something that wasn’t a part of the text, but rather the background the text was referring to.

It was then that I got a glimpse of how much we ask of converts.

Shortly after he was baptized, I moved away, so of course I don’t know how active he remained, how hard he tried, or even if he tried at all. I recognize that’s part of the equation too, that a person will often get out of the gospel what they put in, but I can’t help think that sometimes, we do a lousy job of giving newcomers what they need.

How do you think we as a church can do a better job of welcoming and teaching converts? If you were are a convert, what helped you to stay? (Or leave, as the case may be. I want those stories too, if you can keep it respectful.)

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