Segullah

Mormon women blogging about the peculiar and the treasured

What’s in your summer reading pile?

One of my favorite summer activities as a teenager was spending long, lazy afternoons lying on a lawn chair in our backyard under the shade of our eucalyptus tree, reading Georgette Heyer novels, while boats droned along the river near our house and cicadas chirped in the bush. All through my teenage years, and well [...]

Elder Bednar’s Promise

I started indexing this year, after my stake president talked about it in conference. It was a steep learning curve for me at first; I felt clumsy deciphering the handwriting and stressed about entering wrong information and wrecking the index for some poor searcher. But I’ve gotten better at it, and now I like wondering [...]

Blood Stains

Virginia Aisling Prescott is never called Virginia. Instead she prefers the much more informal, Gina. She joined the church in 2006, at the age of 18 after sending her future husband off on his mission. She graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in English Lit and a minor in Women Studies and finds writing [...]

Munching on a Parable

                        The parable of the talents bugs me, so I have spent some time wrestling with it, chomping on it, working some useful meaning from it into my bones. I like that that the wealthy man gives the same reward to both servants who [...]

Politics and Religion

For reasons that I don’t entirely understand, I am interested in politics. I didn’t grow up in a particularly political household, and I’m not a very partisan person by nature. (Certain of my friends and family would disagree with me here, and I admit I’ve started leaning more to one side as the years wear [...]

No good comes from blogging after midnight

Last night I read something on the interwebs that got my gander up. I won’t go into specifics, but generally speaking, somebody chose to describe her personal experiences using language that I found to be overly dramatic, and inappropriate to the level of hardship. I’ve heard her phrasology ascribed to other, more worthy hardships, including [...]

Ambivalence

(a poem for Facebook) Words slip from the screen, winding me in threads of text, binding mind and feeling. Fumbling at the brisk pace of caring, I scroll through worlds— loss, laughter, lunch on Tuesday, silent strings of detail that glisten outward and by gossamer connection I am both secured and sliced, life left as [...]

Sacrificing the Mother’s Day Martyr

I’ve been a mother for thirteen Mother’s Days, and most of them have been crappy. Ed seemed to either be working or out of town for about five years in a row. The books he got me were never what I would have picked for myself. And the children acted like, well, children. I’d invariably [...]

In Defense of Mother’s Day

Wife, mother, writer, sister, friend, Ruth Mitchell lives in the golden San Diego hills, plans the best parties and tells fantastic bedtime stories. Mother’s day dawns and the women are grumbling. Most of the women I know don’t particularly like Mother’s Day. Growing up my mom hated Mother’s Day. She would sit in church and [...]

A Letter for My Daughter, Ruby

Today’s guest post is from Chelsey, who has neither hot nor cold feelings for Mothers Day; although, she sometimes wishes that more women spoke in church on that day. She thinks they would be more interesting and less inclined to make it all rainbows and unicorns. She does understand the desire to give women the [...]

broken

It’s my turn to write today (Michelle L.) but I want to share these words from my friend Martha with you instead. Our mother hearts stretch as wide as the universe and are as fragile as a tuft of dandelion seeds.   My father calls and wants to know when I will write. Often. And [...]

Dear student, I’m sorry you missed the point

I finished grading final exams from my first-year college composition students. One of them, chemistry major, said this: Having a science background, I realized that writing is much like a science experiment. Writing relates to a science experiment because with practice, you can only get better and better results. This is exactly what happened with [...]

Love and lanyards

Mother’s Day is on its way. I know it’s a loaded weekend for many women, with layers of complicated emotions and expectations and reminders. I understand. Even so, I thought I’d tiptoe into the minefield to share one of my favorite pieces of writing on the subject. Enjoy: The Lanyard The other day I was [...]

No Mosquitoes Allowed

As I sit here to write I realize I have just been some pest’s late night snack. Some mosquito has secreted his way into the house and hung around long enough until I was convenient and then stole a quick draw from my upper arm. I reach to scratch almost involuntarily, then notice the pink [...]

Hypocrisy and You

The topic of hypocrisy has been coming up in conversations again and again lately. In particular I spoke to an old college roommate about four months ago. She is a single mom and not all that interested in taking her two kids to church; too many hypocrites, she says. Oh, how we all hate hypocrites: [...]

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