So, have you ever had a boob job? My next door neighbor did. I remember it vividly, only because of the argument in the Relief Society about whether they should bring in meals or not. So it was, with great pleasure, I read Darlene Young’s poem Angels of Mercy in our most recent issue of Segullah.
Is this some sort of service crisis?
It’s a funny little case study in something I like to call “living the gospel”. I’m pretty sure there’s not one word about boob jobs in the Bishop’s Handbook (but don’t quote me on that). I do know there’s lots and lots of places all over church curriculum that talk about service, though.
Now I’m going to use my old next door neighbor as the example. After her “procedure”, she was indeed laid up for several days. The Relief Society made an enormously quiet mockery of her as they tried to decide whether she did, in fact, deserve warm tuna casserole from someone else’s kitchen. They practically polled the audience to see how everyone felt about helping out Sister B. Ultimately, charity won out. Food was brought.
Here’s where I sat.
I was ticked off.
Ticked off that no one noticed the person that was in the middle of this under-the-surface firestorm. Ticked off that no one saw there was something going on to make her feel she needed bigger boobs. Ticked off that no one seemed to notice that she was, in her own strange way, hollering for someone to pay attention to her (I was quite certain the new size DD’s would accomplish much of this goal for her).
This woman was in a marginal marriage, she had four children in four years (yes, four February birthdays, all in a row), she was quite young, in a house they could not quite afford, quite overwhelmed, and found herself in a neighborhood that somehow left her feeling…ahem…too small.
No one seemed to be discussing any of that.
This woman may have gotten her family fed during that week, but I’ve always wondered if she herself was ever fed.
Oh, the wonderful and vibrantly strange culture of the church — there are just so many many activities in the church that we all wrap ourselves up in so tightly, it’s sometimes hard to extricate the doctrine and the gospel from the mores of our ward. It’s just too easy to make sure we’re right, and overlook whether it really matters.
Those Relief Society ladies may or may not have been right about whether Sister B should have had a boob job. But charity isn’t really doled out on some sort of deserving sliding scale, is it?
Bring the poor woman some food…and for goodness sake, stay and visit for a minute.
That’s what she really needs.
So, did you just sit there and stew about it, or did you bring up the points you mentioned and try to steer the conversation back to charity? And if so, what happened when you did?
What an interesting topic. I really enjoyed reading your feelings on the matter. Although, I would be the one with the really loud opinion of being against plastic surgery, I also feel that what you said is true. Charity is the pure love of Christ and should be offered to everyone. I also think that we could all have a more sensitive heart to what really may be going on with Sister B.
What a good article for me to read, I need to be reminded of how to love unconditionally and not judge others for their choices, whether I agree or not.
Yeah, what John said. Although I find some humor in boob jobs. I do. I suck. I had a lot of fun with my dental implants, or my neighbor did. She kept telling everybody I was sick from my implant surgery. She got these incredulous looks “She wanted them BIGGER?”
But, I know, because several friends have had boob jobs, that it is incredibly painful. I might joke with a friend about it or even about a friend, but I would so be there to help her into the bathroom. I would so be there to fix her food she might be craving because when you’re sick and in pain and on pain meds, you crave strange things.
I think you were totally right, Justine, and I was thinking you were going to criticize her and gripe about taking in food and I just wanted to say, “it really, really hurts. For quite awhile.”
And I have no trouble telling the whole Relief Society off if I think they’re being mean.
Although nobody brought me any food when my face was all swollen and bruised. They just laughed about my “implants.”
thanks for this great post, justine. i loved darlene’s poem as well, and i think the point you both make is really apropos. re: the boob job, i’ve never had one. but my super good friend did. she confessed this to me, completely mortified one day, when i made a joke about wishing i were better endowed. like me she was blessed with the physique of a 14 year old boy and after 3 kids, what little she had to begin with was a mess of scar tissue and sagginess. she refused to put on a bathing suit and didn’t even like going out in public. she felt like a deformed woman, and though she never would have considered the surgery before, she opted for it because her self esteem had completely flown the coop. and guess what? it really made her feel better. i mean, she didn’t go for the dd. she’s a magnificently middle of the road b cup. funny how good just feeling normal can be. and so my point is a totally didactic one: simply, it ain’t up to us to judge. sure, maybe a world in which a woman’s self esteem is tied directly to her cup size is a wrong one, but i’m glad that my friend is the vibrant, self assured woman that she is, regardless of the means (to a point). i think as modest mormom women we hear boob job and think it’s about sex/sex appeal and that’s kind of tabboo, right? and sometimes i bet that is what it’s about, and that’s kind of sad, but like justine pointed out, sometimes it goes so much deeper. again, my point is, we just aren’t meant to judge. the fact that Sister B. was made the butt of a joke is super duper sad and so unchristian, regardless of how grievous her “offense.”
This is so relevant to me–our Sandy, Utah, ward had a recent issue here. We have lots of cancer, ALS, etc situations going on with food deliveries, as well as a string of recent boob jobs and liposuctions (for the 14 couples who just went on a “ward cruise”). My neighbor, the compassionate service leader, decided that given our ward’s serious needs, we would not be bringing in meals or babysitting for elective surgery. I thought she had made a good decision but it was interesting to read this other perspective.
Among your relief society sisters is one place you should be able to feel safe. While serving in a relief society presidency a little while back I was often ashamed at the direction the conversation would take at our pres. meetings. Every sister has her ’stuff’. Some ’stuff’ is manifested in boob jobs, others aren’t so easy to see. We are organized to bear one another’s burdens not to add to each others burdens with criticism and judgment.
I am now in charge of meals. Meals for new mothers or what have you. There is a fair amount of talk about what warrants a meal. I am grateful to have this compassionate service calling because I get to decide. A meal is more than a meal, it is someone saying they are thinking of you, that you are not alone, and it gives the opportunity for sisters in the gospel to visit. I am grateful for the sisters that have served me with meals and a listening ear. Sometimes all you need is to feel that you have a sisters that understand.
I think a different (and possibly better) way for this sister’s needs to be met would be for caring INDIVIDUALS to call and check on her, bring in meals, and just generally listen to personal promptings to extend a hand of friendship. Maybe the reason she didn’t ask for help/meals from the Relief Society was because she didn’t want to be the topic of anyone’s conversation.
“In the end, charity did not fail . . . ”
But it did, of course.
And I wonder, having just been released as Compassionate Service leader, what I would have done. Definitely whatever the RS president asked me to do. But what would that have been? If it were me getting the implants, I think I’d rather hire help than ask for it. I would be too embarrassed, unless I’d had cancer or some other obvious need, and even then I’d be mortified. But if my RS sisters made me feel safe and loved, like (as Carrie said) they were caring about me as an individual rather than an RS project, then I would be glad and grateful for the help.
It’s a dilemma I saw during my brief stint as Compassionate Service leader: people often don’t want to ask for help. They feel foolish and don’t want to bother anyone. No one wants to be a burden (well, not no one. Some people do feel entitled. But, though I heard about it, I never encountered it as CS leader.) But they love it when people visit or call without an “assignment.”
So maybe the system would work better if we all pretended there were no system and just served on our own.
There are many fake boobs in my neighborhood. Many. And they are the HUGE kind, the kind that leap from a teeny waist and not only begged to be noticed, but can’t be avoided. And to be very honest, I do sort of judge those with fakes– I think they want me to, else why put it out there for the world to see?
And yet with the super high ratio in my neighborhood, it has never once been brought up that we take a meal to any of these women. Save it for two women I’m thinking of (who got the boobs for self-esteem reasons that will never be fulfilled by their extensive plastic surgery, veneers and hair extensions), these are women who aren’t suffering from self-loathing (I know– they’re my friends!)– they’ve just kicked vanity up a notch. In my neighborhood it seems boob jobs are just the next step after fad diets, and so I don’t think much of their “needs” when someone arrives at the gym or church (two days later) with ladies out to there.
And I wonder, did Sister B even want the meal? You can barely get a meal delivered to my neighborhood sisters after they’ve had babies– they don’t even want them then. Of course they are the women who can afford to have their botox parties catered…
as an ex-compassionate service leader it would “bug” me to assign meals for “new moms”…
i mean, if i never felt like having a baby was a hardship, why couldn’t these sisters just fix
p nut butter sandwiches for dinner. and then i learned my lesson.
it’s not the new moms and their families that need the dinner, it’s us that need to learn to serve
one another.
you’re right, lily. it’s for me. specifically.
Regardless of my opinions about cosmetic surgery, I would have been sitting next to you, ticked off.
And then maybe we could’ve teamed up and taken dinner in to her and had a good visit.
Because I agree they missed the point. I think any time we hesitate to serve or question whether someone else is worthy of our service then we have missed the point.
I think Sister B wasn’t expecting the meals, but I know she was grateful for them. It was such a hard deal at the time.
And Lily, you are just so right. The meals cooked rarely serve the receiver more than they benefit the giver.
From the title and the first sentence, I thought this was going to be about jobs such as asking whether a person wants paper or plastic and the potential dangers of plastic sacks to tuna fish. :-\
I knew someone who was Bishop at one time and he tried to error on the side of charity when question came up as to who to help. He would have his wife fix a care package for people when he felt it was appropriate. I am not sure how he would have dealt with such an elective surgery.
One of the sweetest and kindest people that I know had breast enhancement surgery. She was adopted and her adopted mom said that she wanted to look more like her. I’m not sure if this person was LDS yet when she had the surgery or if the issue of service was involved.
I do get concerned about how people could be offended if they do not receive service. It is very delicate. The resources are not there to help everyone. We need to be very sensitive though about how things are discussed.
Interesting conversation. Can a man bust in with his two cents? It seems that there are two separate issues: one about the appropriateness of elective surgery, the other about rendering service.
As to the first, I think that Elder Holland took a very clear stance in the October 2005 Conference.
As to the second, I can’t think of any rules anywhere that say, “render service here, here, and here, but abstain here and here.” We serve and love the vain along with the humble. We will never know “the full story” behind what leads someone to feel that they need to change their bodies. Inevitably, some cases will be considered more “worthy” than others. But hopefully, in the end, we focus on bettering our motives instead of the motives of those we serve, remembering that the Savior served even the lowest of all.
Then we pray like crazy that the young women who are growing up seeing their role models and leaders do these things to themselves will somehow come out of it with their self-image unscathed.
Vanity isn’t exclusive to breast augmentation or plastic surgery.
If, as we serve our brothers and sisters, we pass judgment by stereotyping or placing them in ‘vain’ or ‘humble’ or ‘worthiness’ categories then I don’t believe the service rendered has benefited anyone involved.
As a former compassionate service leader, I think I would have balked at giving this woman a meal. Of course, in our ward, our service needs stretched from a teenage mother giving birth to a woman needing an escort to court to have a restraining order against her abusive husband, to providing transportation to doctor’s appointments for a woman who couldn’t walk. I think my tendency would be to assume that a woman who is getting a boob job also has the resources to take care of herself. I have no idea what the recovery is like from plastic surgery, but I can imagine that people’s attitude would be something along the lines of, “Well hey, she chose to have this done….”
I would also guess that we are far more willing to give service to somebody we feel is less fortunate, or is experiencing a trial not of their own choosing than giving to a person who might have resources beyond our own. I know I can’t afford a boob job, and I might feel like it wasn’t fair to ask me to expend my own food budget for a woman who is in an obviously better financial situation.
I would, like Emily, probably end up doing whatever the RS president asked me to do. But I’m not sure I would like doing it if it involved a meal. I like the other parts of service Justine suggested better: getting to know this woman, becoming her friend, trying to figure out why she felt the need to be augmented.
Hasn’t anybody in the universe heard of freezer meals?
In these kind of situations, its not like we don’t know that we are getting a boob job in the coming week. Isn’t that what you do when you are preparing to have a baby or does everyone just assume that the R.S. will be there?
Heaven help us.
Yes, heaven help us if we can’t understand how new mothers could be feeling fatigue, overwhelmed, isolated, the baby blues or even ppd. Again, a meal isn’t just about having something to eat.
I, for one, will continue to bring meals as often as needed with out second guessing whether or not they should have put something in their freezer. I’m also grateful to live in a ward where sisters happily call me to see if they can bring someone a meal.
I think you’re both right, rahrah and martha. There are women all along the spectrum of competence and strength. I’d hate to be the one to try and decide whether someone “deserved” or was really in need of a meal.
But RahRah is also right. We’ve got to be strong women and stop assuming and expecting that we’ll be bailed out or rescued. That sense of entitlement is a dangerous thing, I think. It weakens us personally, and as a group.
I think we need to prepare well for ourselves, and yet be able to accept help and support when offered. We need to be close to the spirit to know when to ask for help, and we need to learn to use the abilities the Lord has given us to take care of our own families. That’s just how I feel about it.
So far I haven’t encountered entitlement in the capacities where I have served, I know it exists b/c I often hear grumblings of it. I do think self-reliance is important but I’m not talking about expecting the relief society to meet your needs. I also believe the pure love of Christ trumps all else. If part of my heart is reserved for what I believe people should be doing and for criticism then I’m not allowing it to be filled with Christ’s love so that I can be his disciple. This is how I interpret my role as a sister in the gospel.
I remember serving in a RS presidency many years ago where we were doing a sub-4-santa for some members of our ward. We implored them to provide us a list of some of their needs so we could more efficiently serve them. We were truly excited to do it, too! The list came back and sucked the giving spirit right out of me. On it were Nintendos, expensive clothing requests, other electronics, and silly things that no one would ever consider to be a need.
It was tough.
I think that we each, individually, need to be willing to serve without reservation, and we each, individually, need to be building our own personal abilities and self-reliance. The two probably ought to exist separate of each other. That way I won’t worry about if someone is “worthy” of my tuna casserole, and I also won’t worry that I’m expecting someone else to care for me.
I understand what you are saying Justine, I respect it as well. I just feel strongly that often(certainly there are exceptions) what is needed is more love and less judgment. I’m not even sure that it is always the Relief Society’s duty to always set these things up. From an individual stand point I want to be in the position where I’m available to love. It doesn’t make me feel good to withhold. Luckily I am in a position where I don’t have to ask others to give, they just volunteer, I know this isn’t always the case. I really feel I’ve been blessed. In the past I’ve had weak times when I’ve been ‘bailed out’, spiritually an emotionally speaking. I’m in the position now to help where I can. I feel I need to pass these blessings on.
Before any such surgery, I’d go over with my years and years of experience with large breasts and let my sister know all about the glory of her now altered body. Back pain, insults, constant questioning if they are real (people do ask) as well as the jokes, the inability to look decent in a button up shirt, the inappropriate stares. And hopefully, I could talk her out of it before a meal was even needed (or not needed.)
Well said Justine. Great post.
I think that we each, individually, need to be willing to serve without reservation, and we each, individually, need to be building our own personal abilities and self-reliance. The two probably ought to exist separate of each other. That way I won’t worry about if someone is “worthy†of my tuna casserole, and I also won’t worry that I’m expecting someone else to care for me.
I really liked this from Justine. Before my son was born last year I stocked up on freezer meals for myself. Then I ended up having an emergency c-section three weeks early. My family that lived in the area was all out of town, my hubby was starting a new second job that we desperately needed, and I had a long recovery. My ward provided meals for the first week after I got home from the hospital, and I was so grateful. I was also grateful that I had made some meals to cover the long term, because it took me nearly two months to really get back on my feet. I think we should all strive for this kind of balance in our lives.
I’ve come to realize that self-reliance and the ability to serve go hand in hand. If I am at a point where my needs are taken care of, then I don’t feel grudging about serving others. From a material standpoint, having a stocked pantry means I almost always have the means to make some extra food to share with others. Spiritually, if we are feeling good we are more free to give to others without reservation or concern for what we are getting out of it. At the same time, the real world is not always so neat and tidy and there will be times when we need service. We should learn to be gracious recipients as well as gracious givers.
I would rather eat cold cereal with water than let my releif society sisters know I was getting such a “procedure”! On the other hand I would have no problem bringing in a meal to someone that had had such a “procedure”. To each his (her) own!!!