The English Geek

Comfort me with Kindness

This morning, I opened my garage door with the goal of getting the garbage cans out to the curb, but one of my neighbors had already rolled them into place for me. Maybe it was the stress-exhaustion speaking (because, even though you don't really do much when you are helping someone with his medical needs, energy-wise, other than spooning ice chips and the occasional but very-appreciated Jello and carrying on semi-lucid conversations which sometimes make you giggle, it's thoroughly exhausting), but seeing the cans already on the curb made me a little bit weepy. There is just something so comforting in un-asked-for service. And I don't use that word, comfort, lightly. It comes when people call, just to offer help, or when others are patient with me because I've not made as many update phone calls as I should have. Friends and neighbors who've helped with Kaleb or brought dinner. Meals that would be delicious nevertheless, but made more savory with their spice of charity.

It is good to be reminded that we are not alone. It is good to be comforted with kindness.

Nearly six weeks ago, when Kendell found out about his heart troubles, one of his first questions was "why me?" I cannot answer that question for him. As I tried to make him feel better, I tried not to ask that question of myself: why my husband? Instead, I am trying to focus on the blessings, like the fact that we discovered it just in time. (The surgeon told us that his heart was in much more trouble than he ever expected, and if we'd have waited much longer it would have been too late.), and the feeling that accompanies that fact which keeps building in me, that there is something more for Kendell to do with his life, and the heart thing is something, for some reason, he needed to experience in order to do it. The blessing of health insurance, and coworkers who've covered our work. The great surgeon we found.

What I continue to learn is that when you are the wife, you get to piggyback on both your husband's troubles and on the associated blessings. The garbage cans at the curb reminded me of the power inherent in simple kindness. Too often, I don't help enough because I don't have the time for the Big Gesture. I remembered this morning that the small things mean just as much. Because it is not so much the type of kindness that is offered but the offering itself, and the way it fills you up with knowing that, no matter what, there will be others who will love you.

Growing Up Almost Mormon

Even though both sides of my family are pioneer stock with a long history in the LDS church (some all the way back to the earliest days with Joseph Smith), none of my grandparents really practiced our religion. My dad’s mom was fairly openly agnostic, and my mom’s parents just didn’t, as far as I know, go to church. I don’t have any idea of how my dad’s dad, who died when my dad was sixteen, felt about religion. I am not judging any of them because if I am certain about one thing in regards to faith, it is this: myriad experiences and emotions influence a person’s religious feelings and decisions. No one really knows the complicated path a person walks through their spiritual landscape, except (somewhat) the person herself.

 

But coming from that Mormon-in-paper-only sort of background has influenced my spiritual landscape. My dad mostly thought about religion in the way his mother did: it can’t be proved empirically, and look at all these intelligent people who think it’s all bunk. Plus, he really liked coffee. Three or four years before he got sick, he began going to church, but his scepticism continues to play a loop in my brain. My mom went to church by herself while she was growing up, and she was married in the temple to her first husband. But I think that whatever the circumstances were that caused her divorce, something after it broke in her, because for nearly all my growing-up years, we were mostly inactive. I remember a few experiences at church: sitting in the stifling-hot Primary room and not knowing many of the songs everyone else was singing; the time I performed in the road show; the Christmas party we attended and how, when I was running around in the gym with the rest of the little kids, I tripped and fell, but instead of scraping my chin along the wood floor I just tucked and did a neat somersault and landed on my feet (earning the applause of a few adults around me).

 

I remember the day I was baptized.

 

But church wasn’t an everyday part of my life. Church was the exception. It wasn’t the place I went to feel close to a supreme being, but a building we drove past on our way to the freeway. An idea that was larger than I could understand, full of hints and innuendos. But I did have my pagan spiritual moments. My happiest childhood moments were the hours I spent in the cornfield that grew behind our yard, wandering around in green shade, watching purple morning glories slowly open in the sun. I know now that the calm, silent peace I felt then came from God.

 

I’ve been thinking about my spiritual beginnings after reading this post about growing up Mormon at a blog I don’t remember how I discovered. This woman had a typical Mormon upbringing, and as an adult she can continue to draw strenght from it. I read her entry crying, because it is so far from what I grew up with and because of how I continue to fail at providing this experience for my own children. I think about walking around in one’s life with the serene faith her experiences have created for her and I cannot imagine how it might feel. Like taking a slow, pensive walk along a flat, shaded path, maybe.

 

Growing up almost Mormon is markedly different from growing up really Mormon. It meant puzzlement every first Sunday of the month, when boys would show up at our door and we’d give them money. I was well into my second decade of life before I understood what that was all about. It meant we had one family home evening. Ever. It meant we had silky, oddly-shaped cloth with raw edges and mysterious origins to dust the furniture with. It meant we all had our own scriptures collecting dust on our bookshelves. It meant I grew up never wanting to go to BYU, and thinking it was ridiculous that LDS missionaries have to pay to serve their own missions—shouldn’t the church they were serving support them?  It meant sometimes listening to conference talks in April and October, but usually not. Grocery shopping on Sunday afternoons—and trips to the mall, and to the lake—because it was much less crowded then. It meant wine on the table for Christmas eve dinner. It meant I was the only girl I knew who wore tank tops and bikinis. It meant occasional visits from “home teachers” that left me with a vague impression: stuff was going on around me that I didn’t quite understand.

 

Sometimes my parents would have a “discussion” about church, and then we’d go for a few Sundays. I knew I was a Mormon, but I didn’t really know what that meant. What little I knew about religion came from the novels I read, but I didn’t know how my religion was different from, say, Laura Ingalls’s.  It meant that after those discussions, there was a vague sense of guilt radiating from my mother, permeating me. There was stuff I was supposed to be doing, but I didn’t know what it was. It meant that there was one specific summer Monday, the day after one of our intermittent church visits, when I sat in our shady back yard, reading my book and listening to the faint shouts and laughter from the kids who lived on the other side of the field, and suddenly had a 10-year-old-sized epiphany: they all went to church together, so maybe if I went to church more they'd ask me to play with them. That day a wound formed in me. Guilt, loneliness, anger, and confusion made it fester. Being almost-Mormon, in the time and place I grew up, meant I would always be on the fringe. Always on the outside.

 

When I was twelve, my grandpa Fuzz died. After that, my mom returned to her religion with a vengeance. She went back to the temple. She went to church every Sunday and wanted us to come along with her. But for me, it was too late to step into the growing-up-Mormon childhood. It was too late for me to simply embrace the church like I’d been there all my life. And it was too late for me to trust the girls in my young women’s class. My spiritual self, which had for all my years been a sort of conglomerate of wondering but not knowing, of feeling the spirit but not understanding it, had begun to to morph into scar tissue: hard to get through. I didn’t want to sit in church with girls who smiled and talked to me at church but ignored me at school. I didn’t want to be in Sunday classes where everyone but me knew all the answers and I was caught naked, unknowing.

 

So growing up almost Mormon continued to affect me, even when my mom and younger sister really were Mormon. Even though I went to church, and I knew why we paid fast offerings (even though we never fasted), even though I went to youth conference and watched more conference than I had imagined even existed, I wasn’t really Mormon. And when I got a little bit older, when I started truly to rebel, it was mostly against the foisted-upon-me religion my family mostly claimed. I mocked everything about the church. I sat in cars in the parking lot of church dances, never going inside. I partied because we weren’t supposed to. I wore short skirts because everyone said you shouldn’t. I laughed at the kids who took seminary in high school.

 

In my current grown-up form, I can look back on my almost Mormon experiences and see the path they led me on. I can see where I was a victim of cruel and narrow-minded people and where it was all in my head. I can see how what I really wanted was just, simply, to belong, and since that couldn’t seem to happen I tried to reject the church before the people in the church could reject me. I know the exact, dramatic moment when my trail diverged and I went a different way, and how my faith is something that is my own, based in what I know and experienced, not in what my parents believe. I can see how my spiritual landscape was formed, and it isn’t a smooth, calm path through dappled shade. It is a landscape full of rises and falls, desolate places and secret, shaded waterfalls. My path has been torturous, quite often, and I still don’t walk easy. I still haven’t achieved that seemingly-easy faith that imbued the blog entry I read this morning.

 

Because the truth is this. I was always on the fringe. I looked like a Mormon among Mormons, so everyone assumed. I felt like a convert, but no one noticed. I continue to feel like I am on the outside, that I don’t really fit, because I haven’t managed serenity, because I still have doubts and questions, because I still have my rebellious moments. I still hear my dad’s voice, questioning God’s existence. I still have my pagan spiritual joy most intensely when I am in nature, not in church. I still wonder if, had I been better at living my religion earlier on in my life, I might have been blessed with the experiences I still long for but won’t ever manage to have, now that it is too late. I still wonder if I will ever be good enough, or if the consequences of my various rebellions will be that I will continue to be almost-Mormon. I still look at my friends and neighbors who are so much more accomplished than I am at truly living their faith and I know that I am failing at giving my kids their growing up Mormon experience.

 

I’m still on the fringe.

 

I know women like the one who wrote that blog post. They aren’t pretending. Their serenity is real. They’ve managed to find a peace that they carry within them no matter what. Their faith, their belief, is something that is inherent to their very natures, a part of who they are, just like the blogger wrote: “Changing my Mormon-ness would be as easy as changing my height to six feet tall.” They aren’t almost-Mormon. They are, through and through. Try as I do, though, I still haven’t achieved that sense of Mormon-ness. It still feels like something I put on. It looks like my skin but sometimes it feels like a tattoo. And I continue through the up-and-down landscape of my spirituality, slowly beginning to accept that maybe I will never achieve it, the growing up Mormon serenity, and that for me the process of trying to rise above being almost-Mormon will be the entire point.

Flocked

During my childhood Christmases, we always had a flocked tree in our upstairs living room. This was the "pretty tree," with elegant gold ornaments (after, of course, my wanton destruction of the beaded globes), flowing gold ribbon, and white lights on white cording. (Strangely enough, one of my most vivid holiday memories is my mom's frustration over trying to find white lights on white cording.) Many nights, I'd lie with my head near the base of the pretty tree, looking up through the branches' mingled green-and-white. I'd touch the flocking carefully, nearly always resisting the urge to crumble the stiff stuff under my fingertips. It sounds like the perfect setting for those innocent-yet-deep thoughts children in novels seem to indulge in. More often than not, though, what I was wondering was about the purpose of the flocking. Another vivid memory is asking my sister Michelle to explain exactly why we had that white stuff on our tree. She looked at me incredulously and then explained that it looked like snow. I'd never really seen, yet, a tree with snow on it that looked like the flocking; the trees in our yard were still small, and they all were deciduous, anyway. It was pretty, and it was familiar, the way the living room was supposed to look. The flocking seemed merely ornamental to me, something else that brought Christmas into our home, but I still liked the downstairs tree---the "cute tree" which was never flocked---much better.

This morning, as I was getting ready for work, it started snowing. I sat by the window for a few minutes, just watching it fall, big, fat pieces, nearly snowball-sized already. Even in just that first hour, it come down furiously. When I finally got to work (it took me forever, because I’d forgotten just how slowly traffic moves in a snow storm), I found myself remembering, so abruptly, my mother’s flocked Christmas trees. Our library has a glassed-in hallway that connects the two wings, elevated over the small garden courtyard between them. When you walk across the bridge, it’s a little bit like walking among the crowns of trees, and it was those trees that made me remember exactly how the pretty tree looked, how it felt. Because the way the snow had piled on them, in perfectly clumps and bumps, looked just like flocking. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen snowy trees look so flocked; maybe it requires the heavy, wet snow we got today (nine inches of it in my backyard!), or maybe I’ve just never paid attention. But I stood on the bridge, looking at the trees and remembering the pretty tree, and there it was: my Christmas spirit.

At least, I had it for a little while. In between getting stuck in the snow trying to leave work (luckily Kendell was on his way home, because he came and pushed me out), and fighting crowds at the mall, it’s sort of faded. But now the house is quite again, and I’m going to start wrapping, and I’m remembering another little moment I had, last night while making dinner. I had just gotten off the phone with my mom, and when I told Kaleb that she was stopping by for a few minutes, he ran around the kitchen cheering "yay! Yay! Yay!" because he was so excited to see her, and I suddenly—with that same abrupt shift in mood—found myself remembering my grandma, remembered our Christmas eve dinners at her house and the way it felt to be bubbling over with anticipation, and I felt it for a second: Christmas spirit.

Maybe, for us grown ups, feeling the Christmas spirit has something to do with memories. Maybe it’s as much about taking the time to remember how it felt to be a child at Christmas—the anticipation, the tingly excitement, the coming of snow and coldness wrapped up in expectation—as much as it is about making Christmas for our children. Maybe it is about taking that tingle of expectation and transforming it into a sense of hope. In a way, it seems like hope is the basis of Christmas spirit. Hope, certainly, that the magic will happen and you’ll find what you really want under the tree. That childlike, pure, and easy hope, only transformed into something more grown up—the hope that is inherent to believing in Christ. Often, hope is hard for me to accomplish. Maybe that’s why the Christmas spirit is just so good, because when I am feeling it, it is easier to be hopeful. I think I need to do more remembering, to try to unwind my psyche a bit and discover in myself the hopeful and tingly child I used to be. Now that I’ve had a little taste, I want more of the Christmas spirit, and even though my list is still feeling more than a little bit overwhelming, I’m still going to find a few quiet moments to just sit and remember, feeding myself little bits of hope until I grow fat with it. The same contentment as in this poem:

Snow

~Anne Sexton

Snow,
blessed snow,
comes out of the sky
like bleached flies.
The ground is no longer naked.
The ground has on its clothes.
The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it.
Someone once said:
Don't bite till you know
if it's bread or stone.
What I bite is all bread,
rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.

in which Prayers are Answered.

Remember when I said I didn’t have Kaleb’s daycare set up yet? Yeah, well. As of this morning at 10:00 a.m., I still didn’t. I can’t explain at all exactly why this has been so difficult for me. My sister gave me the name of two women she knows who babysit, both of whom have three-year-olds to take to preschool this year. It seemed like the perfect set up: babysitting until it was time for preschool. Both women are people my sister knows well and obviously trusts enough to recommend. But I still couldn’t bring myself to call either one of them. It probably speaks to the fact that while I love my job, and I need it, too, I’m still not 100% certain I did the right thing by going back to work. Actually dealing with daycare makes it real: I’m not longer a full-time stay-at-home-mom. What’s more, It just seemed so strange, calling up a complete stranger with the idea of trusting her with my baby. (OK, he’s my 40+ pound, 44" tall, potty-trained baby who tonight told me "that sucks," with all the proper emphasis, when I presented him with pancakes for dinner tonight, but still. He’s still my baby, Love-You-Forever style.)I think that my difficulties came from the idea that deep down, I’m unsure that anyone who doesn’t know Kaleb well can love him enough to overlook his sometimes-complicated responses to the world.

So there it is, Sunday night before the kids go back to school, and I have zero daycare set up for Kaleb. Obviously Kendell isn’t ready yet to hang out with K for five hours, but I’d firmly limited myself—that was pretty much my only option. Well, that and praying for a miracle. And, you know—the prayer was answered. Because not an hour after I’d left for work, Jacob’s cubscout master called. She and I had discovered last week that we both had lonely three-year-olds without siblings at home once school started, and she thought it would be fun for Kaleb to come over to play with her son, Marshall. She came and got him and kept him until I came home. She kept him on Tuesday when I got my hair colored. And she kept him on Wednesday, again, while I was at work. All under the guise of Kaleb’s being there made it easier for her, because then Marshall wasn’t lonely.

Seriously—this was the miracle I prayed for. Kaleb was happy for three days straight playing with his new friend, and Kendell got three days of peaceful recuperation. When I got home on Monday, I went straight to the phone, ignored my anxiety, and dialed the first number my sister gave me. And then the second. And then had a little meltdown, because while one of the women was willing to take Kaleb, the preschool was full. And I was back to the drawing board.

This morning found me in full meltdown mode. Curled-in-a-ball-and-bawling meltdown for being so weird about it, for not just calling two months ago, for dropping my Mommy responsibilities. BIG drop. One of the reasons I went back to work is because I feel so strongly about the importance of two years of preschool, and yet here I was, calling preschool after preschool and finding them all full, or daycare centers just downright too expensive. And Kendell, who doesn’t usually handle my meltdowns very well, was awesome. He made some suggestions, sent me outside to push Kaleb in the swing, and made some phone calls. Once I was able to calm down, I thought of one other preschool to try—and they had openings! Even better, my neighbor’s daughter is also going there. Suddenly, it all fell into place. And then, later this afternoon, my sweet friend Jamie called to offer her help, too.

I needed this—needed to finally get my daycare situation worked out, needed to feel like I wasn’t alone in figuring out the solution. There have been many times over the past week when I have finally calmed my anxious self down enough to feel the Lord’s guiding hand. I needed to feel reaffirmed in my decision to go back to work. I needed this peaceful feeling of all being right in my world today—even though we had to make an unexpected trip to the hospital. (More on that tomorrow!)

I Went to the Woods.

I didn’t go to girls camp when I was a teenager. (Girls camp is something we do in the LDS church each summer with our 12-17 year-old girls as an activity to build faith, connections, and skills, as well as just for fun!) Of course, I didn’t go to church much, either, but whatever occasional fellowship efforts were made in my direction definitely did not include an invitation to rough it in the woods with the other girls for five days. It’s hard to camp in steel-toed lace-up boots and a black suede jacket, anyway.

But since I’ve been working in the Young Women organization, I’ve hoped I could go to camp. I was absolutely certain I would go, in fact, until Kendell’s surgery came up. Then, I just had to think "I’ll wait to see how it goes." But all along hoping (and yes, even praying) that I would get to go. In a miraculous lining-up-of-the-stars kind of event, everything turned out so I could go for a couple of days. Kendell’s ilieus and the troubles he’s been having with his IT bands meant he was in the rehab unit until Saturday; my mom and my mother-in-law agreed to help with the boys; I was able to find someone to take my Friday shift at the library. Thursday and Friday at girls camp were mine!

I went mostly because I wanted to have some good mother/daughter bonding time with Haley. That didn’t really happen, though. I think she had mixed feelings about me being there. She’s always been independent, not one go get homesick or to miss me. So she didn’t really need me there, and I think it felt a little bit like my arrival took away some of her independent time. I tried to be patient with her annoyance, to remember what it felt like to be 13 and annoyed by your mother; I tried very hard, in fact, to not mother her at all, but to let her do her own thing. Occasionally her "own thing" meant hanging out with me, but usually she was with her friends. So honestly, my going to girls camp ended up being more about me than it was about her and me.

I came away with several precious things from girls camp. (I'm fairly certain this won't be my last blog entry about camp.) One was friendships. The women I was already friends with feel like closer friends now, and women who I just knew from church before feel like real friends now. Another thing was a closer connection with the young women. I often feel very inadequate in my calling with the young women because I am so lacking in that ability to immediately connect with people. I am sort of a closed-up-tight kind of person, until I know someone, but that quality also makes it much harder to get to know someone. I felt like, at camp, I was able to open up a little bit and connect to these girls, to laugh and talk and joke with them. And finally, girls camp gave me a little inner peace that I have desperately needed.

Because here’s the thing: I have been so anxious about Kendell coming home from the hospital. Whenever he is sick, all of my resentments start to surface. The old resentments about how he takes care of me (or doesn’t, really) when I am sick. Those resentments make me grumpy and annoyed while I am taking care of him, so I do it out of a sense of obligation instead of love. And I didn’t want to approach his homecoming with that attitude. I don’t want to lose my temper, or argue with him, or have that bitter litany—why should I, when you don’t?—repeating itself in my head. I want to just be able to help him, not because of something he has done for me but because he is a person who needs help. But I have not been at all sure that I could do it like that.

Somewhere, though, at camp, I felt my anxieties settle. It could just be that I love being outside in the mountains. They are sacred places to me. Sacred and magical. The way things happen without people’s interference is part of their draw for me—trees that came from nuts or pods or bolls, not a pot from the nursery; wildflowers that sprung up without potting soil or fertilizer. Despite the rain, the mud, and the constantly-cold hands, I am perfectly content in the mountains. But it could have been other things, too. Maybe it was hiking through the damp piney woods, filling my lungs with fresh air. Maybe it was sitting in the cabin with the other women, talking and crying over our heartaches. It could have been the few moments I sat all by myself on a mountain slope, in a sort of room made of two fallen stones that happened to land at a 45-degree angle from each other, writing in my journal and listening to the wind in the trees. Or even, just before I left late Friday night, standing by the pond and admiring the casually-imperfect fleur-de-lis made by the silhouette of the trees on top of the mountain. I’m not sure of the exact moment, and maybe it was the total of everything. But even though I am exhausted, I am peaceful. My anxiety over taking care of Kendell has melted away, replaced with a surety that I can take care of him well and for the right reasons. It’s not what I expected from girls camp. But I am grateful indeed to have it.

Finding my Good Things (a thought for Sunday)

Last Sunday, Kendell and I spoke in church. (It went OK...I think, though, that I spoke for WAY too long. I forgot to look at my watch when I started, so I don’t know exactly how long I droned on, but I think I definitely talked too much. Heads were bobbing, eyes struggling to stay open, you know the feeling. Yeah.) One of the quotes I found while researching my topic has continued to stick with me in a haunting sort of way:

"We will not be forlorn if we come unto Christ, if we learn patiently that we cannot accommodate everybody's estimate of what we ought to be or do, if we walk in the way our own conscience will approve, if we seek to measure as God measures, and if we esteem ourselves and others as he esteems us." Marion G. Hanks

I have a tendency to be forlorn. I tend to see in myself only my flaws and faults, and my thoughts are often full of ideas like "could I be a bigger idiot?" I used to think this was how it was supposed to be, that everyone walks around full of self-mockery. But over the past year—and I am not really sure what the impetus was for this change—I have begun to see different things about myself. "We cannot accommodate everybody’s estimate of what we out to be or do." I didn’t have those words yet, but that is something I am starting to realize about myself. Kendell has an estimate of the type of woman I should be, as does my mother, and my children; images abound in magazines and TV of perfect wives and perfect mothers. But I am finding within myself this desire to be myself, the person I am rather than the person other people want me to be. I find myself pushing back against expectations. I want to find my own peace. I want to cast off my forlornness about who I am.

Maybe this seems like an odd thing for a thirty-something person to be realizing—finally. Maybe I am too old for self discovery? Maybe I should have figured out who I am before I got a husband and had a few kids. But then, I think the things I am learning are coming to me because I did those things, because of the experiences I’ve had. For whatever reason, I am ready to say: Yeah, sure, I didn’t turn out like I thought I would—but that’s alright, because I still have time to figure the rest of it out.

Of course, the trick is knowing how to do this. It is an old, old habit to break, self-deprication. I think I use it as a defense mechanism: if I point out to myself the things I get wrong, then I won’t be surprised when other people notice. The trouble, though, with defining myself with my mistakes is that I’ve simply made it easier to make more mistakes in the future. If I made this mistake, then it’s far more likely I’ll make that one in the future, right? So why even bother?

What I am left with, after my talk and all my thinking, is the crystalizing idea presented in that quote from Elder Hanks: how might Christ see me? Would he focus only on my mistakes? Or would he also see the good things? I know that if he looked at someone else, he would see their good things. I am working on believing that he would see my good things, too. I am working on having more Christ-like esteem for myself, which might sound odd or selfish or just downright silly. But I want the change to happen.

Women Need Women

Once upon a time, a few years back, I had a neighbor who officially Did Not Like Me. The reasons behind her dislike were varied, not a few of them based on my trees, and seriously: if I told you all the stories I could tell, you would likely think I was a liar. There's the fact that I had to very carefully time my approach to the mailbox (because if we happened to arrive at the mailbox at the same time, she would cast such daggers), which is only the smallest effect from this neighborly dislike. Because she didn't like me, I assumed that everyone in her fairly-large neighborly social circle also didn't like me. (A few years into this whole mess, I received factual confirmation that this woman did, in fact, bash me to her friends, so I wasn't altogether too suspicious in my assumptions.) And---big shock!---this assumption that I was disliked caused me to withdraw into myself.

Which means that I very rarely went to Relief Society functions. (Relief Society is the women's organization in the LDS faith.) A flyer would show up on my door: "come to dinner!" and I'd think "yeah, that'd be fun. But who would I sit by? And how will I know who isn't involved in the neighborly gossip circle and who thinks I am a lazy, self-centered, horrible person with too many trees?" I felt that way in church, too. I didn't talk much to anyone, I never raised my hand to offer up my opinion. I kept to myself.

But then a couple of things happened. A few of my neighbor's friends apologized to me. I was asked to teach a lesson once a month in Relief Society. My neighbor moved. Our ward boundaries changed and there were other women who I didn't think yet knew the awful secrets about me that my neighbor did. (I still don't know all of them, in fact!) I began to reach out a little bit, believing that maybe I could find a place. It's been a very long haul for me to feel comfortable in my ward, to feel like I belonged here or that my presence mattered. But last night, in a very real way, I realized: I am, I do, it does.

We had our Relief Society birthday dinner. And here's the thing: I went. I went without once thinking "yeah, but who will I sit by?" I just took the last empty chair at one of the tables and started chatting to the women sitting there. We had hor d'oeuvres in the gym, and then we went into smaller rooms (which had been decorated most gorgeously by some of the women) for the main course---the room that you went to was determined by the color of birthday candle you'd chosen when you first came in. I loved this idea, as it ensured that each room was peopled with a variety of women, instead of the usual groups we tend to cluster in. I sat with three older women, three women around my age, and one ten years younger than me. We talked and laughed and shared experiences. Then we went back to the gym, for dessert and a talk.

As I listened to the talk, one idea stood out to me: "Women need women." When she said that, it felt crafted just for me. I took a breath and looked around, making myself really concentrate on what I was feeling right then, and it was this: love for the people around me, and also feeling love from them. I thought about those older women I had eaten dinner with, and how they have each, in different ways, influenced my life in ways they probably don't even realize, and of how much I admire the woman who had decorated our room because she is artistic and always looks put together (I blogged about her experiences once before), and how happy I was that another woman at our table put her head on my shoulder when pictures were being taken. And then I thought about the patterns my friendships have taken over the years, how they have morphed from one group to another but how I have always been blessed with girl friends in one form or another.

And I realized: the speaker was right. I need women in my life. Even though I tend to pull away, to stay reserved, to not be trusting. I need them because that feeling last night---feeling, at last, like I mattered, like I belonged---was delicious. It felt like I had overcomed something, the lingering effects of all those years of being disliked by my neighbor. I realized that even if she were there, it wouldn't matter, and that by withdrawing rather than being myself during those years, I had contributed to making the problem bigger. I felt this little spark of courage, fed by feeling accepted, that makes me want to continue to put myself out there a bit more.

notes from The Infamous Woman with the Big Camera

Last Saturday, Haley and I got the opportunity to go to the General Young Women Meeting at the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City.  This is a yearly event that happens one week before our spring General Conference---the time when we have the opportunity to listen to our prophet and other leaders. The Young Women meeting is directed to 12 to 18-year-old girls. Like General Conference, the Young Women meeting is televised, and most groups get together at the church to watch it, but there are also tickets available to the conference center. I'm not really clear on how they are distributed, but this year our stake had the opportunity to attend. I'd never been inside the conference center, except for a quick glance inside during the open house when it was first constructed. To see it full of people was amazing. Even just sitting down, the spirit was overwhelming. Maybe because the place is enormous.

Before the meeting started, I had a little bit of camera drama. I brought my camera along because I was hoping there would be time to take some pictures of the temple in that glowy light that happens just before the sun dips below the mountains. (There wasn't much, but I did get a few pictures of all the girls with us.) When I got to the Conference Center, I discovered that they have the full security detail---X-ray machines like in an airport and a more thorough bag search than I've ever experienced. The security people at the main doors told me I would have to check my camera. So, I had to walk all the way around to the other side of the building (this was the only time I had to snap a few photos of the temple, and I was feeling so anxious that I didn't get any good ones) to the bag check. Once I got there, they told me that no, I actually could take my camera in, I just couldn't take in the bag. That seemed odd, but since Haley wanted some photos of the inside, I thought it was good, too. So I walked back around the building, stood in line again to go through the security check (one person asked me if I was a member of the press, lol...maybe my camera really is too fancy?), only to be told that no, I couldn't bring in my camera. I politely argued with the security lady (the one digging in my purse, checking out every zippered compartment), telling her that the other department had told me I could. She finally let me through with a very stern warning to not take any pictures during the meeting. I felt like everyone in the lobby was staring at me. When I went back to the bag check after the meeting, the guy behind the counter handed me my camera bag and said "Oh, you're that lady. You're infamous here now!" and he went on to explain that any camera with a removable lens is not allowed inside the conference center, and then there were several joking comments all around about why I needed such a big camera in the first place. I left wishing I'd just kept it at home.

The talks that were given in the meeting were incredible. Since I still have so much trouble writing publicly about my spiritual experiences, most of the details are in my personal journal. But, I feel strongly that I should blog about President Henry B. Eyring's talk. It's titled "Walk in the Light." Here is the thing I am discovering as I work in my calling in Young Women: just as my first year of teaching was a little bit about exorcising the ghosts of the experiences I had in high school, working with the young women is forcing me to remember myself at their age. A few weeks ago, I taught a lesson about making wise choices, and I found myself crying as I taught it---and I never cry when I am teaching. It wasn't so much about the lesson material as it was me wishing that I could have really heard what I was teaching that day, only heard it it when I was about fifteen or so. By "hearing" I mean really listening, taking something in and making a change because of it. I walked a lot of dark paths because of my not-so-wise decisions, but looking at myself from a distance I know that I thought I knew everything, and that I never would have listened even if I had gone to church.

So as I listened to President Eyring's talk about walking in the light, and how every decision you make either keeps you in the light or takes you away from it, I kept remembering that lesson I gave, and the overwhelming feeling I had of how impossible it is to teach teenagers the things that you know---how hard it is to get them to hear what you are saying so that they don't make the same mistakes you made. Several times during the talk, President Eyring's voice filled up with emotion, and I wondered if his thoughts were similar to mine---if he was feeling that not many of those girls would really and truly hear him, and would end up walking their own dark paths. Or maybe just that not all of them would hear him---that even just one would choose to walk in darkness.

Because if I have learned anything on my life's journey, it is this: you can be forgiven for almost anything, but forgiveness doesn't eliminate consequences. The effects of the decisions I made as a teenager are still with me. I left the conference feeling a renewed desire to be, somehow, a better mother and leader and example---to manage to teach my daughter (and my sons, too, as they enter adolescence) and the young women at church, somehow, just a few of the things I have learned, so that they can stay on a lighted path.

Familial Gratitude

I have a writerly sort of confession to make: it is really, really hard for me to discuss spiritual experiences on my blog. I find myself feeling that I have to explain the entire history of Mormonism before I can make my original point, which makes for a long read! I can't just write on the assumption that everyone knows and understands what I am talking about or believes the same things I believe. So while I admire the many blog writers I know who write eloquently and concisely about their beliefs, I've not done much of it on mine, and probably will continue to write about most of those things in my regular journal.

But we had such a great spiritual experience this weekend, I'm going to share anyway, regardless of the snarky voices in my head.

Yesterday was Nathan's baptism. Technically, he should have been baptized in December, but I was being selfish. I wanted to have him baptized on a day when no one else in our ward was being baptized, because that was how Jake's baptism worked out, and it was such a wonderful experience being surrounded just with family and friends, people we knew well and who knew us, that I wanted to repeat that feeling. Of course, being The Mom as well as The Maker of The Post-Baptism Lunch, most of the day was a rushed sort of blur, filled with last-minute preparations, running around looking for ties, socks, underwear, or nylons, and worries over whether or not I cooked enough potatoes.

But I was blessed with a calm, peaceful moment---a strong impression I had listening to Jake give his talk about baptism. He wasn't nervous at all, just walked up to the microphone and confidently gave his talk. I thought about his own baptism, when Haley had given the talk on baptism, and now here he was giving it, and before I know it, Nathan will be speaking at Kaleb's. I looked around the room at friends and family, and I thought about how, most likely, plenty of them had been up late the night before, too, fixing food to help me out. About how much I lean on my sisters' knowledge and shoulders, about the fact that I really & truly love my in laws, about how having my dad there in all his altered confusion was better than not having him there at all.

My impression is hard to put into words, but it has to do with how precious and important it is to belong to a family. I had this sense of my children all going on after me, doing things with their lives that I've not yet imagined, of our ancestors hovering behind us whispering encouragement, and those still waiting to be born reminding us to be patient waiting for them. I realized how blessed I am to belong to a family. Even though none of us are perfect and quite often we annoy or fail to understand each other, we still belong to each other. I felt a sense of peace I never had before in relation to my children growing up and moving beyond their childhoods, that somehow they would continue to be there for each other.

Writing this, my snarkiest voice fills my head. "Could you be any cheesier?" it taunts. "Your writing is sappy and melodramatic." See...I really don't do this well, writing about my spirituality. I get that. But I just wanted to put my gratitude out there in the world, so that more people than just me know how grateful I am.

Remembering our Prophet

First off---thank you for your comments on my post yesterday. I think I have a tendency toward gratuitous guilt. And I think you are all right: it is OK for me to find happiness in the things that fill me up. I appreciate your wisdom!

This morning, along with all the LDS world, I am thinking about the death of our prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley. I learned about his death last night when I turned on the news. Kendell was already asleep, so I shook him awake to tell him. Then I told Haley and Jake, in turn, as I tucked them in. In her usual manner, Haley was nonchalant about the whole thing. And, as usual, Jake was bothered by the news. "I will miss him," he told me. Me, too.

President Hinckley became the prophet in March of 1995, one month before Haley was born. So I have listened to his advice and council for the whole of my parenting experience. I have loved him as a prophet. I think that in addition to everything he has taught us, and all the work he has moved forward with our temples, one of the biggest lessons he's provided is just how important tone is. President Hinckley had a great sense of humor---everyone says that, I know. But the humor, the sense of not taking himself too seriously, brought an ease of acceptance to his messages. He wasn't about fire and brimstone. He was about living the gospel in the reality of today's world.

After I told Jake the news, he asked me if I was sad. I got a little teary-eyed at this question, because while I am sad for myself and for my church---we will all miss this beloved man---I am not sad for him. He lived a good, long life and accomplished so much with his years. He deserves his rest and his reunions.