Boy jobs vs. girl jobs

Posted by Heather O. | March 17, 2010 | 22 Comments

My husband’s work schedule has ramped up, and he’s not been home very much. The upshot of this is that I am now fully aware of everything he did around the house. I also realize that I resent having to do boy jobs. Read more

“You are welcome here.”

Posted by Leslie | March 16, 2010 | 22 Comments

Three weeks ago I stepped off the plane in Amman, Jordan. “Welcome,” the immigration officer nodded as he snapped my picture and passed me back my freshly stamped passport.

If there was any one word I would come to hear a thousand times in 10 days it was welcome. In fact, it is the word I think of first when I think of Jordan. I guess I remember it because other than being printed on doormats or hotel signs, welcome isn’t really a word we use much other than in the context of “You’re welcome, ” our semi-conscious auto-pilot response to “Thank you.”

While it was certainly explicit in conversations, it was also so apparent in people’s actions.  It was everywhere, from the father and grandfather who offered to share tea with me during their child’s surgery,  or the mother who brought gifts of prayer beads and the Koran as thanks for our help. It was the little girl who slipped her ring onto my finger while we played in the playroom, and the many compliments and “mashallah”s of  of the mothers as they saw the pictures of my own children as we talked before their children’s surgeries. It was the in the “What can I do to help you?” and ”Anything else you need?” I heard from dozens of volunteers each day.  It was even evident in the waiter who brought me an extra half a kilo of ice cream (in addition to the 1 kilo I ordered—which was already an outrageous amount) just to be hospitable. Not to mention, the invitations for dinner from parents or the medical students who treated us to dinner and gave us a tour of Amman. The spirit of welcomeness seemed to saturate the week and a half; it also permeated our communal meals of endless courses and generous portions.

Read more

In the Company of Angels

Posted by Emily M. | March 15, 2010 | 24 Comments

I’m almost done reading the Whitney finalists! Exclamation point because thirty books is a lot, and while I’ve enjoyed it, it will feel good to be done with the last one. Shelah and I are going to talk more about our favorites in a couple of weeks. You can also visit Shelah’s blog for her Whitney finalist reviews. Today I want to focus on one of my favorite finalists, In the Company of Angels, by David Farland. I spent the weekend crying over it, wrapping my mind around its dilemmas, feeling humbled by the sacrifice of these handcart pioneers.

Farland tells the story of the Willie Handcart company from the perspectives of Captain Willie; Eliza Gadd, a non-Mormon traveling with her Mormon husband and family; and Baline Mortensen, a young girl sent from Denmark to travel in the company without her parents.

I love the way that David Farland embraces the moral complexities inherent in Willie handcart story. Read more

Depression Roundtable, Part III: Feeling Better

Posted by Kathryn Soper | March 14, 2010 | 12 Comments

Welcome to Part III of Segullah’s UP CLOSE series about depression. Parts I and II can be found here and here. If you haven’t already read the series overview, please do so before proceeding.

This week, our band of scriptural sisters share how they’ve successfully managed their clinical depression. These personal experiences are being shared for general information purposes only and do not constitute advice, medical or otherwise. Please consult a health care professional with questions about specific measures of treatment.

Euodias: Taking medication with my first bout of depression really helped a lot. I took it for about 6 months. Right now medication has been a lifesaver, and I plan on taking it for at least 1 year this time. I would have taken medication more regularly in the past, but have felt uncomfortable doing so during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

Other things that have helped are making sure I get enough sleep, regular rigorous exercise, especially if is outdoors. Running really helps keep the anxiety at bay for me. I really like yoga and meditation. I have been amazed at how much they have helped.

Doing something fun with my family even though a lot needs to be done really helps too. After the birth of one of my children I was feeling overwhelmed with all there was to do and the depression was setting in. Going to the mountains with the kids and my husband and staying there all day with them, enjoying the sunshine was much better than trying to clean the house that day. Read more

Mormon Women’s Lit On Tour!

Posted by Kathryn Soper | March 13, 2010 | 5 Comments

Sometimes I really hate that time-sucking, Farmville-ridden, ever-present vehicle of procrastination we know as Facebook. But I’ve gotta credit the site for reconnecting me with many long-lost friends, some of whom I’m actually glad to hear from. One of these is Joanna Brooks.  When we got in touch twenty years after our BYU days, I was delighted to hear about her beautiful family as well as her considerable professional success (none of which came as any surprise). And I was absolutely thrilled when I heard about her latest project: a multi-state tour of Mormon women writers. Titled Our Visions, Our Voices: A Mormon Women’s Literary Tour, the event begins in less than two weeks. Check out the itinerary: Read more

The Onion of Age

Posted by Catherine | March 13, 2010 | 15 Comments

“The way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree truck or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.
You don’t feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say Eleven when they ask you. And you don’t even feel smart eleven, not until you’re almost twelve. That’s the way it is.” ~ Sandra Cisneros, “Eleven”

It’s birthday season in our family—nine in the next seven weeks, beginning with my husband’s this Tuesday. In preparation, I added scotch tape and wrapping paper to the running Walmart list on the fridge and I bought extra butter and powdered sugar at the grocery store last week. All the better to keep the birthday cake supply constant, you know. After the next seven weeks, I anticipate that we will all be fatter, poorer, and, well, older.

I must admit that, although my own birthday is a fun excuse for demanding my favorite foods and a reprieve from dinner dishes, in actuality, it doesn’t mean much. Like many of you, I’m sure, I don’t really keep track of my age all that well. Maybe it’s a purposeful oversight on my part, given that my husband is two years younger than me. Or maybe it’s just that it doesn’t matter what the number is, but what the feeling is. I’ve always loved Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Eleven” in her book Woman Hollering Creek. The narrator sums up birthdays and age for me perfectly:

“What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you are–underneath the year that makes you eleven.

Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.”

Today, I anticipate feeling 20 after I complete my morning run (unless my knees start hurting again, in which case, I’ll probably feel 35). And when I reach for another cookie this afternoon, I may feel 9 and subconsciously look over my shoulder for my mother, who always had a third eye for which of her seven children were inhaling the fruits of her labors.

What about you? What age do you feel best fits you right now?

Warning! Poetry!

Posted by Kellie | March 12, 2010 | 20 Comments

I would hugely appreciate such a warning, as I am incredibly wary of poems. They are dangerous, wily creatures that lie in ambush, lurking stealthily beneath words in my personal scary wilderness. Seemingly restful and innocent, luring me in closer to the stunning flourishes, the polished simplicity, the sweetness of gentle phrases, incredibly lovely to SNAP/?crunch&%^!wallop – and suddenly I’m dazed, leaking blood or tears and left aching in the dust. Or I see something fluorescent green with a clunky gait, seventeen heads and galloping backwards and am told to my bafflement “Oh, that’s a poem.”

Poetry represents my first concrete, unpleasant realisation that language could be mean.  My teacher opened my mind to the beauty of poetry, so readily created in six little lines of rhyme, in something called (so delightfully to a besotted seven year old) a “lim-er-ick”. The giddiness lasted 10 minutes, until Mrs Sumpton told the whole class to make up a limerick about someone – and all but two of my classmates wrote a limerick about me. Kellie. Jelly. Telly. Belly. Oh, the inhumanity. Read more

Notes for my pockets

Posted by Annie | March 11, 2010 | 20 Comments

“The most exciting movement in nature is not progress, advance, but expansion and contraction, the opening and shutting of an eye, the heart, the mind. We throw our arms wide with a gesture of religion to the universe; we close them around a person. We explore and adventure for a while and then draw in to consolidate our gains.” ~Robert Frost

I was talking with a friend who has been undergoing treatment for cancer.  She commented that it’s been hard to reconcile the polarity that everything has changed and yet nothing has changed. Everything–her perspective, her sense of herself, of security, the new focus on healing–has changed.  Yet she looks out her window and kids are still going to school, the seasons change as always, life goes on. Living with both realities, she said, is difficult but comforting.

She said it reminded her of a rabbinic story she heard in her childhood,  an old midrash about a sage who always kept two notes–both quotes from scripture–on his person, one in each of his coat pockets. Read more

“Let’s Give It Up For Wayne!”

Posted by Melissa M | March 10, 2010 | 12 Comments

Several weeks ago I found myself standing in front of a crowded auditorium, speaking to hundreds of eager high school jazz players who had come to hear Wayne Bergeron, a Grammy-award-winning jazz trumpet player, instruct them. It was my job to introduce Wayne and to “pump up” the audience. “You know that I’m just a housewife, right?” I’d asked the guy who told me to introduce Wayne. “You signed up to host this clinic, so you introduce him,” he said. So there I stood at the microphone, reading Wayne’s bio aloud from the jazz festival program (because I knew nothing about Wayne until that very moment), and then said, rather sheepishly, in what I hoped was a crowd-energizing tone, “Let’s give it up for Wayne!”

How did I end up introducing Wayne Bergeron, you ask? Because I have a son, Shane, who plays trumpet in the Crescent Super Band and, wanting to be a supportive mother, I’d signed up as a parent volunteer to help run the Peaks Jazz Festival, where my son’s band was performing. So I spent a whole afternoon at the festival, introducing Wayne and sitting in on his trumpet clinic, then escorting a high school jazz band through its adjudication round (and no, I didn’t know what “adjudication” meant until that day). And all the while I found myself marveling at how our children’s passions take us places we never dreamed of going. Read more

How Do We Know?

Posted by Heather H. | March 9, 2010 | 11 Comments

My husband assigned our four-year-old son Cole the FHE lesson last night. About half hour before FHE on the way home from a playdate he and I got around to planning. It went something like this,
Me-What do you want to do for the lesson tonight?
Cole-I don’t want to do the lesson.
Me-Well, it’s your turn. It will be fun.
Cole-The lesson is never the fun part.
Me-You don’t like to learn about Jesus? (Yes, meant to ignite a little guilt and feeling of obligation. This question would have worked like a charm with my 6-year-old daughter. She loves to comply and please. Cole on the other hand, answered like this–)
Cole-MOM, I am not doing the lesson!
Me-The lesson can be fun. You can do it about whatever you want.
Cole-Okay, let’s play Candyland bingo.
Me-Well, that’s more like the activity; that’s not the lesson.
Cole-See, I can’t do what I want.
Me-But you can choose to read a story or talk about being kind or choosing the right. We can play a game based on something like that for the lesson.
Cole-I want to read a story.
Me-Great! What scripture story should we choose?
Cole-Ahh, not a scripture story! Just a story from a book. I want to read my library book about dinosaurs.
Me-Can you think of a way that connects to the gospel?
Cole-Jesus created dinosaurs.

Okay, so here I’m thinking to myself . . .it’s not exactly written down in any standard works nor has it been said by any of the general authorities that Jesus created the dinosaurs, but I think he probably did, fuzzy creation time periods aside, I mean, who else could have created them?

Me-Okay, we’ll read from your book and talk about how Jesus created the earth.
Cole-Okay.

After dinner my husband asked him what the lesson was about. He smiled, “How Jesus created dinosaurs.”

His big sister piped in, “How did he do that?”
Cole, “I don’t know! We’re gonna’ read about it from my book.” (Semantics, tee hee)

So we changed some of the lyrics in the opening song, “Whenever I hear the song of a bird, or see a picture of a dinosaur” (as opposed to “or look at the blue blue sky”). Cole giggled through that, and I hoped the next time he was in charge of the lesson he’d have good memories of this night. After reading several pages of the book, Dinosaurs Everywhere! which had simply outlined the history of dinosaurs and informed us that what we know about dinosaurs has been learned through the study of fossils, my husband stopped and asked, “So, how do we know that dinosaurs lived on the earth?” I’m pretty sure it was a follow-up question and he was expecting the kids to say something about finding fossils, yadda, yadda. But instead Cole said, “Because we have brains!”

Leggings with feet in them

Posted by Shelah | March 8, 2010 | 29 Comments

A few years ago, Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious was all the rage among the  moms I knew. My oldest, now nine, survives on a diet of chicken nuggets, cheeseburgers, fruit roll ups, orange juice and chocolate milkshakes, and many well-intentioned friends suggested I buy the book. They knew about my struggles to get him to try something as innocuous as a slice of banana or a bite of bacon, and were all sure that if I just hid some shredded carrots in my meatloaf, Bryce would gobble it up and start begging for salads. The kid has the tastebuds of a wary bloodhound, so I smiled and nodded and thanked them for their advice, and secretly knew that I was never going to go there. Besides, Bryce doesn’t like meatloaf. Read more

Depression Roundtable, Part II: Depression and Spirituality

Posted by Kathryn Soper | March 7, 2010 | 34 Comments

Welcome to Part II of Segullah’s UP CLOSE series about depression. Part I can be found here. If you haven’t already read the series overview, please do so before proceeding.

Priscilla: I was 27 when I had my third child and first post partum depression. At least, that what I thought it was, so I read books and did what they said – eat right, exercise, meditate, play — but the depression never lifted. That was 25 years ago.

I have always been resistant to trying medication, even though depression is clearly a genetic thing in my family and my mother, sister, and daughter (that third child) all use anti-depressants. I have tried some at times and once it was a real life-saver, as it pulled me up into functional mode, but then it seemed to lose effectiveness, and rather than keep switching up drugs, I opted for a homeopathic approach. I’ve been using this for 2 years and I think it is working to keep me stable. The past 2 years have also been a period of major spiritual transition, involving much loss and grief as well as much promise of joy. It is always hard for me to separate out the factors of depresssion: which triggers are circumstantial, which  chemical? I have always been able to function and do what I’ve committed to do, but that seems to take more and more effort. Read more

things

Posted by Michelle L. | March 6, 2010 | 10 Comments

Yesterday, I wrote on my personal blog about my mother’s piano. As religious people, we take the attitude of eschewing worldly things, of treasuring our relationships, not our possessions. And yet, I feel a great spiritual peace in my mother’s gorgeous grand piano (which is now mine). Perhaps a bit foolishly, I offered up my old piano on my blog, not anticipating the rush of interest, the almost passionate desire for a bit of music in our homes. I wish I had a dozen pianos to give away. I was tempted to look through the classifieds and buy another piano just so I wouldn’t have to disappoint so many people. Read more

My Old Pigeonhole

Posted by Jennie | March 4, 2010 | 26 Comments

I started out as “the smart one” in my family. My little sister had waist-length golden hair which automatically made her “the pretty one”. Eventually, though, she got a bad perm, had crooked teeth grown in and started getting much better grades, so she became “the smart one” and I, an extremely bratty teenager, became “the mean one”.

“The mean one” title stayed with me for quite a while. I didn’t get along well with anyone in my family and I wore a constant expression of peevishness. I was happy around my friends, but most people only saw a sullen girl who had a bad attitude about most everything.

Of course it was a façade as adolescent angst sometimes tends to be. Deep down I wanted to be cheerful and sweet but I just couldn’t get over myself until I went away to college and grew up a lot.
Read more

The Pleasures of the Flesh

Posted by Brooke | March 3, 2010 | 25 Comments

He seems to love Wii more than me.

And he is six, and who knew this rampant need to play video games was buried inside his fingertips and probably stretches deep: up his limbs to his firm, round shoulders?

I’ve lamented this fact since the Wii arrived for Christmas, and I have people try to console me with the notion that he’s being “active,” but I just wish he was in the backyard gulping fresh air and using his thick legs in long strides. Playing real sports. Running real laps. Using real rackets.

Read more

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