My best nursery idea

You know that awful scratchy carpet that is on the bottom half of the walls of every LDS church building in the world? This carpet hold up felt pieces like magic at just the right height for nursery kids.
In our nursery we keep a little bag of felt pieces in different shapes and colors. The littlest ones just like putting them up, rearranging, hoarding etc. The older ones like sorting, or naming the shapes and colors or making scenes on the wall with the felt.
I've also had good experiences with using felt glued to the back of pictures to hold up illustrations for lessons. I have a bag of animal pictures with felt glued to the back that is very very popular among the nursery kids.
This same idea also works on some pews for quiet fun during sacrament meeting.

Constructive Criticism

Last night my husband attended a Stake priesthood meeting. During this meeting there were the usual exhortations, and among them was the injunction for all the married men to ask their wives "What can I do to be a better husband." Which my husband dutifully did.

Hmm.

My first thought was a smarmy self-righteous, "I choose to not dwell on your faults." We had a good laugh for a few minutes by trying to make that statement even more ostentatious.

My next thought was that if there was anything important that he needed to be doing for me or the kids I would have told him already. Just as I was getting ready to say that my husband preempted me by saying "I would hope that you would tell me without me having to ask like this."

After that there was the thought that if there were things I wanted him to do that I wasn't telling him about then they weren't the sort of things that matter all that much. I think he'd look nicer if he wore his shirts differently; he knows my opinion, and I know that they're his shirts and he's the one who is actually wearing them.

Then we discussed the fact that I would be really bothered if I had gone to a stake Relief Society meeting and had been instructed to ask my husband how I could be a better wife. He agreed that that did seem rather inappropriate and we talked for a few minutes about why one is A-Okay but the other is not. He put forth the idea that despite the ideal there are large cultural forces at play that result in men doing much less relationship maintenance than women.

As the conversation progressed I realized that the whole time in the back of my mind I had been searching for things that I didn't like about my husband. And sure enough when you look for those sorts of things you can come up with quite a list. Perhaps my first answer hadn't been so smarmy and self-righteous after all. That simple question, dutifully asked by my thoughtful husband upon instruction from a well meaning stake president who was trying to help out the sisters put me into a fault finding mindset which I didn't like at all.

So I gave my husband my answer ("Please find a way to let me know when you buy gas so I can put it in our budget spreadsheet.") and went to bed.

If my stake president were to ask how to be a better stake president I would ask him find a way to encourage husbands to do more relationship maintenance work without putting the wives in the position of having to look for their husbands faults.

Private

As a teen and young adult I bore my testimony in Fast and Testimony meeting fairly frequently, about three or four times a year. Even though I am active, and friendly, and still have a testimony I haven't born my testimony once in over five years. What changed? I got married. For some reason bearing my soul to a room of strangers, acquaintances, and casual friends doesn't bother me a bit. But the instant someone I care deeply about is in the room you couldn't make me stand up if you tried. Bearing my testimony in front of my husband feels far too intimate to do in public.
Weird huh?

Male Gaze and the Temple

Among the many symbols in the Temple that I found confusing or hurtful was the veil that women wear on their heads and to cover their faces at times. I spent a lot of time reading varied interpretations of veiling coming from a wide array of sources- LDS, Catholic, Muslim, etc. One recurring explanation is that the veils are intended to shield the holy from the profane, and thus since women are veiled this means that they are holy. This always rang false to me, and failed to comfort me, because if you put a veil between God and me, it is obvious which side is profane and which side is holy. That men didn't wear a veil meant, to me, that men were less profane from women, and that God didn't need to be shielded from them.

Recently, while reading another instance of this sort of explanation the idea struck me that perhaps, at least as far as interpreting the Temple goes, I hadn't internalized the male gaze enough.

The male gaze is the idea that when viewing any sort of presentation the presumed audience is a heterosexual male. So, for example, movie directors assume that the audience would like the camera to linger on a woman's chest, rather than a man's physique. There are all sorts of reasons this is a bad thing, not the least of which is that girls and women have to relate to almost everything indirectly, by first imagining it from a male point of view and then interpreting that in a way that is applicable to themselves.

So when I go to the Temple, without my male gaze goggles on, I put on the veil, and then ask myself "what does this veil mean to me and my relationship to God?"

Perhaps what I should be asking is, "what would this veil mean to a man and and tell him about my relationship to him and what does *that* mean to me and my relationship to God?" In this way the reading that the veil denotes holiness could actually work, if you assume that the veil is there for men and not for women.

So perhaps the most feminist way to approach the Temple is to assume that everything there is actually for and about men.*

Turning the hearts of the children

I did not grow up in a feminist household. My parents (read: Dad) are strict conservatives, and would likely even call themselves anti-feminist. But while they may not call themselves feminist, something has definitely changed.

When I was in high school my parents were called to serve in the stake family history center. Their advanced age, lack of young children and my dad's moderate computer skills were big selling points and they remained in that calling for several years. In the time since then my dad has thrown himself into his family history with great gusto. After retirement he started spending 2-5 hours daily doing family history research.

Because he spends so much time working on it, family history is his favorite topic of conversation these days. In the past few months especially I've really noticed a trend, I would come home from visits to my parents house with stories about awesome women (women I'm related to!), and kept thinking to myself "I've gotta write a post about that!" Now, surely I have just as many male relatives as I do female relatives, but dad doesn't tell stories about them. This could be for several reasons; maybe the men in my family history are a very mediocre bunch, perhaps since women's lives were so constricted the awesomeness threshold is much lower for women, or perhaps my dad focuses on the women more than the men.

I think it all started because my dad prides himself on being thorough and meticulous. He likes getting *every* piece of information that he can. And due to the practice of women taking their husband's name, finding information about women is difficult. So in order to find out everything he had to do a great deal of research about individual women, and he's come to empathize with them.

Just the last time I was home he was talking about a particular woman whose name he was looking for, and he had nothing to go on. Even her gravestone called her 'Mrs. John Doe.' About which my dad exclaimed "That was a person for crying out loud! It's like she didn't even exist."

He also talked about how awful it must have been to have 11 kids in 11 years. Then we got to talking about insane asylums, and how women were put there whether they were insane or not, and how the definition of insane for women was "isn't happy about having 11 kids in 11 years."

All of this has softened his stance on women having jobs, how many kids they should have, and how society still doesn't do right by women. My dad's heart has turned, but not to his fathers; his heart has turned to his mothers.

Which Kingdom I'm going to

There's a poll at BCC. The poll asks, "If you died today would you go to the Celestial Kingdom?"

The poll has three possible answers "Yes, the highest kingdom" "Yes, some kingdom" or "No." I hate questions like this. Lets look at the possibilities


First, you could answer "Yes, the highest kingdom." My initial response to that is, "well I'm glad you think so highly of yourself." It seems incredibly vain to unequivocally declare oneself worthy of the highest degree of the celestial kingdom. For crying out loud just translate me now, because I'm already perfect! On the other hand, there is the notion that a sort of fresh-faced confidence is in a way desirable. That you are faithful, hopeful, and so desirous to be with God that of course you'll be going to the Celestial Kingdom. This kind of honest optimism is certainly a desirable trait where it occurs naturally, but it is one of those things where you can't fake it until you make it..

At the other extreme you could answer "No." Answering the question this way gets into the whole believing Christ thing. Are you saying you aren't worthy because you don't believe that Christ has the power to cleanse you of your sins? Are you not even trying to repent. Don't you want to go to the Celestial Kingdom? Or perhaps you're engaging in some passive aggressive false humility, daring other people to let you say such horrible things about yourself. Or maybe you're indulging in some nod nod wink wink rebellion, that almost says "I'm too cool to go the Celestial Kingdom. Everyone knows the real party is going to be in the Telestial Kingdom." And on the other side of this one is a sort of real humility that just feels so awkward about saying how awesomely righteous they are that they go ahead and say no.

Then there is the middle option, the "Yes, some kingdom." This is the one for people who feel self conscious about either extreme. Dangerously aware of both the positive and negative feelings on each extreme this option appears to be moderate. However, all of the implications of the other answers apply here, just slightly watered down.

If the question had been a fill in the blank, rather than multiple choice I would have said "I know I'll be happy." I refuse to believe that God would create beings only for most of them to end up left out and unhappy, that sort of God is a jerk and not worth worshipping. I will try to live the sort of life that makes me good, and makes me happy, and I'll end up where I end up.

Cross posted at Waters Of Mormon.