I am a disabled mother.

One could easily argue that all mothers of very young children qualify for the term in a loose sense–if you think I’m absolutely batty, then you haven’t recently run the gauntlet of an icy supermarket parking lot while toting a baby, the capacious innards of a diaper bag (only slightly smaller than the luggage I took to Europe for a month), and your fan-damily’s weekly edibles while keeping eyes alert for cavalier drivers incapable of using a turn signal. Doing anything with munchkins presents oft-daunting challenges, even as it presents the endless pseudo-springtime of seeing the world renewed through baby eyes: look! An avocado! What is that thing? Fascinating: I must eat it. Look, dog poo! Same reaction. Rather more scary for mama and possibly papa. (more…)

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This Sunday is Mothering Sunday or Mother’s Day in England. In the church calendar, Mothering Sunday is the fourth Sunday of Lent. (more…)

Last Sunday during my Q&A session in Gospel Principles, I gave them a copy of Elder Oaks’ talk - Good, Better, Best. We talked about the idea briefly in two ways. One, that it’s ok not to do everything that comes up at church, but to make sure we attend our essential meetings and use our judgment with everything else. (more…)

Guest Posts:
I am happy to announce that mfranti has graciously volunteered to help me keep track of guest posts. I guess she was sick-n-tired of me losing everyone’s brilliant posts, refinding (some) months later, forgetting I have them, and just generally being my incompetent self. So we should be seeing a 100% improvement in efficiency around here, so submit away!

We are specifically interested in Women’s History Month posts. We have some exciting posts lined up, but could use many more. So if you have some women’s history interests or expertise, now is you time to shine.

We also love “ask fMh” posts, if you find yourself in need of advice.

Please submit on any other topic as well, especially those topics we neglect, ta da, you can fix the universe! (just so you know, some of these post may have to wait until April, depending on how much WHM stuff we end up doing.)

Guest Bloggers Wanted: (more…)

by Veritas

I know this might rub some people the wrong way, but this isn’t meant to try and convince anyone anything particular about the church. This, as I stand right now, is my ‘testimony’. I know many will judge me but I really needed to write this.

All my life I have had a schizophrenic religious experience – a mental separation of belief and practice. I had a testimony of religious principles I believed were consequent of a great awakening - a fullness of times brought about by miraculous event – the restoration of God’s Power to the earth. I had a deep and abiding personal relationship with a personal Savior – a connection borne out of affliction; a result of my God buoying me up through a turbulent past. A reassurance that He knew me – and loved me anyway.
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I love Almodovar movies.  All About My Mother is a risque story with adult themes, but I enjoyed the movie as a colorful celebration of the diversity of motherhood and parenthood (not _quite_ what Sister Dew was talking about, however, when she said we can all be mothers).

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I’m of the opinion that Americans don’t talk about sex enough. That’s right. We don’t talk about sex enough.

Am I nuts? Probably.

Nevertheless . . .

Yeah, sex is everywhere. Hollywood sex. Messed up, Glossed over, Plastic, Fake, Objectified sex. Raunch is going mainstream. And all that.

The problem is, as a culture we’ve created an absurd paradox, in which we’re increasingly comfortable (or uncomfortable) with fake sex, and yet still virtually silent about real sex. We have this illogical idea that we should (or can) protect our children from sexual knowledge, through . . . silence? Now obviously we want to protect our kids from raunch as much humanly possible, but unless you lock your kids in a padded room, they will be hearing about sex, talking about sex, seeing sexual content, a lot more than we did. They are barraged with sexual knowledge, fake plastic sexual knowledge from the outside, yet from adults, from teachers, parents, aunts and uncles, they get the message that sex is private (uncomfortable) or dirty, or just inappropriate for polite conversation. (more…)

I made it - more than a week ago, I finished my year-long pledge to not purchase new.

There were a few exceptions along the way - most frivolously, for the 7th Harry Potter book. (In return I promised to extend my non-consumerism by two weeks.) Everything that could have broken in the past year, broke. We lost our kettle, our toaster, and our washing machine. We managed to get a second-hand kettle and toaster; and after a day long debate, we decided to buy a new washing machine. We figured that, at its heart, this challenge was about being better to the environment, so it was better to buy a new, environmentally-friendly washing machine than buy a second-hand machine that wasn’t as effecient with water or electricity. We also had to make an emergency purchase of a sippy cup for our daughter while in the US recently. (We lost hers on a plane, and we only took one with us.) But we only bought a new one after a thwarted attempt to buy second-hand. The most promising second-hand sippy cup I found, didn’t work. But considering I went into this giving myself 12 exceptions, I feel we did very well indeed.

What did we learn? (more…)

So I was just taking a relaxing bath, reading about a mostly ignored thirty-million gallon toxic oil spill between Brooklyn and Queens, pausing occasionally to read the advertisements for peace coffee and all-natural cigarettes, when I read an advertisement for Celebrant Foundation and Institute.

It appears to be a training sort of thing for non-denominational officiants of “life-cycle ceremonies”, personalized weddings, funerals, adoption and birth ceremonies. I guess for people who want “ceremony” without all the pesky strictures of organized religion.

I honestly don’t know anything about “celebrants”, but the thought just popped into my head that might be a fun job. And come to think of it, I’d probably be good at it. Which led to the next thought, could a practicing Mormon become an officiant? (I’m not really considering it, just being hypothetical here) (I have zero ambition, but do like to over-think everything). (more…)

It’s coming up on birthday alley around these parts. In the next two months we will be celebrating seven birthdays of close family members. Pretty much a party a week. The cake, the cake, The Cake!

As grandparents and aunties and uncles ask what to buy for my children (who already have too much stuff) and as I try to figure out what to get for my nieces (who have at least ten times the stuff my kids have). I stumbled onto the idea of a magazine subscription. Getting something in the mail is just cool, and it’s something we can read together, which is good.

But I’m not sure what kids magazines are out there, and which ones are good? For pre-readers and emerging readers. Not Highlights, as a kid I thought it was dumb, as an adult, I can’t get my kids interested in it even at the doctor’s office when the choice is between Highlights or doodling-on-an-old-receipt-with-a-ball-point-pen. Are there magazines your kids have enjoyed?

Any other ideas for useful or interesting non-junky gifts would be much appreciated.

by Chandelle

I’ve spent maybe a month of my entire life wanting to be a mother. It takes one attempt for me to get pregnant and that means that I spend about two weeks, maximum, wanting to have a baby, and then I’m a mother and whether or not I want to be a mother is pretty much irrelevant. (The rest of my adult life is spent panicking that I might be pregnant. Being stupidly fertile is in itself its own kind of curse.)

From an outside perspective, it would appear that my family is a great success. My marriage could properly be called amazing. Our questionable gene pool combined to create two startlingly beautiful and deliciously brilliant children. I love my children, and hopefully, that goes without saying. But in many ways I hate being a mother. Hopefully, my readers are forgiving enough to realize that my ambiguity about motherhood does not translate to insufficient love for my children. (more…)

My grandfather just died. We had his funeral on Monday. This is the first time anyone really close to me has died. (more…)

My mother is a very good woman. My siblings and I agree that we had a great childhood, with many fond memories of family activities and balanced parenting.

As adults, we all have variously strained relationships with our mother. In fact I think it would be fair to say that the number one topic of conversation amongst the eight of us involves commiserating about our tactless, manipulative, pushy mother, who loves us.

My experience with most my age-mates, tells me that this is a pretty common experience, variously strained relationships with our mothers. Mothers who love us, and raised us well. Mothers who do not respect adult boundaries. Mothers who are disappointed in or disrespectful of our choices. Mothers we hide things from and lie to, it’s easier that way. Mothers we do not feel emotionally secure with.

I look at my own children and imagine this type of relationship in our future, and it makes me sad. But I see very few examples of healthy friendly deep relationships with mothers among my age-mates, so I ‘m starting to wonder if this is just the inevitable way of things.

But then my dh and his siblings are all very close to my MIL, they adore her, love to spend time with her, have only glowing lovely things to say about her. I think this is largely a product of her generous quiet non-judging nature.

I’d like to have this kind of relationship with my (someday) adult children, but frankly, I’m a whole lot more like my tactless mother. Is it hopeless?

If you are not Mormon, chances are you won’t “get” this poll.
You’re welcome to answer it anyway.

I have a odd area of expertise that has been annoying me lately. By strange coincidence, I’ve read/seen a number of books and movies lately in which people are being swooped by owls. And they’re all getting it wrong, wrong, wrong.

I happen to have a great deal of experience being swooped by owls. I worked several summers (BC) as a fire-lookout, and I’ve been swooped by quite a lot of things (including raging humming birds) but being swooped by owls is nothing like the way the writers/directors describe it. The fluttering of wings, they say, perhaps some screeching, but it’s not like that at all.

Being swooped by owls is creepy precisely because it is utterly silent. You can feel them whipping past, disturbingly close, you can see a glint of a wing in the moonlight or brief blinking of the stars, but you don’t hear anything.

Clearly this is a detail most writers never think to check, a person would just assume that owl swooping is like any other swooping, standard bird sounding, seems logical.

But it got me curious, do any of you all have an area of expertise that writers get wrong all the time? Does it annoy you? Can you look past the incorrect details and still enjoy the experience or do the incorrect details ruin it for you?

He went on a business trip to Las Vegas last week, and came home with this bit of seduction as a Valentine’s gift for me: (more…)

I went to Target last night and there was pandemonium on the Valentine’s day isle. I swear fist-fights were about to break out over that last heart-shaped box-o-chocolates. In the spirit of following many of you all’s examples, and to help our planet, I’ve been trying to make a conscious effort to buy less, to resist the commercial draw to celebrate every holiday by buying stuff!

But. . . but . . . I really like holidays, and I really like giving my kids special presents on special days. So I bought a few chocolates, and made some valentines, but then I just couldn’t resist those little wind-up toys (wind-up toys rule!), little butterflies with flapping wings and lady bugs that do backflips.

I gave in, once again.

So how do you make holidays special without getting all stufffified?

In 1973, Chairman Mao, while engaging in bilateral trade talks with Henry Kissinger, considered “exporting” 10 million women to the US, saying, “What we have in excess is women.”

Kissinger replied that the US had no quotas or tariffs for Chinese women.

Mao continued, “Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens . . . By doing so we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things. They give birth to children and our children are too many . . . We have so many women in our country that don’t know how to fight.” (more…)

I like to send out poems with my valentines–it’s one of those few days a year when you can easily get away with doing it. This is the one I’m sending to my family this year:

Touched By an Angel

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

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I find the brain fascinating, neurons and synapses, knowledge and memory are such tricky slippery things.

So it turns out that (neuroscientifically speaking) certainty is probably an emotion rather like love or hate. The evidence suggests that feelings of certainty (or “I know that this is true”) are not related to active conscious reasoning, but rather to primitive emotive centers of the brain. Certainty feels logical, but it’s not related to logic at all.

I’m still trying to grasp what “certainty is a emotion” might mean for religious conviction. It would seem that being right and being certain are not related. You can know the sky is blue, You can know that Bigfoot is Cain, You can know that freedom is good, all that knowing comes from the exact same primitive “certainty” spot in the brain. No matter the conviction, it’s nonsensical, emotional, and has nothing at all to do with logic (or truth) (obviously). (I knew that already, I think)

On the one hand, it’s fascinating that the feeling-of-certainty happens to us, we can can not control it, we can’t logic our way to it, we can not make ourselves feel certain about something. Hum. Pretty easy to turn that around into something woo woo spiritual mystical revelationy. I actually kinda like that, because it explains so much about not being able to logic yourself into a testimony, or any type of spirituality really.

On the other hand, false certainty feels exactly the same as (err) true certainty. I would think that discovering that our deep-seated convictions are actually an illogical mental sensation rather than a confirmation of fact would call for taking a step back for a careful examination of those convictions.

The ultimate problem being that certainty and logic don’t mix. Logically examining your certainty must inevitably undermine it? Apparently. I think. Which of course brings up the whole faith/knowledge/belief/hope/certainty controversy of testimony. I’m obviously not a neuroscientist or a theologian or a metaphysicist, just wondering what you think?

…is a question I’m not sure we are often asked. It’s also a question I’m not sure we often dare ask ourselves. How do you react to this question, if you’re ever asked it (and I’m asking it, now)?

A good friend of mine told me recently that she and her husband were sitting down and having one of those “state of the marriage/household/future plans” meetings that we all have from time to time, and as they find themselves fast approaching one of those larger life crossroads where a big decision is going to have to be made, she flat out asked him, “well, what do you you want out of life?” He floundered a bit, thought a long while, and then somewhat sheepishly told her he didn’t quite know how to answer that question, A) because he didn’t feel anyone had ever asked it that point-blankly before, and B ) because he’d always just done what he felt everyone around him needed him to do–not necessarily what he wanted to do.

Sound familiar? (more…)

(Reposted from the Council of Fifty blog)

My sister is a moderate conservative, usually votes Republican. She reads the Washington Post and the Chicago Times, even though she lives near Salt Lake City. Today we were talking, briefly, about Super Tuesday and she started talking about her disappointment with the Republican party generally, and with McCain and Huckabee specifically–because of the talk about their back-room deal to edge Romney out, the Republicans’ complacency on Utah being a Red State but without reciprocal loyalty to its Utah Mormon base, and what she sees as a media bias against Romney (reflective of more general U.S. social biases against Mormons), evident in pictures they choose and how they’ve tended to report on him. Actually, “disappointment” is the wrong word. She’s mad. (more…)

From previous threads where we’ve talked books, I know a lot of you like to read. I do too, and although I make good use of my public library, they just don’t have some books I want to read. I tend to buy book cheaply at amazon marketplace, where I’ve paid just a penny plus postage for a fair few books. Not all are books I want to keep though. I’m not going to re-read them and I don’t have enough room on my very full book cases, so I thought I’d see if any of you are interested in taking some off my hands.

I have 2 to get rid of right now - The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency and The Kalahari Typing School for Men (from the same series). If anyone would like either of these email me at fmhrebecca at gmail dot com or put in the comments.

If you are in the same situation as me, and have books you don’t want - list below what you’d be willing to send, or shout up if you see something you want. As long as you leave a correct email address in the “Mail - will not be published” box, I can put people in touch. And obviously everything will be on a first come first served basis.

If this is something people would like to do regularly - write in the comments and I can set up a simple fmh book exchange website.

Caroline Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama because, much like her father, Obama inspires hope and optimism about the future. Obama has the innate talent and political savvy to bring Republicans and Democrats together to address the most pressing problems facing our nation. I respect and admire Michelle Obama, and I know she would serve exceptionally as First Lady. But I voted for Hillary Clinton yesterday.

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Today marks the start of Lent. From the BBC religion website:

The mark of ashes

In Ash Wednesday services churchgoers are marked on the forehead with a cross of ashes as a sign of penitence and mortality.

The use of ashes, made by burning palm crosses from the previous Palm Sunday, is very symbolic.

“God our Father, you create us from the dust of the earth.

Grant that these ashes may be for us a sign of our penitence, and a symbol of our mortality.”

Traditional Ash Wednesday prayer

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Today, as many of you will know, is Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent, which starts tomorrow with Ash Wednesday.

Today is traditionally the day when you feast, in preparation for what you’re about to give up for Lent. It’s also a day when it’s traditional to cleanse you soul - to confess and be absolved. There are records of this over a thousand years old, written by an Anglo-Saxon monk.

Nowadays it’s pretty much just Pancake Day. Not that this is a bad thing. Pancakes have been part of Shrove Tuesday in England for centuries. Pancake racing still takes place and is thought to have started in 1445, when a woman cooking her pancakes heard the church bells ring, calling to confession. She ran to church wearing her apron and carrying her pancake still in its pan!

Lent is not something we think too much about in our faith, but I like the idea of cleansing the soul, then cleansing our bodies in preparation for Easter.

Do you give up anything for Lent? If so what? Will you be eating pancakes today? If so, what’s you favourite pancake topping?

Here it is:

Have your water heater rust out the bottom, drown the pilot, and stop working.

Seriously, it works! Not only do you save energy by not heating the water, but you save water because its icy temperature encourages you to turn it off as soon as you possibly can.

What I don’t recommend is doing this the same weekend you have guests and the toilet backs up–it starts to feel mildly overwhelming.

I have a soft spot for the Ross-Perot and Ralph-Naders of the world. I guess I just love an underdog. And even though I’m not even vaguely Libertarian, I did feel a certain affection for Ron Paul and his enthusiastic supporters. Until the newsletter scandal broke. Regardless of whether Ron Paul actually wrote/read the racist remarks contained in his newsletter, whether it was neglect, stupidity, or hate, I simply can not respect someone who would publish these types of statements. Even if I agreed with him on every other subject, I could not vote for him after that.

Racism is a deal-breaker for me. Period. Full Stop.

It seems that for a lot of Mormons, Abortion is the deal-breaker issue. No matter whom they agree with on climate change, war, health care, the economy, or immigration, they could simply never vote for a (even moderately) pro-choice candidate. In fact, it sometimes seems like there there is no other issue. Which I’ve often viewed as illogical decision making.

I’ve written before about how unproductive and stupid I find American abortion polemics. And pro-life/choice is not what I really want to discuss today (though I’m amazed by how civil we’ve been in those discussions).

Rather I’m curious to explore the question of whether my deal-breaker feelings about racism are substantively different from a conservative Mormon’s deal-breaker feelings about abortion.

What do you think?

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