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about crying and swimming and God.




When I teach swim lessons, I have 8 or 9 days to get a kid to swim across the pool. This is easy for the 5 and 6 year olds. A little trickier for the 4 year olds.

As soon as I think a student is ready, I make them practice treading water (because swimming across the pool is useless if you don't know how to also keep your head above water).

The thing about treading water is that you can't learn to do it in shallow water. You just can't. If you can stand up, you'll stand up as soon as you get tired. So, I take my students to the 5 feet which is as deep as the current pool goes.

Some of my students are terrified of the deep end. 

I mean, terrified.
They think they are going to drown.
Their fear is absolutely valid because learning to swim is all a controlled kind of drowning. 

So, in the five feet, I make them tread water. This usually includes me prying their fingers off my arms, turning their body so they aren't facing me, and letting go. This way, they have to turn around before they can hold on again—and by then, I can step back and they can't reach me.

This may sound mean, but there are some things that cannot be explained. Learning to tread water is one of these things.

Anyways, there we are in the five feet. They are yelling for help and I'm counting to ten, or asking about their favorite animal, and they are crying at the top of their lungs. Other swimmers are staring. What my students don't realize is that if they can cry, they can breathe, which means—they are treading water.

Afterwards, they are usually super angry with me. They are so angry, sometimes it takes 3 or 4 days of repeating this short ritual for them to realize what they are doing is actually fun. 

In those 10 seconds where they fight through their fear and terror hard enough to yell at me for help or cry for help, I think about God, and how sometimes, he just cannot save us—not the way we want, because he's about to show us a skill which will provide us joyousness or peace or ability for our whole life! It's just scary to learn at first. It might feel like drowning. But, in not saving—he is creating.



And now for some pics of my brave students (whom I love):
















on swimming & talking to children



A while back, I read an article called "How to Talk to Little Girls". It's haunted me ever since. Mainly, because I realized I don't really talk to little kids: I just compliment them (and, as the article points out, my compliments were landing heavy & square in the physical appearance & fashion category). Since, then, I've worked on having actual conversations. It's been going well. Sometimes I forget.

Except something changed this summer. I teach swim lessons. For the past fifteen summers, I've coaxed small children into swimming with nothing but enthusiastically yelled compliments and Starburst bribes.  People think of swim lessons as fun and necessary, but I witness—daily—children overcoming absolute terror (and stubbornness) and using their bodies to do amazing (and fun!) things.

I find myself yelling all day long things like, "That float was beautiful." Or, "Those were awesome arms!" There's nothing wrong with this feedback. But, for some reason, this summer, I started saying, That looked so pretty!—referring to floats or swimming. I just like the word pretty right now. And, all year I've been using it to describe things that don't have anything to do with our traditional concept of prettiness.

Except, the article was haunting me, and I realized that maybe I could come up with a better word. So I started saying, "Good! that float was so strong!" Or, "Those were such strong arms! great work!" And, then, when kids did things even though they were terrified, I started complimenting their bravery.

Because they are so brave! 
In real life. 

It feels good to yell brave and strong across the pool to any kid—girl or boy.

I'm always thinking about words—about the gigantic differences a small word change can make. But, I've never seen a word switch (pretty to brave) create so much energy, and maybe happiness? Because, the kids smiles are different when I yell, "THAT WAS SO BRAVE!"



Did you read the article? How has it changed your life? and/or how you talk to kids?

Cup of Jo had a great response here.

on being single + mother's day

love family

Two years ago, on mother's day, I decided to go to the family ward down the block from my house. My decision had nothing to do with mother's day, it was just that I decided my time in the singles' ward was over (RIP). I was 29, and it felt right. I'd been living in my grandparents' house—they died when I was 14, and I knew many of the people in the ward would have stories for me. Which they did. But, what I really learned from my time in that ward was the power of mothers.

Relief society was first, and I arrived a few minutes late. As soon as I sat down, I felt the love of God like arrows in my heart. I knew that many of the people in that room had loved my grandma, and that my grandma had loved them. I knew they loved me partly because of their memories of her, but mostly because these were women who loved. There was something about that feeling, knowing these women would protect me—that made me want to cry my eyes out.

Afterwards, the relief society president came up to introduce herself, and I did cry. She took me into the kitchen and just held my hand while I cried. I couldn't explain to her that I just felt so much relief. That it felt so good to be in a place where I knew I'd be taken care of. She said, This day must be hard for you because she thought I was crying that I didn't have any children. It felt too dramatic to explain that I was just so grateful and relieved.

I used to think when people would say, Everyone is a mother! You don't have to have kids! that it was the most boring thing ever to say—I just didn't even care. I have an awesome mom—that seemed good enough. Who cared about me being a mother? Not me.

But then, a couple of years ago, someone pointed out that Eve is called the mother of all living before she ever has children. I've wondered about that curious sentence (which happens before God even asks Adam and Eve to have children). I wondered about that sentence and watched the women in my ward because suddenly I began to see that perhaps we don't quite understand the connection of motherhood and women very well. Those women were mothers to me. I have a mom. It's not like I needed 150 other moms. But, like I said, perhaps our lack of understanding is encouraged by an insufficient lexicon.

The women of that ward did protect me. And, that protection included encouragement, belief, hope, love. It felt powerful to be with them and to be loved by them.

As Sherri Dew explains in her awesome discussion here:
Motherhood is more than bearing children, though it is certainly that. It is the essence of who we are as women. It defines our very identity, our divine stature and nature, and the unique traits our Father gave us. [...]
Few of us will reach our potential without the nurturing of both the mother who bore us and the mothers who bear with us. I was thrilled recently to see one of my youth leaders for the first time in years. As a teenager who had absolutely no self-confidence, I always sidled up to this woman because she would put her arm around me and say, “You are just the best girl!” She loved me, so I let her lead me. How many young men and women are desperate for your love and leadership? Do we fully realize that our influence as mothers in Israel is irreplaceable and eternal?  Sherri Dew—Are We Not All Mothers?
So, no, mother's day is not a sad day for me as a single woman. First, I'm just gigantically grateful for my own mom. Then, I remember to be more aware of those around me who may need the power of my faith, hope, and love for them.

This is not to say that it's inappropriate to cry your eyes out on mother's day because you want to have kids. It is a real grief. So if you're single, cry it out. If you're married, cry it out. And if you just miss your own Mom, for whatever reason, cry it out. We will all just cry it out together.












My Radical Argument about YSA Wards

mormon ysa ward

First you should know that I spent 11 years in YSA wards. I loved them. I mean, I really loved them.  When I heard once that there were apostles who wanted to dissolve them, I was like‚ why?! they are so awesome! But dear people, I think they should be disbanded. Here's my main reason: at a vulnerable time, they divorce single people from the central concept of the gospel—the family.

I didn't realize the full effect of this absence until I transferred my records to a family ward. I thought I knew what a family ward was like. I grew up in one! I visited one at Christmas, Thanksgiving, and all summer! But, it's totally different when you have a calling, and when you are battling it out with everyone else.

Switching over to the family ward, I realized I loved hanging out with grandmas and grandpas. I loved talking with people who'd been married 20 years about my dating life. They had such good advice! I realized I had something relevant to say in relief society and sunday school because we were all facing challenges—and we all needed the atonement.

As someone interested in getting married, it was awesome to witness a wide variety of couples working together through various stages of life. Because, in a YSA ward, for years and years and maybe years, a single person can worship without witnessing any family (functional or dysfunctional) besides their bishopric's.

I know the YSA wards are designed to help single people meet other single people, but sometimes I think that goal could be achieved in simpler ways—FHE activities, sports, and meaningful contributions in the community (meaning you are part of a group that goes every wednesday to tutor refugees or work at the homeless shelter).

The truth is that while the YSA wards can facilitate relationships, they can also create a culture of eternal dating. They can encourage unrealistic expectations about what marriage really looks like. They can majorly encourage the idea that unless someone is married, they aren't a full citizen in the gospel of Jesus Christ. And! maybe more importantly, they prevent really great learning opportunities that occur when worshipping with people from all kinds of life situations.

You probably disagree with me. It's okay. I will just leave you with these two things:

1. My dating life is better since I went to the family ward. Partially because I get set-up with more people (you have 300 people who have single grandsons/nephews/brothers/friends). Partially because when I want to go to a social event, it's because I want to go and not because I feel like I have to go.

2. In addition to worship being more focused on using the atonement to overcome all kinds of challenges, I have never experienced more love and support and awesome back-up than in a family ward—especially when facing challenges that might seem irrelevant to married people. It's super gorgeous.

These two articles might also be relevant here and here.

You probably still disagree with me. Again, it's okay. But, perhaps advocate in your ward for FHE and other activities that really contribute within your wider community. If we're going to have 300 talented, awesome, single people worshipping together, we might as well be a force for consistent usefulness with populations that need help & support. Wouldn't it be radical if your ward volunteered with one specific organization every monday night for 6 months? What meaningful relationships and connections would be made both within the ward and outside the ward?

!


Anyways, tell me your thoughts on the situation.



On Elizabeth Smart's comments about the stick of gum object lesson


This is actually just a placeholder for a post I want to write about how we sometimes discuss chastity in church. The post will be entitled, "Of Boards with Holes, Sticks of Gum, Pieces of Pie, and Variously Defiled Roses—No One is a Licked Cupcake".

But first, I think it's really important to listen to Smart's awesome & brave comments in context. It's about twelve minutes. I think it's important mainly because most the news media coverage makes it sound like she didn't escape because of an abstinence lesson—which I think is disrespectful to Elizabeth who says the reasons are complicated. The truth is that she discusses a couple of factors that parents, leaders, and other youth stakeholders could use, practically, to better prepare kids to face crises of fear and manipulation. One being the fear for her family, and the other being an absolutely ridiculous object lesson about abstinence.

As Mormons, it's a great opportunity to think about things we say that might seem "normal" because we've heard other people say them, but actually don't teach doctrine. In fact, some of these phrases and analogies teach the opposite of doctrine. Her comments regard her rape which wasn't her fault, and really highlights how teaching a principle of the gospel of Jesus Christ out of fear is always wrong. God wants us to teach principles out of love.

Clearly, I have more to say about this. But, I'm still thinking.


single + mormon + celibate

This post was originally posted on my more mysterious and vague blog (the one I write for friends and family). Click here to read it in that context. I'm reposting it here because it's still true. If you're single and practicing celibacy for religious and/or personal reasons—I'd love to know your perspective, or what you've learned/are learning. 


When I was little my biggest fears included the following:
  • Bloody Mary living under my bed. 
  • Leaving the lunch money for me and my 2 siblings on the bus (this actually happened). 
  • My sundial science project being used as a shovel in the sand box (this also happened). 
  • Not ever getting married.
From my seven year-old perspective, the whole dating/marriage process sounded suspiciously like a gigantic, maybe horrifying, round of picking teams. No one wants to be picked last—ever.

But I was seven. And, who really thinks about things like that for very long? So, then I grew up.

When I was 24, I moved into little a apartment with two 20 year-olds. At this point in my life, at least one round of close friends had already been married for 3 years, I was about to graduate from college, and that old sneaking suspicion about picking teams and dating was occasionally haunting me.
By this time, I'd already read, He's Just Not that Into You*. So, I wasn't buying excuses like, "You're too independent" or "He's just intimidated."

Being Mormon narrows a person's dating pool to a very small amount. I mean... very small—if you want to date in your religion. Add in a personality which is sort of different...well, the pool is tiny (maybe the size of a fish bowl?).

I was beginning to wonder, what if?

In my new ward I had a relief society president who was 28, single & totally cool. She was an artist. Which doesn't mean anything to anyone else, except I didn't know too many artists, and I wanted to be one some day. When our ward had an 80's dance, she had the coolest outfit. She wasn't sitting lonely and sad anywhere.

I never heard her complain or be bitter (although I'm sure she complained to friends, her mom, etc., because that is totally normal).

But, she took every opportunity to be open about her experience. She told us over and over again that being RSP didn't make her immune to pain. She told us she'd had her heart broken. A lot. And she said it hurt. A lot.

Then she told us that we must decide for ourselves if Christ really came to save us from our sins and our heartbreak. Because if he did, he could help us make that pain into something compassionate and beautiful. If he didn't? What was the point of coming to church?

So I decided. And, I decided that if I had to be single for a long time or my whole life, I wanted to be like her. I didn't want to be sitting anywhere sad and bitter. I wanted my life to equal happiness and hope and love. Christ was just going to have to help me because I really believed he died so that I didn't have to feel despair.

At the end of that year, my super cool relief society president got married and moved away. And, I moved away. But, I’ve never forgotten her or the things she said to me. (She doesn’t know the wake of healing and hope she left behind her. She could never have any idea.)

***

In the years since, I've really seen how God can take pain and just take it out of your hand, roll it around for a while, and hand back this gorgeous glowing lovely thing.

It sounds so easy, but there have been nights when maybe the neighbors heard me crying through the bathroom window.

You learn real fast how and why agency matters in any hard thing. It would be so easy it get brittle and mean. And ugly. Ugliness is so easy when he just stood you up again. Or after he promised to marry you then changed his mind. Or after he never calls. Or after you haven't been on a date in months.

I wanted to fall in love with my best friend just like my friend Sam. I wanted to have ten kids. Just like my mom. I wanted my husband to have memories of me when I was 21, and to know what my hair looked like before it started turning white. I mean, I had really pretty knees when I was 23.

***
It takes a lot of breathing. And conscious choices you feel in your gut. (Also, real life prayers where you really believe you're talking to someone who created you.) (And maybe yoga). But, its possible to feel great happiness despite great disappointment.

One time, I was watching my younger brother cut open a pomegranate. He cut off maybe half an inch from the top of the fruit. I was busy shredding lettuce, but I happened to glance over just as he made the cut. In all my life, I'd never seen a color so deep and red and lovely. The color was made up of all these seeds packed together. Just jammed together. It looked so vulnerable and hopeful at the same time. I thought to myself: I want that to be my heart*.

***
So, every day = my agency. My life is just as fun and gorgeous as I can dream it up to be. So yes, thank you, I will be delighted when I finally see those stained glass cathedral windows all lit up—I had no idea I just had to drive by at six in the morning.

And yes, thank you, I will love you forever for helping me pick up the contents of my art box—in the cold, on the icy sidewalk, you even found my needles.

Thank you, you can't marry me, but you minced garlic and sauteed vegetables whenever you knew I was starving.

Or. Here is a sunset with clouds, here is a sunset without, and here is a sunrise that wakes you up, and here is rain in the middle of the day, and here are some Christmas lights, some oranges, some raspberries, a dad who misses his plane so he can replace your garbage disposal, a brother who likes hanging out with you even when you're cranky, another brother who calls you to tell you his swim times, a sister who lets you call her when you have horrific nightmares.

How about neighbors who shovel your walk when it snows? a mom who makes you turn around instead of driving all night through a snowstorm? or maybe some friends who make you laugh super hard all the time? This is all in addition to things like waking up in a room with blue and green wallpaper, the view from the corner of my street (at night), and the existence of elephants and whales.

Is every day like that Yael Naim music video? 
Nope. I’m working on it though.

*** 
The truth is we all have hard things we have to live through, suffer through and/or overcome.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my friends was telling me she was lonely. She said a lot of things that were similar to what the author of the NYT article said. Things like, wouldn't God want me to have this experience? Wouldn't he want me to share my life with someone? Then she said, I don't want to die a virgin.

I mean... it was sort of dramatic. I also knew she'd just kissed someone like two weeks before. I wanted to tell her: "There are people in this room (there were a lot of people in the room) who have real problems! Pull yourself together! At least you can swim! You can taste food! You have the use of all your limbs!"

I could tell she was sort of fragile about the whole issue—so I said something normal.

The whole point of life is to have experiences specifically designed to bring us closer to God—and to become like God. Sometimes the experiences are happy. Sometimes they are really difficult. Really difficult. Sometimes the difficult things last our whole entire lives. But, the design is the same for both kinds. Isn't that a relief?! Isn't that joyous? We can't lose! No one loses! Yay! We all get to be acquainted with God (if we want)! It's so hard! It's really really hard! And so fun!

The normal thing I told my friend (and I only repeat here in the hope that it could help someone else—because it really helped me):
One time one of my friends—who is pretty religious but has no issues with sex while dating—asked me about why I wouldn't have sex. I told him some reasons. Mainly, I made a promise to God. And, I happen to love God. I don't really want to let him down.

Then, he said, "I can't believe you've never had that experience—you don't know what it's like."

I said, "I just know something different."
For the first time I realized that what I was choosing wasn't a lack or an absence, but an experience that was helping me gain real knowledge.

So yeah, I can walk into a room of professional, adult people and not feel like I am a child trapped in a woman's body. I know something different than most of them—probably all of them, and its completely appropriate because I'm not married.

I'm not celibate because I've been told all my life it's wrong to have sex before marriage. Not even because pre-marital celibacy automatically prevents unplanned pregnancy, stds, one-night stands, and a lot of emotional trauma.

I’m celibate because it’s a form of worship, it’s a physical practice of faith hope and charity, a sacred prayer--and something that brings me closer to God (who loves me).*

***

Notes regarding:
  • The book He's Just Not that Into You—I probably need to read it again because I still forget stuff in there— like, he's not that into you if he's not asking you out... a basic principle (I know. Gosh) (bwhahaha).
  • The heart/pomegranate story—You probably don't believe me. But go buy a pomegranate, cut it in half and see what pops into your mind. Probably something amazing.
  • This post is intended to be read as another story in response to an essay posted in the NYT.

easter + perplexed

I recently found a talk by Elder Maxwell that is changing my life. I was 14 when he gave it. Which doesn't mean anything except I'm real grateful for the technology that allows me to listen to old conference talks pretty much wherever I want, whenever I want. The first half of the talk will kick your butt. The second half will make you weep from love and the promise of hope. Oh that promise.
Do we understand—really comprehend—that Jesus knows and understands when we are stressed and perplexed? The complete consecration which effected the Atonement ensured Jesus' perfect empathy; He felt our very pains and afflictions before we did and knows how to succor us." —Neal A. Maxwell "Swallowed Up in the Will of the Father"
I really love that word perplexed. We talk a lot about making it through hard challenges, painful challenges, but not very often about the hurt of confusion. But, the atonement offers perfect empathy even for that rubik's cube of a wound. Especially when we have to wait one hundred years for understanding.





deus ex machina


Or, god out of the machine.
Referring to the way some Greek poets would lower a god onto the stage via crane to save the hero (!) and provide the audience with a happy ending. Horace (whom I love) detested this device. He said writers must never use such an artificial resource for finishing a narrative or solving a story problem.
Normally, I agree with Horace. 

But, there are certain occasions in my life where I find myself praying for a real life deus ex machina. Except that God himself will save me. Solve the problem. End this particular part of the story quick and gorgeously with a miracle and festive banners of untold happiness.

Even as I say this small prayer, save me—I know it won't be quick and gorgeous. God will not appear on the stage via crane. He will save me. But, it will require a journey.

Which means a lot of boring walking.
It will be so long.

I'm dreading it. 
But, I've read C.S. Lewis' story about Cupid and Psyche. As the sister says of the gods who didn't answer her for years and years and years, "How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” 

And, so i will learn happiness out of kindness and gratitude. And love, out of many things.





one thing about grace



I'll begin this short post by saying that I'm not totally sure how to define grace technically. We use it for so many gorgeous & useful reasons, both religiously and non-religiously. But, in terms of the atonement—perhaps after a period of astonishing pain or wanderingness—grace sometimes feels like finding yourself in a very lovely room with extremely comfortable chairs. There are also wood floors (and wonderful light from south facing windows). You can walk around in this room barefoot because the floors are always warm. You may find yourself asking a hundred times, do I really feel so comfortable and lovely here? and the answer is, Yes. None of the chairs go away. And, neither does the relief. You never have to leave.


You didn't know that the easiness of the yoke would be forgiveness.
The burden so bright.