Why Are LDS Women So Cliquey?

I believe I have figured it out. While in casual conversation with non-LDS people, I often encounter discontent and disappointment with the less than amicable behavior on the part of LDS members toward non-members. The LDS gospel teaches its believers to show love, acceptance and forgiveness to all people, no matter the circumstance. Tolerance, friendship and fellowship are important key factors in this principle. However, when a group of LDS mothers gather at the park for the playdate they scheduled with each other at church the previous Sunday, they sit together, talk together and are often completely oblivious to the non-member mother sitting alone watching her own kids play. Often, the morning rolls on without a single invitation for conversation to the lone non-member mom. She may hear them talking and sharing experiences with each other, and wonder how they all know each other and why they don’t seem interested in her.

I don’t think the LDS women intentionally exclude the non-member mother. She is simply an unknown element in an otherwise familiar environment. It’s not that the LDS women consider themselves superior to the non-member mom, or think she’s not worthy of their time. The perceived impenetrable walls of this exclusive “clique” are, in reality, non-existent.

Think of it this way: Two strangers on a bus may sit the entire duration of the ride without saying one word to each other. When they get to their stop, they go their separate ways, still silent. It may not be that they dislike each other, or that they even have noticed one another at all. For most people, it is just difficult, awkward, and sometimes even uncomfortable to approach a stranger and strike up a conversation. It isn’t any different with an LDS woman. They have their circle of friends, and usually stick close to them because it’s comfortable… and it’s easy. Think about it. If an LDS woman is even remotely faithful, she will be attending church on Sunday. That’s one out of every seven days that she will encounter and associate with the same people. Friendships are almost hard to avoid attaining when a person spends that amount of time with the same group of people. Even if she’s not looking for it, she’s most likely going to find some kind of companionship in another member of her congregation. The LDS Relief Society also has at least one monthly activity for women to attend and socialize with each other, as well as frequent service and humanitarian projects.

With all those opportunities, it would be difficult not to find a friend or two. Being members of the same religion also makes it easier for an LDS woman to relate to another member woman. That being said, the reason why LDS women seem so cliquey is because it is simply easier for one member to befriend another because of all the opportunities the LDS church provides for social interaction. If only the Sunday church meetings were attended, 14% of the days in the year would have some kind of member-member interaction. How many days of the year do you spend more than 15 minutes at a time with someone other than family? Not to excuse LDS women’s reclusive comfort of familiarity, but human nature is to do what is easiest. Sometimes we all, including LDS women, just need to step outside our comfort zone and welcome a stranger.

Children and Fathers

Children slow parents down. But not necessarily in a bad way. I've come to the realization that having children slows time. Or at least consumes more of it than when I didn't have any. It takes at least twice as long to do just about everything. When I go to get a spoon out of the silverware drawer, instead of taking about three seconds, it takes at least six because someone wants to see what's in the drawer. When I want to eat breakfast, instead of taking fifteen minutes, it takes a half hour just to get everyone their food. It's another fifteen minutes to clean up the scraps off the floor and rinse the dishes. When I want to go somewhere, instead of grabbing my purse and hopping in the car in two minutes, it takes at least twenty because I have to find three to four pairs of shoes, pack a diaper bag with enough for four kids, load up four carseats, and grab drinks or snacks for the short car ride to our final destination.

I dread the infrequent occasions when Jeff has to go out of town for more than the day. That means I will have sole responsibility for all the kids for the entire day and night rather than having some help in the evenings. Putting four young children to bed at night can be an hours-long process if I don't skimp on their routines. Pj's, brushing teeth, reading books, changing diapers, dancing and prayers multiplied by four can be incredibly time consuming. The lack of distinguished conversation in a house full of children can also take a toll on my sanity.

Thinking about all the things I do each day, and all the strains, stresses and accountability that comes with raising children, I have no choice but to acknowledge and begin to treasure the amazing gift I have been given in my husband, Jeff. I truly and honestly do not think I could manage on my own without him. He is very intuitive to my sanity. He is amazing with our children and they know he loves them dearly. He is an incredible husband and has so many qualities that I really admire and appreciate. He works very hard so that I can stay home to raise our kids. He has amazing accountability and is very honest. He has the best work ethic of anyone I have ever met. He has a great sense of humor and a comfortable personality. He keeps me sane. He keeps me happy. He is my true love, and my best friend and I love him eternally. I don't think some people realize the role that the husbands and fathers play in the child rearing process. Many believe that the man's role is to work and provide for the family while the woman tends the children and house. What many fail to realize is the enormous pressure that is lifted off the woman's shoulders when her husband comes home and shows his support. This is definitely the case in my house. I really couldn't do it without his love and support. Happy Father's Day!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today is my birthday. 27 years old. I feel just a little old, but young at the same time. I feel old in the sense that I am not quite as fit as I was ten years ago. I decided to show Sarah some "tricks" on the grass the other day (really it was gymnastics). I did a few handstands, some cartwheels, front walkovers, and even helped her do a few things. No problem, right? Right. It really wasn't any problem. Until I did a roundoff-back handspring. I did it fine. A little slower, heavier feeling, and ill-formed, but I did it properly. It was when I finished and stood back upright that I noticed it. I had hyper-extended my elbow. Feeling rather foolish, and even slightly disheartened, I told Sarah that Mama is too old to do tricks like that anymore. Exercises in gymnastics, moving boxes up and down stairs, lifting heavy kids, bending down to pick up stray toys, and even sitting for long periods of time is longer is innocuous to my back. It aches daily, though not to any debilitative degree.

On the brighter side, I'm not too old to play tag with my toddlers, lift both boys to look out thier bedroom window, dance with Audrey, and spot Sarah for many of her new "tricks" she likes to try. I can still play with my kids at the park, walk around the zoo or dinosaur park for hours before I'm ready to go home, and go on hours-long shopping marathons on a Saturday afternoon and still take pleasure in the time out of the house. So... I'm not too old. Not too young. I guess I'm at just the right age. I'm definitely happy with my life, even if I can't be as careless as I used to with my physical stressors. Either way, it's my birthday. So Happy Birthday to Me!

A Bit of a Rant

Have you ever had someone call to set up an appointment of some kind, only to call and cancel or change the time? I have. Many more times than I'd like to try and count. We are moving into our new house soon, and need to find someone to take our place in this rental. The landlord has yet to post an ad or put out a sign, so I decided to place one myself. We graciously informed her more than a week ago that we would be leaving in 30 days. Therefore, after eight days of lost advertising face time, I was getting a little annoyed, not to mention restless. Now there are only twenty-two days until we plan to vacate the premises. Apparently she's not as gung-ho about getting someone in here as I am. Even if she thinks it will rent quickly, I would rather have someone lined up now rather than wait until the last minute before we know whether we will have to make yet another useless rent payment. (don't get me started on rent vs. own).

Having been listed online for a little less than a day, our home got it's first interested inquiry. The guy called me this morning asking if he and his girlfriend could come see our place this afternoon around 6:30. As my eyes panned the overly cluttered, hugely messy room, I reluctantly agreed while my mind immediately started planning a course of action to get this place in ship shape and ready to show. There was much to do, and extremely little time to do it. His call came in around 12:30pm. I know that a little more than six hours should seem like plenty of time for a little organization. However, my house is full of four young offspring and their mountains of toys, clothes and shoes which were so delicately scattered throughout the entire house when he called. It seems as if when I'm sick for a day (like I was on Sunday) the whole house seems to go to pot.

When it comes down to it, a little more than six hours was just what we needed to be ready to showcase our place. Unfortunately, 6:30 came and went with no ring of either of our two doorbells. 6:34 turns and the phone begins to ring.

"Hello?"

"Hi Ashleigh, it's ****. I called about coming to see the house at 6:30."

"Yes."

"Well, it's 6:30 and I'm not there."

"I noticed."

Would it be possible to come around 8:00 instead?..."



And so on. The conversation continued as he began to try to explain away his tardiness. As it turns out, it was fine. We had not planned on leaving, or turning in early or anything. Eight is our boys' bedtime, but we thought we could show them their room first, and then put them down for sleep while they saw the rest of the house. They did end up coming at eight, and we did show them the place and pass along our landlord's information. That's not really the point. The point is: What if we HAD planned on leaving? Or what if we normally put our kids to bed at seven? Why couldn't he have called earlier so we weren't racing around thinking we had less time than we actually did? I'm sure his father-in-law didn't hurt his back that very minute and ask him to come pitch hay right away before the storm hits (which is where he said they needed to go between 6:30 and 8:00). Storm? Wait a minute. The skies are perfectly clear...

In short, JUST BE COURTEOUS, PEOPLE! You are not the only one in the world, and your actions never affect only you.

Now that the venting is finished. I can go enjoy my immaculately clean house for the next few minutes before I need to go to bed. And that's probably all it will be because as soon as the kids wake up, the toys, clothes, shoes and other clutter will magically reappear before I have a chance to blink. I love my kids, but they sure are messy.

The Golden Rule

"Do unto others as you would have done unto you" or some version of that statement is probably known by most people, child and adult alike. It is a simple concept and easy to follow, right? One would think so. In the broad variety of experiences and situations I have encountered in my life, I have come to wonder if anyone considers class or status when practicing this idea. It has been extremely typical for me to observe a person treating someone they perceive to be in better standing or social status than himself with respect and good form, only to turn around in the next minute and speak condescendingly and give patronizing glances to one he considers beneath him.

For example, while sitting in a nice restaurant for lunch, I might notice the table across the aisle occupied by two businessmen. They spend the time waiting for their order to be taken joking and laughing about the happenings at work and planning future financial investments. They conduct thier business together with poise and dignity looking relaxed and comfortable. The air about them immediately changes when the waitress asks one of them to repeat an item he had just ordered after a loud noise from the kitchen drowned out thier voices. He rolls his eyes annoyed and looks over at his associate while making a gesture meant to convey the air-headed ignorance he so clearly deduces from the waitress' simple request for repetition. They clearly consider the lowly occupation of "Server" to be undeserving of the high regard and respect an educated businessman is entitled to. He is very apparently under the impression that he merits competent and accurate service from this ignoble lower class peon.

Having encountered similar behavior from most of her patrons on a daily basis, the waitress' self perception and her perception of others has likely been permanently formed. Having dealt with unceasing condescendence on a daily basis, the same superciliousness carries through to her own behavior toward people she feels are inferior to herself. For instance, when she leaves work for the day after the unseemly businessman incident, she may travel over to pick up her child from daycare. When she arrives and claims her son, he may have an unattended runny nose. She scoffs at the caregiver and sarcastically asks, "You couldn't find a tissue?"

While not one of these occupations is more or less important to our culture than the others, it seems that our society seems to have an inappropriate bias toward higher paying, higher regarded ones. If people truly followed the admonishment in the Golden Rule, there would be no social class or status. Everyone would simply be nice to everyone else, or at least treat them how they want to be treated, however that may be. Though I highly doubt there is anyone who truly prefers to be treated like they are inferior.

"What's In a Name" - Stolen from Stephanie

1. My rock star name (first pet and current car): Going with our first pet (that I remember) when I was a kid, it would be Sugar Civic. Going with our first pet as my own family, and our other car, it would be Cosmoe Durango
2. My gangsta name (favorite ice cream flavor and favorite cookie): Cherry Vanilla Almond Sandy
3. My "fly girl" name (first initial of first name and first 3 letters of last name): Afar
4. My detective name (favorite color and favorite animal): Purple Butterfly
5. My soap opera name (middle name and city where you were born): Michelle Enumclaw
6. My Star Wars name (first 3 letters of your last name and first 2 letters of your first name): Faras
7. My superhero name (2nd favorite color and favorite drink with "The" in front): The Pink Dr. Pepper
8. My Nascar name (first names of your grandfathers): Alvin Grant
9. My lounge singer name (name of your favorite perfume/cologne and your favorite candy): Lucky Skittles
10. My witness-protection name (mother's and father's middle names): Lynn Lance

I kinda like Lucky Skittles and Cosmoe Durango

Watercolor Paintings

I have recently taken up watercolor painting. (Thanks Kathy and Linda for helping me learn how) I really enjoy creative projects, and watercolor is very fun to try. The thing I like most about it is that I can sit down to paint something and be completely finished in a couple of hours. It dries fairly quickly and I can complete a painting without having to wait long periods of time beetween phases. I'm not very big on waiting to finish things. I've been known to stay up until 3am finishing a garment I was sewing because I was too excited to see the finished project. I even took a sewing class in college once and didn't have the patience not to finish the skirt I was making before the instructor could finish teaching how to properly do some things. Anyway. I'm proud of my recent accomplishments, so I decided to share. I'm posting my first six paintings here. I'll try to put them in the order in which they were painted. Hope you enjoy! I sure enjoyed painting them.


Painting #1. What got me interested in watercolor painting in the first place was an advertisement in a flyer that was distributed with our city utility bill. The City Historical Association was looking for paintings of historical sites in the area done by local residents to compile into a calendar for 2009. I decided I'd give it a try since I live right across the street from a cemetery founded in the early days of the town. This is what I came up with. For my first painting ever, I guess it was okay. But I consider it a little too Simpsons-esque for me. Can't you just see Bart or Lisa running down that path doing something mischievous to one of the gravestones or something? Yeah. It's a little to cartoonish to submit for the calendar. Maybe if I try it again in the next few weeks and it turns out better, I'll submit something. We'll see.Now, keep in mind that I wouldn't have posted this one at all, except I wanted to show the progression from 1-6. It's definitely not one of my finer creative renderings...



Here's my painting #2. Kathy and I painted these watermelons from a picture we found on the internet. She was very helpful in teaching me how to paint that day. Thanks Kathy!



Here's #3. These are some peaches I painted to go with the watermelon



#4. I painted these oranges to complete this set of fruits that I want to hang in my kitchen.



Here's the fruit set framed and waiting to be hung until we get into our new house. These ones were all done in the month of March, 2008.




Here we are a couple of months later (mid-May, 2008) and I'm learning to appreciate the awesome beauty of Northern Utah. The weather has been amazing, and the scenery even more awesome. Late Monday night, I was coming out of a store and walking to my car when I saw the moon emerging from behind the mountains. It was a beautiful, clear night, and the moon was absolutely magnificent. If I were a little more talented at this painting thing, I probably could have captured the stunning scene that I saw in person that night. Here's painting #5.



The next day I saw a huge plume of smoke rising from somewhere off in the distance and decided that I wanted to try my hand at painting landscapes. Here's the result. I'm not completely satisfied with the depth of this one, and I wish I had left the two mountain peaks to the left of the smoke out, and maybe added a bird or two, but this is what I turned out last night. Painting #6.



Here are those two, framed and waiting. I'm not sure if I want to keep these two together as a set or separate them, or paint new ones to match (like maybe another nightscape for the moon one, and a dayscape for the smoke... I'm undecided). Any suggestions or opinions on that matter would be appreciated. Do you like them together? Should I separate them into two different sets? Or keep them as singles?



Here's the whole lot. They're standing on my piano right now until I decide to pack them up for our new house.