:Naiahdot

Nothing brings my hand to my forehead and an exasperated sigh to my lips like reading misinformation about the church in a news article. Whether the it was fed to or crafted by the writer, it’s frustrating. I am the only member in my family, and often I feel like they take these reporters’ words about what our church is ‘really’ about more than they do my own. Slandar, libel, and more inadvertent forms of misinformation have plagued our history even longer than we’ve been a church. These incorrect ideas and the opinions that they influence impact us all in different ways, and up until now there really wasn’t much that we could do about it. Now, there is; it’s the LDS News Watch website, brought to us by the More Good Foundation. (more…)

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So, late Wednesday evening, I realized something important—I didn’t actually *want* to cook Thanksgiving dinner. I did it last year for the first time, and it was a ton of work and stress, and really, it did little to engender feelings of gratitude in me, or my family. It was just a meal put down in front of them. They hadn’t been part of making it, and so they felt little ownership of it, or sense of participation in it. It was kind of flat. I’m not a big fan of get-togethers that *should* be meaningful slipping into a production-put-on-for-the-guests kind of mode. There’s something undeniably plastic, desperately shallow, and unforgivably stepford in it all.

Holidays are a teaching opportunity, whether we realize it or not, and that is not what I want to teach my children. Such values are purely of the world, rooted in hollow, temporal pride. Time is our most precious commodity in this life, and what we spend it on before our children’s eyes teaches them more than any lecture ever could. (more…)

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He’s dead. He has been for a month now. I’m only just now feeling it, just now really crying.

On September 5, I had a lump removed from my breast, and as much as I told everyone that I was sure it was nothing, I feared. Any mother, excuse me, anyone would. Last wednesday, I had yet another surgery on a different part of my body to remove some tissue. This time, I didn’t bother with the façade. I’m a chess-player’s daughter, and I played this one out to every conceivable endgame, and it showed. Maybe being deeper in the body, the fear rooted deeeper into my soul; I don’t know. I was lost to the world, locked across the board from a spectre of an opponent, and play as I might, I found myself knocking my king over again and again. (more…)

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