Back in November, when I was trying to come to grips with the fact that Christmas would, indeed, come again, I started trying to think of what I could change within myself to help Christmas go more smoothly than it did last year. I made a list: let go of trying to make things perfect, enjoy the good moments as they come, get enough sleep, let go of what isn’t essential, live in the present instead of pining for the days of little ones, enjoy my memories from Christmas when I was a kid.

But even as I worked on these things, I continued to have a very specific prompting: study Mary.

Study Mary.

(My favorite painting of the birth of Christ, Brian Kershisnk's "Nativity.")

It never stopped tickling my conscious until I decided to do it. So, for the past six weeks or so, I have been studying Mary, the mother of Christ. This isn’t the first time I’ve pondered on Mary—remember my broken Mary? Every year when I pack her away with the rest of my Christmas things, I almost decide to leave her out all year because she reminds me that as mothers we continue to press on, to do our work, even when it is hard. Especially when it is hard.

But I haven’t ever thoroughly studied her.

This month, I have delved into the scriptures to learn about Mary, reading all of the parts of the New Testament (not just the Christmas story) that mention her. I went into my studies thinking of Mary with preconceived ideas, especially that she was meek and mild. But after reading so much about her, I have decided that while perhaps she was humble—certainly her socioeconomic level was—I don’t think she was either of those things.

Consider all of the difficult things she experienced:

• Carrying a child which her society most likely believed was illegitimate.
• Having to tell her betrothed of her experience with the angel.
• Traveling to Juda to see Elizabeth, to Bethlehem to deliver her baby, to Egypt to save him, to Cana for the wedding, to Jerusalem when Christ was crucified. Traveling during her lifetime must have been an exhausting experience.
• Hearing the prophecy of Simeon and knowing, for her entire experience of mothering Christ, that she would experience great sorrow.
• Being poor. One of the proofs of Mary and Joseph not being wealthy is that, when they brought Christ to the temple for purification after his birth, they brought a pair of doves instead of a yearling lamb and a dove; this was a far less costly option.
• Having to share her son with the world. “Who is my mother, or my brethren?”
• Witnessing her son be crucified.

Meek suggests submissive, yielding, compliant, deferential. In my mind, Mary is none of these things. She is involved, actively, in the processes around her. For example, when the angel comes to her, Mary is not passive or silent. She first thinks about the angel’s words, and then she asks him a question. It’s only after the angel has explained things to her that she says “behold the handmaiden of the Lord.” To me, this means she didn’t just do whatever the angel told her to do. She listens to him, she asks questions, and then, in the gap between Luke 1:37 and 38, she chooses.

She wasn’t acted upon, but acted.

I think it’s an important distinction, her choosing. It says something about her character—that she was brave, thoughtful, and faithful, certainly, but also that she was confident and self-assured. It reminds me that we always have a choice, even when the decision feels impossible to make. Even when choosing what God wants you to do seems like the hardest thing you can imagine. And that her choice comes after the angel reminds her (and in my imagination, it is a gentle reminder) that with God all things are possible. I think she would need that knowledge throughout her entire life.

Mary is also unafraid to voice her testimony. Think of her in her cousin Elizabeth’s house, delivering her magnificat. She isn’t quiet and her words are not demure; they are full of praise and joy and exuberance. These aren’t words to be whispered, but shared with the world. She didn’t ask Zacharias for his testimony, didn’t defer to the priest in the house, but shared her own.

Those travels of hers, too, are inspiring to me. Difficult, yes, but I love that her world wasn’t as narrow as her own small town. I would like to know her stories, of what she saw in Egypt, of how she felt traveling to Bethlehem so very pregnant, of what she thought of the land and the landscapes. She went out into the world, she walked and ran and hiked mountains and crossed valleys. To me, a meek woman would rather stay at home.

Always the two words are paired: meek and mild. As if they are synonyms, almost, but they aren’t. Mild suggests gentle and tenderhearted, but also calm and good-hearted and easygoing. I wish we knew more stories about her raising Christ, about what it was really like. But I wonder (both with Mary and with my own mothering): where do children get their characteristics? Is it only nature, only nurture, or some of both? Those characteristics of mildness can also be used to describe Christ, and yet He was also (in my mind) passionate and unafraid to say the truth. I think Mary’s mildness comes in how she raised Christ, and while He was undoubtedly brimming with good qualities, he also learned them from His mother.  I doubt that mildness is the only quality her example provided. She was the mother of Christ. She taught him the things of this world, and I think to teach Him to be brave and outspoken and wise and kind and passionate and loving, she also embodied them.

I have learned so much from my study of Mary. Knowledge that helped me this Christmas—to remember what is important, to be both gentle and brave, to grasp the experiences that life brings me—but which will continue to help me. Mary might’ve been both meek and mild, but she was certainly other things. She was fierce, she was determined, she was brave. She spoke her mind, she experienced her world, she did everything she could to raise her son well. What she teaches me is twofold. One, what the true meaning of a blessed life is. (Because, remember: Gabriel says she is blessed, and then Elizabeth says she is blessed, and Mary herself acknowledges that she is blessed.)  It isn’t a life without trials and troubles, but one lived in the presence of the sacred. Mary’s example reminds me to find peace and joy in what is good in my life, no matter what is hard.

Second is what lingers from my favorite scripture about Mary: Luke 2:19.

To me, this means Mary continued to act. She continued to think about and find meaning in her experiences. She knew that what her life contained was larger than just herself, and that her choices influenced more than only her own life. This is true for my life, too. It reminds me that while I’ve been accused of overthinking and putting too much meaning into things, pondering and coming to understand “these things” in our lives is not a bad thing or a worthless use of time. It is essential—to ponder and to understand.

Studying Mary during the Christmas season helped me in many ways. It brought me a sense of peace that I have never felt. It helped me remember what is important. It guided me in seeking out the sacred in my own life. It helped me to be bold in stating what I felt passionate about. It kept me actively choosing—to be present, to be joyful or sorrowful as my experiences asked, to act swiftly upon promptings. And while (until I have a safe high shelf to display it on) I will still bubble wrap and pack away my broken Mary with the rest of Christmas, I will keep this new understanding of Mary with me all year.

(FYI: this is a long and Mormony post about very Mormony things, so feel free to skip it if you're not interested in that sort of thing.)

Imagine my mother:

A small, blonde girl with ringlets in a white dress, pale pink pinafore, bobby socks and patent-leather shoes. She’s walking down a tree-lined sidewalk on a Sunday morning in spring, one of those days when color has finally come back in the world and everything feel full of hope.

Her blonde curls bounce as she walks, and sometimes a skip makes its way into her stride.

Where is she going? To church.

Why is she alone? Because her parents—my grandparents Florence and Fuzz, who I love dearly and miss desperately, the two people in my life who taught me the most about unconditional love—didn’t believe in the church.

(Actually, I don’t know: did they not believe? or did they just not go for some reason?)

Her parents didn’t take her to church. Her brother didn’t join her. She just went—by herself.

This is one of my favorite imaginings of my mother, headed off to church by herself. I don’t know why she went (we don’t often talk about church), if she had friends there, if other families took her into their pews or she sat by herself. But it teaches me something, this image of my mother, about being faithful, about finding your own way.

She kept going to church. She grew up, went to BYU, got married in the temple. Then, two daughters and three years of miserable marriage later, she got divorced.

And she stopped.

Stopped going to the church. Stopped going to the temple. Stopped living an LDS life.

She met my dad and married him. He adopted her daughters and they had two more together. Sometimes we went to church, but usually not.

I don’t know what happened in her first marriage to make her turn away from the church—it is another thing we don’t talk about. But later, when her dad died and the steel mill closed, she went back to the church. She started wearing garments again, started praying, started going to Sunday meetings.

My dad was a different story.

He, too, grew up with parents who didn’t go to church. But his mom, unlike my maternal grandma, was vociferously agnostic. She taught him to question—the kind of questions shaped to poke holes rather than build knowledge. She taught him doubt and disdain. He was baptized, although I don’t know why: they never went to church; they didn’t believe.

Not going to church, he grew up. He lost his dad when he was far too young—only sixteen. He stopped playing football, he gave up his baseball dreams, he partied and ran wild and started working at the steel mill. Then he met my mom. He adopted my sisters. He gave up smoking after I was born. He taught me to love reading, being outside, and flowers. He was kind and gentle, an animated (if rambling) storyteller unafraid to tell a dirty joke. He blessed us when we were born and he baptized us, but he mostly ignored the church until he was in his sixties, when he decided to read the Book of Mormon and then to go to the temple.

He was ill with Alzheimer’s not three years later, and he never fully explained to me his change of heart. I don’t know why, exactly, he reached out to Christ, except for his worsening depression. But during those last years before he got sick, he lived the gospel.

These are the faiths of my parents.

And I could no more disavow them—all their imperfections and inconsistencies, all their leaving and staying and changing, their questions and their calm indifference—than I could disavow my own faith. My imperfect, shaky faith.

In our little Utah town, I grew up ostracized—baptized a member of the church, but not really Mormon. When my mom decided to go back to church, I went too, but only for a little while. When I sat in Young Women classes with girls who had never really been my friend and treated me like I wasn’t good enough, I felt a dissonance I didn’t have any words for, and I poured every bit of it into my adolescent rebellion. I challenged everything, sharp questions meant to poke holes. I was full of disdain for the church.

And then, when I was seventeen and at my darkest, I turned toward the church for light. I went back to church, as the saying goes, even though for me it wasn’t exactly a return. I’ve been a member my entire life, but I feel more like a convert. Like my mother, I found a reason to return. Like my dad, I have never stopped questioning. Perhaps not poking holes, but my faith isn’t the kind that automatically accepts everything. Instead, I question. I have to learn for myself why a thing is true or not true. My faith is restless and wandering, a doubting and troubled sort of thing.

It doesn’t always bring me peace, but I am accustomed to that. I have learned that I will likely never have a usual Mormon response to most things, will never intrinsically think like my lifetime-member friends do.

I have learned that this is a strength I bring to the church. My knowledge of truths does not come from blind obedience, but from using the truths. Trying them out, pondering them, seeing how they work in my life. Or don’t work. What I believe I believe because of my own tests and trials, not because someone told me I should believe it. I think this is a strength because it lets people see that having questions and pursuing answers doesn’t lead to rejection of the church but a deep and living knowledge.

But here I am, trying to understand a policy I don’t want to understand. Because I don’t want to think the way that someone would have to think in order to agree with this policy. It’s twofold:

1. Gay people who are married are considered to be apostate by the church. (“Apostate” meaning, basically, that you knew the truth but rejected it.)
2. Children of gay people who are married are not allowed to be blessed as babies nor baptized until they are 18 and willing to denounce their gay parent’s lifestyle.

The first part deserves its own blog post, but it is the second part that has me (and so many, many members) troubled. I don’t know what breaks my heart more:  children being denied blessing and baptism, or adult children being forced to renounce their parents. This doesn’t feel like my church. It feels like putting the sins of the father (or the mother) onto the child, which goes against every basic tenant of the church I know. It feels like punishing children. It feels like a statement: only the perfect are wanted here.

I know what someone else might say: that my response is too extreme. It’s not all imperfect families not welcome in the church. It’s just the gay ones. By saying that people in gay marriages are apostate, the church is saying, in effect, that they are unforgiveable. And their children barely redeemable. Which is untenable to me. How is having a gay father more wrong than having, say, a father who abuses his wife? Or cheats? Or drinks himself silly far too often? Or what about a heterosexual mother who is herself apostate, actively involved in teaching her kids to hate the church? Why would any children be denied entrance into the church because of what their parents do?

If my entrance to the church was based on my parents’ faith, would I be admitted? Because their faith was imperfect. Their parents’ faith was also flawed, if it even existed. What about my own children—if we are basing their acceptance within the church on my faith, they, too, might not be acceptable. Where will we draw the line at who is good enough? If it is only the children of gay people, that says one thing about the church. If gayness is just a beginning, and soon others also won’t be good enough, that is another.

But neither is good.

I don’t understand. I don’t know how to fit this into my faith. Strike that: I don’t want to fit it into my faith. I don’t want to think that only the perfect are wanted at church. And I don’t want to devalue my own parents’ imperfect contribution to and shaping of my faith. If I had to disavow them because of their mistakes, I don’t think I could, because, yes, their good choices influenced me, but their mistakes did more. How they dealt with their questions and struggles was a living example to me that in the church are experiences and truths that are worth the rest of it, the judgement and small-mindedness and the refusal to see that there isn’t always one right answer. The combination of their faiths taught me that faith is an imperfect thing that weakens or grows strong at different times and with different experiences, but is always also a choice.

And always before me is that image of my mother, walking to church all by her small, brave self.  She was imperfect, too. She came from “faulty” parents who smoked and drank and cheated and had coffee every single morning, tea with lunch, gin with dinner. What if she hadn’t been made to feel welcome? What if someone’s idea of her parents had made her feel less than, and she had stopped being brave and going to church on her own?

Without her imperfect faith, I wouldn’t have my own faith.

This wouldn’t matter to me at all if I didn’t love the gospel. The church is one of the frames I have built my adult life on, and I did that consciously. Not because it’s what you do where I live, but because I actively chose, and I chose because of the good in it. It brings me good things (as well as frustration) and it brings my family good things. This is not the first policy I have grappled with, it will likely not be the last one I cannot make peace with. It is, though, a thing I will have to love the gospel around. Despite of.

I thought writing this might bring me some sort of resolution, but it didn’t. Last night, late, I stood in front of the picture of Christ I have in my living room. Just looking at it and thinking, and a thought came to me: what would Christ want me to do? Does He want me choose obedience? Or does He want me to choose His example of loving others? That is a pair of spiraling questions, a gyre leading nowhere. Obedience should bring me to a place that allows me to love others.

And I don’t know what to do with this policy that makes it otherwise.

Last SundayI taught a lesson in church. I almost always love teaching or speaking at church (yes, even sacrament meeting talks) because it reconnects me with the skills I worked so hard to develop as a teacher. The lesson I taught was in Sunday School, which is a meeting with adults, where we focus each year on different scriptures. Speaking in sacrament meeting is not a hard thing for me because it’s just public speaking. Teaching in Relief Society (the women’s meeting) is one of my favorite things to do at church because it is discussing important things with my peers. But I’ve never taught in Sunday School and I was—well, not nervous. But unsure, because A—I’m not the world’s strongest scriptorian and B—men.  I had a fear that I would get a scriptural detail incorrect and that one of the men in the congregation would call me out on it.

I worried about this for the last week.

And honestly, if the teacher I was covering for wasn’t out of town, I might have called her and had her find someone else to teach. I’m in this strange place, spiritually. In one sense I feel like my testimony is very fragile. I am full of questions, concerns, and doubts. On the other hand, I feel very argumentative over the things I feel passionately about…and these topics are the ones that I don’t agree with the majority on. I was afraid that someone would say something that would get me started, and then I’d lose it and start ranting.

But I put on my big girl pants and I prepared my lesson. And I am so glad I did.

The topic was the hours between Christ’s experience in Gethsemane and His burial in the tomb of Joseph of Aramathaea. I read all four accounts (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and what stood out for me this time was the people who were involved. Pilate, the Sanhedrin, Caiaphas, Peter, Mary and John, the Roman Centurion, Judas, Barabbas, Herod, Nicodemus, the crowd following Christ and mourning as they went—so many people, each of them with something to give us. Something to teach. (There are entire sermons of knowledge to be gained just from Peter, aren’t there?) But the person who haunted me the most was one I hadn’t ever really paid attention to, or maybe even noticed, and that is Simon of Cyrene.

He was a man from “the country” (Mark and Luke tell us) who is chosen, seemingly at random, to carry Christ’s cross for him. Carrying your own cross was part of the process of crucifixion, but at that point Christ, weakened by his experiences in Gethsemane and the midnight trials, was physically unable to do so, and so Simon was given the task of carrying it for Him.

This small detail—only a few verses in each gospel, and not even mentioned by John—takes my breath away. It makes me need to weep in that ugly and painful way that weeping comes when I am ashamed. Sometimes I feel like Christian religions get in the way of following Christ. We each have our rituals and traditions and observances, but sometimes they obscure what should be our goal, which is to follow Christ and to act like He would act. Reading these parts of the New Testament with such intensity stripped everything else away and reminded me again: we are about Christ’s business and nothing else.

Or we should be. I should be.

What would Jesus do? should be our constant restraint, but Simon of Cyrene makes me ask myself a different question: what can I do for Christ?

Simon, in the right place at the right time, was given a difficult, painful task, to literally take up the wooden cross for Christ. If he had decided to stay in the country that day, someone else would have been chosen in his place. Someone else would have carried Christ’s cross. So the events that lead to Simon being there have meaning only to Simon himself, who had both the work and the privilege of that experience. What Simon did for Christ was both to be there—to be present and ready—and to lessen His suffering.

What can I do for Christ?

I cannot literally carry the cross for Him. But perhaps by helping other people carry their burdens, I can, in a circuitous manner, be like Simon. Which is why I felt that ugly, ashamed cry coming on: because I haven’t. I haven’t carried enough, especially for my children.  “Adolescence is an illness,” my grandma used to say, and “an illness that happens to one person in a family happens to everyone in the family,” I have learned. I have made their adolescence about me, about how much damage they have done, instead of trying to see what damaged place they are abiding in. I have tried to lift up their burdens, but not well enough.

I could extend this outward as well. I have complained to friends about my problems but not listened well enough to theirs.

I have been angry at some family situations when an attempt to understand would have been better.

Even at work, I have been annoyed and short tempered with people who haven’t had the opportunity to learn what I have learned, instead of just sharing what I know.

Like Simon, I have been in situations where I could have helped others—when I could have carried someone’s cross. Unlike Simon, I did not take them up.

But I also find myself thinking of Christ, and how even He had his moment. That time when, physically exhausted, his body literally could not do what He wanted it to do. Of course, I am nothing like Christ, only striving. But that gives me a sort of peace, a place to pause in the self-flagellation and to remind myself: all I can do is move forward. All I can do is, like Simon, be present. Or actively find ways to help others.

On Sunday evening, when I was cooking dinner, a neighbor knocked on my door. He’d stopped by because he wanted to thank me for my lesson. He said that I had said some things that had helped him with a struggle he had been having. He didn’t tell me the details and I didn’t ask—I didn’t need to know. And he thought he was stopping by to thank me, but really what he did was give me courage. Remember: I did not want to teach that lesson. And yet, by teaching it anyway—despite my fears of looking stupid or losing my tempter—I was able to help someone else. Or, more precisely, God nudged me a little bit to be in the right place to help someone else.

I am more ready now, after studying those scriptures, after saying yes to a hard thing I didn’t really want to try. I want to carry this new knowledge with me, to not forget. To not even be asked, but just to rush, to hurry, to notice more quickly who is struggling with their weight and to know how I can help them. I want to know the answer more and more profoundly:

What can I do for Christ?

In the LDS church, we have a scripture that says “Adam fell that men might be, and men are that they might have joy.”

(Adam and Eve, by Marc Chagall)

I love this scripture for its simple, succinct summary of the Christian viewpoint.

But it’s also always bothered me a bit, because really: Eve fell. She chose to partake of the fruit first. I suppose the traditional view is to see her as the person who let evil into the world. But I don’t see it like that. I think that Eve fell that choice might enter the world, and the power to choose is the power to create our own joy.

(Not as snappy as the scripture, I know.)

Think about the fruit she chose to pluck off of the tree: the knowledge of good and evil. Think of where she existed, in Eden, where all was peaceful. There have been many times in my life when I have longed to visit Eden. To not always be buffeted by regret, by fear that I am not a good enough mother or wife or Christian, to feel only absolute love and acceptance because that is all I’d ever known. But I don’t think I would want to live there. In truth, I imagine Eden as a somewhat sleepy place. (Really, quite a bit like the wood between the worlds.) But there Eve is, in Eden. In peace, and never having known anything other than peace, she makes a choice: to act.

But before I can imagine her making that choice, what I wonder about is God Himself, placing the tree of knowledge into the Garden of Eden in the first place. He knew that eventually, Adam and Eve would pick the fruit. He didn’t hide it from them. He knew they would choose; He knew the consequences. He didn’t have to put the tree there—He didn’t have to offer them that choice. But He did, because without choosing to learn, Eve and Adam could not move forward.

What I wonder, though, is how God could bear it. How could he bear giving them the freedom to make choices that would bring them sorrow?

But He did, of course. And Eve chose knowledge, and let choice loose into the world. Do you think she regretted her choice? I don’t think she did. Despite weeds and noxious plants, despite eating her bread by the sweat of her brow. I think even if she had known the sorrows her choice would bring to her, she would still chose.

This is because of two things. First is that in the Garden of Eden, in her constant state of peacefulness, it would be impossible to know, to truly understand, what joy feels like. Without the contrast of sorrow, joy is nothing but another green hue in a garden. We have to know sadness to understand happiness.

But I don’t think it’s only that. I think this is also true: knowledge gained by experience is valuable. What could Eve learn in Eden? God could tell her about having children and becoming a parent. But until she held the newborn Cain in her arms, she would never really know that terrifying joy of being a parent. Until she learned of his mistakes, she couldn’t imagine the sorrow a beloved child could bring to her. Until she experienced the results of her own choices, she could never know anything.

What I would like to ask Eve is this: was it worth it? Was the knowledge of both good and evil worth sharing the power of choice with the world? And once you know, is there ever again any real peace to be had?

I picture Eve, standing before the tree, in her last moments of innocence. Did she hesitate? Or was she certain that the knowledge would be worth it?

Then I picture myself, and the many times I have stood in front of the tree. The many times I have devoured the fruit of knowledge of both good and evil. When it has dripped from my chin and my elbows, and sometimes it has been sweetness, but quite often it has been bitter.

I think about what I have learned from those moments of gaining knowledge. If I could go back and change the bitter ones, I would not. I value too highly the knowledge I have gained.

But now I see my children. They are old enough to stand in front of the tree themselves. The can reach whatever forbidden fruit they choose to curve their hands around. They can tug it from its stem and lift it to their chins, and only when they have bitten will they know for certain if it is sweet or bitter fruit.

And this is the great conundrum of choice: I don’t want them to find the bitter fruit. I don’t want them to know that feeling of sorrow dripping from your fingertips. Even though I wouldn’t take back my own bad choices. Even though I value beyond bitterness or sorrow what my difficult experiences have taught me, I don’t want them to feel it. What I want is to be like God, simply telling Adam and Eve about the world.

What I want is to keep them safe in Eden.

Even though I know they can’t stay there. Even though I know they have to gain the knowledge they will obtain. Even though I know that sorrow will make them understand joy. I don’t want them to suffer. Instead, what I want is for my knowledge to be a thing I could give them. A stone talisman that they could always keep in their pockets, to rub with their thumb and receive knowledge without agony.

Of course it doesn’t work that way. And that is the bitter fruit I am eating right now: I cannot do it for them. Eve didn’t just give me the power to choose. She gave it to them, too. And oh, how I want them to choose correctly. How I want them to know that they create themselves by the power of choice. They choose their sorrows and their joys, and as they grow they get to wield that power with more and more independence, until the time when I am no longer an influence on what they choose, when I will also no longer be responsible for the consequences.

One of my edgy Mormon friends told me that he thinks the thing that God values most is agency. It is within God’s power to make us choose something different, but in nearly all cases, He does not. He always lets us choose, even knowing that our choices will bring us sorrow, suffering, darkness, or pain. I think my friend has a point, but I also think he is missing an equally important thing: the atonement. Through Eve’s choice, God gave us the power to choose. Through Christ’s choice, He gives us the ability to be forgiven when we choose incorrectly. Without one, neither would have any meaning. Forgiveness doesn’t always take away the consequences of our choices (I think, in fact, that it almost never does). But it does let us have a little piece of Eden within us, to go along with the salt of knowing.

What extraordinary power Eve unleashed on the world. What extraordinary opportunity. We are all, I am learning—me, and you, and my children as they grow, and yours—also Eves. Standing in front of the tree of knowledge. Plucking the fruit. Savoring. Grimacing. Shaping our lives. The only thing I can do to help my kids, as they stand and pluck, and pluck and reach and grab and have placed in their hands, is to teach, and to tell stories, and to hope that what I have taught will be enough to help them find the sweetness and endure the bitterness and not, in the end, be changed utterly by the knowledge they gain.

Sometime Tuesday night (or early Wednesday morning) I sat up in bed, entirely awake. (As opposed to the times I sit up only half awake, like last night when I nearly fell out of bed after sitting up and shouting "Taco Bell!") It hit me that I had gone to sleep without praying, which I confess I do more often than not, but which I should not have done that night, as something I had been praying for had happened: Nathan made the basketball team. I wanted and hoped and wished and prayed for this not because I'm a sports fanatic (or even really like basketball) but because he wanted it. He wanted it so badly, and so I wanted it for him. Wanted him to have a team, and the experience of being an athlete, and to find his Thing, the certain something that everyone needs to define themselves with in high school.

(I would've wanted it just as badly if it were a non-athletic goal he had.)

Plus, he'd worked so hard on improving his skills, going to almost every open gym, even the ones at 6:00 a.m. So I hoped. I encouraged. I helped him nurse along his minor injuries. And when he told me on Tuesday night that he'd made the team (after teasing me with snuffling and slamming doors when he came home), I was so, so happy. I rejoiced with him.

But I didn't express my gratitude in prayer that night. Even though I'd been eager to express my want in prayer.

So, that late night or early morning, after I'd prayed, I snuggled in my bed and thought about gratitude. I thought about how so many people I know are doing the daily gratitude post on Facebook or the photo on Instagram, or by writing about it on their blogs. I've done that in the past, too. This year, it sort of felt like a book I'd already read. Like a thing I didn't need to do because I'd already done it before, and what would I even write about, having already hit the major things in my previous posts?

Then I thought about the story in Luke, when Christ cleanses the ten lepers, and one comes back to thank him. "But where are the nine?" Christ asks. But they were not to be found. "Go thy way," Christ says to the thankful man. "Thy faith hath made thee whole." I pondered on those other nine healed lepers. Did their leprosy return because of their ingratitude? I don't think it did, and I almost don't think it matters what happened to them. What matters is what happens to the thankful man, who is made whole through his faith.​ I think this is different than the cleanliness that the nine had—the kind that just happened, miracle or not. The faithful man's effort made him whole, and the illustration of his faithfulness was gratitude.

We cannot, I think, be whole without gratitude. And I don't think that stops being true if you are not a person of faith. Everyone, believer or not, feels better—happier, more fulfilled, more aware—with gratitude.

Lying in my bed in the dark, I chided myself, because even if I wrote about the same things I wrote about before, they are things (people, experiences, blessings) that I am still thankful for. I still have them. Can we ever just stop being grateful? Just have already filled up our gratitude quotient? Even without any startlingly new blessings, I don't think so. The consistent blessings might just be the sweetest.

So here I am, writing about being thankful. Full of thanks.​ I don't want to fall into the group of the nine any more. I want to be grateful because I know I have been blessed. And because I want to feel it, more keenly, the happiness those blessings bring. I am grateful, today, for gratitude itself. For being reminded of how important it is, for the act of watching and for the richness that brings to the world.

I think the world tends to look at Mormons in two fairly distinct ways: either we are completely crazy whack jobs or we are paragons of virtue and self-denial. In reality, we are a mix: some thoroughly devout, some struggling, some new to the church, some raised in it their entire lives. We are none of us all one thing, except for followers of Christ, and we all have our own stories. Our own paths through this spiritual terrain.

This is the story of my faith.

On paper, I am an ideal Mormon. I grew up and still live in Utah County, which is a bastion of Mormondom even in Utah. I am a descendant of pioneers who crossed the plains with the very first group of immigrants. I am a descendant of the infamous pioneers in the Martin Handcart Company who were caught in the early snows near Devil's Gate. Some of my ancestors knew Joseph Smith and Brigham Young; one is mentioned in the Doctrine and Covenants. Both sides of my family have polygamous marriages. One of my ancestors helped to build the Meeting House in American Fork, the pulpit in the Provo Tabernacle, and the spiral staircase in the Manti Temple. Think of an archetypal Mormon story and I'm certain to have an ancestor who experienced it. Even my own life is an LDS cliché: Mormon girl from Utah marries Mormon boy from Idaho.

My ties to the LDS faith go back much farther than my life, so you'd think it would be a place I feel not just comfortable in, but natural. Alas, not so. Perhaps because there is the other side of the "my family were all Mormon superheroes" story. There is an apocryphal story in my family history that has something to do with one of my ancestors losing a dress during the westward migration, only to spot it later on, worn by one of Brigham Young's wives, and this dress (not the years-long trek or the years before spent building temples and witnessing miracles and suffering hunger and being persecuted) was the thing that made that branch of my family leave the church. Because how could a true prophet be married to a stealer of dresses?

Hand in hand with all of my devout Mormon ancestry are the doubters.

In the poem "Forgetting" by Robert Pinsky, there is this stanza:

Hardly anybody can name all eight of their great-grandparents.
Can you? Will your children’s grandchildren remember your name?”

I can actually name all of my eight great grandparents. But what I can't tell you is their testimony. I don’t know if any of them went to church. I know that both sets of my grandparents were not active in the LDS church; I don't know, exactly, why. They were all drinkers and both of my grandpas were alcoholics. I remember my Grandma telling me that no good God would keep her out of heaven just because she liked to drink iced tea, and if that was the worst thing she'd ever done, surely she'd be OK. My dad's mom, Elsie, was antagonistically agnostic, and I remember my mom telling me to just not bring up church with her at all.

Why I would bring up church as a kid is a mystery, because we hardly ever went. Primary a few times, sure. We went to the Christmas parties and I was in the roadshows. But my dad (agnostic mother) wasn't interested and my mom had come out of a rocky marriage and rough divorce with a bad taste in her mouth for the church. It wasn't really a thing for us until I was a teenager, when my mom’s dad died and she had her moment that caused her to go back to church. But by then it was too late for me. Why would I want to go sit in church meetings for three hours every Sunday with girls who had previously excluded me for not being Mormon enough?

As a kid, I found religion in the world. I don’t think I could’ve told you that was what I was feeling, but I felt it: the Spirit in a petunia, inspiration in the mountains and the desert, revelation while wandering the corn field behind my house. (Where, incidentally, they eventually built a church.) We went to church every once in a while, and I was baptized when I was eight. But it was only enough to give me a vague sense of guilt over not doing something I really maybe should be doing.

And then I hit my adolescent angsty period and my pagan little heart took a sudden turn. I still felt an (unnamed) sense of God-is-in-the-trees, but religion? Religion seemed anathema to me. Especially the LDS church. A major component of my teenage rebellion was antagonism towards and mockery of the church. Again, I never could have put this in words back then, but what I know now is that what pushed me to the edge was people’s hypocrisy: saying they were followers of Christ but then not acting like Christ.

Of course, every life has its “come to Jesus” moment, and I had mine at 18. (A long story for another day.) In a sense, I feel like I am a convert to the church, even though I was born into it and I was baptized. I didn’t really start to become a Mormon until that year I was 18. But since I looked like a Mormon, no one noticed, really, my conversion, so I figured out how to be a Mormon on my own. This is one of the lessons I had to learn, that no one else but me was going to help me understand the gospel. I was on my own.

Mostly, at first, I just copied what everyone else did. But slowly I started to understand the rhythms and the purposes behind our practices. I gained my fragile, delicate testimonies of different principles: going to the temple, fasting, understanding personal revelation. As I did it on my own, I began to understand the truths I needed, and to understand them in the context of my own life. I began to love parts of the gospel not because I was supposed to but because I did. I did.  

I stumbled and I tried again. I am, I confess, still stumbling. But also still trying. I question everything I learn: is this true only because that man told me it is true? Or is it true because it is true? And how can I fit it into my life and my perspective? I often feel, sitting in church meetings, like a fish swimming upstream. Like the ugly duckling in a nest full of adorable fluffy ones. Like any other image you can think of that expresses not quite fitting in. I’m there, I’m working on believing and understanding, but my mind is always full of questions, objections, and ideas that no one else seems to have. Things that everyone else nods their heads in agreement with generally tend to make me shake mine in disbelief, annoyance, or surprise.

Sometimes I share my thoughts, but usually I don’t. I still have that fear, I guess, of not being Mormon enough. But that is also something I’m working on. Not on being more Mormon—on being less afraid of not looking the part.

I am slowly, so slowly it is a process that will take my entire life, coming to understand what it means to be a Mormon. What it means to me, as an individual. I am starting to know the features of my relationship with the church. For me, it hast to be, must always be, about me. Not about what my neighbor thinks, or my mom or my sister or my friend, but what I think, study out, come to know. It will, I think, always be troubling. I will never feel fully at peace, fully comfortable, in this faith. I still find God in the trees more easily than I do in a church. I will always have my questions, doubts, oppositions. I will not always believe everything I am told to believe. But what I do come to believe, come to understand and implement, I will not lose because I have gained it on my own.

I think often of my dad, who was much like his mom except without the aggression: mildly agnostic, I suppose. After my mom went back to church, they used to argue about it some. She wanted him to come to church with her, to be like the other priesthood holders she saw there, but he didn’t go. He had questions and he had his mom’s “church is silly” attitude and he liked to drink coffee. My mom told me once that she didn’t understand why he wouldn’t just stop drinking coffee. Why not give it up, when in exchange he would receive everything the gospel could give him? He also, eventually, had his moment that helped him turn towards the church, but he never told me what it was. He stopped drinking coffee and he went to the temple and to church.

Only now that I’m older do I think I understand about the coffee.

It isn’t the simple exchange of a beverage for all the truth the gospel can give you. It’s not even, really, about the coffee. It’s about the choice: why does something small prevent someone gaining knowledge? It is just like my Grandma with her tea. Coffee, tea, skirt lengths, the color of your shirt on Sunday. Facial hair and the bow tie/regular tie debate. The little things the church concerns itself with that aren’t really about the whole truth of the gospel: it is their very smallness in the face of that hugeness that makes them so hard to choose to let go. If the truth is good, shouldn’t it be available to anyone? Even if they drink coffee in short skirts?

This story isn’t my dad’s story, though, even if his story influences mine. Understanding his religious experiences (as much as I can without being able to ask him anymore) helps me understand mine. Thinking about all of those ancestors, examples of both living and not living the gospel, shapes me. In the end, the story of my faith is this: I come from a long line of believers and an equally long line of objectors, and in me they are combined. I both believe and object. But I am not passive. I’m not standing still. I am striding this religious landscape. I am finding my own trails. Sometimes I’m bushwhacking. But I’m finding my way, with a sweaty forehead and dirty shins. My story might not include all of the characteristics of the genre. But I take great peace in knowing it is my story, and I am writing it as I go.

NOTE: This post is part of a series started by Andi at Maybe I Will to go along with the release of a movie about us Mormons.

We belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints otherwise known as "The Mormons". We are proud of this part of who we are! We are excited to team up with over 65+ of us strong... to extend an invitation to see a film. A film entitled "Meet The Mormons". This film is not meant to be an "in your face" - you must join our church film. It is simply designed and produced to uplift and inspire you through six stories of those of our faith who have followed promptings to follow Christ more fully in their lives. We hope you take the opportunity to enjoy this film. We hope your hearts are made light as you feel the goodness that comes from following our Christ and Savior. All proceeds from the film will be donated to The American Red Cross. So not only will you be uplifted and inspired, your money will be going to an amazing charity!!

We also would like to take a moment and share our personal testimonies, stories of our own personal conversions, and our own stories of how following our Savior, Jesus Christ has changed our lives. The light of the gospel of Jesus Christ offers a joy and hope that only following him can provide. We hope as you click through and read our stories and testimonies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, you will feel uplifted and encouraged. We are by you! We love connecting with our readers, that is why many of us do what we do! Please be kind and considerate in your comments. It takes great bravery for us to open our hearts and our mouths to share with you such a tender and personal part of who we are. We share because we feel strongly the need to share the peace and the hope that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Adrienne | Free Time Frolics , Camille | Chicken Scratch n' Sniff , Natalie & Rebekah | House of Sprinkles , Kathleen| Fearlessly Creative Moms

Emily | The Benson Street , Staci | The Potter's Place, Alyssa | Alyssa.Marie , Kristen | Capturing Joy , Aly | Entirely Eventful Day

Katie | Clarks Condensed, Larissa | Just Another Day In Paradise , Camille | My Mommy Style , Candice | She's Crafty

Anita | Live Like You Are Rich, Landee | Landee Lu , Tara & Devin | Salt & Pepper Moms , Mallory & Savannah | Classy Clutter Kelli & Kristi| Lolly Jane

McKenzie | Girl Loves Glam , Pam & Lisa | Over The Big Moon , Melanie | Forty Eighteen , Sky | Capital B Adell | Baked in Arizona

Andie | Maybe I Will , Shatzi | Love and Laundry , Robyn | Create it Go , Rachel | R & R Workshop

Tiffany | Feel Great In 8 , Katelyn | What Up Fagens? , Brittany | BrittanyBullen , Ginger | Ginger Snap Crafts , Stephanie | Crafting In The Rain

Chelsey | Cee Me Be , Amber | Crazy Little Projects , Kallie | Smitten By, Elyse, Kristen, Lauren, Steph, Kendra & Camille | Six Sisters Stuff Annette | Tips From A Typical Mom

Amberly | Life With Amberly & Joe , Taralyn | Keep Moving Forward With Me , Jessica | What Does The Cox Say? , Lisa | Mabey She Made It , Kiki | Kiki & Company

Kierste | Simply Kierste , Tayler | The Morrell Tale, Jennifer | My Daylights , Cambria | Live To Be Inspired, Danielle | Today's The Best Day

Amber | Dessert Now Dinner Later, Natalie | The Creative Mom, Bobbie | A Vision To Remember , Becky | Babes In Hairland

Lisa | Pebbles & Pigtails , Mandy | Sugar Bee Crafts , Krista | Reclaim, Renew, Remodel , Wendy | Musings, Miracles, and Mayhem

Nat & Holly | My Sister's Suitcase, Britni| Play.Party.Pin , Montserrat | Cranial Hiccups , Heidi | A Lively Hope , Ashley & Meegan | Flats to Flip Flops

Alexis | We Like to Learn As We Go, Amy | The English Geek , Mariel | Or So She Says Carriann | Oh Sweet Basil

Kirtley | The Gist of It | Aubrey | Dreaming of Someday, Natalie| The Messanos, Angela | Handmade In The Heartland

I hope that you will read a few, some, or all of the other stories. Thank you for reading mine!

This past Saturday was the Women’s Conference for the LDS church. And I am one of about thirteen people in the entire church who didn’t go.

Or so it feels.

I joked with Kendell that I didn’t need to go, because not ten minutes after the conference is over the highlights will start showing up on Facebook as inspirational images.

But my reasons for not going run far, far deeper than a silly (but true) joke. They are raw, my reasons for not going, and maybe not wise to share, but it feels important to write about.

Partly I didn’t go because, at the risk of sounding like one of those people who find fault with everything, I am not thrilled about the recent change that makes it so girls eight and older all go to the same conference. Maybe if I had a young daughter I’d feel different. But such a wide range of ages in the audience changes, obviously, the audience. The talks have to be less specific to a time in life and are thus more vague. Plus, I confess, it opens up some of my old wounds, being in a crowd of mothers and daughters spending time together. It reminds me that I wanted to have more daughters. It reminds me that I’m not as close to my mother as I wish I were. Old aches, but persistent.

In the afternoon before the conference, I went to the book festival at the Salt Lake City public library. This was sort of an ordeal to get to, as it meant I had to figure out how to get my shift covered at work and how to get my family to deal with me being gone even though I wasn’t at work. But as soon as I found out that Laini Taylor was speaking, I felt so strongly compelled to go. Not just that I wanted to, but that I needed to. So I went, and then I drove home in the pouring rain in such a conflicted emotional state. On the one hand, inspired. On the other, thoroughly discouraged at the thought of everything I never accomplished.

I kept thinking, over and over, about something she said, about how when she started blogging in 2006, she found her writerly tribe.

Her tribe.

I want a tribe.

That is another reason I didn’t go: I’m not sure that this is my tribe. I have some wonderful friends who I’ve met at church and with whom I’d be friends with even if the church stopped existing tomorrow. But when I go to large church functions, when I am surrounded by so many believers and good people living their faith, I don’t feel like I belong. Not completely. I feel like I’m pretending. Like a tare in a field of wheat, desperately trying to look like the rest of the grain. Like being a Mormon is a coat I have put on—but it isn’t my skin. It isn’t my naked self, as hard as I try to make it be. Partly this is because my reactions to things are quite often so inherently opposite to how everyone else reacts. I question, I doubt, I get hung up on little details that maybe shouldn’t matter. I feel not exactly quite at home. Even this writing is proof: what good Mormon doesn't believe she'll find an answer by listening to conference?

Earlier that day, while I was showering I was thinking about the effects of sin. About how, yes, there is forgiveness. But how forgiveness doesn’t take away the consequences. About knowing how to let go of the burden of very old guilt, worn down to its bones but still a weight I carry around. About not knowing how to let it go, I suppose. I had an imaginary conversation with an unknown church leader who accused me of not understanding the atonement, and how if I understood it I wouldn’t carry the old bones around. But maybe I don’t understand it—because when hard things happen, both new ones and the same old aches, I look at the scapula and clavicle, the femur and the ulna, and I have a different knowledge: they cannot just be put aside because they are the reason. They are always the consequence.

There just…there isn’t a talk specific enough to address all the stuff I am carrying around. If I could go and listen to council that would help me answer my deepest, hardest questions, I would go. But the widely-applicable sentiments aren’t the answers I need.  "He knows you how you really are and he loves you today and always,” for example, from President Uchtdorf. That was the first illustrated quote I saw on Facebook that Saturday night. So many people need to hear that. We all need to hear it. I need to hear it and to understand it. I know it should make me feel better. I know it should make me feel loved. But somehow, when it brushes against all that is real and hard, all the ways I have failed, somehow the thought just becomes someone else’s words.

In the end, I think I didn’t go because I have found myself in a strange place in my life. Where I want things to change. Need them to. Where I am tired of the old skeletons, the old arguments, the old aches, but also all the same old answers, given by Someone In Charge. Where I’ve lost faith that anyone else has any answers for me, or that even I have my own answers. Or that there are answers to be found. I feel thoroughly and completely stuck. I can see what I want, how I want to change, but I don’t know how to do it. And I’m fairly certain that the Women’s Conference won’t show me the way, either.

Eventually, I’m sure, I’ll listen to it. I’ll read the talks and think about them. Maybe I’ll even make an inspirational, illustrated quote of my own. But I couldn't go. I couldn't make myself go, and sit among women, and smile, and talk afterward. Listen to everyone's comments about how uplifted they felt while I still felt low. Felt lost. Leaving without an answer is worse, somehow, than not trying to find one at all. 

Did you go to the Women's Conference? What did you think?

“What do you think about the Kate Kelly excommunication thing?” one of my friends asked me recently.

I didn’t exactly know how to answer her, because the truth is I haven’t followed it completely. I have the general gist of what happened: she started a website focused on women obtaining the priesthood, the church felt like this was campaigning, and she was excommunicated. But I don’t know enough of the details to have an opinion, really. (Except, I do think it is ridiculous that they scheduled the meeting when she had already moved.)

That’s not entirely true, to be honest. I mean, I don’t know all of the details, but I do have an opinion on women having the priesthood. It is still evolving and I don’t have the right words for it yet, but I do think this: there can be a difference between women having the priesthood in the LDS church and women having equality in the LDS church. We can and should be able to achieve a more equal representation. Whatever is said about the brethren caring for the sisters, the fact is that until we are allowed to be present and to make decisions, it doesn’t matter.

(This is the root of my current troubled heart regarding my faith.)

But what really, really makes me ashamed of my church and its members is how we are treating each other. Part of why I haven’t read all of the newspaper articles and the blog posts and the web pages about the topic is how virulently righteous so many of the comments are. There is mudslinging and name calling, all in the name of “I’m right and you are so fetchin’ stupid for being so wrong.” There is an abundant overflow of judgment.

And I cannot stand it.

We (They?) are so quick to judge. To assume that motivations are known, that hearts are understood, that knowledge of other people’s behavior is good or bad, right or wrong, is the dominion of someone else. There is the casual cruelty of condescension and then the outright mean statements.

I don’t think we (they?) are acting like disciples of Christ. “By this shall men know that ye are my disciples: if ye have love one to another.”

But I’m not either, if I’m honest. Because, you know? I love Kate Kelly, whether she's right or wrong, for taking a stand. For being courageous enough to make her voice heard. For being confident enough in God’s love for her that she dares give voice to her ideas, questions, concerns, and hopes.

But I hold a corresponding scoop of disgust in my heart for the judgmental. For the mean, rude, derisive. For the ones who think they know better than everyone else, have all the answers, and know why everybody else is wrong. I don’t love them.

One of the reasons given for excommunicating Kate Kelly is that her actions have contributed to other people questioning their faith.

But those people making their high-handed comments? They shake my testimony more than anything else. Because they make me question whether I want to be associated with that kind of people. The kind that think, narrow mindedly, that their answer is the only right answer. The kind that think a little awfulness in the name of defending the faith is ok. The kind that refuse to look at anything with an open mind. I know that the church is not built up with only these types of people. But right now, their voices and actions are louder than anything else for me.

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Lately, with all of the furor over those edited yearbook photos, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about modesty. Then I spotted this post on several different friends’ Facebook statuses. I’ve found myself having a fairly intense imaginary conversation in my head about modesty, and it’s not ending any time soon. 

So I’m writing it down. (Plus, Kendell is getting sick of listening to me rant about it!)

In the (prevailing) LDS culture, a lot of energy is spent on teaching a concept we call “modesty.” We teach lessons about it to our teenagers and children. We make sure that all youth activities have dress codes. We hear talks on it from the pulpit and from conferences. We take it upon ourselves to point out when someone isn’t being modest, even going so far as thinking it’s OK for children to point out to adults “you shouldn’t go running in that tank top.” (That isn’t cute, or precious, or preternaturally wise. It’s rude.) 

We pat ourselves on the back for our modesty, which we interpret as: covered shoulders, covered thighs, covered bellies, covered backs.

We forget something, though: dress is only part of what modesty is. Look it up: modesty is the quality of not being proud and flamboyant about yourself, your abilities and possessions and appearance. I know plenty of Mormons who won’t let their daughters wear tank tops and so consider themselves to have taught their children about modesty, while living in a gobsmackingly large house and driving a giant SUV. Girls in their cap-sleeve Ts and modest shorts who backstab and gossip and get all Mean Girl with their friends? That, to me, is not modest either, because it sends the message “I am so awesomely wonderful and important that being mean is TOTALLY OK behavior.”

“Not dressing in a way that draws sexual attention” is only one part of modesty, yet we seem to have forgotten that.

And listen: I get it. There is a lot of skin in the world. So I’m going to focus on that part of modesty now.

Two weeks ago I went to my niece’s wedding. When we were leaving, Nathan spotted one of the bridesmaids, who had changed out of her fluffy bridesmaid’s gown into a very tight and very short dress. Her bum was barely covered and she wasn’t wearing a bra. “Look, Jake!” he said. “That girl is so hot.”

(I had the strangest reaction to that moment, which doesn’t really related to this post but which I’m sharing anyway: part of me was horrified that despite my lofty goals, my 14-year-old son still saw a girl in a tiny, tight, sexy dress as a sex object. Part of me was embarrassed to realize I never looked that good and I never will.)

I confess that I only could sputter. Part of me (and I’m not very proud of this part) was judgy: wow. Could that skirt be any shorter? And part of me was thinking Nathan! Just cover your eyes! And another part was all you are too young to notice her. And there was even a small part that thought I wish she wouldn’t dress like that because look what she’s done to my kid. So I sputtered and didn’t really say anything (then…we talked about it later) because there were so many things I wanted to say, but in my heart, even in all of those warring responses, what I know is this: he’s fourteen, he’s going to notice a hot girl in a tight dress.

 And really, that is the foundation of my philosophy on modesty. We notice each other’s bodies. Instead of prescriptive rules about skirt length and sleeve style, why aren't we teaching our teenagers how to deal with the thoughts and emotions and ideas that come into our minds when we see each other?

I refused to teach my daughter that she needs to dress a certain way in order to help a boy control his thoughts. When she was five and six and seven, I let her wear sundresses that showed her shoulders. When she was eighteen we were still seeing her shoulders. She wore a two piece bathing suit. She wore tank tops and shorts that didn’t cover all of her thigh. And I talked to her. I talked to her about picking clothes that made her feel pretty and self-confident. I talked to her about modesty in dressing. I talked to her about her body—that she should love it and take good care of it and be proud of it. I talked to her about dressing in ways that please her, rather than pleasing boys, or trying to draw a boy’s attention.

Mostly I wanted her to know the same thing about her clothes that I did with nearly everything in her life: it isn’t about getting a boy to like you. It’s about doing the things that make you happy. Because she doesn’t exist just to catch a boy. Her life doesn’t only have to be about romance. She is made for so many different experiences, love being one of them, but not the only one. I don’t want her to make any choices that are based on “what would make a boy like me.”

Which in a way sounds like I am saying the same thing that the church does: your clothes don’t exist to draw a boy’s attention.

But really it’s not the same thing at all.

Take this recent very popular video. In theory, I get it. It’s about letting girls know that there are boys who will like them even if they don’t wear short skirts or tank tops. That is an encouraging thought. As I listen to it, though, I get madder and madder. You’ll like the girls who dress modestly? Awesome. What about you like a girl because she is smart, kind, funny, athletic, energetic, whatever. You know…like her for who she is, not what she wears.

And these lyrics that make me insane:

“Being the way that you are is enough”

“If only you saw what I can see, you’d understand why I need your modesty”

“Virtue makes you beautiful.”

“We don’t know why you’d want a guy that only cares what he sees with his eyes.”

It’s that last one that gets me the most. It makes me want to punch all those smug faces right in the sunglasses. Because no one is seeing the logical flaw: those boys are singing about caring what they see with their eyes. If they didn’t only care about what they see, they would be able to see the person underneath immodest clothes. This is a song written in praise of modesty in dressing, which is just as much about what someone sees with their eyes as immodesty in dressing. If a boy looks at a girl, and sees she’s modestly dressed, and thinks, hmmmm, that’s a girl I think I should ask out because of how she’s dressed it’s the same as him seeing a girl in a tank top and thinking, hmmmmmmm, now that’s a girl I should ask out because of how she’s dressed.

It’s a false dichotomy and it all based on the exactly wrong things we should build a relationship on. That we should build our characters on.

I don’t want my daughter to think she has to make choices to please other people. I want her to choose what works for her. I want her to date boys who see her for who she is, not for how she dresses, no matter how appropriate or modest it is.

And who is teaching boys that? How much time do we spend on teaching girls the “right” way to dress modestly? And how much time do we spend teaching boys how to treat girls? How much time was spent by those rich white boys to make that video that inversely does the same thing as the bridesmaid at the wedding: teaches that how you look is what matters most? Teaches, in essence, that a girl only is what she looks like. By connecting integrity and virtue with clothing, we (again) turn women into objects.

So this is what I try to teach my sons: girls don’t exist just so you can look at them. They are people, just like you. Sure, they have boobs. They also have thoughts, ambitions, dreams, and goals. They have a long life history and many stories to tell. They are more, much more, than their sexual possibilities.

And I also teach them this: you are responsible for your own thoughts.

I know. That’s a hard thing to control. I know it is natural for boys to see girls in a sexual light. And maybe I’m being naïve, but I also think it’s entirely possible. I think Nathan can learn that the hot girl in the tight dress is a person, and the way she dresses is her choice. (Hopefully her mother also taught her to dress to help herself feel pretty, not to catch someone’s attention.) Most likely, her choice doesn’t have a single thing to do with him. He doesn’t have to jump into bed with her in his mind just because she’s there in her dress.

I had this conversation with a very close friend once, a friend who thinks differently than I do about this topic. She talked about wishing that girls would think about how their clothes affect the boys around them. That is what the song lyric “you’d understand why I need your modesty” refers to—the idea that a girl is doing the boys around her a courtesy by dressing modestly. And, I suppose that’s true: it is easier for a boy to not let his thoughts wander if he’s not surrounded by skin. But I reject the idea that he needs her to dress modestly in order to control his thoughts.

And that is the other truth: he needs to learn. Because certainly the world is filled with girls’ knees and shoulders and thighs and backs. He will see girls like the hot girl at the wedding every day of his life. And if all he ever learns is dressing like that is bad, then all he ever learns is judgment. Instead, what I am desperately trying to teach him—and wish, I confess, what the church would also teach him—is that he’s going to see chests. He’s going to see shoulders. But if all he sees are body parts instead of people, he is failing in part of his humanity. Because the chests and the shoulders belong to people, and as a grown up, functioning adult man, he will interact with people who are women. Who happen to have woman parts. But who also have ideas and creativity and input. I want him—want all my sons, and all of their friends, and my nephews, and the boys down the street—to know that women are people. And it is only by seeing a woman’s humanity (instead of just her woman parts, covered up or not) that you are truly treating them with respect.

Nathan told me the other day about a video he’d seen, where someone had taken the titles of Disney movies and censored them. So, instead of Finding Nemo, for example, it was ****ing Nemo. Isn’t it funny how, by covering something up, it changes your perspective? Just what is being done to poor Nemo?

All of the proclaiming of modesty does the same thing. It draws attention to something that doesn’t have to be the focus of our thoughts. Our actions should be the focus of our thoughts. How we treat people. That is what matters most. Not how long our shorts are, or how much shoulder we show. Not if we have visible cleavage. How we act.

I wish we’d put more focus on that.