we are women project

Women in Music- Part One | "Girl Indie" is not a genre

2012-02-20T12:11:00.193-07:00

I'd like to introduce you to one of my closest friends, Kendall. We have known each other since our middle school choir days, and continue making music together in our individual music ventures. Here are her thoughts on being a female in the music industry. -Allison

That's a picture of my band, "Cartoon Bar Fight." Upon first glance, you'll note that there is only one lady in this group--and that's me.

I have been songwriting, singing and playing in Cartoon Bar Fight for over four years. I initially started the group in Fall of 2007, during my first semester at San Jose State University, and was quickly joined by Dirk (the lovely fellow on the far right, who also happens to be my boyfriend), the only other remaining original member.

We live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and play indie rock music influenced by bands like Eisley, Radiohead, Feist, Brand New, Bon Iver, Neutral Milk Hotel and Arcade Fire.

I have certainly been spoiled to find such intelligent, respectful, creative and extremely talented band mates, and I love them all like family. With them, I don't feel there is much of a divide because of gender. I don't feel lonely, or like the "odd one out" or anything like that, and this is because we share common goals, interests and skill levels. Though I would love to have another woman in the band for vocal harmonies and duets (I adore the way female voices sound in harmony), we haven't found her yet.

Over the years, I've given a fair amount of thought to how gender plays out within our band, as well as in the lower levels of the music business. Getting in to the music industry is tricky for anyone, but it can get even more frustrating for women who are trying to make their way, due to subtle sexism perpetuated by band mates, family members, booking agents, sound engineers, folks in the audience, and even from ourselves. Allow me to count some of the ways:

(Post continues after the jump)--

1. If a band has a female lead vocalist, the band may henceforth be referred to as a "girl band." My brother demonstrated this to me as I watched him import an Eisley CD to iTunes and change the genre to "Girl Indie." I was like "NO BRO!" Cartoon Bar Fight has also been referred to as a "girl band." Apparently, the presence of people of my gender in a band is enough to nullify the boyhood (and I say "boyhood" because if I am going to be referred to as a "girl" then they get to be "boys!") of the other members! Does this mean I can start referring to Radiohead as "Boy Experimental Rock" or to Bon Iver as "Boy Folk?" Or do they not require the same qualifiers? Frankly, I don't care if six girls are playing the music, or three boys are playing the music, or if three girls and one boy are playing the music. Music = music, k? Thx!

2. I hate getting dressed to play shows. Yeah. Sounds trivial, but it can make a person pretty agitated. There is a fine line for me between wanting to appear simple yet put-together, or "perfect" and all feminine and sparkly. I typically shy away from dresses and jewelry and heels because first, they can be distracting and pull attention away from the band as a whole and unjustly focus it on to one person. Second, I don't like projecting an image of fragility when I'm on stage. I don't want to look like I could topple over at any moment because of some stupid shoes, and I don't want to worry about how I'm standing or constantly be fretting that someone can see up my dress (however, bike shorts under dresses have solved this one in the past!!). Third, it's just impractical. You can't safely carry your gear in heels, and I'm certainly not about to let one of the dudes in my band carry my stuff for me. I just don't like it. But, unfortunately, I had it crammed into my brain from a young age that nothing you do matters that much unless you look attractive while you're doing it. For women, there will always be pressure to look conventionally attractive, while performing music (unless you want to go the Lady Gaga route, in which case, more power to you!), and even while conducting your general day-to-day life. Thanks MTV. Thanks, you rotten, garbage teen magazines. Wish I knew about BUST or B*TCH or Ms. Magazine when I was a lass.

3. As I discussed with some friends after one of our last shows, some local promoters will throw certain bands together on a bill based purely on the fact that the singers all have lady parts. It doesn't seem to matter much that the bands may play completely non-complimentary styles of music--what matters is that the singers are female and it is therefor assumed that all their music must sound the same. This item is particularly frustrating, as it sends a very negative message to the woman musicians: our songwriting and lyrics and style don't matter as much as the fact that we're female. Booking blunders like this aren't just lazy. They're very, very sexist, and probably frequently overlooked, since they likely occur most often in the lower levels of the music industry.

4. Contrary to popular opinion, I do not perform music for the purpose of attracting suitors. Yes sir, I will be pleased to talk with you about my fricking awesome, rare, gorgeous Telecaster tenor guitar. No, I will not go get coffee with you. No, I do not want your cell phone number in case I change my mind. Go bother one of my band mates.

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I self-admittedly cite more male or mostly-male musical acts as influences than I do female acts. Similarly, most of my friends and band mates listen to libraries of music comprised primarily of male groups or artists. Many of us seem to have tricked ourselves into thinking that male creative works are the default--that they are the pieces of music and film and literature and art that everyone can relate to, regardless of their gender. Creations by women are often thought to be less accessible or not as widely applicable, despite the fact that women make up half of the global population.

Perhaps at one point it was more difficult to come across female musicians because the mainstream music industry was so male dominated (actually, it still is, in most ways). We have obviously had some mainstream female acts get huge, but they remain vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts.

But it is the great year 2012. When it comes to indie music, we have the internet, and we have services like Last.fm and Spotify and Pandora that exist purely to help us track down new artists that are worthy of becoming mainstays in our musical collections. Plus, we have locals shows to go to, and at least in the San Francisco Bay Area, bands are playing all over the place all the time. And there are a lot of women in those bands. Indie music has no shortage of talented women, and it would serve our ears well to move beyond the stigma of "girl music" versus the supposed real or regular (male) music. There is no real divide. We only tell ourselves there is. Music made by women is no less valuable or relatable than music made by men, just like literature and films by or about women are not and should not be treated as any less valuable or relatable.

And it's important not to forget that a great deal of music (and other creative material, for that matter) is produced by women and men, together. To celebrate this notion, I leave you with these links to some bands I adore:

Local Bay Area bands:

National-scale bands:

Eleanore Friedberger (from The Firey Furnaces)

Who are some of your favorites?

-Kendall

In Progress

2012-02-18T07:00:00.007-07:00

by Sarah Sheley

Learning

2012-02-15T08:00:00.001-07:00

by Elida

never just a mom

2012-02-14T07:00:00.001-07:00

Just Moms by Ash Leishman

I have a friend who makes documentaries. (Doesn't that sound cool? I believe that just by knowing her my coolness factor increases several notches.) She has traveled the world working on them.

A few months ago she came over and spent the day with the child and me. She followed us around on our walk and watched us read together all the while she asked me questions about being a mom. It was still so new and raw that my thoughts kept going back to how hard it is. But every time I watch this movie I remember how much I love being Millie's mum. It doesn't mean it's not hard anymore but I am more in love with that little girl now and am so happy that she is mine. And you know what? It is easy to see how much Millie has grown and changed physically since this was shot. But what really stands out to me is how much I have changed. For the better. And it is all thanks to Millie.

So thank you, Ashley, for letting me be a part of your project and giving me tangible evidence that I really have grown and that I truly love being a mom.

Ash Leishman is busy revamping her professional life so for now you can see more of here work here. And she did our family pictures here.

The Wife

2012-02-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

by Kelsey (more here)

2012-02-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

I love when people stand up for what they believe and feel to be right, even when it means hard choices.

(source)

Family

2012-02-09T08:00:00.001-07:00

by Pam

new

2012-02-08T07:00:00.001-07:00

Do you ever feel a little... crowded? Sometimes by people but more by situations and, well, comparisons? And you just need to take a step outside and breath? Or shut everyone out and breath?

I have been breathing a lot lately. Well, after feeling like I couldn't breath anymore, I took a step back and tried to stop all the negativity that was bogging me down. There were too many "to do's," too many amazing women who could have a nice house and a happy baby and even maybe some dinner, while I can only manage one at a time.

I was being stomped on by my inadequacies.

And shouldn't it be the other way around? I should be stomping on and crushing all the things that make me feel small.

We even went out of town for a long weekend. I thought I would come back refreshed and ready to get those bathrooms clean and write a little. But I went right back to feeling deflated. And since I at least like to end posts on a positive note, I didn't write at all because I had nothing very positive to say.

I feel better now. I stayed away from the world wide web, took a couple walks by myself, finally let everything bothering me out via my husband, and spent some good time with my little family. I took care of some responsibilities (it feels good to be needed), started running again (it's been too long), and got some good spiritual reminders that it is ok that motherhood is hard (it is still worth it).

Speaking of motherhood being hard but worth it, I watched this video:

"THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED RAMBLER" a documentary about a girl crossing Iceland on her own from Klara Harden on Vimeo.

And I cried. When she says: "... will ask myself why the hell am I doing this? Well I hope that I will still realize that it is worth it. It is always worth it."

And isn't it true. The things we do are hard. I feel happier when I am doing something hard. Challenging myself. But sometimes I ask myself if it is really worth it? But it always is. And if it isn't, then maybe I need to take a step back and figure out what I should be doing that would be worth it.

(I wrote a little something about how I was feeling the last few weeks but I have not decided whether I should share. Maybe you have felt the way I was feeling so maybe it is worth it to put it out there.)

The Creator

2012-02-07T08:00:00.003-07:00

by Charity (also here and here)

2012-02-06T17:32:00.001-07:00

There is now a quicker way to get to the We Are Women Project blog:
http://wearewomenproject.com

And, as always, we would love you to snag the button below to put on your own website/blog... especially with the We Are Women revamp coming up in the next few weeks.

Ooh! Have I said too much? ;)

2012-02-04T08:00:00.001-07:00

"God has set within you a femininity that is powerful and tender, fierce and alluring. No doubt it has been misunderstood. Surely it has been assaulted. But it is there, your true heart, and it is worth recovering. You are captivating." - Captivating by John & Stasi Eldredge

Interview with Lia Collings

2012-02-03T07:00:00.003-07:00

Over a year ago, a good friend of mine told me of a project her sister had been working hard on. Similar to Allison, she was also putting together a book of essays written by women for women. (You can see a quote from one of the essays here.)These essays told tales of women who put promising careers and some of their goals and aspirations on hold to be able to be home to raise their children. I read the essays before I had Miss Millie and was in awe of these talented, intelligent women who had changed their lives to do what they felt they must. I admired their strength and their courage.

I emailed Lia, whose brain child this book was, and got to know her a little better through those emails along with another interview she did. We talked about doing an interview here but life kept getting in the way.

Now I am happy to tell you that we have finally done it. As I read over her answers I feel her strength of character and her determination. I have been so inspired by her and I hope you are too.

So without further ado, meet Lia Collings, creator of Choosing Motherhood.

Tell us a little about yourself and your family.

We are a happy little family of three little girls, aged 7, 5, and 3, with another baby on the way currently living in Berlin while my husband finishes his dissertation. I think the most unique thing about our family is that Justin and I have made a conscious effort since the early days of our marriage to make our family culturally independent of the world. By that I mean we’ve never owned a television set, we’ve gone to the movie theater I think twice in our entire eight years of marriage—one of those was to Puss and Boots with the whole family about a week ago—and we hardly ever read novels or plays that were published after the first half of the 20^th century. In general we accept “recreation” but not “entertainment”. It makes us pretty different as a family than a lot of other families, I think.

(Interview continues after the jump)

Do you consider yourself a creative person? Do you feel that it is something that has comes naturally or is it something you have worked hard/actively to develop?

The first thing I think of when I hear “creative person” is a graphic designer or a scrapbooker or a seamstress, one of those super homemaker types. I am totally not that person. But I loved President Uchtdorf’s perspective on creativity that he shared with the women of the Church a few General Relief Society Meetings ago. As children of the Supreme Creator, of course we are creative, all of us are creative. We’re supposed to be creative, we’re happier when we’re creative. The contrast between entertainment and recreation probably comes into play here. Entertainment is a passive activity—dinner and a movie, for example—and recreation is an active one—trying a new recipe and reading a play out loud together. Both evenings would have the same result on one level, you’re not hungry anymore and you’ve experienced drama in some form, but in one situation you’ve exerted a lot more agency than in the other. Yeah, I don’t really think of myself as a creative person at all, but I’m often making up new recipes, I started a Yale Law Wives group while my husband was at law school, I turned a closet in our last apartment into a beautiful little Book Nook, pulling Choosing Motherhood together was probably creative. You think of Mozart or Picasso as being creative, but we all are in our own little way.

Frequently we have ideas of great projects to tackle but often times we get tackled ourselves. What inspiration helped you to continue your efforts in writing for and compiling the essays for Choosing Motherhood?

I have a very strong testimony of the power of a can-do attitude. Here’s my hard, scientific proof: In 11^th grade, like many high school students, I took the ACT college entrance exam. There are four sections, Math, Writing, Reading Comprehension, and Science Reasoning. My mind just really doesn’t grasp scientific concepts as well as other subjects—I got a D on my first college science exam because I just cannot understand how elevators work!—so I went in and took the test expecting to do really well on the first three subjects and hoping not to do anything disastrous on Science Reasoning. When I got the results I had scored a 36 out of 36 on Reading Comprehension and a 28 out of 36 on Science Reasoning. The 28 brought my overall score way down, obviously, and when I started thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that Science Reasoning on this standardized test wasn’t really about science—they hadn’t really required any outside knowledge—it was reading and reasoning from the graphs and information given. In other words, Science Reasoning was really just another aspect of Reading Comprehension, and I had just seen that I was really good at understanding what I read. So I signed up to take the test again. The second time I took it, all of my other scores stayed pretty much the same, but Science Reasoning jumped from 28 up to 36. An 8 point jump on a standardized test just by changing my attitude.

Connected with attitude is just having faith that what you’re doing is really important. With Choosing Motherhood I really felt like I had had unique experiences that could help other women in their thinking about motherhood. I think our whole nightmare infancy with our second daughter and her health problems was in large measure to change my attitude about devoting my life to my children, and I would not wish that experience on my worst enemy. So if I can write it down in such a way that another person can experience it vicariously, I’ve helped someone. On the positive side, the mothers around me were all so incredible, and it was a unique experience that there would be that many amazingly wonderful mothers all in one place, especially since few of them would identify themselves as natural nurturers, I think. But they are all superb but different models of good mothering. I benefited immensely from their examples, their thoughts, conversations with them, but other women wouldn’t have that opportunity in person, so I had to make it available vicariously. So I had a really, really strong motivation to put together this book because I really believed it could help someone, even if it was only my own daughters twenty years down the road. Combining a belief that what you’re doing is really valuable with a can-do, positive attitude, when you run into challenges—the book actually morphed quite a bit from my original plan, but I think the end-result is much better—you just say to yourself, “I know this is a valuable project. How can I change my thinking in order to surmount this specific obstacle?”

A totally different example could be my last sewing project. My daughters were understandably hesitant to move to Germany and have to go to German school and leave all their friends at home. Capitalizing on their love of princesses (and in an effort to rid ourselves forever of the influence of the Disney Princess pantheon), I decided to make them Renaissance-style princess dresses for them to wear when we visited castles and palaces in Germany. I am not a seamstress by any means, but any monkey can follow directions, right? So I didn’t undertake this enormous sewing project as a seamstress, I undertook it as an instruction follower, and the dresses turned out beautifully! (I must say I had no idea about some of the more complicated properties of brocade and I did have to send them off to my mother-in-law so she could serge the hems, but I am pretty proud of the rest of my handiwork.) However, once you do quite a few sewing projects as only an instruction follower, you eventually become a seamstress. I’m hoping I’ll reach that point before prom dress time.

As you were writing your essays for the book and working with the other women who also wrote essays, what new discoveries did you make?

For me personally I think recording the health challenges experience and articulating through William Blake’s illustration what being a mother means to me has really solidified my belief in what I’m doing with my life and in how absolutely vital I am to my children, how vital every mother is to her children. “The best I have to give is me,” is TRUE, and it’s not because you have such and such degree or because you have such and such talent or you know how to do such and such, it’s because you are YOU. I think the love our children have for us when they’re young is a lot closer to the kind of love Heavenly Father and our Savior have for us than any other, because our children don’t love us for any other reason than that we’re their parent, just like Heavenly Father loves me for no other reason, really, than that I’m His daughter.

The other big thing I learned was from an essay that ended up not going in the book because the contributor was put on bed rest for a high-risk pregnancy and didn’t feel like she could continue working on it. She shared a story of a friend with two children who was serving as Young Women’s President in her ward and who really, really wanted a third child. If I remember correctly, I think this woman somehow knew that she would have a third child, but she didn’t end up conceiving until after her six or seven year term as Young Women’s president. That taught me that even though being a mother is the greatest thing we can do with our time, it’s by no means the only good thing and that Heavenly Father needs us to do other things as well. Thinking of this story really, really helped me when I had a miscarriage about a year later because we were still finishing up the book and I knew I couldn’t have continued working on it had the pregnancy continued, and then I received really clear guidance that having another baby wasn’t what we needed to be doing right then. ( I feel like I should clarify it was actually a blighted ovum or missed abortion, so my body thought it was 10 weeks pregnant but there was really no baby, just a placenta.) Anyway, I guess also having so many varied examples from different people about how the Lord directed them in their lives just strengthened my faith that the Lord takes care of us. Now that we’ve been 6 months in a foreign country I am so grateful I had the miscarriage, actually, because there is absolutely no way we could have managed living in Germany with four kids while my husband wrote his dissertation. And the Lord knew that.

When I read the essays in your book, my mind starts reeling about my decisions and my own story of how I chose to be a mother. So many people think that because of education and experience, choosing to put motherhood before career and personal ambitions is a waste of talent, intellect, and education. Obviously you disagree. Can you tell us a little more about your thoughts on that?

Oh, these days I just feel so sorry for people who think parenthood is a waste of their time, especially motherhood. Fatherhood doesn’t usually entail putting career on hold for a while. Maybe if we had more of the German concept of Bildung and less of the American idea of education it would be easier to see how parenthood is the HEIGHT of educational experience and a venue for maximum intellectual application. This is probably an area into which creativity definitely comes into play, because I think anyone would acknowledge that it takes just as much ingenuity to get four little kids to happily help clean the house as to get four adults in an office to work well together, but there’s no one to give positive feedback on a performance review or give you a bonus at the end of the year when you manage it with the four little kids. So you have to create your own set of accolades or compensation. Having an appreciative and engaged husband is probably all it takes in a lot of instances—just getting a “thank you” or a “I love watching Katharine light up when she plays with you” is really nice, and then having him feel like your children are your joint project can really make the difference in feeling validated and that what you’re doing is important and worthwhile.

I wonder, too, if sometimes we as mothers are just overly sensitive to the opinions of others. I think two of the essays in Choosing Motherhood bring up being at the glitzy party and being asked what you do. That an awkward silence follows the answer that you’re a stay-at-home mom doesn’t mean that your interlocutor thinks you’ve wasted your life, it probably just means that your experience is so far removed from their daily life they don’t even know what follow-up question to ask. If we as mothers thought of our chosen career as being just as noble as the human rights activist, we’d gush about our current work just as torrentially as they would and not even need to be asked a follow-up question.

Are you working on any other projects right now?

Yeah, survival! Living in Germany with no car, limited language ability, one child in a German Grundschule and another in a German Kindergarten, and the general cultural and lifestyle differences has really given me a new perspective on what the many immigrants in the U.S. are experiencing. What brave souls! So other than trying to navigate a family of five through a year in a foreign country and growing a baby, I spend my time trying to learn German and letting Julia Child teach me the art of French Cooking. I figured I could save money on ingredients if I undertook that project here, plus there’s not too much skill involved in frying a sausage, so I think I have German food down. J

If you could have a dinner party with the six people who inspire you most, who would they be and why?

I have to go back in history to answer this question, not because I don’t know any inspiring people but because I know so many! My husband endlessly inspires me, and I have dinner with him every night, and we both frequently comment how surprised we are that our friends are friends with us, because they’re all just so amazing by any standard and we feel so ordinary. So, over the whole gamut of human history, six people with whom I’d like to have a little chat:

Julie B. Beck, General Relief Society President. I think Sister Beck is a rock star, and my interest in sitting down with her kind of connects to Choosing Motherhood. I found it so interesting that after serving as a counselor in the General Young Women’s Presidency for five years under Sister Tanner and seeing the problems and challenges facing 12-18 year old girls and young women all over the world, Sister Beck’s very first address to the entire church after being appointed General Relief Society President was “Mothers Who Know”. What were the issues she saw with the youth of the church that she felt would be eradicated if only their mothers were doing the things she suggested in her very first address? Other than that I think her vision of Relief Society is really inspiring and really gets back to what was originally intended for the organization. I was reading Women of Covenant shortly before Sister Beck was called and some things I heard her say at the beginning of her term as president just really impressed me. I also think the publication of Daughters of My Kingdom was really inspired, as was calling Sister Tanner to write it. She’s another amazing woman.

Mormon: General, Historian, Prophet. My other inspiring religious figure is the ancient Nephite prophet Mormon who abridged the Book of Mormon, a book held to be scripture by members of my church. Mormon seems like a Renaissance man to me and in all the best ways. He’s wise, he’s intelligent, he’s thoughtful, he’s a leader, he’s a fantastic father, a righteous man, a writer. And just look at those Arnold Frieberg paintings—he totally went to the gym. J I like his description of himself as being “a sober child”. I think he was a watcher and a deep thinker. I’d love to hear more of his thoughts on civilization and politics and rearing children in troubled times than what we get in the Book of Mormon.

Michelangelo. I’ve heard that it only shows your ignorance to name Beethoven as your favorite composer or Michelangelo as your favorite artist. I think that’s just posturing. Michelangelo is in a world all his own in my opinion, so I guess we can squabble about second, but he defines art for me. I feel like when we talk about Plato’s idea of Forms and there being a perfect, heavenly chair or whatever, and everything else being only a shadow or reflection of the true, perfect chair that exists somewhere (I haven’t read Republic for a while, so I don’t remember the theory exactly) we’re talking about Michelangelo and his art. Despair and heart-wrenching anguish is Michelangelo’s Pietá. The masculine, creative power that defines God is God as depicted in The Creation. He somehow captured an ideal above and beyond human experience. How did he do it? What was he thinking when he came up with these, not just how to paint or sculpt something, but to sculpt that subject? How did he see it? How did he cope with living among the everyday banalities when there was so much beauty in his head? The man was a total, beautiful genius. Even if he did wear his boots until the skin came off with them because he didn’t remove them even for sleep. Geniuses are always eccentric.

Marcus Agrippa. Agrippa was Augustus’ right-hand man in the Empire, and it has always impressed me that he had no qualms about being second best. That seems so uncharacteristic of highly capable men, and Agrippa was so varied and wide-ranging in his abilities. Maybe it was a David and Jonathon sort of relationship or maybe Agrippa just didn’t like the limelight—I don’t think so, though. I think he had a very noble character and I think it would be really exciting to meet him.

A deceased ancestor of mine. I really like doing family history research. I find it a really rewarding mental exercise and since lots of Mormons like to do it but my parents are the first Mormons in their family, there’s a whole lot of research to do. There’s one specific person I want to meet though I don’t remember her name now and meeting her would just be representative for me of so many other ancestors and so many other ordinary people who lived in the past. This particular woman lived in a little village in Bisingen, Hohenzollern, Prussia in the early 1800s. She must have been a good Catholic because her marriage was recorded in the little church there, as were the births of her three children. The deaths of each of them were also recorded, I think in every case before the child had reached a first birthday, and then finally, soon after the death of the last child, this woman’s own death was recorded. I imagine her death was related to complications associated with the birth of her child. Such a sparse history was probably recorded time and time again for so many women throughout history. I would just like to talk to her, ask her about her life, ask her what gave her joy and hope and the strength to go on every day. I was really pretty distressed when I found these records, actually, and when I returned home from the Family History Center I told my husband about this woman. In response he shared something that really inspired me. He said, and I’m paraphrasing his paraphrase, though his paraphrases are basically direct quotes, “Many of these people [for whom we search and perform LDS temple ordinances] lived very hard lives. Perhaps some of them died wondering if God even knew who they were. But each of these people will have their name read in the temple of our God, and they will know that they were not forgotten.” I thought that was such a beautiful idea.

What books are you currently reading? What is on your list of favorite reads?

Right now I’m mostly reading the Old Testament and The German Genius by Peter Watson, a cultural history of Germany trying to reclaim Germany’s illustrious intellectual and artistic past from the grave of Nazism. I like reading cultural histories because then I get good ideas for novels and plays to read--you know, things that have stood the test of time or had an impact on their era instead of what fleeting thing is on the top of the New York Times bestseller list. I really, really like Will and Ariel Durrant’s The Story of Civilization, by which they mean Western Civilization. My favorites are pretty standard—George Eliot’s Middlemarch (we named our second daughter after Dorothea), Dicken’s David Copperfield (I completely agree with Tolstoy’s sentiment, “If you sift the world’s prose literature…Dickens will remain; sift Dickens and David Copperfield, will remain; sift David Copperfield, the description of the storm at sea will remain.”), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It’s funny, I’m usually hesitant to read a “classic” novel because I think only smart people read them and they probably only read them in order to feel smart, but they’re classics because they are accessible to everyone. To some degree. Like I said before, we have a general rule not to read anything written in the latter half of the 20^th century or beyond—partly because there’s been so many marvelous things written before then who has time for that stuff anyway, partly because there was such a drastic shift in world views. I don’t know if it was industrialization and capitalism and the subsequent alienation and shift from family to the individual or what, but it’s just not as edifying. Maybe once I’ve read the complete works of Shakespeare I’ll feel authorized to move on, but I’m pretty far from that.

One book that we go back to again and again—we try to read at least portions of it once a year—is a book called Arm the Children by Arthur Henry King. BYU TV just aired an episode about Professor King in their series LDS Lives, I think. He was British and a literary critic—mostly Shakespeare, I think—and after spending his whole life analyzing and criticizing texts he came across the Joseph Smith story at around aged 60 and felt just from the style of the account that Joseph Smith must be telling the truth. He ended up joining the LDS church and coming to BYU to teach and Arm the Children is a collection of talks he gave in various venues, mostly with the theme of how arts and culture support the gospel and how the gospel supports art and culture and how we need to use arts and culture to raise our children in an increasingly degraded world. This book resonated so much with us that when we saw that the BYU Bookstore was selling their last ten copies before the book went out of print we bought all ten of them and gave them to 8 families we really appreciated and kept the other two, one to have permanently, one to lend out.

I know that you care a great deal about education, for yourself, your children, and others. How does creativity play a role in pursuing your goals in educating yourself, your children, and in your goals in education reform?

Yes, we do care a great deal about education. Living in Germany has introduced me to a single word that I think captures my idea of education—Bildung. While “education” in America immediately makes us think of K-12 or university or a stack of textbooks, in my understanding Bildung would shed the formal education framework, add music and drama and dance and political discussions, and conjure up an image not of a brain being expanded but of a soul being enlarged. Once you get outside of the ‘education’ box—which takes some creativity, I guess, because you begin to think of anything as education and anything as an opportunity for raising yourself a little higher—you can create an educational opportunity out of anything. One example that has just come up is in dance. I love watching ballet and uplifting modern dance, but I’ve never taken a dance class in my life and only know plies from an exercise video I watched once. But after a few exposures to some ballet here in Berlin, all three of my girls have been leaping and twirling around the house on their tippy-toes, humming the Swan Lake and Nutcracker suites to themselves. It just so happened that I picked up an antique book of old Scottish dances from a bookstore here to give to a friend, and it just so happens there’s a section on teaching the steps to young children. So I’ve arranged for someone in the ward who does know about dance to give me a crash course on deciphering choreography notation so my little ballerinas can start dancing some simple Scottish reels. It takes a little thinking to “create” a learning opportunity, but I don’t think it really takes that much.

As far as how that relates to my ideas for education reform, fundamentally I think the idea is inherent in the very word education. I haven’t looked at my Latin for a while (Classical Studies was my major at BYU, but I graduated years ago now) but I’m pretty sure that “educate” comes from ducere meaning “to lead” and ex meaning “out”. I think education is both leading out and amplifying the good things already present in a person and leading out and abolishing the bad things. Like I said, I haven’t looked at it in years, but I’m pretty sure the ancient Greek model of education had a three-fold focus on music, dance, and then logic/rhetoric. I think using music and dance from the earliest ages with children, who naturally have a great need to move their bodies and to employ their vocal chords to the max, is a great way to educate them. I’ve come across a few things about German education reform in the early and mid 1800s and am finding that others have thought similar things about looking to the Greek model and especially that the way the Greeks thought, wrote, and taught lent itself to an involved and responsible citizenry. In this age of mass media and mass communication, the study of logic and rhetoric is absolutely vital. Justin and I were talking the other day about how it’s interesting that you can usually tell whether a source of information can be trusted—be it an e-mail, a newspaper article, a radio ad, a documentary—within a paragraph or two just by the style and word choice. This subject had come up because Justin was speaking with someone who didn’t feel like he knew what he could trust when he was reading things, essentially this was a person who believed anything in print, and we were talking about how we haven’t really felt like that. As we were trying to pinpoint from where this ability to discern between sources stemmed, we concluded it was probably partly from having worked on a historical project for an extended period of time in which you are trained to always question the source, partly just from education, but mostly from reading the scriptures. When we talk about any sort of canon—the Western Canon, the Scriptural Canon—we’re talking about an accepted standard. For me the scriptures are the standard of truth, and the way they tell their story is the standard for the way one conveys truth. Take the story of king David. I think it is universally accepted that when David with all his wives took the wife of another man and then had that man killed in an effort to cover up his action, he had done something abominable. Certainly according to the moral standards set forth in other books of the Old Testament this was a reprehensible deed, not just adultery but murder, as well as coveting and probably bearing false witness at some point along the way. But whoever is recording the story of David never makes any condemning statement about David. We are simply given the facts of the case. Of course by the inclusion of certain details—the little bits included about Michal in the chapters leading up to the account of Bathsheba are so interesting to me, and I think are included for a reason though once again the author makes no judgment calls—we are led to believe certain things, but there’s no impassioned effort on the part of the author to persuade us to do or think or believe anything. That is so different from all the information we get today which is almost always trying to persuade us to believe one thing or the other. So teaching children from the time they’re very young how to recognize rhetorical devices and logical jumps, i.e. having a certain kind of phone actually has no bearing on how much fun you have or how many pretty girls hang on your arm, or that every member of the political party in opposition to you isn’t a brainless devil incarnate, the world would be a lot better off. And then maybe our politics and advertising wouldn’t be so embarrassingly ridiculous!

Describe a typical day. What routines do you have?

I’ve really gained an appreciation for our traditions since coming to Germany. I think Tevye has it right in The Fiddler on the Roof, traditions really are what keep the unstable fiddler from falling off the roof, and even when they’re forced to leave Anatevka, their traditions will follow them wherever they go. I think it was really helpful for our girls that even though we moved to a totally new place with a new language, new friends, new home situation, new school situation, we still had family scripture study with a pancake breakfast every morning and we still had our family reading time book and a song before bed every night. And then of course having the same church classes every Sunday and Family Home Evening every Monday. I think it’s even helped that I spent so many years perfecting the art of sandwich bread, because they really don’t like the sour taste of European whole grain breads so I make the same bread I was making in the States for their sandwiches and as something that will at least keep them from going to bed starving when they just really can’t stomach the foreign entrée I’ve tried at dinner. So their transition to everything was remarkably smooth. Other than their being awesome kids and our praying a lot for that to be the case, I think our little routines really helped things.

How does courage play a role in the many different aspects of your life?

I’ve heard Elder Holland quote a world-class swimmer saying that the key to his success is to “Stroke when you don’t want to stroke, kick when you don’t want to kick.” We used to focus on a value every month and memorize poems and scriptures that had to do with that value—I don’t know if you can tell, but we’ve toned things way down since coming to Germany. I figure a 7 hour immersion course in a foreign language is traumatic enough on a young mind! Anyway, “courage” was our value one month and we defined it as “doing the right thing even when it’s hard and even if no one else is doing it.” I am constantly just having to use sheer force of will to get through my day, especially since I feel yucky and am so tired from being pregnant, and I often have to fight away the rationalization that I don’t have to do this because no one else is doing this. Who cares what someone else is doing? They’re not me. They don’t have the same purposes and end goals that I have. I guess that’s how courage comes into play. And then courage to just get out there and fail, because you’ll have to fail a few times before you can succeed. This mostly applies to my speaking German right now.

Introducing: Reachel's Love Your Body Challenge

2012-02-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

Beginning tomorrow, the stunning Reachel Bagley of Cardigan Empire (and of the We Are Women book) will be leading the Love Your Body 10 Day Challenge. I don't know about you, but I will surely be checking her blog daily to see what treats she has in store for us.

being girl:

2012-02-02T08:00:00.013-07:00

brantley gutierrez

"I had no choice but to own up to the fact that I was a girl and stop feeling like that was a professional liability. I'm so glad I did... It's totally allowed to be 100% girl and 100% pro."

- Emily Haines

Repost: A Virtuous Woman

2012-01-30T08:00:00.001-07:00

Who can find a virtuous woman, II

by Louise Parker (from here)

I love the proverb of the virtuous woman. The woman described is so contrary to modern culture, but so perfectly admirable. And the terms to describe her are also, in fact, quite contrary to modern culture, but again, so perfectly admirable. And a little confusing.

"She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands." ...while perusing the women's clothing at Target?

"She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar." ...a far-mer's market? 

"She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens." ...and when it says meat, it really means frosted shredded wheat with 1% milk, right?

Despite some confusion, and some contradictions to the occasionally less-than-praiseworthy lifestyle that I obviously lead (yes, cereal is my primary food group), there are some universal truths to a virtuous woman mentioned in these passages:

"Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come." - You can't put this sister down! She's the ultimate optimist!

"She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness." - She's super nice to everybody! She also probably hosts great dinner parties with stimulating conversation.

In a world that constantly tries to put women down, or make us think that we're too smart, not smart enough, not curvy enough, not thin enough, and just not enough, the proverb of "How to find a virtuous woman" can teach some real lessons. Read it, pray about it, and decide what kind of a woman you want to be. No, you don't have to wake up before dawn to slaughter a pig and make some bacon for your household and all of your extended relatives who live within a 10 mile radius (in fact, you will never find me doing that, ever). But there are still some beautiful lessons and some valuable virtues to be found in this proverb. And for the men: what kind of woman do you want to call "yours"?

Related thoughts: My aunt's blog post about the Photoshop Diet, and another post of mine, "Learning that I am an 8 Cow Wife." Enjoy!

(This essay was originally posted here).

The Continuing Fight Against Obstetric Fistula

2012-01-27T22:38:00.000-07:00

In the coming months, we will be re-releasing the We Are Women book as a hardcover. There will also be a couple more essays included. It will be beautiful and we are so excited!

Speaking of the We Are Women book, you can order the original paperback now and receive free ground shipping with the code WHOASHIPPING through the end of January. Good deals!

As always, all proceeds from the We Are Women book go to the Campaign to End Fistula. To read more about fistula, see this post, or this one. Also check out Victoria's Secret model Miranda Kerr talking about obstetric fistula here, and in the below video. This easily preventable/fixable condition is getting more attention, and that is always a good thing.

creativity and me

2012-01-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

It took me a while to realize that my college education was not just about the specific concepts I learned in each class. I studied math and worked really hard at it. And yet, from one semester to the next, from one year to the next I always had the same struggle: I would so quickly forget all that I had worked so hard to learn. Each semester was a struggle to relearn what I had already studied and learn all the new material. It was frustrating.

One day it finally occurred to me. I had just finished the hardest semester yet and was only a few weeks into the new one. All the mathematical proofs I had worked on had apparently gone out for a bike ride and I could not remember a thing. It was ridiculous. But I realized that I could survive without that specific knowledge. I had learned how to write a proof; how to stretch my brain and think beyond what I have thought before. I learned how to solve the problems the book spit at me.

That is when I learned how to be creative: while I was studying math. I learned that answers do not always come naturally and I must think outside of the box, beyond what I have previously thought or considered and learned and come to a new way of approaching the problem. I learned that to keep my personal “creative juices flowing” I must periodically take a step back, leave the problem for a day or two. When I would come back to it, new thoughts would flood my mind and often, the answer was right there.

Usually when I think about creativity and those who possess that specific gene I think of musicians and painters and dancers. Some of you probably think of crafters and scrapbookers. But what if there is more to creativity than the obvious?

This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

The product of "creativity" has typically been defined in one of two ways: either as something historically new (and relatively rare), such as scientific discoveries or great works of art; or as producing something new in a personal sense - an apparent innovation for the creator, regardless of whether others have made similar innovations, or whether others value the particular act of creation.

Can you hear that? That tiny little noise? It is the sound of hope for all who think they are not creative. Because you are. Amidst all those who draw and preform and bake up beauties, there you stand. A source of originality, imagination, and talent.

What you create doesn’t have to be new to anyone else or mean anything to anyone else. If it is new to you then you have created.

There can be creativity in all the we do: problem solving (at work, home, etc.), traditions, gardening, interior design, raising children, cleaning the house, yoga and other forms of exercise, architecture, travel, party planning, educating yourself, organizing, finding time to read when there seems to be no time at all, budgeting and saving money (and paying off debt), cooking, sewing, writing, painting, drawing, singing and other such musical endeavors.

Of course there are those who are more creative in different areas but the point is, we each are creative. When I create something, even if it is just more room in the closet, I feel a sense of accomplishment that I want to do something more.

Strength:

2012-01-23T11:40:00.001-07:00

sarah tobler
(from the we are women book)

"I myself have no power. It's the people behind me who have the power. Real power comes only from the Creator. It's in His hands. But if you're asking about strength, not power, then I can say that the greatest strength is gentleness."

-Leon Shenandoah, Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy

(source: Wisdomkeepers).

2012-01-20T21:06:00.004-07:00

A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

~James Allen in As A Man Thinketh

The necessity of loving yourself.

2012-01-18T12:37:00.001-07:00

photo by gary barnes

I really do believe that womanhood is beautiful. I believe that a woman who has overcome a challenge is exceptionally beautiful, as is a bloated pregnant woman, a determined business woman, a I-haven't-showered-in-a-week mother-of-five, just about any woman. And men, too. People are beautiful. That's why my university studies are pointing me to a career in social services. And that's why I began the We Are Women Project, to celebrate the fact that we are beautiful individuals.

But as much as I believe these things wholeheartedly about others, that sentiment of beauty hasn't quite penetrated my own being. I never quite realized the depth of my own lack of self-worth until recently. I say "depth" because it extends even to my early childhood, when the foundation stone of my belief system was set. A simple statement based on simple childhood observations that continues to penetrate my thoughts and define my self-worth even to this present moment.

When this conclusion was made, I was advised to break down that foundation stone, then let everything above that settle gently down. Everything that has built upon that initial stone is so important, because it makes me who I am, but that initial negative statement needs to go.

I don't know if any of this is making sense, but that's where I am right now. I am learning how to live, thrive, and love myself. I think that's also part of the "I Am" project. Defining who we are. Discovering how beautiful we each are as individuals.

For more information and my progress with this topic, visit the apple a day blog.

2012-01-16T11:43:00.002-07:00

The time is always right to do what is right.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Knitting for a cause! Want to join in?

2012-01-14T21:42:00.000-07:00

I tried to take this a couple times and still look tired, so I apologize. But the point is:

I've been knitting! And for a reason!

Check out the Love Scarf Project for more info.

i think i am, i think i am

2012-01-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

We were sitting at a table of strangers at a friends dinner reception. They were going around the table asking everyone what it was that they did. My heart was racing. What was I going to say? Though I spend my days at home as a mother, I had made a decision a few weeks before that 1.) I was never going to say “I am just a stay at home mom” and 2.) that “mother of a wiggle child” was not all that I was and all that I did. I am still an individual and a wife and a friend and a sister and so much more.

Then it came to me. “And what do you do?”

I sheepishly pointed to the child who was trying desperately to reach the salad in front of us. Then they asked “What else?” in a purely curious way. So I said it:

“I am a writer.”

AHHHHH!

Who was I kidding? I felt panicky but I stuck to what I said. I told of my love of writing and that I wrote for a couple of blogs when I could and that I was working hard on improving. They kept asking questions and I felt like a fraud. I felt like I had lied.

I was no writer. I liked to write out what I thought and felt and experienced but I was no writer. There were so many ways I needed to improve and things I needed to do before I could have that title bestowed on me.

Afterwards I told Billy about how silly I felt about it all but how I knew that I needed to have more courage. He didn’t even say anything. I was working through it all on my own.

Who but me could decide what I was?

If I love to write and continue to write, then why not say that is what I am?

There is no need to be scared. No one ever said that to be something, you have to be it perfectly. You just have to keep trying and keep improving. There may be no one else in the world outside of me and my husband that considers me a writer. But I don’t care.

I am a writer.

I am a writer.

Who are you? Email us your "I Am" photos! Click here for more information!

January Book Sale!

2012-01-11T09:41:00.001-07:00

Remember the We Are Women book? (A collection of essays and photographs depicting the divinity of womanhood?)

Now through 31 January 2012, the book is available with a 25% discount when you use the code LULUBOOK305 at checkout.

And, as always, all proceeds go to benefit maternal health care through the Campaign to End Fistula.

Purchase the book here.

Dilemma.

2012-01-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

"Do what you love. Love what you do."

Such a simple phrase! So catchy!
And you can buy it on a sticker! A mug! A mousepad!

But, as with so many things, it's much easier said than done. And when it's done, it boils down to: the only thing I've ever kept up with is music. And second to that, there's my major in family science, which basically means I'll probably end up with a career that sends me home every night heartbroken and wanting to adopt 20,000 babies.

Throughout adolesence, I dabbled with Campfire Girls, Brownies, ballet, basketball, piano lessons... and goodness, the list could go on forever. So many clubs, so many activities, only lasting maybe a day, or a semester, at the most. There were even those times when I showed up for tryouts before remembering that I had no coordination (hip hop dance team) or always looked like I was drowning (swim team).

This is embarrassing.

So what's a girl to do when any hobby that remotely lasts a substantial period of time is not in the least lucrative?

What gives me hope is that there are actually some people who find that balance in life, and they make it work! Like Jordan of Oh Happy Day! or Courtney of C. Jane Enjoy It! or Sarah Jane with her beautiful illustrations! (Side note: I'm considering this as my year-theme. And when I say "considering," I mean I just need to send it off to Kinkos to print and it's a done deal.)

And now my question for you:

How have you found that balance?
How have you learned to "do what you love" and "love what you do"?
Leave your thoughts in the comments. In the words of the musical ensemble OutKast:
"Lend me some sugar! I am your neighbor! (Ow!)"

2012-01-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

~Dorothy Parker

Old Year New Year

2012-01-05T07:00:00.004-07:00

(Photos from our visit to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, December 2011)

Facebook seems full of mockers these days.

Things like: “The gym was so full today of all those new years resolution people. Can’t wait until February.”

It’s funny and a little bit true but it also makes me a little sad. I like starting a new year. I love that feeling of starting new; of looking back at where I was a year ago and where I am today. I like thinking of where I want to be.

But there is the tendency to be motivated for the first few months and then we slowly forget what we so determinedly resolved to do. Unfortunately that is part of human nature. To learn and then forget. However, I believe that it is through continuing to try that we actually change ourselves. Think about it. I try so hard to keep my clothes off the floor in our bedroom. Inevitably the laziness takes over and I am back to the pile of clothes sprawled about the room. I have to say, though, when I was younger, those piles almost never got cleaned up. Now they do… most of the time.

It is an improvement. And I believe that I have improved simply by continuing to try, even when I fall short.

If the way we are setting our goals and resolutions isn't working, we can change and be more creative with what we are setting and how we plan to accomplish it. Danni did 12 by 2012. Susannah created a write up to help you unravel the past year and look forward to the new year. You could set one big resolution then break it down into the little steps you want to take to accomplish it. Instead of doing it for new years, you could do it at the beginning of spring: the moment those tulips bloom, you make your goals for the next 12 months. Or you could just set goals for every 3 months.

You can do anything as long as you are doing something!

Looking back at the last year, a lot has changed. I have changed. We welcomed our little Miss Millie into the world. After a hard pregnancy, my husband patiently loved me while I struggled through the postpartum blues. Once I found my feet again, I felt ready to jump back in my life and start new things. It was a difficult year but such a good one. And I want to keep moving in the right direction.

Can I tell you a couple of my goals?

Two things have really been on my mind. 1.) Creativity and 2.) Courage.

So here is what I am going to do. I want to explore what creativity really means and really take a look at the people who inspire me. Since I do my best thinking through writing, I want to write out my thoughts and share them all with you.

Then there is courage. Oh my dear friend Courage. I want to try to get myself out of my shell and try new things. I want to do things that stretch me in some way. For instance, last week I went to a yoga class that my friend teaches. That does not seem like much of an accomplishment but it was for me. Although I have done yoga before, I am rusty. I didn’t know how the class was set up or who would be there. Those things are very important to me. I like to know exactly what I am stepping into or I seem to get a lot of anxiety. So by me walking into that dance studio, unsure of what to even put on my feet, I was doing something that was hard for me. And oh how worth it it was. I felt so happy and free by the end of that class that I can’t wait until the next one.

So there they are. The two things I really want to focus my energies on. No. They are not the only things I want to improve on. I want to be better mum and a more loving wife. I want to write more and read more and study more and DO more. But creativity and courage are the two things that will drive those other goals of mine.

What are your goals or resolutions?

Do you have a creative way to keep the motivation to continue working on your goals?

Also, if you try something new and want to share it, email me at agraehl@gmail.com! I want to hear about your experiences!

"I Am" Photo Request!

2012-01-02T06:00:00.002-07:00

To begin the 2012 year, we want to make a request for "I Am" photos! We want to hear from anyone and everyone. You can submit more than one (although there is no guarantee that all will be posted, but at least one from each submitter will be posted), and if you want to, you can even to "You Are" photos for the women you love, or "We Are" to include anyone/everyone!

How To:

Using a photo editing program such as picnik.com (free, and used below),

or any default or downloaded program on your computer, etc.,
create something to echo your "I am" sentiment.

Original:

Edited:

When you have created your masterpiece,

e-mail it to allisonabarnes@gmail.com

(or if you are friends with Allison or Alicia on facebook, you can send it there. We're not too picky).

In the next few weeks, we will be posting these on the blog for all to enjoy.

What do you love about yourself?

What are some divine qualities that you hold dear?

It's time to celebrate those qualities now!

2011-12-31T12:29:00.002-07:00

Did you all see? Our own Jessica was featured on the Cardigan Empire! Go see what she has to say and give her a shout out!!

don't wait a single moment

2011-12-31T12:22:00.003-07:00

How wonderful it is that we need not wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

~Anne Frank

Happy New Years!

"I have these memories of you, wearing long red socks and red shoes, I have these memories..."

2011-12-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

Things are changing, as you can probably tell.

The posts are slowing, things are being reworked.
Alicia, Jessica, and I are all sorting through new experiences with the coming year, which is making life a bit hectic, but memorable.We can't wait to tell you all about it.In the meantime, please be patient with us!Love, the We Are Women Writers

Christmas Time

2011-12-21T22:26:00.004-07:00

We have been down and out here at the Fish residence. Well... I have been down and out and Billy has been taking care of everything, including working all week and most of the weekend, coming home to keep me alive, taking care of the child, and keeping the house clean. After what I thought would be a easy surgery and quick recovery, we finally went to the Instacare to get antibiotics, and pump me full of fluid and pain medicine. I am feel much better and have been trying to get that darn Christmas Spirit back and seems to have gotten scared away by all the throwing up and terrible pain.

But now that I write that, I think there has been a lot of Christmas Spirit roaming our house, just not the way it usually is. While I was too sick to take care of my normal duties, friends and family brought over hoards of food, took care of our teething feisty crawler, decorated for the Christmas party that I was suppose to decorate, and help me get some Christmas shopping done. So much charity and love.

Thank Heavens for true Christmas Spirit.

wake up!

2011-12-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

this quote hit me the other day - and made me really want to wake up.

we all have the power to move mountains.

it's realizing we do that's hard part, sometimes.

2011-12-07T23:17:00.004-07:00

(art by kirby)

"nature seemed to me benign and good; i thought she loved me, outcast as i was; and i, who from man could anticipate only mistrust, rejection, insult, clung to her with filial fondness."

~Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre

inspiring me today

2011-12-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

Are you loving this season? I always hate how fast it seems to flit on by. Here are some things that are helping me to remember to make the most of it and to love the things that really matter most.

Happy Holidays!

Savor // Shutter Sisters

A marvelous Christmas Mix by Marilyn of Passionista!

Sarah of Sarah Jane Studios (she's an illustrator and designs fabric... how cool is that?) posted her Christmas children's book advent last year and I love it. You don't even have to own all the books. You can get some library books, wrap them up (make sure you open them before they are due, of course), read them together, then return. She's a clever one, that Sarah.

I have loved this idea from Danyelle of dandee and I think we are going to try to use it this year with Millie (even though she is nine months old and couldn't careless one way or the other). Want. Need. Wear. Read. (You can read how they got started here.)

This video is so inspiring. The song is from Hue and Hum i.e. Caitlin and Robbie Connolly's Christmas album (that you can buy here). Caitlin is showing how she did the album artwork. Those two. Man. They make me want to create something all my own. (via here)

"Canned Bread & Butter," or How My View of Food Storage Has Changed Drastically.

2011-12-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

Before last week, my idea of food storage was cans of beans, pillowcases of raw grains, and the occasional Twinkie for dessert. Nasty. Thanks to Grandma Hendrixson, my future food storage will actually be edible-- and even moreso, enjoyable and dare I say, delightful!

I give you,

How to can bread and butter!

Bread: You can use either the store bought dough, or make your own. When the dough is made, spray a tall Mason jar with Pam, making sure all surfaces are covered. Put the dough inside the jar, filling it about half way up, let rise, then put the jar (uncovered) in a 350 degree oven for about 45 minutes.

While it's baking, sterilize the tops of the jars by boiling them in a saucepan of water (you can see the saucepan in the picture above). When the bread is baked, take it out, cut off any muffin-top, and seal it with the sterilized top. Done! Soon you will hear the "ping!" of the top sealing.

Butter: First, sterilize the jars (without lids) in a 250 degree oven for about 45 minutes. Sterilize the lids in boiling water (see above).

Put 2 sticks of butter in a glass measuring cup and microwave until it's melted. Pour the melted butter in a jar and seal it. Keep melting butter and putting it in jars until you are done filling jars.

While the jars are cooling, make sure you are continuously shaking the jars until the butter hardens. You want the white stuff at the bottom of the jars to be mixed throughout the butter (see above). If there's still that separation when the butter hardens, you'll want to stick the jars in warm water to re-melt the contents, then keep shaking to mix everything together.

There you have it! Canned bread and butter. The butter, we know, lasts at least 5 years. The bread-- we're not sure. No one's ever kept it in storage long enough to find out. I guess it's just that good!

P.S. Neither bread nor butter need to be refrigerated. They will keep just fine on the shelf until opened.

To learn more about becoming self reliant, click here.

J.K. Rowling on Failure and Imagination

2011-11-28T07:00:00.002-07:00

A few years ago, I watched this speech given by J.K. Rowling at the 2008 Harvard Commencement (I wasn't there... I just saw it online) and I have not been able to forget it. She is a powerful, creative writer and a talented speaker. I admire her for what she has done with her life, even with hardships and disappointment. (You can also read it here.)

Source: Harvard Magazine

2011-11-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face... You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
- Eleanor Roosevelt

I should probably not say this out loud, but...

2011-11-25T15:20:00.000-07:00

...I've been listening to Christmas music since October. My bad.

But this one's in Spanish! So if you didn't know better, it could be a multi-holiday carol, right?

danke schoen

2011-11-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

I am grateful to be a woman.

I am grateful to be a mother.

I am grateful to be able to continually learn.

I am grateful to have good books to read.

I am grateful for music that makes me want to dance.

I am grateful for my sisters and sisters-in-law.

I am grateful to have good food to eat everyday, not just today.

I am grateful for our apple tree.

I am grateful to be able to write here and be so open with all of you, strangers and friends.

I am grateful for the smells of the holidays.

I am grateful for 44 cent avocados... and 3 dollar milkshakes

I am grateful for our amaryllis.

The Busyness Becomes You

2011-11-21T12:33:00.010-07:00

I felt like my head would explode. Or my feet would fall off. Or my arms would give out. Or I would just fall asleep right where I was sitting. In yet another meeting.

Sundays have become my meeting days. Jumping from one to the next, with a baby on my hip and a diaper bag that seems much heavier than it should be. If the meeting is with all ladies, I can nurse the child right at the meeting. Otherwise I am scrambling in the 15 minutes between to get her fed and changed and ready for the next one.

When I finally reach my home, my husband opens the door for me and offers a hand and a kiss. All I want to do is sit and stare at the wall. But the lists of "To Do's" grew quickly at each meeting and if I stop and sit, there is a chance I won't ever get anything done. So I start right away. Call this person, email that one. Look up Christmas stories for the party or a song for the kids to sing.

Sometimes, I wonder what really is the point of all the busyness. Is there a point? Or is it like the movies say. Suburbia with it's matching houses and crazy neighbors, where everyone spends their time doing the same things over and over again, with little purpose but to keep ourselves busy.

But I don't really believe that. My to do list is not full of senseless things to fill my time. It is full of reminders to go talk to that child, who in class seemed so quiet and maybe a little bit lonely. It has reminders to make sure my neighbors remember the Christmas party that I am helping organize; or ideas of who would sing so pretty for that party. It is full of ways to improve, be more efficient, ideas that I had to be more thoughtful and what I could do for a friend.

I am grateful for my life. That I can see the people around me who I can help and love. And maybe each thing I do takes a piece of me so that by the time I get home, I wonder if I have anything left to give. But then I remember that I do it to help other peoples lives be a little happier, a little less lonely, and maybe even a little easier. And that makes me happy.

2011-11-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

"Be something, Abe."

The last words Abraham Lincoln's mother said to him.

Intuition

2011-11-14T07:00:00.002-07:00

Before the child was born, I was absolutely terrified about being a mother. Flashbacks of babysitting as a teenager haunted my late pregnancy dreams. I tossed and turned, fearing the hell that my child would go through because I had no idea what I was doing. Kind friends would assure me that there was nothing to fear. They told me of my mother’s intuition that would kick in and I would just know what she would need.

But that particular gift or talent or whatever you want to call it seemed to elude me. Billy and I were so lost and confused we even had to ask the nurses at the hospital how to hold her and if we would ever feel less awkward doing so. She would cry and I had no ideas of how to soothe her. Secretly I cursed those who had told me to rely on my intuition; because all my intuition was telling me was that she had a fever (which she didn’t) and that she was lethargic (which she wasn’t). It seemed instead of mother’s intuition I had simply been endowed with eyes that were so tired they would not stay open and endless fears that kept me checking on her all through the night.

As time slowly (and yet so quickly) passed, I started to get to know our little one. I started to hear the subtle differences in her cries, informing me when she was tired or hungry. I knew what position she liked best to sleep in; which toys she liked best to nibble on; which animal noises made her laugh; which foods made her gag. I learned her sleep patterns, her ticklish spots, and how she cries when she is lonely.

I guess I had naively imagined mother’s intuition as a sort of dust that kind little fairies would sprinkle on my head the night before my child would be born. Instead it was the product of time and energy and tears. Many, many tears. It was earned during sleepless nights and showerless days. It came only after loving her and cuddling her and getting to know her.

And then one night she was sick for the first time. As she threw up all over herself and her bed, I suddenly felt like that brand new mother who was at a complete loss as to what to do for her child. I cleaned her up and took her temperature. “She is fine” the thermometer assured me in soothing tones. So we laid her in her bed with her clean, fresh sheets, said a prayer with her and kissed her good night. Not 60 seconds later she was throwing up again. What had been small worries in the back of my head became great fears.

What if something was really wrong. Did I feed her baby food that had gone bad? Had she licked something that had germs on it? The fears quickly escalated to more terrible things, stories I had heard of children with health problems that only showed themselves months after the child was born.

Panic was taking over. Who should we call? What should I do?

After I dressed her in yet another pair of pajamas, I held her in my arms while Billy cleaned up her bed once again. I rocked her and touched her soft little nose and her rosy little cheeks. I said a little prayer in my head, begging for a calm to help me separate what was real and what was simply my fears running wild. I caressed her arms and held her tiny little fingers between mine. I was reminded that, though we are still learning, that we know our little miss Millie. We are her parents. And we can know when something is really wrong. I breathed in deep, smelling her baby smells. She was drifting into sleep again and I could feel that everything was alright.

I sat there and for the first time in my life, I believed in mother’s intuition. I believed in my ability to take care of my baby. It was not something that had come as naturally as I had hoped or been told. It had come with work and time and effort. But it was there and I could and would trust in it.

2011-11-12T07:00:00.003-07:00

"... Don't pray for tasks equal to your abilities, but pray for abilities equal to your tasks. Then the performance of your tasks will be no miracle, but you will be the miracle."

~Thomas S. Monson

2011-11-10T07:00:00.003-07:00

"Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained."

~Marie Curie (1867-1934)

Guest Post: Passionate

2011-11-07T09:49:00.004-07:00

Let’s Get Passionate!

Romantic even. Let’s get ridiculously silly sometimes.

And let’s face it: Passion is a woman’s catharsis. It heals. It refreshes.

Now let me expound….

Last night I was doing two of my favorite things—eating good food and laughing with family—and we were hit with a storm. First, it was just the wind building up. We noticed the trees bending and waving wildly. The evening sky turned shades darker as black clouds rolled in and covered our neighborhood. And as we all gathered outside to revel, the first drops started pounding the pavement.

I love a good storm. In a silly, unexplainable, passionate way! My husband knows this about me, and he grins when my “stormy side” comes out. Truly. Storms do something physical to me—my heart races. I suddenly wish I was wearing a dress from Sense and Sensibility, so I could run out into the rain and get soaked down to my bloomers. And in my disheveled state, I would expect my husband to run out and kiss me really fantastically!

Okay, so, passion. Storms make me passionate—romantic, silly, etc. But I get other kinds of passionate about other kinds of things. A Mumford & Sons song gets my blood racing also…. But in this case, it becomes a heady euphoria, and I feel like I could really, truly change the world. Equally unexplainable. But their music fills me with passion.

But I didn’t run out into the storm last night—not in front of everyone. How silly I would have looked! And I don’t tell people about my stormy side in casual conversation. Of course not. They would listen to a statement or two, a shine of embarrassment behind their eyes, and tell me that they hear their kids crying, or they really should get dinner started, or whatever.

But then I wonder if that’s how it would really play out. What if I told it to just the right person, who listened and then said, “I know! Every time I pass a field of golden wheat, I want to pull my car over and run through it. I can’t explain it. I just need to do it, with a passion!”

Or, “Yes! When I hear my boyfriend play the piano, I want to run over and jump into his lap, take his fingers, and kiss each one! But isn’t that silly?”

I imagine myself looking at that person entirely differently forever—in a beautifully passionate way. I would suddenly recognize a “bosom friend,” someone to be silly, deep and passionate with…

Aka, someone to be real with.

Wouldn’t that be amazing? To see everyone’s passions on the outside? To see a depth in someone—even about something trivial—that we have never seen before? To understand what things truly move everyone around us?

Why speak in Victorian-era statements, when we could be so much more real with each other? I certainly do not mean the kind of real where we tell people their clothing/hair/etc is ugly; where we go around offending people because “Oh, I’m just being real.” No, that’s not real. That’s narrow-minded. It’s mean.

I mean real, where people know I feel deeply about things. Where instead of saying, “Oh, yeah, thunderstorms are cool,” I say, “Yes! Thunderstorms make me want to run out into the middle of the street and hold my arms out in blissful welcome!” Where they see me as a person that is moved, that is emotional, that resounds inside. Someone with passion for….whatever it is that I feel passionate about. What’s wrong with being deep and silly anymore? Why must we look and act detached, controlled, serene, mild, benign, bland, flat?

I am passionate about thunderstorms! I am passionate about Mumford & Sons!

I am passionate about My Husband, My Children, My Faith!

I am passionate about books! About writing; and how words are put together!

I am passionate about the earth around me! About the ocean!

I am passionate! I am romantic! I am real! I am me!

(Ahh, doesn’t that feel good?!)

This essay was written by the delightfully passionate Charity Brooks. You can see her other essay here and visit her personal blog here.

"run and not be weary" part 4

2011-10-19T07:00:00.004-06:00

In the past month or so, I've had an intense dilemma as to what my goals should be. Should I find a way to have more energy? Lose the blues? Kick off those few extra pounds? Eat more vegetables? Eat only vegetables?

It's quite confusing, really, and concentrating on those little details pulls me down quite a bit. So to close this segment of "Run and Not Be Weary," I'd like to quote part of a sermon from one of the leaders of the church I belong to:

"In the beloved children’s story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the mysterious candy maker Willy Wonka hides a golden ticket in five of his candy bars and announces that whoever finds one of the tickets wins a tour of his factory and a lifetime supply of chocolate.

Written on each golden ticket is this message: “Greetings to you, the lucky finder of this Golden Ticket … ! Tremendous things are in store for you! Many wonderful surprises await you! … Mystic and marvelous surprises … will … delight, … astonish, and perplex you.”

In this classic children’s story, people all over the world desperately yearn to find a golden ticket. Some feel that their entire future happiness depends on whether or not a golden ticket falls into their hands. In their anxiousness, people begin to forget the simple joy they used to find in a candy bar. The candy bar itself becomes an utter disappointment if it does not contain a golden ticket.

So many people today are waiting for their own golden ticket—the ticket that they believe holds the key to the happiness they have always dreamed about. For some, the golden ticket may be a perfect marriage; for others, a magazine-cover home or perhaps freedom from stress or worry.

There is nothing wrong with righteous yearnings—we hope and seek after things that are “virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy.” The problem comes when we put our happiness on hold as we wait for some future event—our golden ticket—to appear.

... The happiest people I know are not those who find their golden ticket; they are those who, while in pursuit of worthy goals, discover and treasure the beauty and sweetness of the everyday moments. They are the ones who, thread by daily thread, weave a tapestry of gratitude and wonder throughout their lives. These are they who are truly happy."

- President Dieter F. Uchdorf, Forget Me Not

On our journey to optimum health, let us not forget to savor the everyday moments. These are the moments that make life worth living-- healthy bodies and minds just enhance the experience even more!

To read past posts on this topic, click here.

Thoughts on a Monday

2011-10-17T07:00:00.000-06:00

Today I am up for a post. I have some ideas of what to write about but to be honest with you, this week has been a bit draining for many reasons. One of those reason is a new responsibility I have been asked to take on at church. It will be a big change and a new experience for me and to be completely honest, I have been feeling a little... intimidated. But I know that I can do it. And I know that it will push me and pull me and make me stretch.

So, until I actually get something written, here are a few essays and articles that have impressed me as of late.

Did you hear about the three women who won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2011? It was awarded to them for their work for gender equality, peace, and democracy.

Though I personally have not experienced it, Reachel's essay on her journey through infertility touched my heart. AND they just found out that they have permission to adopt their foster child Coco. Oh happy day!

Some people wonder why get an education if you are just going to "waste" it by staying home with your children. While there are many reasons why I feel passionately that it is important for everyone to get as much education as possible, I believe it greatly affects our children and their future. This article reaffirmed that belief.

"run and not be weary" part 3

2011-10-12T21:41:00.003-06:00

For the 3rd part of the "run and not be weary" series, we have a guest post by my dear friend Jessica P., from the good ol' state of Kentucky! I just love her sweet, active family, and I know you will, too! -Allison

I was faced with a tough choice mid-afternoon today. I could let my little boy sit down and watch some T.V. when he got home from school or I could have him go outside and play. T.V. would have been much easier. He and his siblings would have been jazzed out of their gourds to be given the go ahead to open their eyes wide, drop their chins a little, and settle into the deep parts of the couch. I could’ve done whatever I wanted to…by myself…with no interruptions...alone...solo mio...you get my point.

But then I thought about how Allie asked me to write a post about having an active family. And I figured I better live up to the jive. So I told my little boy that before he could watch a show he had to go outside and jump on the trampoline and play on the swing set with his siblings. And then I sighed and realized that if I was going to do this whole “active family” thing I better go whole hog and head outside to play with them too.

We had so much fun we all kind of threw a fit when it was time to come in for dinner. We pretended the swing was a train and told the conductor where to take us. We were all pirates – well except me, I had to walk the plank. And we showed-off our mad trampoline skills. I can bounce back up to my feet off my back folks...don’t feel like you have to save your applause.

So what did I learn this afternoon? That being active is fun. It can be creative. It can be bonding. And it is mighty good for the heart and trimming the chubs that do like to hug my mid-section. How’s that for efficient?

The alone hour I could have had? Didn’t miss it at all.

Allie wanted me to include a few things that my family does to stay active. Here are a few “active family” good memories of mine from growing up as well as things my family is doing now to try to keep moving.

Racing. My brother, sisters and I did a kids’ triathlon annually for a few years growing up. My parents would help us train by timing us running around the block. I felt so speedy and proud.

Taking Walks. There are particular walks from my childhood that are still warm in my memory, except for the one where we had to walk through a field of tall weeds to get back on course. I screamed like I was walking over fiery flames because I was afraid I was going to step on a snake.

Camping. I don’t care if it’s in your backyard, frontyard, a campground with toilets, or under a tree sleeping with bears. If you make yourself live outside for a night or two you’re going to start moving actively. There’s something about nature that does that. And you’ll like it. My grins are awfully wide in the pictures of me storming the wilderness as a chubby six year old.

Playing in Your Backyard. You don’t have to sign up for a soccer team or baseball team to play sports. You can actually play sports in your own yard with your own family. Crazy! I know, but so fun. And it’s so much better to be tackled in the snow by your own brother than by a stranger.

Tricks for Treats. Here’s one that I didn’t do growing up, but that my husband will throw out every now and again. My kids will do anything for a gummy bear. Ten toe touches – aye, aye. Ten push ups – you bet. Five sit ups – okie dokie. So maybe the sugar counterbalances the benefit of the activity. But I figure it can’t hurt to develop a Pavlovian love of exercise.

Investing in activity. We bought a small house with a big backyard. We added a small gym to the back of our house and threw some climbing holds up on the roof and walls. We want to be active and we're willing to put our money where our muscles are.

I’d love to grab up a few more good ideas for being active as a family from readers of this blog. I’ll come back and read the comments to find out your good ideas. I like this sharing stuff. I bet you do too. We are women you know.

My Introduction to Motherhood

2011-10-10T07:00:00.002-06:00

I have a friend that I have only recently come back into contact with. We were closer when we were younger but as life shifted, our contact slipped. Thanks to social networks and blogging, we have been able to see what each others lives have become so far. I really admire her for her strength and faith and courage, for it took great courage to share her experience with us. She wishes to remain anonymous but I know that you can also see her kind heart and strength of character as you read about her experience.

When I was introduced to this blog, I was quickly drawn to the “We Are Women” book’s beneficiaries. Let me tell you why.

Excitement

My water brakes - our baby boy is coming! We head to the hospital and are so excited to meet our infant. I can almost feel what it will be like to hold him for the first time.

Detour

No. No. No. Tears start to well up - this isn’t how my story is supposed to go. Where is the doctor? Why are there so many nurses in here? Where are they taking my baby? I tell my husband to not let him out of his sight. My thoughts are with my boys but my body is not, I feel myself start to get dizzy.

14 Hours Later

I still haven’t held my baby. I tried to visit him in the NICU, but I got nauseous and almost fainted while they were wheeling me in. I am losing a lot of blood and sometimes feel gushes of horrible-smelling air when I try to sit up or walk.

Peace in the Storm

Finally - I hold my baby for the first time at 4:00 A.M the next day. My body hurts so badly I can barely sit down, but I don’t care, I take in the moment. My baby is in my arms.

Confusion

The air thing is getting worse. I can barely move anywhere without it flowing out. This can’t be normal. I call my doctor. He tells me that in his 30 years of delivering babies he’s never seen something like this first hand. He apologizes and tells me this can sometimes happen with 4^th degree episiotomies. He can’t help me. He tells me to wait the weekend and see a specialist on Monday. Wait the weekend? Like this? How? I need to be seen now. I go to the E.R., but my body is too sore and my wounds too fresh to examine. I’m given antibiotics. Pray. Wait. Pray again. Monday can’t come soon enough.

Some Answers

The colorectal specialist can see the problem: the beginning of a fistula. He tells me that this is common in Africa and can also happen to women who have 4^th degree episiotomies. Deep breath. He tells me to wait it out. There is a chance that I can avoid surgery and that my body can heal on its own.

Embarrassment

I wait weeks. I can’t go anywhere without a foul odor accompanying me. Uncontrollable gas and who knows what else flows randomly throughout the day. My body is out of control. I ache constantly. My mind is consumed with fear and worries. More deep breaths. I long to be happy and wish I was enjoying this time of my life. My heart is heavy. My husband’s love, my son’s countenance, and my faith in God and His Son push me to keep going.

Hope Comes with Healing

Second appointment with the specialist: it’s getting smaller! I breathe a sigh of relief. I’m not out of the dark yet, but there is light. There will be more follow up appointments. Life begins to be a little more normal each day. I continue to have appointments. I hold my breath after each exam as I wait for the report. Good news is followed by better news. My body is healing on its own - I don’t need surgery. Prayers are answered. I am relieved.

Today

Putting my thoughts down has been painful and healing at the same time. My experience with the fistula has been one of the most frightening and traumatizing things I’ve experienced. My compassion and respect for women who are affected by fistulas have increased. I recognize that many women have not had as happy an ending as I have. I am grateful to share my story and hope that it can raise awareness about this worldwide issue.

If you would like to learn more about Fistula, you can see a brief explanation here or visit the website for the Campaign to End Fistula here. Also, all the proceeds from the We Are Women book go to the Campaign to End Fistula, to help train doctors in prevention and care of women who experience it and it goes toward the $300 treatment for those who have it.

Obstetric Fistula is something that affects women everywhere. Thank you, dear friend, for sharing your experience and making this issue more personal and real for us.

Look who's rockin' Cardigan Empire!

2011-10-04T09:59:00.000-06:00

Dear Alicia is featured on Cardigan Empire's Beauty-Full Tuesday today! Check it out!

"run and not be weary" part 2

2011-10-03T12:28:00.001-06:00

One summer day I decided to run a 5k-- a 5k that started at 9am, when the sun was fully committed to being as bright and warm as it could be. Additionally, I decided to run despite the fact that I was experiencing very painful shin splints. By the end of the 5k I was near tears, trying to massage or stretch or soothe my shins in any way. It was like someone was continuously stabbing a knife into my legs. And that feeling continued for quite a while, and was revived everytime I tried to run for months after that.

And that is how I developed a fear of running. Because who wants to be stabbed in the shin?

And then my running shoes got too small (Do I have a different shoe size in the South? Was it from when they got sogging wet then dried for 3 days straight when I helped sandbag a town a few months back?), and 6:30am was just way too early to think about aerobic exercise, etc.

And now here we are. Sister Koford and I, running despite my fear of shin splints and her concern about side aches. If you wake up at 6:30am and live in our little town, you may see us slowly "jogging" down the street. Of course, I'm in my Keds, and there's a good chance that we both slept in the clothes that we are running around in. When it's 6:30am, you do what you can.

I love this video about the physical and spiritual benefits of eating well and taking care of our bodies. It references the Word of Wisdom, the health code for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but is of course applicable to any healthy lifestyle.

I Am

2011-09-26T07:00:00.000-06:00

When I was 12, having just moved to a new house, neighborhood, city, state, part of the country, I was horribly intimidated by the fact that I was going to have to find new people to be friends with. The very first person I met was Mary-Jane. She made the whole "becoming friends" feel like it was no big deal. All of the sudden I had a huge group of friends because she introduced me to them all and helped me be a part of them. And now, years later, she has traveled the world, been in I have no idea how many operas and become a truly inspiring woman. She is beautiful, glamorous, thoughtful, crazy talented, and crazy fun. Her blog archi loves mary-jane holds the pictures and words to prove it. Just knowing her makes me feel I have a little of that in me too. I wanted you to meet her and get to know a little of who she is. So, without further ado, meet Mary-Jane:

I am an opera singer.

It’s hard.

I love it.

I hate it.

I dream about it.

I practice hard.

I don’t practice at all.

I want to travel the world.

I want to stay inside.

I am a performer.

I am introverted.

I am settled.

I am confused.

I am realizing that my path to becoming an opera singer is getting harder and harder because I am faced with more important and challenging decisions.

When I was younger my path seemed easier, clearer. Go to college. Do well. Go to graduate school. Do well. Go to an apprentice program for an opera house. Do well. Now your life is set. It was all planned-out. So easy. So simple. Whoopsy. I’m finding it’s impossible for me to plan a perfect little path because something will change whether it’s me, my desires, my options, my location, or my loved ones. Nothing is finite. I am changing and my perfect little world and path that I’ve created is changing too.

I have a partner and best friend in life and what he wants and needs is just as important as my own personal desires. (A lesson I’m learning.) I want him to succeed and I want him to be able to follow his own dreams as well. Sometimes it gets tricky trying to meet each other on our various paths, but I think so far we’ve done pretty well. But it’s our next stage that is a little dubious.

Sometimes you have to live in middle-land for a while and not be sure quite what the next step is. It's kind of weird, but I'm trying to make the most of it. I need to remind myself everyday that middle-land is a beautiful place to be. We haven’t quite reached our ultimate career goals but we’re on the way. We have time to pause and notice what we are doing now and what it is we really want to be doing.

Whilst chasing my dreams of being an opera singer I sometimes forget that I have other interests and talents. Middle-land is teaching me that I can use all of my other resources and talents to make additional dreams and desires realties.

I am a dreamer.

I love being a dreamer.

I am a dancer. (in my living room or kitchen)

I am a wife.

I love my husband.

I like to sew.

I am a friend.

I am a traveler.

I laugh too hard.

I am a sister.

I can be a nerd.

I am a daughter.

I take too long to wash my hair.

I am an auntie.

I need family.

I am loud.

I want happiness.

I have it.

I am happy.

"run and not be weary" part 1

2011-09-24T07:00:00.006-06:00

Sister Koford and I, 19 September 2011

Sister Koford suffers from unexplainable migraines. Despite adequate nightly rest, I still have moments of intense exhaustion throughout the day. After a conversation with an incredible woman this morning, we have both decided that we definitely need to add more fruits and vegetables into our diets, and concentrate on raw foods.

The woman we spoke to has lupus, and while she once was constrained to a wheel chair, then a cane, she has been able to walk on her own for a year. Over the last 1.5 months, she has become a vegan, eating about 70% raw foods each day. She says that she has more strength, fewer migraines, and just feels overall healthier-- both physically and spiritually.

These things have been on our minds lately, and so when this woman just started sharing her insights with us this morning, we decided that now was the time to put these things into practice in our own lives. For the next four weeks (or thereabouts), check back regularly to this blog and Sister Koford's blog as we record our journeys toward optimum health!

Update: Green Smoothie Progress:
Day 1: No frozen anything to put in it. Abort plan to make smoothies.
Day 2: Prepared ice cubes! But peaches, spinach, and ice just didn't cut it, and we grimiced every time we took a sip.
Day 3: We bought frozen berries! Spinach + Berries + Ice was a little bit better, but it was still missing something.

...this may take a while to get down.

2011-09-22T07:00:00.006-06:00

'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,

Hard times, hard times, come again no more.

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;

Oh, hard times, come again no more.

-Stephen Foster
(photo by allison)

Those Who Save Us

2011-09-19T07:00:00.001-06:00

"Thee lift me, and I'll lift thee, and we'll both ascend together."

~Anonymous

There is so much unkindness and selfishness in the world. It would be easy to think that no one cares for others anymore.

But I believe in kindness. I believe in the people who save our lives and our souls and our sanity. I believe in being kind to strangers and neighbors. I believe in kindness even when it doesn't always seem deserved.

I am grateful to the friend who brought me soup and conversation when my health and hope was at its lowest.

I am grateful for the man who, when I was a poor college student, left his change at the front desk for me, not knowing I had no money to buy my last textbook.

I am grateful to my friend from high school who, seeing a child drowning, pulled him from the water and revived him, saving his life and his parents from great grief.

I am grateful to the bystanders who saw a motorcyclists life in danger and stepped up, lifted the car that was on top of him and pulled him to safety.

I am grateful for the men and women who ran into the burning Twin Towers on that fateful September day to save the people left inside.

I believe in the greatness in everyday people. I believe in the kindness in you and me. We can save one another, in big ways and in small.

THANK YOU for the kindness you show those around you. You are someones savior. Never forget that worth (and responsibility) you hold.

Inspire us! Share your stories of kindness that you or others have shown.

2011-09-15T12:47:00.005-06:00

Life, believe, is not a dream

So dark as sages say:

Oft a little morning rain

Foretells a pleasant day.

~Charlotte Brontë, from the poem “Life”

2011-09-09T10:14:00.011-06:00

“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

~Mother Teresa

"...let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work."

~Mother Teresa

There are people in our lives who do amazing things. They travel the world, caring for the needy, fighting for the rights of those less fortunate.

Sometimes, I wonder, since I have not done those things, if my contribution to the world is of any worth.

But then I remind myself that I can and do make a contribution:

I can smile and be kind to the cashier at the grocery store.

I can make a dinner for the family in my neighborhood that just had a baby.

I can learn how to garden and make a space that emits beauty and peace (and be able to eat my own vegetables).

I can greet my husband after a long day of work with a sincere smile and kiss, letting him know what he means to me.

I can teach my daughter how to read and draw, to appreciate art and literature, and help her understand and feel the great worth that she has.

I can make a difference, even in this little corner of the earth that I live.

2011-09-05T07:00:00.001-06:00

"We thank Thee for every blessing

bestowed by Thy bounteous hand" (detail)

by Allison, 2 September 2011

2011-09-01T09:47:00.005-06:00

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like hard work."

~Thomas Edison

Good luck to those who are going back to school, starting new projects, continuing with old ones, making your homes happy ones, and working hard at whatever you do.

Of Dolls and Bicycles

2011-08-29T07:00:00.005-06:00

I have recently read some articles and subsequent discussions on how we are raising our little girls. There are arguments that we should not let our girls be obsessed with pink and princesses, while others say that those things don’t matter. Arguments for girls being tomboys and other for girls being girly.

For me, it is overwhelming and confusing. How can I agree with parts of each side when they differ so much in opinion?

Billy so wisely has told me (with regard to many things) that it is all about balance. To be extreme on either side is not wise. Balance is key.

In a class I took in college, the subject of body image came up. While the conversation became passionate, I started to feel uncomfortable. The general outcry was that “true women have curves.” But then I thought about the woman in my life who were skinny by nature. They did nothing extreme to be skinny. They just were. Where they not “true women?”

I came to the conclusion that it was not about being one way or the other: it is about accepting exactly who we are. (I have to say that I do believe in change. I believe that there are things about each of us that can and should change. For instance, my tendency to envy or to compare. Those are things worth changing. But that is not the direction I would like to go in. Another topic for another day.)

I spent my growing up years, even into college, trying to hide the things about me that I thought were “too feminine.” I felt that if I was too feminine, that my credibility would be diminished and I would not be respected. So I hid from the color pink, wore T-shirts and jeans instead of skirts and dresses. I tried always to be tough, not admitting to any weakness, trying desperately not to cry when I was hurt (physically or emotionally). I would not admit that though education was a top priority and being able to support myself was a goal of mine, that what I really wanted to do and felt was important for me to do was to have babies and be home with them. I went so far as to tell myself that I would never depend on a man. I was a strong, independent woman.

The problem did not stem from those specific things being wrong. I was simply not being true to myself. I love wearing skirts. And while pink is not my absolute favorite, I do enjoy wearing it (as I do most colors). Sometimes, when I get hurt, I cry. And when something touches my heart, I am overcome with emotion. I want to be a mother that can be home with her children. In fact, I do not do well when I am stretched thin between too many responsibilities. I struggle to focus and so, for now, this is what works best for us, in our marriage and our family. And truth be told, I depend completely on my husband. He is the organized to my mess, the calm to my chaotic. He loves me when I don’t deserve to be loved and reminds me of my worth.

Those things, particularly the last, do not take away from my credibility. They do not diminish my intelligence or make me less than any other man or any other woman. They simply contribute to who I am. I (am learning to) accept the parts of me that love the colors blue and green, that want to run and play and be wild while also loving the side of me that loves to get dressed up, that gets giddy when the flowers begin to bloom, and that never felt truly comfortable in her own skin until her husband loved her just how she was.

This is not to say that this how you are or how you should be. It is all about balancing all those parts of you and becoming the best and happiest person you can become.

So what do I want for my daughter? I want her to be kind and wholesome, intelligent and balanced. I want her to find role models that are worth admiring. I will do my best to surround her with things that help her develop those attributes.

And if she loves nothing more than to dress up and have tea parties, then I will make crumpets. Or if she wants to go skateboarding with her Papa, then I will shoo them out the door on another adventure. And if she wants both, then I will help her find balance in those different parts of who she is.

What are your thoughts?

2011-08-24T15:39:00.009-06:00

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

~Albert Einstein

2011-08-22T07:00:00.001-06:00

"I myself have no power.

It's the people behind me who have the power.

Real power comes only from the Creator.

It's in His hands. But if you're asking about

strength, not power, then I can say that

the greatest strength is gentleness."

-Leon Shenandoah, Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy

photo by gary barnes, mi hermano

Learning that I am an 8 cow wife.

2011-08-19T07:00:00.003-06:00

Sister T is from the islands, and contrary to popular belief (read: from my prior knowledge of island life from this short movie, Johnny Lingo), there are no cows on her island. Still, after 18 months of living in Tennessee, she is astounded when she sees a single cow, let alone a pasture full of them (see below).

We watched this tonight, and while she got a huge laugh out of how ridiculous it is (and drooled a little when she saw the ocean), I discovered how beautiful this movie is. It rang more true to me now than ever before. Perhaps its the southern-weight-gain, or the eternal exhaustion, but sometimes I just need to remind myself a little more diligently that I am a beautiful woman-- that I am, indeed, an 8-cow-(future)-wife.

Just Being

2011-08-15T16:18:00.008-06:00

Today we have a treat for you. My friend Charity has kindly written a little essay about... well... about just being. While she calls herself an aspiring writer, I call her a bona fide writer. She is the kind of person who everyone likes and who likes everyone. I hope you enjoy her essay as much as I have.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. . . It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

~e.e. cummings, 1955

I have been pondering the great art of Just Being lately…. It is precisely that. An art.

When I was a child, I had an incredible imagination—so my parents say. In a single afternoon, I was a princess trapped by lava monsters, Rogue of the X-Men, a chef making stone soup and mud patties, a mermaid hiding from the humans, and a singer whose voice changed the world. I was anyone, really anyone, because I didn’t know limits or boxes as a child. There was no concept of genres in a seven year-old’s mind. There just was. I just was.

And then I was a teenager. And though I had mystifying periods, I still basically knew who I was… or who I wanted to be. I knew I was kind, that I didn’t like cliques and exclusions. I knew that I loved music, and that the music I loved wasn’t the top 40 pop chart (you know, that’s never changed. Hm). I knew I was an anti-fashionista—my clothes were thrift-store by choice, mismatched by choice, and wrong era by choice. And I knew that I wanted to write great things. I wanted to be a great person.

And then I got lost. I thought it happened later in life than commonly occurs. Most people have their identity crisis in high school/college, don’t they? And then they figure it all out, and they know—for the rest of their lives—just who they are. And I suddenly discovered, after college degrees, nearly five years of marriage, and two kids, that I couldn’t find my self.

The curious part was that I wasn’t sure how it had happened. I couldn’t pin down a culprit for my lost identity. My marriage was absolutely lovely; always has been—and as far as I can do anything about it—always will be. My kids were beautiful, albeit nuts, like all normal kids. I was proud of my education, and I never have regretted being an English major/an aspiring writer.

So where did I lose myself? If everything around me was just as it had always been, where had I gone?

I pondered for months over the lost me, and I made a discovery: I had become uncomfortable with the art of Just Being. How could I just be a college grad, but not be working in my field? How could I just be a wife, and not a trophy wife? How could I just be a mother, and be forever working behind the scenes? How was I not a New York Times bestselling novelist, with a body like Jillian Michaels, involved in daycares and charities, with a home featured on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens? How could I just be?

So I sat down with myself and went through the missing pieces of me, one by one. I realized two things: I was lost somewhere amid comparisons and limits. I was worried that I wasn’t a complete person because I saw others more complete around me. What is the complete person? Is there a template? I am learning to let go of the myth of completeness, because 1) the definition changes for each person, and 2) isn’t that why we’re allotted seventy, eighty years in this life? To learn to become the most complete version of ourselves, unique and separate from the complete others around us? So how could I possibly compare? There is no one to measure up to but my own future self… And so I’ll cross that comparison bridge in a few more decades, when the only person I must answer to is me.

And the limits? I had finally learned about genre, that concept so innocently unknown in my childhood. I couldn’t possibly be certain things simply because I wasn’t that kind of person. I didn’t fit in that box. Where are these boxes kept? And who labels them? And who enforces them? I am learning to let go of the myth of limitations, because only I know what I am capable of. My limitations are only set by the efforts I make. And that is a part of myself I can control/change—it is not beyond me. And really, what if I never publish a book? Then I am not a writer? I am who I choose to be and who I work to be, and that is not determined by the world’s standards, charts, or figures.

So was I lost? I still believe in kindness, in inclusion. I still dress to the beat of my own wardrobe’s drum. I still listen to underground music and shudder at most country songs. I am still intelligent and capable, even if I have no paychecks to prove it. I am a blissfully happy wife. I am a proud, growing mother. I am a writer. I am me.

And I can be anything else… someday, down the road, I will be many other things. Perhaps a professor of dystopian literature; a public speaker/ambassador for the cause of abolishing illiteracy; the front man (woman) of a Heart cover band; a world traveler; a grandmother; an ice cream shop owner. I am learning that I can be anything I want.

And that I can just be.

2011-08-15T15:20:00.007-06:00

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'"

~C.S. Lewis

This summer has been busy. For you too? Not only busy with family parties, vacations, gardening, and, well, baby raising. But busy with figuring some things out. Figuring out how to become the person I want to become and then just doing it.

Thank you for being patient. I am thinking that things will start to get back to a routine, and hopefully that also means for this blog.

Come back tomorrow to read an essay by the one and only Charity Brooks. It will be worth it, I promise!

2011-08-09T13:59:00.002-06:00

"That there is a God my reason would soon tell me by the wondrous works that I see, the vast frame of the heaven and the earth, the order of all things, night and day, summer and winter, spring and autumn, the daily providing for this great household upon the earth, the preserving and directing of all its proper end."

-Anne Bradstreet, 'To My Dear Children'

melanie of fifth & hazel

2011-07-29T15:32:00.003-06:00

photo by Gary Barnes
"It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another,
all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people.

You have never talked to a mere mortal..."

- C.S. Lewis

Also: My dear Aunt Susan posted this on her blog last summer,
and goodness, it still makes my heart so happy. Susan is the
matriarch of such a sweet family. I know you will agree!

Trying to remember springtime...

2011-07-22T12:30:00.000-06:00

When springtime began rolling around, I rejoiced in the green that blanketed the earth. As the weeks went on, I marveled at the growing crops, forgetting what the land looked like without walls of corn stalks. Fireflies appeared, and I experienced the magic of the South.

However, when temperatures are soaring to the 100's, causing both brow and bosom to be embarrassingly caked with sweat, sometimes you just need to kick back and remember the good old days.

Autumn, come soon.

2011-07-20T13:00:00.004-06:00

"think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy"

-Anne Frank

We Are Women Book Giveaway

2011-07-13T11:10:00.000-06:00

Remember how this blog got started? Remember how you submitted your photos and some lovely writers wrote about their experiences as women and Miss Allison put them into a book? Remember about ending Fistula?

Well... Stacey over at Love and Photographs is hosting a giveaway and the We Are Women book is the prize!

Go enter to win a copy!

Or buy your own here!

And thanks for reading!

a day trip to Paris!

2011-07-13T07:00:00.002-06:00

Welcome to Paris, Tennessee!

(Not quite Paris, France. Not quite Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face,
which is what I was aiming for in the picture,

but when you're in the South, you take what you can get!)

2011-07-10T16:36:00.005-06:00

"Opportunities don't often come along.

So, when they do, you have to grab them."

~Audrey Hepburn

Image Source

moments that matter most

2011-07-06T14:19:00.000-06:00

I feel like time is slipping away.

For weeks-- if not months-- my journal has been sparse. Most entries end with a sigh of exhaustion. I can't remember what has happened during the day, and by the time Monday rolls around, our designated e-mail-the-family day, I struggle to pull even one thought out of my head.

The moment is gone, which makes me wonder,

Am I taking time to reflect on the joy I have felt here?

Will I remember the twinkling of fireflies?

Will I remember sitting on the porch at the end of a hard day,

basking in the warmth of the humid air?

Will I remember mowing front lawns,

itching mosquito bites on my legs,

and running down the street to escape a summer downpour?

Will I remember the sadness I have felt as the tears of a friend stained my shoulder?

Or the joy I have felt as someone finally recognizes divine purpose in their life?

Will I remember what matters most?

2011-07-01T07:00:00.004-06:00

Our lives are a collection of stories, truths about who we are, what we believe, what we came from, how we struggle and how we are strong. When we can let go of what people think, and OWN our story, we gain access to our worthiness-the feeling that we are enough just was we are, and that we are worthy of love and belonging.

-Dr. Brene Brown: The Hustle for Worthiness DVD

Photo by Alicia Fish

regaining my bearings

2011-06-27T08:37:00.004-06:00

Hello We Are Women!

I have been remiss in blog updating here in this wonderful space, and I am sorry. Coming back to the blog, I want to share with you all a quick conversation I had with a fabulous friend from Nigeria, Ifeyinwa Egwaoje. You see, as I have landed back in the United States for a brief few weeks, where the problems for women are in some ways so different, and in others just the same, I always get into a hyper-reflection mode as to what is to be done to end needless suffering of women worldwide. The conversation I had with Ifeyinwa exemplified to me this global struggle, and how certain cultural nuances may make it seem that our challenges are worlds apart, the underlying issues remain the same.

So. Ifeyinwa and I were sitting in a Motherhood Advocacy conference in Toronto, listening to a presentation on "Mocha Moms," an support network for black women in the US who choose to be stay-at-home moms, a choice very much frowned upon in many black communities in the US for a variety of reasons. Ifeyinwa turned to me at the end and whispered, "but isn't this exactly what we're fighting against? Moms who just stay at home?"

I responded - "no! We are fighting for a woman's right to choose what path she will take, and be fully respected in that path - to not be seen as "just" a stay-at-home mom, and to not be derided for going to work either."

She thought for a moment and said..."but in Nigeria we have to show our worth to our husbands by getting a good education, by building a career - you are treated better by your husbands if you do that. You are looked down upon if you stay at home. You can be seen as worthless."

And then I realized, how often do women in the US feel worthless? How often do we have to question and justify and balance forces and influences around us? I look at friends of mine constantly questioning themselves based on their style, the behavior of their children, the life choices they made, their boyfriends/husbands or lack of boyfriends/husbands, and perhaps most prevalently - what they ate today and what their clothing size says. A lot of this has to do with the treatment we fell we will receive from men in our lives, and the judgments we feel could come in from others (including other women). Just like Nigerian women who have to fight for their worth by leaving the home. A lot of it is also a matter of self-justification. Even if no one cares or notices or expects us to be a size 2 or to be perfectly balanced with a clean home and perfect children or a stellar career, we feel we have to prove that to ourselves in some way. We question ourselves incessantly, and I write this to say that ENOUGH!

Enough with feeling we have to justify our worth! We are women! We have worth inherent! We have nothing to prove! We are women! Shout it to the world! Spend today celebrating your powerful womanhood, the uniqueness of that gift of being a woman, of our gorgeous bodies and our incredible potentials, and stop questioning and justifying and feeling you are not enough. You are more! You are woman!

Self-Worth: Welcome Back Old Friend

2011-06-23T13:14:00.012-06:00

I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you that I am working through some “self-worth” issues as of late. (You can read more about them here, here, and here.) Needless to say, the changes my body, mind, and spirit have been experiencing have been eye opening and sometimes scary. I wish I had a better sense of who I am to not be so effected by it all but the truth is, I am still figuring it all out.

Today, I am not going to talk about all the insecurities that seem to plague me, but tell you how I have been working through them. Yes, that is right. I have been working through them. And just the act of picking myself up, making a decision of the direction I want to head in, and working toward it, has restored a sense of self-worth that I once felt and have since lost. (Yes, lost, but lost things can be found again.)

Can I tell you what changed in me? I remembered that I have the ability to change. I do. Yes, I was born with certain tendencies and personality characteristics. Some of those I hold dear to my heart. I embrace those things that I feel make me unique. But some things are not so lovely. Before I realized that I don’t have to keep those things I don’t like, it was rather depressing to think “I am lazy. It is just who I am. I am scared. It is just the way it has to be. I hate my body. But that is life.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. Those things that I hate seeing stare me down in the mirror don’t need to be that way forever. I can change. The ability is there; I just need to make the choice to do it.

A few weeks ago I took a step back and looked at the things that have been nibbling at my self-worth. And instead of just accepting my fate as something I didn’t like, I decided that I could stop it now. Can I get a little specific?

Physically, I was not happy or comfortable. So, I called a friend who said she liked to run and we made some plans. We would meet at 6am and run together. Some days it works and some days it doesn’t. But the fresh air, the exercise, the attention to my physical well-being has brought a sense of accomplishment to my life. No, I have not lost the baby weight but I feel a tiny piece of my self-worth becoming my friend again.

And making that one choice to change what I didn’t like had a domino effect; all the sudden I was paying attention again to what foods I was bringing into my body, how much water I was drinking, and how much sleep I was getting. Billy and I started to make changes, throwing out the foods that were simply empty calories and replacing them with veggies and hummas, fruits, and whole grain foods. And guess who was knocking at my door? Another part of that lost self-worth.

There are more changes that I have been bringing into my life: finally dressing to fit not only my personality but my body type, taking a photography class to relearn old, forgotten skills, organizing my house, putting my whole heart into church responsibilities, and flossing my teeth. The list goes on. With every change I make, whether it is starting to do something new or bringing back things I used to do but have since let slip from my mind, I feel stronger, prouder, and more able to continue to make changes and become the person I have the ability to be.

There are still so many times that I fall short of what I feel I should do. And some days, I struggle to get back up. But with the help of a husband who loves me for who I am and sees what I can become, and the support of friends and family who are patient and remind me of what I can do, I get back up and do those hard things that make me proud to be me.

(Thank you all for letting me share myself with you. It is not always easy but has meant so much to me!)

here are women:

2011-06-18T13:51:00.000-06:00

It's a rainy day here in Kentucky. Maybe time for some light reading? Check out these stunning women and the stories they have to tell:

Naomi, Husband, Baby Eleanor, and Kingsley make one awesome family. I think this just about sums it up: "she has lots of freckles. he wears lots of bow ties." So good! Check them out here!

NieNie's blog is simply inspiring. In 2008, she and her husband were in a terrible small airplane crash. She has since resumed blogging. Whether pre-or-post-crash, the entries share her joy of motherhood, and that joy is contagious!

I just love Angela. I love how design plays such a huge role in her life. I love how she and her husband are carving out a life for themselves. Her blog offers a little glimpse into her sweet life. I also love this guest post she did on Cardigan Empire.

Speaking of Cardigan Empire-- Reachel of Cardigan Empire was one of the writers featured in the We Are Women book. She is such a strong woman, which is very much displayed in her positive-body-image fashion blog, and through her battle with infertility. There are many aspects that I admire about Reachel, but there are two!

Another adoptive mother is Kami of the blog NoBiggie. After struggling through years of infertility, she is now the mother of two beautiful children, one of whom is adopted. She is all about the family. I love it! Check out her story here.

Who are some of your favorite bloggers?

Counting my blessings...

2011-06-13T09:43:00.002-06:00

For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

-Isaiah 55:12

I Should Know Better By Now

2011-06-02T16:25:00.013-06:00

I have a beautiful baby girl.

I have a creative, inspiring, tender husband.

I live in a colorful, happy home.

I have talents that I am discovering and developing.

I have organized friends into a book club so we can read and talk, two things I love dearly.

I live near friends and family who shower me with love and support.

I believe in a Father in Heaven who knows me personally and loves me.

And yet I still spend too much time feeling ashamed of how I look.

And worrying about what others think about me and how I look.

I should know better by now but apparently I don't.

I read this post today.

It's a part of a series.

"Real beauty is the confidence that comes with knowing that you are the only you, embracing that unique you, andsharing you with the world.

A few months ago I decided to stop comparing myself to what I was "supposed" to be, and just decided to be me, and I found my real beauty." (Nina from MammaGoRound)

I felt that I could find my beauty.

The beauty that is seen and the beauty that is unseen.

It's there.

It always has been.

I just need to find it and nourish it until I feel it in every part of who I am.

Becoming

2011-06-02T06:00:00.001-06:00

"Who do you want to become over the next 1.5 years?" was essentially the most terrifying question I could be asked. Amidst inner turmoil-- longing to have just a moment alone and feeling anxious from the strict schedule and high standards expected of me-- I could not think even a minute ahead, let alone 1.5 years. I ignored the question and busied myself with anything else I could find.

Four months later, the same question was posed. I started fidgeting, averting my gaze, staring into my lap, then began to consider how uncomfortable this question really was. Not very. A lot had happened in the last four months, and I was still going.

I had been able to handle tornado warnings, sand bagging flood-threatened homes, walking in snow, walking in heat, gaining a greater understanding of the pain of adultery, alcoholism, drug use, and dishonesty. I have seen families flourish, and I have seen families fall apart. Tears of broken women have stained my shoulders. Fear for others has gripped at my heart.

And yet, I'm still here. I'm still going. I never could have imagined all that I have faced in these last few months. There is no textbook that says "Here's what to expect when you go out to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with others," and anything that came close scared me out of my whits. But I can do more than I thought I could, and there is no better feeling.

We are women of infinite strength.

Who are you becoming?

P.S. Any thoughts on how to overcome exhaustion?

Worrywarts Anonymous

2011-05-16T21:51:00.005-06:00

Hello. My name is Alicia and I’m a Worrywart.

Phew.

There.

It’s out.

But let’s be honest… are you actually surprised by that? Just ask Billy. He is well trained in the correct responses to my many irrational (and periodically, but only periodically, rational) fears and the usual tears that accompany them.

This last week was a bit rough. Tired, frustrated, and feeling hopeless, I felt that nothing would ever change. I was too weak to change the things about myself that were overwhelming me. I worried that I was doomed to be a lazy blob for all eternity.

But this didn’t all start like this, so let me back up a little.

Having a newborn has been… well… difficult. If this is a news flash to you then I don’t really know what to say to you. Today Millie is ten weeks old. Almost two and a half months old. She sleeps better. And I am getting better at knowing what she wants though that is not always the case, and she is becoming more fun. Smiling, squeaking as she almost laughs, and generally being adorable.

So after two months of the house being a mess, her room still overflowing with the endless gifts from family and friends, a garden still full of weeds and the rotting vegetables from last summer, and still no dinner on the table, I started to worry. Was I failing? Every night I would make goals. At the beginning they started out rather ambitious: finish Millie’s room, plant garden, end world hunger. After a few days, they had become small and somewhat pathetic (at least in my eyes): Monday= dress Millie, Tuesday=shower, Wednesday=finish one load of laundry, Everyday=smile and remember to kiss Billy when he gets home from work. Yet, sadly, even this list seemed out of my tired, lazy reach.

Being someone who enjoys lists and enjoys checking things off said lists even more, these things began to get me down. When Billy would get home from work and I had nothing ready for him to eat, I was overcome with guilt. There he was, working 10 hours a day with only a few hours of sleep each night and I couldn’t even greet him with a nice meal. What a terrible wife. He never complained and always told me to relax but it just made me feel worse.

In the wee hours of the morning, as I would lay there listening to Billy’s slow, even, sleepy breathing and praying that Millie would keep breathing (like I said… worry worry worry), I began thinking of everything that I had done wrong. I thought of how I spent all day watching silly movies on Netflix, how I hadn’t seen or talked to anyone but Millie and Billy for three whole days, how we still didn’t have a working budget after a year and a half of marriage, how the dirty dishes had taken up permanent residence in the sink and were quickly trying to take control of the counter.

I’m sure that I don’t need to tell you that this did not help anything. It depressed me. All I could see were the things I was failing at. All the unfinished projects. All the piles that I had labeled “To sort” that I now wanted to label “To Throw Out the Window.”

I began thinking I would never change. Even if I tried harder the next day, I would inevitably fail. I was naturally unorganized and tended to only get things done when someone was there to help me and motivate me.

These thoughts led to a feeling of deep hate. Hate for myself. How could I be so lazy and pathetic? How could I never get anything right?

I would just have to accept my fate. There was no way I would have the self-control to lose the baby weight, no way I would motivate myself enough to clean out the office, and really, no way to overcome any of the weaknesses that I was delusional enough to think I could weed out of my life.

I was weak, lazy, and pathetic.

At least, that was the conclusion I came to at my two am worry session. It was negative and pessimistic, but all my eyes would see were my past attempts at change and the overwhelming failures. It doesn’t help that I was going off of very little sleep. (I tend to get rather emotional and slightly crazy when tired.)

And then something happened: the next morning, I got out of bed, went to the neighborhood exercise class, and when I came home I didn’t let myself sit down. Instead, I got to work. All the dreaded tasks that I put at the bottom of the list went straight to the top. I was determined that if I got those terrible terrible assignments done first (i.e. calling insurance, making doctor’s appointments, paying hospital bills), then maybe I would do the things that I enjoy (gardening, organizing). And by golly, it worked! One by one, I checked things off my list and felt a tiny glimpse of freedom and accomplishment.

I could do this. I could change my ways, overcome my natural tendencies, and be an organized, happy person. Sure, I hadn’t quite gotten around to making dinner but let's not get overly ambicious. Baby steps, friend, tiny baby steps. Maybe next week will be the week we eat a real dinner again. Maybe. Maybe not. But Jimeny Cricket, I sure will keep trying.

Inspiration for Mother's Day

2011-05-05T14:14:00.027-06:00

With Mother's Day on Sunday and with a newborn child sleeping peacefully in our room, I have been thinking a lot of women and mothers; what it means to be a mother, to have a mother, and to be surrounded by women who teach me and inspire me. I am blessed to have amazing women all around me (family, friends, neighbors, leaders, and other bloggers).

Today, I wanted to share some articles, essays, books, and links that inspire me! They give me goosebumps and make me proud to be a woman and a mama. And even if you aren't a mother, as it is commonly defined, I hope you still take a look at these things. "The true definition of a mother is a woman who teaches, inspires, nurtures and loves those she comes into contact with"(Motherhood Matters). I really believe that. So, without further ado...

~Did you know? One of our local news stations, KSL, has created a site dedicated to helping women feel empowered by motherhood. Here is a little of what they have to say on the subject matter:

"More than just a stage of life marked by the presence of children, we are celebrating motherhood as a way of life that empowers our best selves... Popular culture promises that by recognizing and focusing on our own needs, we will find empowerment. In reality it creates a culture of comparison, distraction and discontent, none of which lead to empowerment. The act of mothering … caring for, teaching, and nurturing, has just the opposite effect. It emboldens us with confidence, contentment and purpose."

Amen to that!

Go. See more of what they have to say. It will make you proud to be a woman!

~Choosing Motherhood. This is a collection of essays complied by the lovely Lia Suttner Collings from women who made a conscious choice to be mothers. They are woman who left promising careers and personal aspirations to bring children into the world, to teach them and care for them, and inspired them. Here is a little excerpt that makes my eyes water and my soul scream in agreement!

"I finally laid down the book with a feeling of reverent awe. 'Who wouldn't want to be a mom?' I wondered. A career in motherhood had its elements of drudgery, but so did any other. What other career could claim as its end product the elevation of a human soul? Not just the enlightening of a mind or the development of a body, but the improvement of every aspect of a vibrant child of God? I, at least, wanted to be a mother because I believed, with President Harold B. Lee, that the most important work I would ever do would be within the walls of my own home. I chose to be a mother because I wanted to teach souls to fly"(pg 36).

Goosebumps, every time. You can also read an interview with Lia here. It makes me want to be a mother like her.

~ Even before I was ready to be a mother myself, I read this essay and felt proud of what I would one day become. Beautiful words by a beautiful woman.

~Courtney of C Jane Enjoy It always has fantastic essays about being women and mothers. This essay and this essay are just a couple of examples!

~And last but not least, how can I not say anything about the book that inspired this blog, us writers, and the project to remind women of their own importance, divinity, and influence. We Are Woman. Rereading the essays this morning, I feel a sense of empowerment and a desire to be a better woman. And, if I may, a quote from the book, from the essay We Are Woman of Purpose by Susan Hayward:

"True, I am not rich or famous. However, I have the opportunity to influence how the next generation turns out in the most intimate way possible. I am Someone Important. I am a parent."

There you have it. Some things to help remind you of how important you are, as a mother and as a woman. I hope you feel how special you are as a woman, mother, daughter, and individual. I hope you remember the great gifts you have and the potential for good that you possess. And I hope you remember, on this Mother's Day weekend, the women who have helped shape you into that woman you are today.

We love you! Happy Mother's Day!

Becoming Centered

2011-04-29T06:00:00.001-06:00

Everyday we visit families in trailers, houses, condos, duplexes, apartments, and the occasional mansion. We visit military homes and civilian homes. We visit broken homes and happy homes, clean homes and dirty homes. In my opinion, though, the most important aspect of a home-- regardless of physical condition or retail value-- is the personal and familial values that the home emits.

If you value your family, hang a family portrait in the entryway. If you value God, keep your Bible out on the coffee table. If you value the color yellow, hang yellow curtains! When family values are everyday elements of a home, the joy it brings to individual family members can be shared with others who enter the home.

What do you value? How do you share your values with other?

bits and pieces

2011-04-25T08:27:00.000-06:00

I am in the process of moving from Brazil and things are a bit mad, so allow me to just share a few rad links (both old and new) with ya'all about women today. Is that alright?

Here you are!:

Wonderful, quick discussion on the relevance of feminism. This has been in the news quite a bit of late, and i love what is written here.

This is an oldie, but SUCH a goodie - the work of the absolutely amazing Dr. Hawa Abdi in Somalia. Truly, read it and be inspired.

The Smithsonian has a photostream of gorgeous women from the ages. (Thanks to my lovely friend Jordan for this one!)

Did you know about this fab new academic and social initiative out of Toronto all about motherhood advocacy? I think it is just brilliant.

Finally, on a bit sadder note, this is a profile of a woman I really admire. She's an artist and is the widow of incredible writer David Foster Wallace. I find her so refreshingly honest and forthcoming about life, death, marriage, and love.

beijos to you all,
Julianne.

2011-04-22T14:38:00.001-06:00

[photo by angela comperry]

I merged so completely with Love, and

was so fused, that I became Love

And Love became me.

-Rumi

I am me

2011-04-18T07:00:00.003-06:00

I always knew I wanted to do something important. Travel. Study. Help people. I wanted my education to mean something. I wanted my life to leave a mark. So I moved forward, heading toward that ever so broad goal of “accomplish something of meaning.” But plans were always thwarted, either by finances, simple bad luck, and, let’s be honest, by my own fears and apprehensions. Time after time, year after year, I never quite reached a sense of self. Even with the progress I was making with my formal education, I felt something was missing.

And, I saw a pattern: I was defining myself not by what I was doing and who I was, but by that I wanted to do.

Don’t misunderstand: there is great worth in our goals and aspirations. But I was putting too much stock in those goals and aspirations, basing my sense of self on them alone. Someday, I will become a world traveler. Someday, I will have career. And when those things happen, my life will have a meaningful impact on the world.

But life has a way of changing those plans for us. And I let it. I lived in Germany for a year and spent another six months in Austria. I learned a new language. But, that was not the way that I had planned it. Then I got married younger that I had anticipated (I planned on being a well-established 26 year old) and had a baby much quicker than my younger self had ever imagined. Although not part of the plan I had so determinedly created, I wouldn’t change any of those for the world.

However, I have been left wondering: if I was not going to be a career woman who traveled the world, then who was I going to be? Would my life have meaning beyond the walls of my little home? How would I leave my mark? Would I leave a mark at all?

I began to think of the people who left marks on my life, people who affected who I was, and people who I admire. I began to see the mark that I could leave. Even without a paid career to push me along, I leave a little mark all along the way. And that is what defines who I am.

I leave my mark by bringing my friends from all aspects of my life together to be in a book club, where books are chosen that help me see the world through different eyes and where we share our ideas and passions. I know that I can define myself by the charity I show my neighbors by making them dinner when life is just too much for them to handle or by stopping to ask how they are doing. By creating a home where creativity, inspiration, and love are present, I can help our daughter gain a love and appreciation for the arts and sciences, just like my husband and I have.

Who am I? I am a wife, a mother, a sister, a friend, and a neighbor. I can be kind, thoughtful, creative, and motivated in those individual relationships. I have hobbies and interests that are unique to me. I may not be paid for what I do every day, but I know that I am not defined by that.

Guest Post: A Heritage of Women's Literature

2011-04-13T20:16:00.001-06:00

i've been swamped with finals. lucky for you, that means you get to hear from someone else! natalie's writing is delightful. read more at her personal blog (which is fantastic!). enjoy...

Greetings! My name is Natalie, and I’m excited to make a guest appearance on this blog. My sister Jessica is a regular, but she asked me to fill in for her today.

My thoughts today on womanhood drift towards one specific aspect of women’s contribution to society. I recently graduated with a BA in English, and as I learned to both analyze and create literature, I couldn’t help but notice how priceless the female voice is in our literary canon. Western history shows that before the 19^th century, education for women was rare; thus, it was a struggle for female authors to be published and recognized. But the brave souls who paved the way for a future of women and literature would not be silenced.

Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the advocates of women’s literacy, publishing A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. A Vindication argues for many aspects of women’s rights, including that of education. Wollstonecraft describes the dangers that generated from the ignorance of women, writing that their ignorance injures their moral character, ability to raise children, and encourages vanity and sentimentalism. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication was a near-immediate success, showing that the world was ready to take a serious look at women’s education.

Perhaps a more recognizable name than Mary Wollstonecraft is Mary Shelley, Wollstonecraft’s daughter, and author of Frankenstein. The daughter, like the mother, became an accomplished writer, and Frankenstein is canonized as a beloved romantic/gothic novel. It successfully explores the dangers of playing God, the consequences of obsession, and many other themes and motifs. One of my favorite moments in all of literature comes from this book, as young Frankenstein beholds his creature come to life and realizes the horrific monster he has created:

“It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered against the panes, and my candle was nearly burned out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”

Doesn’t that just give you a shiver?

Thank Mary Shelley’s genius for that little shiver. We should also thank her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, for advocating a woman’s right to be education and educating her daughter accordingly. One mother’s passion translated into her daughter’s success, and both mother and daughter live on in the wonderful legacy of women’s literature

An Eternal Perspective of Families

2011-04-01T14:07:00.002-06:00

dad, mom, me, brother. january 2011.

Before I came to the South to serve a full time mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I had been working toward my degree in family science. While studying people and relationships sounded interesting, I realized that truly making a career out of my degree would be heartbreaking: I had a desire to help individuals and families, but I am no where near emotionally strong enough to do so as a career. So when I felt prompted to serve a mission and teach others about Christ, not only did that sound like a wonderful experience to begin with, but it also meant a break from school, and more time to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life. I never would have guessed how much my time out here would matter not only to the people I work with, but to my individual progression and knowledge.

One of my greatest blessings thus far is the chance I have had to interact with families daily. I have been able to enter a variety of homes and see a variety of family dynamics, an experience I would have never received as a single student in a college town. I get to see the concepts I learned in family science lectures and textbooks play out before me.

The most incredible thing I've witnessed on my mission so far is the power of transitional characters: people who

1. learn from and overcome difficult and destructive pasts, and
2. create a happier home for their family of procreation (their spouse and children).

I have met several individuals who exemplify this concept:

A woman gave birth to four children as a teenager (a single baby, then triplets), but gave them all up for adoption. She wanted them to have a better life than she could provide them at that time. Even though they are out of her life, she still speaks of them with love. She is now working at a fast food restaurant with her boyfriend, who suffers from PTSD after being deployed in Afghanistan. They help care for a pregnant friend's two children while her husband is deployed.

One man traded a 6-pack of beer and a pack of cigarettes for his first tattoo at the age of 14, got his girlfriend pregnant at the age of 17, then stepped up and joined the military to support his family. He now is married to a wonderful woman and helping raise two of her children from a previous marriage. Love abounds in their home.

After 17 years, a woman left a mentally and physically abusive marriage with her two teenagers in tow. She struggles both emotionally and financially now, but is strong in her faith, and loves her children above all else.

A young mother is struggling to forgive her unfaithful husband, who is out of the country for work, while raising their child as a single parent. Despite his emotional and physical distance, and his indifference toward religion, she is turning to God to find peace in her life. Her home is a little bit brighter everyday as she continues to endure her hardships with faith that everything will be okay.

When an individual has the courage to redirect their life toward a brighter path, not only will they flourish as an individual, but their families will feel the blessings and strength from that action as well.

I have never understood the divine importance of family more than I do now. God gave us all families to safely learn and grow in. Sometimes that family structure comes through close friends, adoption, inter-generational living arrangements, or through one's future family of procreation. Regardless, God has a plan for us, and that plan is based around family.

I have seen strong men and women tear up their families through negligence, addictions, and pride. But I have also seen valiant men and women build their families up through faith and devotion, caring for God's children as He would himself. A family isn't just a temporary organizational unit, but an eternal one. When we realize the sacred nature of family relationships, we will be blessed and our families will prosper.

To learn more about families and the gospel, click here.

To read more about what I believe, click here.

Love, Sister Allison Barnes

(P.S. Please disregard the religiosity of this post if that is not your thing. I'm a missionary right now, so it's my pleasure and responsibility to be religious!)

Women Abroad Take 3: Minal Singh

2011-03-28T06:47:00.003-06:00

The worth of women is unfortunately too often questioned by the very family members and communities that surround them. It's heartbreaking to see (particularly young) women pushed into destructive decisions by the pressure of men or elder women in their households.

One amazing woman, Minal Singh, works to stop these cycles of disempowerment. She and Drishtee, the organization she works for in Noida, India, work in rural Indian communities to ensure that women get proper access to necessary education, healthcare, and income generating activities. She once said to me that everyday "we are in a war" for women - how true and tragic a statement! For Minal, this war is against all the people who believe a mother has no need of prenatal care, can give birth unassisted, and can then return to working brutally long days days after the delivery. It's a vicious system of influences and counter influences that cause countless unnecessary deaths and suffering. In the case of millions of communities in India, it is this low status of women, the actual perception that they are worthless and deserve no consideration in terms of support, love, or even basic needs as a doctor's visit in their third trimester of pregnancy, that Minal is working to diminish. The work is time-consuming and exhausting, but where would these women be without someone like her to stand up for their right to life?

I took this picture of Minal a few months ago (she's in the middle!), with two other amazing individuals that I should also write about for the amazing work they're doing for women! Nick Pearson of Jacaranda Health, and Laura Stachel of WE CARE Solar. Look them up! Inspiring, all of them!

2011-03-21T07:00:00.004-06:00

"Woman was born to create...in creating she becomes herself, accomplishes her destiny. Her whole life is only an initiation into creative power. To create is not merely to produce a work...it is to give out ones own individuality."

-Jeanne De Vietinghoff

Millicent Sophia Fish was born March 7, 2011.

Photos taken by Bella Baby Photography... in the hospital.

on the individual

2011-03-14T23:00:00.001-06:00

this past weekend, i attended a musical get-together. a group of students all packed together in a tiny little living room, trading off roles of audience and performer. it looked like a typical group of students; people i see on campus every day. however, after about ten minutes i realized something.

yes, these were typical students, but they were incredible.

many who took the spotlight that night were women. and time after time, it hit me how incredible these women are. every voice was different, every original piece (there were many) was just that - completely original, nothing exactly like it.

as women, we face temptation of social comparison. it's rampant among us today, and the most distorting mirror we can look through. when looking at a group of us {women} together, we may all look typical enough. but that's exactly the danger of comparing. at the open mic night, each woman had the chance to be an individual, to set herself apart, to be untypical. it was truly a beautiful experience.

watching these unique and individual women helped me look at women {and people, in general} in a very different way. i would have passed any of those women on campus or at the grocery store and thought, "oh yeah, they're just like me, just like all the other girls in this ordinary town." but under the typical appearance of twenty-something years old and medium-length brown hair, most of the women in that room were musical geniuses with unique talent and rare creative gifts. gifts that are very different from mine and different from each other, too.

i understood in my heart that night what i've known in my mind - that we are each unique, each individual, and each given gifts that no one else has. it's impossible to recognize that individuality while looking only at a collective. i get caught up in a mindset studying the social sciences - people become numbers: a sample, a population, a trend. but i've recognized the wrongness in that kind of thinking.

we are individual. as women, we all have absolutely unique gifts. recognizing those gifts in ourselves and others is important to our relationship with ourselves and everyone around us. so, i invite you to do two things: 1) make a list of your unique gifts. what are a few things that make you incredible? 2) get to know someone new. this night reminded me how different people are from each other and from the way i initially perceive them to be. have a conversation - find out someone's story!

next, leave a comment so we can all share the experience!

here's my list:

i love to experiment with food - my creations are unique and yummy!

and this week i've been getting to know a new roommate - with truly a unique perspective on life. she's a math major and english minor and we share a deep love of granola. she's one of the most peaceful (yet passionate) people i've ever met!

now... what's your story?

the unknown

2011-03-07T08:59:00.000-07:00

As I reread the Harry Potter series, I am repeatedly blown away by the wisdom of Professor Dumbledore. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, he tells Harry, "It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more," (page 556).

I think this quote is so great. Literally, it makes a lot of sense. Metaphorically, it's profound.

I'm at an age where my whole life seems to be about change. Moving to new cities by myself, entering the work force, deciding to go back to school . . . a lot of my decisions seem scary. Maybe you feel alone because all your friends are getting married and moving away. Maybe you feel that you are incapable of being a good mother to the baby growing inside of you. Maybe you just aren't sure what it is that you want out of life. But so many good things can come out of the unknown.

Without conquering the unknown, Harry Potter would have just lived a miserable life with the Dursleys. He wouldn't have found himself at Hogwarts. He wouldn't have met and grown to love Ron, Hermione, and Ginny. And although his life was often hard, painful, and exhausting, Harry wouldn't have destroyed Voldemort if he had just stayed in the corner, sucking his thumb.

Yes, Harry is a young, fictional character. But take a look around at all the people you admire and I'm sure you'll see the same principles at work.

So, here's to standing up tall. Here's to remembering who we are and that we're loved. Here's to embracing the unknown!

Battle Wounds

2011-02-28T07:00:00.004-07:00

Acceptance of ones body is not a new topic. It is one that men and women alike have dealt with, though possibly in different ways. It is a struggle that I am familiar with. Learning to accept the body that carries me through this life. At times, that acceptance comes easily. Those are the times when I appreciate all the capabilities that this body has. But often it is a battle to remember the wonder that is the human body and not let that be clouded by imperfection.

This is not a new topic. We have all heard it. We have probably all felt it.

My husband and I had always wanted children and we were blessed quickly with pregnancy. But almost as quickly as we got pregnant, life turned upside down. I found myself extremely ill, weak, and unable to continue in a normal way. Appreciation for the life my body had helped make was quickly overshadowed by the misery of being too sick to move. Eventually the storm that we found ourselves in would calm enough for me to be able to get out of bed and see the sun again. I started to gain back the weight I had lost and began with the usual task of gaining weight for the growing child I was carrying.

I found myself being grateful for the weight gain and the baby bump that was finally appearing. Feeling a peaceful acceptance of my body for the first time in my life, I declared “I have done it. I have finally accepted my body as it is.”

But as with life, my body did not stop changing. And one day, that “peaceful acceptance” I had so confidently expressed was shattered and replaced with the reality of the changes that came with pregnancy. As the child grew, so did my stomach. And slowly, but surely, the stretch marks began to appear. Stretch marks: nothing new, earth shattering, or life altering. But they were there and they were permanent.

When I first saw them, I could feel emotions welling up. I began to cry. Yes, about silly stretch marks. I kept telling myself “It’s ok. This is ok. It doesn’t matter.” My husband also reassured me of my beauty and that none of it mattered.

And then I felt guilt. Hadn’t I been trying to gain weight at a healthy pace? Hadn’t I been applying lotions that would help? I felt that everyone knew and were secretly judging me and my inability to take care of myself. Any pride and joy that I had in my body was dwarfed by those marks that covered my stomach.

It was ridiculous and I knew it.

Because I knew other women with stretch marks and I couldn’t have cared less that they had them. They were beautiful. They radiated warmth and confidence, even in the imperfection of mortal and fragile bodies. I gravitated toward the beauty that came from those imperfect bodies and the lovely women who owned them.

So why did I think that I was different? How could my stretch marks make me feel less when I thought no less of other women who had them too? And hadn’t I declared acceptance of my body “just the way it was?”

But that was it. I had not accepted my body as it really was. I had merely accepted my body in the one small moment in time. I realized that to accept my body was to accept it and all the changes that life would inflict on it: age, pregnancy, weight changes, health and sickness. Those changes would never end. And in essence, neither would the process of learning to love the body that I have, imperfections and all.

The first step: to stop looking at those stretch marks as permanent scars of failure and frumpiness but to remember how these marks have been earned. They are my battle wounds. They document the struggle this body has fought through the whole pregnancy. They represent a willingness to forget self and to carry another human being until she can carry herself. How can I not take pride in that? I have struggled and wept and begged for relief and those were the scars to prove it.

I can’t lie; sometimes that panicky feeling comes back when I remember that those marks are here to stay. I forget about the wonders of my body and feel ashamed and saddened by the changes that I can’t stop. But when this baby wiggles and pushes, the marks are forgotten. When my husband lies next to me, rubbing that stretched belly, smiling and musing about the little girl we created together, I feel complete and more beautiful than I ever felt without those stretch marks. And sometimes, the amazement of what this imperfect body of mine can and has done overwhelms me. And really, those are the things that matter.

Women Abroad Take 2: Fernanda da Silva

2011-02-21T05:14:00.000-07:00

The next dear woman I want to share with you today is Fernanda da Silva, who though only 16, has already lived so much more life than one would imagine in her few short years. Fernanda is from a rough neighborhood of Sao Paulo originally, but I know her as a resident of a shelter for adolescent mothers run by a small Brazilian organization I'm working for, Lua Nova.

Fernanda is an amazing mother. She loves her daughter with her whole self, plays with her and cares for her constantly. She impresses me all the time, giving so much love to her sweet daughter when she has herself received so little. Fernanda left her home to flee severe abuse at a very young age. She then fell into prostitution and drug trafficking to support herself, becoming pregnant in the process at 15. A network of Brazilian social workers took her out of this situation and brought her to the care of Lua Nova, one of the only places in all of Brazil where she can rehabilitate from drugs, prostitution and homelessness WITH her child. Typically social services will separate mothers from their children, but the brilliant thing about Lua Nova is that they focus on rehabilitating young girls with their children, as mothers, teaching them that in truly loving both themselves and their children, they can learn to break their dependence on drugs, giving them a real reason to live a full life.

Fernanda's story is unfortunately all too typical here - all the girls living at Lua Nova's shelter have some version of her story, and it breaks my heart to hear their experiences. But what is miraculous and brings more joy to me than anything else is to see these girls blossom away from their broken circumstances, becoming dedicated mothers and learning how to find their way in mentally and economically supporting their new family. I'm not a mother yet myself, but their stories inspire me so much on the power of love to transform lives and communities, motherly love perhaps above all else. It also shows to me again the wonderful power of women, of our physical strength to bear and birth children, and then to mentally find the capacity to give our lives to these new children. Motherhood is so often cast aside as some lesser form of living - "just a housewife" is a phrase too often repeated. Instead it is the opposite: there is a true transformative power in motherhood, and I am witness to it daily here with women like Fernanda!

project 31: a women's movement

2011-02-14T22:10:00.000-07:00

happy valentine's day!

in honor of the day of LOVE, i'm introducing a project that focuses on just that. earlier this month, i took on a challenge over at my personal blog - a women's blogger challenge. not being hip on the idea of blogger challenges, this was a new thing for me, but i love it already. project31 is a challenge issued by blogger mandy at shebreathesdeeply. she challenged women to blog for 31 days about the beauty that they individually possess. it's an empowering movement to follow - truly. personally, the thought of more women really accepting themselves and realizing their individual beauty through this journey gave me shivers. i've read a few that are really taking off with the challenge and it's a beautiful thing to see.

and isn't the day of love a great day to really start loving ourselves? the bloggers participating have been so inspirational {to me and many others}, and from my brief experience the journey of participation is life-changing.

you can find the original challenge here.

the link-up at shebreathesdeeply is currently being reworked, but visiting mandy's blog here will hook you up with some fabulous women taking the challenge!

it's about time we all realized our individual beauty and celebrated our unique differences!