For some wards, Mother’s Day is awesome, in others it’s not so great.
Check out the recent Exponent thread, Mother’s Day The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, about Mother’s Day 2011.
This thread can help articulate some of the reasons Mother’s Day is difficult for many women and some examples of success and failure that happen in the LDS church on this holiday.
How can Mormon women ever envision themselves as divine beings, as gods equal in every way to male counterparts, if Heavenly Mother almost never gets depicted or even mentioned in Mormon discourse? We … [Read More...]
Here at WAVE, we are concerned that a recent news article may have created the mistaken impression that Mormon women are not intellectuals. The article reprints a list of Mormon intellectuals from an … [Read More...]
Dear Ask A Feminist, My husband and I were married in the temple over eight years ago. I hold a calling teaching Relief Society. My testimony is strong, but painfully damaged. To make a long story … [Read More...]
I haven’t shared this online yet but there was a talk this Mother’s Day in my ward that was awful. There were two lows of it. First the awkward joke about “how fair is that men have the priesthood and women don’t? The men are the ones who get to move mountains and perform miracles and women have to suffer childbirth.”
Seriously, my head almost exploded.
Then, later in the talk, he used octopus mothers as examples of self-less mothers as he in great detail described how the mother will stay near her eggs for an entire month without eating and tirelessly blow air on them so they are oxygenated. I quote, “The octopus mother quite literally gives her last breath to ensure the survival of their young.” Then he moved on, no disclaimer that human mothers should not be expected to do the same and that human mothers require the support and assistance of fathers and their community. No mention that it would do a great disservice if women through their children’s infancy and toddler years never slept to attend to their every need and how mothers nurturing themselves to exhaustion through those early years mean that children are left without their mothers. Using that example had a lot of potential and it was a cool marine biology fact but to imply that we as mothers ought to kill ourselves for our children was almost enough to make me walk out.
A highlight though was the gift given from the Young Women of the ward to all the mothers. It was a handmade card with a quote from President Hinckley on it accompanied with a handful of chocolate pieces. The quote wasn’t the worst, either. Of course, I was too busy with a child squirming on my lap to speak up that they had skipped over me when giving them out, but I did get to enjoy the one my mother received.