FIve Things for Friday, 12th Edition

My husband and I went out on a rare date night and saw the movie “17 Miracles” which is about the Martin and Willie handcart companies, a group of Mormon English immigrants who got caught in the snow during their trip to the Salt Lake Valley and suffered unbelievable hardships. I’ve been taught about this history my whole life but it was so powerful to see it re-enacted. The movie was very well done and to my surprise my husband cried more than I did! Which if you know my husband is just another testament to how good this movie is.

The last few days I’ve kept thinking about the movie and I’ve been filled with such gratitude for all I have. Gratitude at having enough food to eat, to have warmth, to have a car, to my health, to have a good man, and to have the gospel in my life. It makes me want to pull my family in close and not take anything for granted. If you haven’t seen this movie it is so worth it. Especially when you compare it to what else is playing at the theater!

I am happy to announce that Heidi and The Price Family are the winners of the copies of The Nashville Tribute Band’s new CD! Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway. I LOVED LOVED LOVED reading your missionary stories! Thanks for sharing them with me. I wish that I had CDs to give everyone.

I got lots of wonderful comments about my “Getting Adam to Partake” piece and I just wanted to say how much I appreciate all the insights my readers share. You are wonderful. Becca directed me to this really powerful article about an American woman whose young daughter chose to wear a hijab (headscarf) even though her mother doesn’t. I especially thought this paragraph about the mother’s first time wearing a bikini really reinforced what I was trying to say in my essay about how women can misuse their divine power and how that hurts them more than they realize. I think she also does a great job at illustrating how different Muslim ideas about modesty are compared to Western ideas. The author writes about buying and then changing into the bikini and then she writes:

“Goose bumps spread across my chubby white tummy and the downy white hairs on my thighs stood on end—I felt as raw and exposed as a turtle stripped of its shell. And when I left the bathroom, the stares of men seemed to pin me in one spot even as I walked by.

In spite of a strange and mounting sense of shame, I was riveted by their smirking faces; in their suggestive expressions I thought I glimpsed some vital clue to the mystery of myself. What did these men see in me—what was this strange power surging between us, this rapidly shifting current that one moment made me feel powerful and the next unspeakably vulnerable?

I imagined Aliya in a string bikini in a few years. Then I imagined her draped in Muslim attire. It was hard to say which image was more unsettling. I thought then of something a Sufi Muslim friend had told me: that Sufis believe our essence radiates beyond our physical bodies—that we have a sort of energetic second skin, which is extremely sensitive and permeable to everyone we encounter. Muslim men and women wear modest clothing, she said, to protect this charged space between them and the world.

Growing up in the ’70s in Southern California, I had learned that freedom for women meant, among other things, fewer clothes, and that women could be anything—and still look good in a bikini. Exploring my physical freedom had been an important part of my process of self-discovery, but the exposure had come at a price. Since that day in Venice Beach, I’d spent years learning to swim in the turbulent currents of attraction—wanting to be desired, resisting others’ unwelcome advances, plumbing the mysterious depths of my own longing. I’d spent countless hours studying my reflection in the mirror—admiring it, hating it, wondering what others thought of it—and it sometimes seemed to me that if I had applied the same relentless scrutiny to another subject I could have become enlightened, written a novel, or at least figured out how to grow an organic vegetable garden.”

You can read the whole article here.

On Saturday we had a door-to-door salesman come to our door selling a cleaning spray. Salesmen from this particular cleaning supply company come every summer and every summer I politely turn them away. Well this year the young man selling the spray was good… really good. He somehow maneuvered himself into my kitchen and used his spray to clean the NASTY grout on my kitchen floor that I had given up all hope of ever getting clean. Needless to say my husband and I were impressed and we bought a bottle. We put the bottle on the counter and then spent the next ten minutes telling each other about all the great things we would do with our $40 bottle of cleaning spray and trying to reassure ourselves that we hadn’t just gotten ripped off by a smooth talking 20-year-old. Well, we were starting to feel pretty good about our purchase and then I heard my husband yell, “Oh, children, oh, children! You did NOT just pour $20 worth of cleaner onto the carpet!” I ran into the dining room and found our two little ragamuffins hiding under the table with a half empty bottle of the expensive cleaner and Rose wiping her mouth. Apparently they had somehow they had opened the lid, popped the safety seal, both taken a drink of it, decided it was gross, and then dumped it out on the carpet! I spent the rest of the night talking on the phone with poison control (luckily the spray was very non-toxic), chasing two wild misbehaving children around the house, and frantically using all of the cleaner I could mop up out of the carpet to clean my couch and the spots on my floor. Needless to say it was not how I had planned to spend my Saturday night. Yet, I guess if there is a silver lining to the whole experience it is that it forced me to clean my house MUCH sooner than I would have otherwise! Crazy children.