During last Sunday’s lesson…
In Relief Society, the meeting just for women in the LDS church, the teacher read a quote about how LDS mothers are the best mothers in the world.
My wife spoke up. I don’t think that’s true, she said. There are plenty of wonderful mothers who are not LDS and many lousy LDS mothers.
The teacher backpedaled. I’m just reading a quote from the prophet, she said.
I don’t care if you’re quoting Jesus Christ, said Roseli. (Women gasp.) I don’t think it’s true, and I think it’s prideful and divisive to say LDS mothers are the best mothers in the world.
Roseli relayed this conversation to me yesterday, and I told her “Good for you!”
As a faithful member of the church, she can get away with voicing a critical or dissenting opinion. If I were to make the same comment, it would probably be dismissed since it comes from the ward atheist, so I tend to keep my mouth shut.
Roseli, I am impressed!
I remember feeling uneasy at the RS’s meeting when one woman got up and said how she always felt that she did not feel like a perfect wife and mother with her house being often messy and her having to shout at her husband and kids in order to discipline them. She talked of a couple living across the street who was indeed perfect, with a beautiful house, pretty kids and candle-light dinners every other night. But then this woman once overheard a terrible scandal in the neighbor’s perfect house. The spouses were acting very tensed and screaming at the top of their lungs at each other. That’s when this woman thought, Well, they are not perfect after all! I am in a much better position, because I at least have my LDS faith behind me!
It felt absolutely wrong to me! The idea that one could take joy in somebody else’s unhappy happenings and that one could so easily and arrogantly attribute all the bad things happening in somebody’s family to the absence of LDS faith was tough for me to take. That’s when I got up and never came back…