Today’s guest post comes from Amy S., who is not really a writer. She majored in fashion design at BYU (one of the few and the brave) and worked for a time as a costume designer for a dancewear company. She knows a lot about sequins. She gave up that job to stay home with her children and eventually began to work as a fiber artist—specializing in embroidery. Her work has been shown across the country and is represented by several galleries. Her life goal is to spread knowledge of handicraft and fiber to a people who have forgotten where their socks come from. She has an art blog, amosthefamous.blogspot.com, but it is mostly looked at by Scandinavians and South Koreans. She does not know why. She lives with her good husband and five children in the middle of Iowa.
I am the Mormon stereotype: a white, stay-at-home mom, blessed with the large bones of my pioneer ancestors. I am not, perhaps, the best person to write about diversity in the Church. I read an article yesterday at Slate.com by David Haglund called “I’m a Father, a Husband, and a Rock Star. And I’m a Mormon.” He talks about the potential ramifications of the “I am a Mormon” series of commercials and suggests that perhaps one result of the commercials is that members of the Church will see the Church differently—as a more diverse and inclusive community. I wondered. Late last night I went to Mormon.org and watched 20 or 30 of the videos. I felt my inner cynic creeping up on me—is this really a representation of the Church? All those people were SO cool. And they so carefully represented all the colors of the human rainbow. Is this really who we are? Or is it just a TV version of our cool diversity?
I decided to do a very simple census. I made a list of every sister that I have had on my visiting teaching list for the last ten years. Here they are:
A college lacrosse star.
A mother of three. Who borrowed my vacuum, pawned it and used the money for drugs.
A Nigerian medical student.
A state senator’s wife.
Two Filipina women. One old and one young. Both homesick for their country. I served them by eating all the food they cooked for me.
A Haitian woman. Who worked 80+ hours a week to not only help support her husband and children, but to also supply all of the school fees and supplies for her extended family back in Haiti.
One Venezuelan stay-at-home mom who always tried to sell us stuff she’d bought down the street at Wal-Mart– for a substantial profit. I still have a backpack I bought from her.
A Jamaican paralegal.
An elderly animal lover. When she was in the hospital I cleaned her litter boxes. And committed to never getting a cat.
A Texan escaping an abusive marriage.
A woman currently in an abusive marriage.
A Colombian single mother. We took her out to lunch one day at the worst Chinese restaurant I’ve ever been too. She had good advice: “Order the shrimp and broccoli. It’s impossible to make cat look like shrimp.”
A native New Yorker—born on the steps of the hospital because her mother refused to leave the musical she was attending before it was over.
A Californian who decided to become an Iowa farmer in her late thirties.
An uber-organized branch librarian who was seriously thrilled to learn she’d been secretly nick-named the “library Nazi” by branch members.
A half-Japanese, half-Jewish heiress to a bio-engineering company.
Eight are single and nine are married. Some are students, some work, some are stay-at-home moms and some are retired. Their average number of children is 2.29. Most chose to join the Church as adults and just one is descended from pioneers. They range in age from 18 to 82. These seventeen women do not just represent the Church for me. They are the Church for me.
What does the Church look like to you?
Related posts:
Continue reading at the original source →