When the (Disney) Queen is Right ~ Jen

I’ve heard everything feminists have to say about Disney Princess culture and I get it. I really do. I’ve seen it in my own home. Sometimes Kate puts on that Belle dress and the Beast comes out, all imperial orders and commands.

No one will be shocked to hear that my daughter roars right past princess to Queen.

But the last two Disney princess movies have been different. In Brave, Merida is the tomboy of all tomboys, with her riotous curly hair, and she takes a pretty strong stand against her mom turning her into a proper princess. She has to come of age, because she makes a mess, but then she cleans it up. She fights for her own honor and there is no handsome prince in that movie at all, unless you count the triplets.

When Kate wears her Merida dress, she charges out into the cul-de-sac to ride her bike, her arrows slung over her shoulder, singing “I will rise! I will fly! Chase the wind and touch the sky! I will rise! Chase the wind and touch the skkkkkyyyy!”

Now we have Frozen, with its amazing soundtrack. Most of you know what I’m talking about. But if you’ve been in a hole for two months, go to Youtube and search “Let it go”. See what happens next.

Kate got an Elsa dress for Christmas, of course, because Elsa is the Queen and Anna is just her princess sister. She has memorized the whole soundtrack and for a while, she sang Anna with her purer soprano while I sang Elsa. But then Kate decided that Let It Go was the best thing in the history of ever, and my solo became a duet.

Or she sings it alone. Like the other day, while I was cleaning the kitchen and she was cleaning up her toys in the loft. This is what I heard:

Let it go, let it go!

I will rise like the break of dawn!

Let it go, let it go!

THAT PERFECT GIRL IS GONE!

Here I stand in the light of day!

Let the storm rage on

The cold never bothered me anyway

And I thought Oh yes, my sweet girl. When the world asks you to be perfect, bombards you with false images and makes you feel like you aren’t enough, I pray to the good Lord that you will rise like the break of dawn and make your stand.

Learn from Merida that you can’t selfishly disregard your responsibilities as a member of our family, our community, our world. And learn from Elsa that you should never hide your magic to be what others want you to be.

Sometimes that will be easy. And sometimes you will have to fight against the storm.

In these two movies, there is no happily ever after. There is no guarantee that a few songs and dances have earned Merida and Elsa charmed lives. They only climbed the first mountain, of accepting who they are and what that means. And that’s something we all have to do.

PS: Before anyone says “But the Disney characters bombard little girls with false body images, I saw that article on HuffPo that pointed out that Anna’s arm was thicker than her waist and what is UP with their eyes??” I asked Kate about that. “Does Merida look normal to you?” I asked “With those great big eyes?” She looked at me over the top of her glasses like I was the silliest mama ever. “She’s a cartoon. She’s not supposed to look like a human.” Duh.

It’s Not a Competition ~ Dana

I’ll admit, with great pride, that I love Facebook. I love status updates. I love check-ins. I love pictures and videos. And I really love hashtags.

But in the past year or so, I’ve read different blogs and even heard some friends talk about how much they hate Facebook. The complaint is usually the same, that all of their friends’ Facebook lives are fake, that they only show the good, beautiful, staged moments, and that it makes them feel badly or even guilty about their own messy, imperfect lives.

To those people, those who feel inferior because their living room isn’t as clean as their friend’s, or because their Christmas tree didn’t look as pretty, or because their football-shaped Super Bowl cake came out looking like a big brown blob, I have one thing to say: Stop. Just stop.

It’s time for life to stop being a competition. And those of you who know anything about me, you know that I am a fierce competitor. If you and I play Yahtzee, you’re going down. I mean it. But our everyday lives need to stop being a competition.

When we look at our friends on Facebook with jealousy we are doing two harmful things:

1. We are devaluing our own wonderful experiences. If you can’t see the beauty in your children and proudly post their chocolaty smiles and whacked-out hair, if you haven’t noticed the stunning sunset on your drive home and revved up the colors with an Instagram filter, if you haven’t taken a selfie while you’re out somewhere fun on a date or at home with your cat, you’re missing out, friend. You’re missing out on the glorious beauty that your life has to offer.

2. We are neglecting to find joy in others’ happiness and accomplishments. I don’t know when it happened that we stopped celebrating each other. But I don’t like it. I don’t know when it became more fashionable to say, “You’re going to have the perfect wedding, aren’t you? I hate you.” (Yes, someone actually said that to me at my bridal shower.) I don’t know when friends stopped being friends and loving each other, but if you find yourself feeling that way or saying those things, I don’t think that I have room in my life for you anymore. Harsh? Yes. But so is the word hate.

I guess, too, that I am fortunate that my friends on Facebook post their fails as well as their wins. I’m part of a great group of people that has the ability to laugh at ourselves and our misguided attempts at cooking, family pictures, or bath time.

Try it sometime. It’s liberating, really, to post a picture of yourself in your volleyball camp t-shirt from the summer of 1990 and no make-up because you can’t believe how much your 9-month-old daughter just peed on you:

It’s rad to brag about your swollen feet at 33 weeks pregnant. Because it really is amazing how freaking big they are:

You’ll get a lot of good recipes if you post a picture of your failed attempt at making your own pizza dough from scratch:

And when you post a picture of your infant crying her head off at her daddy’s tenure presentation at the college…

…your friends will cheer you even more when you finally get a magical picture like this:

Oops, I mean like this:

#winnerwinnerchickendinner #boombaby #youshouldseetheother12picturesitooktogetonegoodone

Quilting~ Jen

My mom sent me to sewing classes in the early 80s. It was during the Stretch and Sew movement, when all earth mothers made tons of t-shirts for their families, striped with contrasting solid color neck and arm bands. I rocked those things in my Dorothy Hamill haircut.

I’m still not sure how I feel about threading a machine, but I did learn that I love to hand sew. I’m pretty good at a straight seam. It’s a very calming and productive way to pass an afternoon.

I have handmade things for my family along the way, most importantly our Christmas stockings, modeled after the ones my mom made for us when I was little.

Last Fall, I got a hankering to make a quilt. I say hankering, because really, what other word is there to describe a desire to make a quilt?

I remember watching my third grandma, Opal, hand stitch hexagons together into quilts. How hard can it be, I thought. And if it is hard, who cares? I’ll be sewing. I had visions of sewing the afternoons away in front of a roaring fire this winter, a new generation of earth mother, proving that all things old are new again.

Well.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Old Man Winter turned his back on So Cal this year. He has his feet planted firmly in the four corner states, facing East and frowning hard.

We haven’t had a fire in so long that there’s a dove nest in our chimney top.

And sewing hexagons into flowers is not as simple as it looks.

I discovered online that this pattern is called “Grandmother’s Garden”. Then I stopped looking online because there was all this talk about English paper piecing and it made me feel like I was missing something. Important.

Instead, I put my head down and made twenty of these:

Then I found a quilting website and sent the nice lady an email describing what I’d done so far and asking for advice on what to do next. How do I make these twenty flowers into a quilt, I asked.

She emailed back and said this: I wish I lived closer. I have no idea what you are trying to do. Good luck!

I retreated from quilting.

One day I noticed a quilting shop tucked in a corner of our town.

“OK”, I told the lady behind the counter, “I’m going to tell you what I did, but please don’t laugh.”

Not only did she not laugh, but she said “I hand sewed a Grandmother’s Garden! It’s right over here!”

She told me exactly what to do next. Then she told me when I finished that part, to bring it in and she would tell me what to do after that. She told me I could hand sew the whole thing, from start to finish.

Even the quilting?

“Well yes, dear. If you’re sure you want to hand quilt it, you can.”

She fired me up. I got right back to quilting, adding the path to my flowers. It’s kind of mathy in a geometry way, which is not my forte, so no surprise that this happened:

On the plus side, I now understand why my hexagons came with a piece of paper that looks like a honeycomb.

This weekend I completed my first row:

It might take me a year to finish, but I don’t care. It’s feeding my soul to make this quilt, to have busy hands even when I am resting. It’s meditation, prayer, creation. And my heart is asking me why women ever walked away from this small work, because there is peace here. I feel there will be more on that later, when I am done.

In the meantime, I have a quilt to sew!

What We Have Failed To Do ~ Jen

In my church we say an Act of Contrition towards the beginning that I have always felt nailed Jesus’ call to action right on the head. It goes, in part, like this:

I confess to almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do…

What I have done and what I have failed to do.

Months ago Dana wanted to write about our stance on the LGBT community and I balked. She gets pretty fired up about the issue and I was scared to offend some of our readers who do not share our opinions. The blog was new and growing and still feeling its way.

So the Supreme Court decision on Prop 8 came and went and we stayed silent. And the controversy over Russia’s intolerance of gays came and went and we stayed silent. Not yet, I said. There’s too much to lose.

In a way, I was right.

Last week in Kansas, the Republican dominated House of Representatives passed KB 2453, which says the following:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no individual or religious entity shall be required by any governmental entity to do any of the following, if it would be contrary to the sincerely held religious beliefs of the individual or religious entity regarding sex or gender: (a) Provide any services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges; provide counseling, adoption, foster care and other social services; or provide employment or employment benefits, related to, or related to the celebration of, any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement; (b) solemnize any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement; or (c) treat any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement as valid.

Although KB 2453 was passed in the name of religion, it has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with power and fear. But not feeling fear.

These people want to cause fear.

You think they didn’t know that we would all draw the same conclusion? That provision (a) of KB 2453 sounds similar to this:

Between mid-1933 and the early 1940s, the Nazi regime passed dozens of laws and decrees that eroded the rights of Jews in Germany. Some were seemingly insignificant, such as an April 1935 edict banning Jews from flying the German flag; or a February 1942 order prohibiting Jews from owning pets. But others withdrew the voting rights of Jews, their access to education, their capacity to own businesses or to hold particular jobs. In 1934 Jews were banned from sitting university exams; in 1936 they were forbidden from using parks or public swimming pools and from owning electrical equipment, typewriters or bicycles. Jews were also subject to cultural and artistic restrictions, forcing hundreds to leave jobs in the theatre, cinema, cabaret and the visual arts. – See more at: http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/anti-jewish-laws/#sthash.V0qUpHSt.dpuf

Today, various news outlets are reporting that the Republican dominated Kansas State Senate will not pass the bill into law, with its leaders claiming the bill is discriminatory and so, even though they stand for traditional marriage and family values, they cannot support it.

As if they were not working with their colleagues in the lower house all along. They floated a test balloon on Friday to see if it would fly and it didn’t. Today, state Senators got to stand in front of news cameras and take the high road.

But what if it no one noticed that the bill passed the House? Would the Senate have gone on to pass the bill this week? Would institutional discrimination have become legal? And from there, in the name of Jesus, what would have happened next?

These are the questions I asked myself. And then I knew that if real followers of Jesus do not speak up against those masquerading as followers of Jesus, then hatred and bigotry and evil will win.

I am sorry. Sorry that we’ve kept quiet. Sorry for what we haven’t said and haven’t done. Sorry that while we’ve talked about love, truth, Jesus, family, friends and faith, we haven’t seemed to extend that to all our brother and sisters. Even though in our hearts and in our lives and the way we are raising our kids, we are doing it. We are teaching them to love, and walk as Jesus walked, and to know, as Pope Francis tells us, that it is not for us to judge.

Dana and I are children of God raising children of God to live among children of God. We are pro-strong marriages and pro-strong families. We have gay married friends who are welcome in our homes and in our lives and we thank God for them. It’s who we are. And I think we’re done being quiet about it.

#Truth

Some truths are easy and fun. We’re not dealing with those today, because those aren’t the ones that cause us trouble.

All the time, I see these posts on Facebook that tell us to Live your truth! Find your truth! Speak your truth!

It always makes me think Why not just say “Live, Find, Speak The Truth”?

Truth is Truth—verifiable, supported by facts, actual. In a sense, the quality of Truth is one size fits all.

We can be in denial, or fear, or have strong opinions about the Truth in our lives. We can wish the Truth away, act like it never happened or try to misrepresent the Truth in our words and actions.

But none of that changes the Truth. It’s still there, squatting powerfully in the corner of our hearts, driving us to reach for anger, fear, shame. Another drink. Another bowl of ice cream.

That truth can be hard. Scary hard. Especially when it tells us that we are our own worst enemy.

Or that our lives are not going to go how we thought.

Or that a dream is not going to come true.

Or that we have experienced a pain from which it will take years to recover.

None of those things create “my truth” or “your truth”. They create the Truth. And isn’t there a kind of beauty and consolation in knowing it’s a shared Truth? Because these things happen to everyone. Which is how, in God’s wisdom, these hard truths can give us new life.

A life of recovery. A life of surviving. A life of new beginnings. A life of triumph.

Truth is not darkness. Truth is coming out of the darkness into the light.

It’s not complicated and oppressive. It’s simple and straightforward.

Even hard truths can be known, tolerated, understood. The moment we accept these hard truths in our lives, we can begin to move on from them. We can heal. We seek forgiveness. We can forgive.

And I just know, because God is good, that the more we stand on Truth, the less hard Truth there will be.

So whatever we are eating, drinking, smoking, snorting, hitting, stealing and lying about, it’s not the Truth. If it’s keeping us in the darkness, it’s not the Truth. It’s shame or anger or fear of the truth. It’s what we are letting ourselves accept, or take responsibility for. It’s how we wish it were all different. But it’s not the Truth.

The Truth is somewhere else, bathed in Light. If we seek it, we’ll be in the Light too.

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