Interesting Article from Salon.com on Mormon Mommy Blogs

I am re-printing this article from the left-wing website, salon.com, on Mormon Mommy Blogs because a) I found it interesting and b) in some ways my blog is a Mormon Mommy Blog. I am a Mormon, I am a mommy (though my youngest is 11 now, and prefers to call me Mama), and I am a blogger, but I have deliberately avoided posting pictures of my children here and I don't think I've ever posted a recipe or craft project. My blog is less about appearances (interior design, crafts, perfect living) than it is about thoughts and ideals, writing and phtography, books and movies.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this article as much as I did:

Saturday, Jan 15, 2011 17:01 ET
Why I can't stop reading Mormon housewife blogs
I'm a young, feminist atheist who can't bake a cupcake. Why am I addicted to the shiny, happy lives of these women?

At first glance, Naomi and Stacie and Stephanie and Liz appear to be members of the species known as the "Hipster Mommy Blogger," though perhaps a bit more cheerful and wholesome than most. They have bangs like Zooey Deschanel and closets full of cool vintage dresses. Their houses look like Anthropologie catalogs. Their kids look like Baby Gap models. Their husbands look like young graphic designers, all cute lumberjack shirts and square-framed glasses. They spend their days doing fun craft projects (vintage-y owl throw pillow! Recycled button earrings! Hand-stamped linen napkins!). They spend their weekends throwing big, whimsical dinner parties for their friends, all of whom have equally adorable kids and husbands.

But as you page through their blog archives, you notice certain "tells." They're super-young (like, four-kids-at-29 young). They mention relatives in Utah. They drink a suspicious amount of hot chocolate. Finally, you see it: a subtly placed widget with a picture of a temple, or a hyperlink on the word "faith" or "belief." You click the link and up pops the official website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Yep, Naomi and Stacie and Stephanie and Liz are Mormons. They're members of a large, close-knit network of Mormon lifestyle bloggers -- young stay-at-home-moms who blog about home and hearth, Latter-day Saint-style. From Rockstar Diaries (Naomi) to Underaged and Engaged (Stacie) to Nie Nie Dialogues (Stephanie) to Say Yes to Hoboken (Liz), Mormon lifestyle bloggers occupy their very own corner of the blogosphere.

Their lives are nothing like mine -- I'm your standard-issue late-20-something childless overeducated atheist feminist -- yet I'm completely obsessed with their blogs. On an average day, I'll skim through a half-dozen Mormon blogs, looking at Polaroids of dogs in raincoats or kids in bow ties, reading gratitude lists, admiring sewing projects.

I'm not alone, either. Two of my closest friends -- both chronically overworked Ph.D. candidates -- procrastinate for hours poring over Nat the Fat Rat or C. Jane Enjoy It. A recent discussion of Mormonism on the blog Jezebel unleashed a waterfall of confessions in the comments section from other young non-religious women similarly riveted by the shiny, happy domestic lives of their Latter-day Saint sisters.

"They have lovely homes, picture-perfect kids, loving, super-attentive husbands, and things seem very normal and calm," writes a commenter named BrookeD, who admits to reading five Mormon blogs daily.

"I thought I was the only one!!" responds another commenter.

"THANK YOU," adds a third. "I'm another closet non-Mormon reader of Mormon mommy blogs."

So why, exactly, are these blogs so fascinating to women like us -- secular, childless women who may have never so much as baked a cupcake, let alone reupholstered our own ottomans with thrifted fabric and vintage grosgrain ribbon? It's not as though we're sniffing around the dark side of the faith, à la "Big Love." And it's not about religion. As someone married to a former Saint (my husband left the church as a teenager), I certainly have no illusions about what life as a Mormon would be like, and I'm sure it's not for me, which makes my obsession with these blogs all the more startling.

Well, to use a word that makes me cringe, these blogs are weirdly "uplifting." To read Mormon lifestyle blogs is to peer into a strange and fascinating world where the most fraught issues of modern living -- marriage and child rearing -- appear completely unproblematic. This seems practically subversive to someone like me, weaned on an endless media parade of fretful stories about "work-life balance" and soaring divorce rates and the perils of marrying too young/too old/too whatever. And don't even get me started on the Mommy Blogs, which make parenthood seem like a vale of judgment and anxiety, full of words like "guilt" and "chaos" and "BPA-free" and "episiotomy." Read enough of these, and you'll be ready to remove your own ovaries with a butter knife.

"It seems that a lot of popular culture wants to portray marriage and motherhood as demeaning, restrictive or simple, but in the LDS church, motherhood is a very important job, and it's treated with a lot of respect," says Natalie Holbrook, the New York-based author of the popular blog Nat the Fat Rat. "Most of my readers are non-LDS women in their late 20s and early 30s, college educated, many earning secondary degrees on the postgraduate level, and a comment I often get is, 'You are making me want kids, and I've never wanted kids!'"

Indeed, Mormon bloggers like Holbrook make marriage and motherhood seem, well, fun. Easy. Joyful. These women seem relaxed and untouched by cynicism. They throw elaborate astronaut-themed birthday parties for their kids and go on Sunday family drives to see the fall leaves change and get mani-pedis with their friends. They often have close, large extended families; moms and sisters are always dropping in to watch the kids or help out with cake decorating. Their lives seem adorable and old-fashioned and comforting.

"I've gotten e-mails from readers thanking me for putting a positive spin on marriage and family," Holbrook says. "It's important to acknowledge the hard parts -- and I think we all do -- but why not focus more on the lovely and the beautiful? That positive attitude is a very common theme throughout all aspects of the Mormon faith."

This focus on the positive is especially alluring when your own life seems anything but easy. As my friend G. says, of her fascination with Mormon lifestyle blogs, "I'm just jealous. I want to arrange flowers all day too!" She doesn't, really. She's just tired from long days spent in the lab, from a decade of living in a tiny apartment because she's too poor from student loans to buy a house, from constant negotiations about breadwinning status with her artist husband. It's not that she or I want to quit our jobs to bake brownies or sew kiddie Halloween costumes. It's just that for G., Mormon blogs are an escapist fantasy, a way to imagine a sweeter, simpler life.

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about "the New Domesticity" -- an increasing interest in old-fashioned, traditionally female tasks like sewing, crafts and jam making. Some pundits see this as a sign that young women yearn to return to some kind of 1950s Ozzie and Harriet existence, that feminism has "failed," that women are realizing they can't have it all, after all. That view is utterly nonsense, in my opinion, but I do think women of my generation are looking to the past in an effort to create fulfilling, happy domestic lives, since the modern world doesn't offer much of a road map. Our parents -- divorced, stressed-out baby boomers -- are hardly paragons of domestic bliss. Nor are the Gen X "Mommy War" soldiers, busy winging snowballs of judgment at each other from across the Internet. (Formula is poison! Baby wearing is child abuse!)

If those are the options, I'll take a pass, thanks.

Enter the Mormon bloggers, with their picture-perfect catalog lives. It is possible to be happy, they seem to whisper. We love our homes. We love our husbands.

Of course, the larger question is, are these women's lives really as sweet and simple as they appear? Blogs have always been a way to mediate and prettify your own life; you'd be a fool to compare your real self to someone else's carefully arranged surface self. And Mormons are particularly famous for their "put on a happy face" attitude. The church teaches that the Gospel is the only authentic path to true happiness. So if you're a faithful follower, you better be happy, right?

The phenomenon of the happier-than-thou Mormon housewife blogger is so well-recognized it's even spawned a parody blog, Seriously So Blessed, whose fictional author brays things like "We have non-stop fun all the time and are LOVING married life!" and "Speaking of fall, I kind of sometimes want to start a non-profit to help moms who go all of fall without blogging pics of their kids in pumpkin patches, because it seriously breaks my heart!"

So why are Mormon women such prolific bloggers? "It probably has something to do with the fact that Mormons are the world's biggest journal-keepers," says my husband, offering a partial explanation. Church elders have long encouraged members to keep regular journals for the dual purposes of historical record-keeping and promoting spiritual insight, and as a result Mormons are champion journalers and scrapbookers. In the 2000s, church elders began officially promoting new media technologies like blogs as a way of spreading the gospel, and the Mormon blogging community soon became so large it earned itself a punny nickname: the Bloggernacle.

For many LDS women, blogging about the domestic arts is a natural fit. As ex-Mormon designer Emily Henderson explains on her blog, The Brass Petal, growing up in large families engenders an attitude of make-do thriftiness -- homemade bread, recycled soda can Christmas ornaments, Salvation Army fashion. With the rise of DIY culture across secular America, all of a sudden those skills have become trendy, even bankable.

"Blogging is something they/we can do that feels productive, can potentially make money for our families and can be done from the home at any time," Henderson writes. For young Mormon women, who face immense cultural pressure to stay home with children rather than pursue a career, blogging about their adventures in homemaking becomes a sort of creative outlet, a way of contributing to the larger world beyond the home.

The bloggers I read may be as happy with their lot as they seem. Or not. While some Mormon women prosper under the cultural norms for wife- and mother-dom, others chafe. Utah is, after all, the state with the highest rate of prescription antidepressant use, a statistic the president of the Utah Psychiatric Association attributes to the pressure among Mormon women to be ideal wives and mothers. The creator of Seriously So Blessed, an anonymous Mormon woman, addresses this pressure in an online archive of Mormon women interviews called the Mormon Women Project: "In any highly homogeneous culture we all feel pressure to be and look and think and act a certain way," she says. "You start to think you need to be absolutely perfect in every area."

Clearly, life for the Mormon wife is not all crafts and cupcakes. Even if it were, I seriously doubt that crafts and cupcakes are all that much fun when you do them all day, every day.

But the basic messages expressed in these blogs -- family is wonderful, life is meant to be enjoyed, celebrate the small things -- are still lovely. And if they help women like me envision a life in which marriage and motherhood could potentially be something other than a miserable, soul-destroying trap, I say, "Right on." I won't be inviting the missionaries inside for hot cocoa now or ever, but I don't plan on stopping my blog habit any time soon.

Emily Matchar is a Chapel Hill, NC-based writer whose work has appeared in Men's Journal, Gourmet, Babble and lots of others. More: Emily Matchar

Book Review: "Persuasion" by Jane Austen

I've just finished reading "Persuasion," Jane Austen's last novel. Because of the archaic language (written in 1816), many people mistakenly assume that reading Austen is some sort of an academic exercise, like reading Latin, but it is pure pleasure! With all of its hilarious characters, witty words and romantic elements, it's a bodice-ripper for the mind.

I could not put it down and dreampt of it in my sleep. The language does effect speech patterns (and writing styles), however.

The main characters in most of Austen's books are slightly unpredictable, idealistic youg women, but in this novel the heroine, Anne Elliot, is older but wiser, jaded by disappointing life experiences. The bloom of her youth is behind her. She is useful to everyone but valued by almost no one. At the outset of the novel, it looks like her life will continue in that vain until the end.

But,of course, love intervenes.

I found myself wishing with Anne Elliot that the object of her affection would appear at a party or chance to meet her on the street. or that he would glance at her at just the right moment to convey some meaning.

Jane Austen is all about subtlties!

I read this book over 20 years ago and had fond memories of it, but the only part I remembered clearly involved a minor character at the end of the book.

Here are some excerpts I loved:

"There is hardly any personal defect," replied Anne, "which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to."

On Mary Musgrove: "While well and happy and properly attended to, she had great good humor and excellent spirits, but any indisposition sunk her completely; she had no resources for solitude."

"A thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling: that it would soon be over."

"She found that to retentive feelings, eight year may be little more than nothing."

"Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement."

Mrs. Harville: "I hate to hear you talking so...as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days."


It was an impulse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship.

Like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.

After all she had gone through, nothing was so likely to do her good as a little quiet cheerfulness at home.

Family connections were always worth preserving, good company worth seeking.

"My idea of good company, Mr. Eliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company."
"You are mistaken, said he gently. "That is not good company, that is the best."

A sick chamber may often furnish the worth of volumes.

There is so little real friendship in the world!

"I am no match-maker, as you well know," said Lady Russell, "being much too well aware of the uncertainty of all human events and caluculations."

He had an affectionate heart. He must love somebody.

Of course they had fallen in love over poetry.

She had some feelings, which she was ashamed to investigate. They were too much like joy, senseless joy!

Whoever suffered inconvenience, she must suffer none.

When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it.

Anne saw nothing, thought nothing of the brilliancy of the room. Her happiness was from within.

On women loving longer than men: "We certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is perhaps our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. "

A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening, or never!

To flatter and follow others without being flattered and followed in turn is but a state of half enjoyment.

Anonymity & Independence

When I frequent a business establishment of some kind (a bank, a restaurant, a shop...whatever) I like to be anonymous. I do not want anyone who works there to know my name, or, if they know it anyway, to let me know that they know it. I like my anonymity. (As if I were famous or something!)

Is that weird or what? I'm not sure anyone else in America feels this way.

I know most people like doing business with people they know. They like walking into a bank and being recognized as a frequent customer or going into a restaurant where the waiter knows exactly what they want to order. For whatever quirky reason, I do not.

I was thinking about this today, because I was considering going to a clothing store where they go overboard on customer service, which actually keeps me away. You know: can I hold that for you? Can I find you a different size? Would you like to see it in a different color? etc., etc. You walk in and ten minutes later they know everything about you -- your name, your size, your color preferences, what the occasion is you're shopping for...everything! I do not need them to gather all of this information. I like to shop independently. I can look at the clothes myself and assess whether or not I want to try them on.

Places like this assume you don't really know what looks good on you, so you need lots of extra help. In my case, they are probably right, but I still prefer to dress myself. When I am shopping, I'm not asking for a makeover. I just want to find something I like.

When Scott worked downtown, he used to frequent a fast food Japanese place at lunch. I knew he ate there often, but I had no idea how often until I accompanied him one day and the person behind the counter greeted him by name and asked, 'The usual?' Scott looked at me sheepishly while I laughed. I still tease him about it.

I guess I came to this opinion when we were first married. We bought life insurance from a neighbor of ours, a very nice guy we liked a lot. But when we had to make a change to the policy, he put us on a guilt trip. We almost capitulated to his objection just to be neighborly, when we realized that if we did not know our insurance agent, we would have no emotional attachment to him and could make decisions independently. That's how commercial decisions should be made.

Don't get me wrong -- I prefer to shop locally and keep the money flowing in my own community. I feel personally responsibile when a local establishment goes out of business -- I really do! Like I should have patronized that tanning salon more, even though I don't use tanning salons.

Basically, if I lived in 1980s Boston, I would not frequent Cheers, 'where everybody knows your name,' and if I lived in 1960s Mayberry, I would be tempted to drive all the way to Raleigh to do my shopping. That's just me.

Sugar Factory Coming Down...Slowly

I was out practicing with my new camera today and took these pictures of a local landmark, which is being demolished very slowly with a small wrecking ball. Giant chunks of concrete defy gravity, suspended in webs of rebar. This used to be a very large sugar factory when our city was rural. It was one of the largest sugar beet factories in the world at one time. Now it has been deemed seismically unsound, too expensive to bring up to code, so it must come down. I finished taking pictures and I was driving away when I looked up and saw the door swinging open at the top, so I changed my lens and, voila! I could see inside. Obviously a very drab, gray day.