My mother, my talk

Remember how two years ago I gave a talk in church and ended up spending five posts covering it?

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2022/08/my-talk-pioneer-heritage.html 

Last Sunday, I spoke in church again.

I don't believe I will spend five weeks on it, but there is one thing that really goes along with dominator culture and what I was going to write about next. 

It will probably make more sense if I explain about the talk first though. So, maybe two posts.

Like last time, I was assigned a conference talk to build from. It was "Covenant Confidence through Jesus Christ" by Elder Ulisses Soares from April 2024 (Saturday morning session).

My talking points become very clear because of an encounter Julie had with someone who used to be in our ward. She has moved in with her sister now, because both of them were recently left by their husbands for other women.

Obviously there was a sense of betrayal, but what stuck was that she felt like she was left with nothing, having been taught all along that if you married a return missionary in the temple, then everything would work out.

That has not been my experience, and not only because I have remained so consistently single. 

I remember a vivid lesson in Young Womens about all of the things that could go wrong. I mainly remember a nervous breakdown one woman had for fear of something happening with her having no skills, and a hypothetical of Prince Charming falling off of his horse and hitting his head on a rock, but I think Prince Charming going after a different princess was listed.

Also, in my project of reading all of the old conference talks, I am currently at 2011 (from 1971). In 40 years of conference talks, they mention things going wrong and being really painful a lot.

Maybe things don't always sink in. Maybe some people have more idealistically wrong youth teachers. I think we can be conditioned to hear things a certain way based on other life factors. I don't want to be too harsh, because I do have an idea of the pain. 

What I ended up largely talking about was my mother, who was also cheated on and left. 

In many ways her situation was similar. What was different was that she knew she was not left with nothing. She had her testimony and her membership and her covenants.

That doesn't mean it was easy. 

Well, let me clarify. My father first cheated when I was 9. He did not leave, but he did stop going to church then. He did not actually leave until I was in my last year of college, once all children were safely over the age of 18.

When he first stopped going to church, Mom did feel judged and gossiped about. We went back to our old ward in Tigard for about a year. Then our home ward split, and the people she had worse feelings about were in the other one (which is the one we are in now, but that was many years ago),

The point is, she kept going. She kept serving, in callings and as a visiting teacher. Once there was a temple locally, she started going regularly.  

As her memories deserted her, there was a time when she couldn't really go to the temple anymore, and a time when she couldn't really focus on church anymore. Even so, when she could still speak in complete sentences -- even though she was talking about people who were long gone or had never had those names -- she would often talk about her faith. She told me that she knew God loved her and watched over her. 

Even now, when complete sentences don't really happen anymore, she still has a peace that a lot of of other dementia patients don't. She has kept her sweetness, 

Yes, her husband broke their marriage covenants, but she didn't. She continued to be blessed by her covenants and those blessings are eternal. 

I do not doubt that she is still bound to her children, even though I don't know how that will all look on the other side. 

As I thought about that, I knew that there was no greater testimony to covenant confidence that I could give than to talk about my mother.

It also felt a lot like giving her eulogy and saying goodbye; I wonder if we are closer. There are some things you only find out by moving forward.

In all of that, with those sisters, and our mother, and other people we know, there was a high incidence of women left by husbands, much higher than the other way around. 

Dominator culture has a lot to do with how much easier it is more men to suck (specifically the patriarchy section of it).

That's what needs its own post.