Christmas Knitting

I didn't do a ton of Christmas knitting this year, but I also got a late start and didn't have a whole lot of spare time.  There's actually one project not pictured here that I finished, but haven't gifted yet, so I'll have to wait to post about it until I send it since the mom of the recipient reads this blog.

My first project was a cabled hat for an older lady who rides the same bus as me.  We live near each other so maybe once or twice a week for the past couple of years we wind up at the stop at the same time in the mornings and then we chat on our way into work.  She's always interested in whatever I'm knitting on the way in if I happen to have brought my latest project on the bus with me.  She wears black all the time (like a true New Yorker, which she is in her heart), so of course I made her a black hat.  It's really difficult to see the cabled pattern in black, so here's the hat I made her:

And here's someone else's hat in a color where the cables show up better:

Next, I made matching tams for our niece Anya and her brand new baby sister, Mira.  My SIL Sarah sent me this picture of Mira in her hat, which is hilarious and which prompted Jason to comment that she looks like one of the mushrooms in Super Mario Bros.

Well, she was a preemie.  She'll grow into it.  Sarah assures me that Anya's looks adorable, but she wouldn't keep still long enough to get a good picture of her in the hat.

Finally, this is the project I was talking about before with the Ocean-colored yarn that I wanted to make into an afghan, but made into a sweater instead because afghans are tedious.  Anyway, I made this sweater for my mom.

She has rheumatoid arthritis and is home in bed most of the time, so I thought this would work well as either a sweater to wear when she does go out, or as a cozy bed jacket.  She loves it and I'm so pleased!

Pants

I spent part of last night wide awake, thinking about the whole pants thing.  This morning, I started writing a post, but it turns out that Joanna Brooks has done a lot of the explaining and linking for me already.  So go check out her post for some background.

Joanna Brooks's point that not all Mormon feminists feel the same is so important.  Some women want an extreme and immediate change, and some women are willing to work within the current structure and wait patiently for changes that they hope will come.  The truth is, individual Mormon feminists don't necessarily feel the same from day to day - at least I don't.  Sometimes gender issues in the Church weigh heavily on my heart.  Sometimes they don't feel like such a big deal.

I didn't wear pants yesterday.  The reasons are twofold.  First, I hate pants.  In fact, the only pants I have are a couple pairs of jeans.  I have no problem with pants wearing at church, I just think church is one of those things that it's good to dress up for, so I wouldn't have felt comfortable in jeans, personally.

Second, I wasn't really sure if pants wearing was the statement I wanted to make at church.  When I first heard about Wear Pants At Church Day, it seemed a bit silly.  (The fact that wearing pants could actually be a political statement just shows how weird we Mormons can be.)  However, the ugliness and vitriol that emerged on the internet and in the personal lives of the organizers over the last week has astounded me.  Based on the comments I read last night at Feminist Mormon Housewives, a lot of people were emboldened to act because of the outrageous personal attacks heaped on the organizers and those who joined the movement early on. 

I am lucky to live in New England, where Mormons are rare, but, in that subset, liberal Mormons are fairly common.  I'm not overly vocal about my political positions, but by virtue of being a woman lawyer who voted for Obama, it's probably safe to make some assumptions about where I stand on things.

Yesterday I wore a red dress to church because it was our ward Christmas celebration and we sang at the Lessons and Carols service in Cambridge. I felt Christmas-y.  After reading the experiences from women literally all over the world, I wish I had passed over the red dress for my purple satin shirt and a skirt. I doubt anyone in my ward would have noticed, but because of the threats levied on the women who planned to wear pants, I wish I had worn purple to express my solidarity with my Sisters who were threatened.

Jason wore a purple shirt and a purple tie.  OK, so purple is his favorite color and he wears that shirt a lot, but yesterday he made a purposeful choice to wear the purple.  I am so proud to be married to a man who thinks gender inequality and patriarchy are kind of dumb.

As Jason drove us home last night, I read to him about the "Pantscapades" on Feminist Mormon Housewives.  Most of the women seemed to have positive or neutral experiences.  A few had negative experiences.  Jason's overall observation: The men in these womens' wards were generally much more supportive than the women.  While bishops and other male leaders wore purple ties and gave the pants-wearing women high fives, they got the cold shoulder or odd looks from some of the women. 

He was right.  If the pants wearers experienced negativity it usually came from other women.  I know I'm probably the five hundred millionth person to say this, but women are so, so hard on one another. 

I've always considered myself a feminist, but recognizing the issues in the institutional Church has been a fairly recent thing for me.  My husband is great; my current church leaders are great.  I feel listened to and respected in all that I do in my ward in my calling as the Young Womens President.   But there is an ache that comes from feeling that within the institutional Church, as a woman I am not quite equal to the men. My friend Kristine expressed this concept so well in a short but poignant post she wrote last year.

There is a lot of beautiful theology in the Church about women and men and our divine potential.  I think that's why so many of us stick around.  We can't deny the spiritual experiences we have had, and we cling to the potential that we see both for the Church and in the eternities.

Helping Out A Little

On Wednesday, our bishop sent around an email requesting church members to head down to New York or New Jersey for the weekend to help out people affected by Hurricane Sandy.  It's been a few weeks since the hurricane hit, but there is still a lot of need in the area.  Jason and I talked about it and, amazingly enough, we didn't have anything going on this Saturday, which is rare for us.

Well, we planned to decorate for Christmas and clean out the garage, but this seemed a little more important.

So we went down with a few other people from our ward (Mormon for congregation).  There were 7 of us from the Central Falls, RI ward, including one of my Young Women who wanted to come.  Anyone 16 or over could come and help.  I don't think she realized until the day of that she was the only person under age 22 going, but I think she's glad she went.

(As we were driving home, she told me and Jason, in kind of an amazed voice, that all of us grown ups are pretty fun.  That opinion may have been negated by the completely boring lesson I taught the Young Women this morning at church, but my scheduled teacher had a family emergency and I had an hour to prepare, so, you know, you win some, you lose some.)

We left yesterday morning at 5:30 and drove to Rockaway in Queens.  We could tell once we crossed over the bridge into Queens that something big had happened.  We started to see piles of construction debris in front of houses as we drove by, and noticed that a lot of businesses were closed.  The Mormons had a designated meeting spot, where we found the rest of our group and the 7 of us set out for our first house.

We wound up in the basement apartment of a house that had been pretty gutted already and stripped down to the aluminum framing.  I initially thought that it was the basement of someone's house until I talked with the teenage daughter who was there helping us out, and realized, when she started pointing out where their bedrooms and living room were, that it had been their apartment, not just storage for the house upstairs.  It would be bad enough to have your basement flood, but they lost absolutely everything.

As if that wasn't enough, they had just finished fixing up the entire apartment a few days before the hurricane hit.  We wound up smashing up their brand new bathroom with brand new sink and toilet and bathtub and brand new tiles because the drywall behind it all had been soaked through and had to come out.  Because of the storm surge, the apartment had been filled with 8 feet of water.  We could see a watermark way above our heads on the tile in the bathroom.

So we pulled up their tile and subfloors and we knocked down the bathroom, hauling out the debris and leaving it in a pile in front of their house like all the piles we had driven by earlier, for the city to come and collect.  We shoveled and swept and tried to leave the apartment in as good of condition as we could so that they would have a relatively clean base to start over.

The thing that blew my mind was how upbeat the family seemed.  We met mom and the teenage daughter, and then mom's brother and his son showed up to chat with us and see what we were doing.  I know they've had a few weeks to absorb this, but I don't think I would have been so easygoing about it all if I had lost everything.  Mom made hot chocolate for those who wanted it.  At the end, we took pictures, hugged each other, and we left.

We only had an hour and a half left until we were supposed to wrap up work, so we tried some of the other houses on our list, but either no one was home, or there were other groups there helping.  I think there must be a general list of homes that need help that is distributed to all the groups, so sometimes the same house winds up on more than one group's list in a day.  I was so thrilled to see how many groups there are helping. We saw lots of Mormons in our yellow vests, but also many, many other groups.  Even a group from Minnesota!  That's a long drive.

After dropping off the big tools back at HQ, we searched for a place to eat dinner, and had to drive for awhile because, of course, the storm surge flooded stores and restaurants too.  Everyone is rebuilding, but it's a slow process.  I was happy to see a few different distribution points where churches and other community groups were handing out  food and clothes to those who lost so much.  The family we helped was lucky that they have family nearby who didn't get flooded and who could take them in while they fix their place.  But I'm sure there are other people who don't have a good support system, and who are dealing with construction and lack of power all on their own.  I was happy to see that so many in and out of the community are pitching in.  It's definitely needed, especially as winter is coming.

Eventually we found a diner and ate dinner, then 3 of us drove back, while the other 4 headed to a local Mormon church building to spend the night.  Jason and I wish we could have stayed, but we had Evensong this afternoon up in Cambridge, and would have had to leave too early this morning to be of much use.

I'm so glad we went.  We played a very small role in the overall effort, but I'm glad we got to help that nice family, and I hope we eased their burden even just a tiny bit.

This is me prying up the subfloor.  I only did a small bit of the hardest labor, but I was pretty proud of this.