In a strange land

Yesterday during sacrament meeting I had a moment. I was sitting between the boys in the very front pew, watching Eric give a talk while keeping one eye on Marley who was running wild in front of the stand. I pictured the scene in six months, with another little person on the pew and realized that we are on our way to taking up our own row.

My mind wandered to a time when I was six or seven and one of my friends told me that my Dad talked funny. I still remember my feelings of utter incomprehension- he talked perfectly normally! It was years before I was able to hear the heavy Egyptian accent that was obvious to everyone else. I was just so used to it, I never even noticed. Even now that I can hear his accent, I still have to occasionally ask him what a word he just used meant- his vocabulary is better than mine.

The other night we got a letter from one of the young men in our old ward. We've been writing to him while he's on his mission in Denver. He told us about a sixteen-year-old girl he's been teaching who's getting baptized in a few weeks. It took me back to when I was sixteen, feeling a small part of what my Dad must have felt when his plane landed in New York thirty-something years ago.

The church seemed like a parallel universe I had never known existed. A place where we make macaroni and cheese from scratch*....and where we sit in a sunlit room on Wednesday nights listening to all kinds of advice about living the gospel and write notes in a cute little journal....where families pray before they eat....where we all have relatives who live in Utah....where women (and men) think of staying home to raise a family as a career (huh? there's more to life than getting into a good college and then going to graduate school!?)....where we watch Disney movies even though we're teenagers and everything around us is rated-R....where we go to dances with actual decorations where boys actually ask girls to dance....

I could go on, but my point is that it was all foreign to me, and I watched it, riveted, totally convinced from the almost very beginning that I wanted to live there, in that parallel universe, with those amazing people. At first I didn't think about being one of them, I just knew I wanted to be there, because I felt loved and supported.

I realized soon enough that there were things I would have to sacrifice to live in that world, but I decided it was worth it. As the years passed I began to change, bit by bit, so slowly I hardly noticed it. I got married and had my own beautiful children. I went to church Sunday after Sunday. I met friends who showed me behind the scenes of those incredible families I first knew when I was sixteen. That they were human, with human weaknesses, that their houses weren't always clean, and their macaroni and cheese wasn't always from scratch...but that it's normal and okay to have weaknesses and imperfections, because they help us to be humble, compassionate, more like the Savior. I even had in-laws in Utah!

Sitting in church yesterday I realized that I'm not a stranger in that wonderful land anymore. Those women that I looked up to, who cooked and cleaned and sewed and served and prayed- I am one of them. Minus the sewing. And my children don't hear my accent. And that elusive goal- taking up your own whole pew at church- it's within my grasp:).

*It's not that I'm saying that only Mormons cook from scratch or do any of these things for that matter, it's just that, honestly, I had not been exposed to those things before I was introduced to the church. Once in college, I was suprised when my friend Carrie, who wasn't a member of the church, brought me dinner. She reminded me that "Presbyterians do nice things too!"