This archive Sunday post by Shelah, originally appeared on October 29, 2009. To see the original post and comments go here.
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Our ward had its Primary program a few weeks ago. Our family was spared any major embarrassment– all of my kids delivered their lines without incident (my five-year-old proclaimed, “In our family, my mom is responsible for taking care of the kids”), and none of them grabbed the standing microphone, Sinatra-style, and crooned into it at the top of their lungs (although that did happen). Since then, the kids have had Primary songs on the brain, this verse of “The Family is of God” in particular:
“A mother’s purpose is to care, prepare, to nurture and to strengthen all her children./ She teaches children to obey, to pray, to love and serve in the fam’ly.”
I don’t know why it rankles when I hear my son’s sweet little voice singing this song. I expect that when I send my kids to Primary on Sunday, they’ll learn about stories from the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and will also learn about things like the Family Proclamation. In short, I don’t expect them to learn anything different from what they are learning, it just surprises me how much the lyrics make my skin crawl.
Our Primary Presidency really did a great job corralling the masses, getting them to sing, and making things move smoothly (and on time!). They also infused humor into the kids’ talks. One of the kids in my son’s class said that his dad “is responsible for going to work and changing light bulbs.” It’s true that I’m responsible for taking care of the kids, at least 95% of the time, but my negative reaction to his statement shows that I’m a little bit resentful about that too. It just sounds like I don’t have anything else interesting going on in my life when he puts it that way, and I think I’m afraid that it’s true. Would I prefer that he says that his mom is responsible for “meeting her kids’ most basic needs and spending lots of time on the computer?” That would be true too, and a heck of a lot more likely to earn him a laugh.
I guess I like to think that I’m a stay-at-home mom because we decided as a couple that it would be the best thing for our family’s particular needs, not that I’m doing it because of cultural pressure and expectations, (even though, at the time, we were so young and naive that I don’t think we seriously considered that any alternatives could work for us). As I looked around while the song was being sung, I saw the physician mom sitting across the row from me, and the working mom behind me, sitting next to her non-LDS husband, and kept thinking, “If I’m having this reaction, I wonder what they’re thinking.”
Last year’s hot button Primary program song may have been “Home.” We’ve been singing “Home” at our house for years, because it was written by my husband’s grandma, Caroline Eyring Miner. The lyrics go like this:
Home is where the heart is/ And warmth and love abound./ Home is where warm circling arms/ Go all the way around.
Home is where there’s father/With strength and wisdom true./ Home is where there’s mother/ And all the children too.
Home is where our Father,/ Who dwells in heav’n above,/ Guides us in the way we live/ And let us feel his love.
When I actually started thinking about the lyrics, I wondered whose family she was writing about. This one sounds so traditional and so idyllic, and while Caroline had eight kids, she was a working mom (in the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties– if you went to Highland High School, she may have been your teacher), a published author and award-winning poet, and a world traveler who did as she pleased. I know the line about being a mother is only five words long in the song, but I worry that we might see our roles as reductive, as closely circumscribed as those five words, when those are the lines our kids get in their heads and put on repeat play.
So how I do I get out of this funk? Play some Laurie Berkner to get the song out of my kid’s head? Apply to grad school? Or just, somehow, make peace with my current lot in life? How?