Fiona Phillips gives us a glimpse into her life as the mother of six children, ranging in ages from 21 to 6. Her dedication to motherhood and her reliance on the Lord shine through in this interview. How did you and your husband decide on the size of your family? I knew I wanted to have children but I wasn’t a particularly child-orientated person, so I didn’t dwell on it. When we got married, my husband and I wanted four, I think subconsciously because that had been the number of children in my family growing up, so we were just thinking about having four children. But when we got married I was told that we might not be able to have children as I was told that I had Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). There was a 50/50 chance. Women with PCOS just don’t know until they try if they will be able to have children. So we got married and decided that we would try right from the beginning. I got pregnant within three months. That was the beginning of our four-children family. We had four children in five and a half years, which I found quite demanding. How did you manage having four children aged five and under? It was very difficult. It was almost too difficult. I remember a senior sister missionary with six children telling me “Take your time,” trying to warn me in a subtle way, and I ignored her and carried on! And then found myself sobbing in the bathroom with four children all around me. Once when I was breastfeeding the baby, Meg, in the smallest room in the house, Beth and Laura ran in and starting fighting about something. Sam decided to join us as well, so he ran in, tripped up, bumped his head and started screaming. Meg then jerked because she was so frightened and started crying. There I was sitting in a four-bedroom house with everybody squeezed into one tiny room, howling! It really was a defining moment as a mother. This was never going to be easy, but I absolutely loved my children and I have always felt that I wanted to be with them all the time and give them as much as I could give I just wanted to make sure I was always there to teach and help them and I was going to do it to the best of my ability. Heavenly Father has given us a commandment and asked us to have children. I wanted to push myself but I recognised I had pushed myself further than I had realised, and that I needed to pause at that point. However, I didn’t necessarily feel that I had finished having children, even in that desperate time. I just loved them so much, I didn’t want to feel that I had finished, even though we had our four children. I was prepared to carry on if I felt that was the right thing to do. I held that as a thought. But I knew I couldn’t carry on then, I knew I had to have a gap. So that’s what we did. After a rest of about two and a half years it took us a year to conceive James. We ended up saying, “If I’m not pregnant by Christmas, then that’s it.” We would have four children, it was what we had always wanted, and we would just leave it there. Of course, I found myself pregnant at the end of the December and James was born the following September! I really do think Heavenly Father has a sense of humour. After your fifth, James, you still went on to have a sixth, Will. What circumstances led you to having a sixth baby? After James was born, we wouldn’t have had any more children without a definite spiritual prompting! The year before James was ready to go to school, I started to have this feeling that I should have another baby. But it was a really difficult thought for me. All the toddler-dom was almost over. I hadn’t found it easy, and as my children were getting older, I was really enjoying motherhood a lot more. We prayed about the promptings we were having, received a clear “Yes”. and I just thought, “Oh no!”. I knew it was going to make a really big difference to me. But I knew that I should do it, so I did. Fiona Phillips and Her Husband The joy that everyone–not just me, but my husband and our children–has experienced as a result of Will joining our family has been huge. He is quite amazing, but that’s not so much the point as it is that I feel he really completed our family. I think it taught the teenagers a lot, and I think Dave and I have learned a lot. I felt that I was actually getting the hang of being a mother (at last!), and I enjoyed it because the others were so much older so it was much easier. I felt that I was finishing on a real high and that was a real blessing for me because I had found those early years of motherhood hard. Having my children was a miracle and a blessing and I do feel very strongly that that was meant to be just as it worked out. Is motherhood natural for you or were there some things you had to work on? I definitely had to work on patience! I am not a patient person, so I am a lot more patient than I used to be simply because I have chosen to have six children. I feel that is a huge blessing because if I hadn’t done that, I think I would have been very different. I think Heavenly Father knows what we need and He knew that I needed to learn a lot and I have learned a lot from having children. Those experiences were the perfect ones to teach me. Mothering the younger children didn’t come naturally to me, but I tried my best. I learned later on with subsequent children that I should have got out of the house more. It seemed to take so long to get everyone ready that by the time we got out it was time to come back. It’s hardly seemed worth the effort. I can tell you some hilarious stories about supermarket shopping with four children. I have learned a lot from my children as well, from the examples that they set and their simplicity and their faith. I also learned to rely on the Saviour because at times as a mother you do feel isolated and alone. Your husband can’t always there, so I found that prayer was the answer.I think I was very committed. I did everything and was probably a bit over-the-top. We would have Family Home Evening with all the visual aids and I was really into it. I found it hard with young children. But, I just loved my kids to bits and I would do anything for them and I would sacrifice whatever was necessary. I wasn’t the perfect mum – sometimes I felt that if I had to do that jigsaw one more time I would throw it out of the window! But I would never think, “I’m not happy; I’m going to find another way of fulfilling myself.” I am very protective of my children; I will just do everything I can do for them, which sometimes leads me to being almost over-the-top in the other direction, but I do love them so much. How has prayer blessed your life as a mother? It has made a huge difference to me as a mother. I pray about each child individually every day because they all have different issues at different times. I don’t necessarily feel anything during my prayer, but things flow into my mind afterwards, even when I am in the shower. Sometimes it is an idea about what to do in Family Home Evening or ringing their teacher or something I should bring up with them in private. I know that I have prayed and received a prompting to go and speak to one of the children, and I haven’t known why, but there has been something that they have needed to talk to me about. This happens all the time. Has there been any counsel from General Conference, or the Ensign, or the scriptures that you have referred to frequently during your years of parenting? We read an Ensign article years ago talking to parents with large families that recommended parents spend individual time with their children, stressing how important that was. We had the first four at the time and we were wondering how we were going to pay them all the attention that they needed. Ours were in this big blob because they were so close together in age! So we started “Days Out” once a month. This means that Dave or I take one of the children out for an activity of their choice (budget allowing) as an opportunity to spend a few hours together one on one. We have done this consistently for over twelve years now. That one thing has made a huge difference in the relationship we have with our children because they look forward to it, even when they are teenagers. It is a time when they can talk to us, and it is a natural opportunity for us as parents, to find out what’s going on without being too obvious. The other thing I have found valuable is when I have heard or read things that I really like, I have typed them up and stuck them around the house. I put them up so that if I am having a hard time, it reminds me of what I should be doing and who I should be. We were desperately trying to be consistent in our family prayer and so I just put up the scripture from 3 Nephi, “Pray in your Families,” and that is still on the wall after many years. What specific decisions have you and your husband made to put your family first? We made a definite decision that I would stay at home. I had just earned my degree in psychology and was about to start another degree in educational psychology, as I didn’t think I would have children for a long time, but as I was about to start the course, Laura was born. There was a nursery available but I wasn’t ever going to put her in the nursery and do the course. I knew I wanted to be at home. I acknowledge totally that I have been really lucky to be able to do that and I know that circumstances vary for everyone. However, we have had a couple of times in our marriage when it has been difficult to make ends meet financially. The first time it happened, the children were younger so there was no question of me going out to work even when things were difficult. Dave was starting a business so we had no wage for about a year at one point. It was a really difficult, but we were blessed, and I still do not know how we managed through that time! It was like the cruse of oil that never dried up. Throughout that time I never contemplated going to work and we paid our meager tithing. Before we knew it things were back to normal. Fiona Phillips and Her Family More recently, as the demands of expensive teenagers kicked in finances were again tight, I felt like I could be contributing. I had more time as the children were older and Will had just started school full time. It was a really interesting experience. I found a part-time job thinking that it wouldn’t affect anybody. However, even in just those few hours a week that I was working I found myself getting calls from school with sick children, forgotten PE kits, etc. Although I was only doing fifteen hours a week, I found that it did have a significant impact on the family. So I stopped working after just a few weeks. Instead I decided to start a small baking business from home which I could fit around the needs of the children. I did that so that I could be in control of my time and make my own decisions. I only do a small amount now, even though I could fill all of my time with it if I wanted to. I also feel strongly about being available to serve and that is another deliberate part of why I am at home. The Lord needs people, and if we are not there, if we’re too busy doing other things, there is no one to help Him. What mothering tools do you use frequently? One thing that Dave and I talked about was that we would try and say “yes” as much as possible, so that when said it was necessary to say “no” our children would take us seriously and know in their hearts that there was a reason for that and accept it better. We have also made it a rule that we would have an open home where we would invite people to come over regularly, especially our childrens’ friends, and that has been a really good thing. They tend to always want to be here, it is hard work but it is really worthwhile because the children are safe, protected, and in a good environment. I try not to shout. It is a lot harder than it sounds! As soon as you start shouting, then you lose any credibility. I try not to act like a teenager too! I think it is as much about the things that you don’t do as it is about the things you actually do. What are your strategies for running a busy household? Thinking and planning ahead is key. I think I avoid all kinds of disasters because I am always working six months ahead. By the end of September I am just getting to the end of things I was planning back in January. I have been busy, but I haven’t dropped too many balls. I find I generally mange to avoid things that could cause chaos in our large family. I have a large calendar that I write everything on, and I make lists every day and love crossing things off. Occasionally it means I find it hard to relax, which can take away from motherhood. I can be too busy being organised because I have always got to be planning the next thing ahead, so I do recognise that as one of my failings. I do need to be more spontaneous. How do you refill yourself amongst doing all of your daily routines? I am a huge believer in prayers and scriptures. My quality of scripture study hasn’t always been great. I resorted to reading them in the bathroom when the children were young because I didn’t get the time during the day and I was always shattered by the time I went to bed. But I have tried to do it consistently, even if it sometimes feels like a box that has to be ticked, because I know I need to do it and I want to be obedient. I also try and serve; I get a lot back from that and I do enjoy serving. I did make the mistake when the children were younger of being a bit of a martyr. Dave would try and make me go off and have some time to myself but I rarely would because I felt I should always be at home with the kids. I should have taken more advantage of those opportunites because it was very demanding. I do that now, and if I have an opportunity for social or separate time, I take it! While I am at home and on the job I am 100% there. What are your educational philosophies for your children? I think it is about working hard and being consistent. I try and teach them that it doesn’t matter what the result is, it matters that they have done their best. We don’t pay them for getting grades because we feel that the result is their reward. I don’t want them to feel that if they don’t get an A, then it’s inadequate. I know they are all capable of different things. I expect them to work hard, and I try and teach them to be consistent and make their education a high priority. Even since the time that they were tiny, they have had a routine of coming home from school, having their dinner, and then doing their spellings and reading or homework or whatever it is they are doing before they go off and do anything else. Mostly they have really taken it on board and they have learned to be self-motivated. They also understand that their educational achievements will affect their future lives in many ways and that they need to plan properly, not just stumble into whatever the future holds. Fiona Phillips What do you hope to pass on to your children? A testimony. I want them to love the Saviour, and to want to serve and be committed, and not be half-hearted. I want them to really love and serve. Those are the most important things, because if you work hard and you love Heavenly Father and you are consistent and you have a testimony, then really you can’t go wrong. As you look to the future with your youngest now in full-time school, what are your plans for the future? I am assuming that I will never be without having a lot of children in the house, either my children or grandchildren. I’m hoping there will be lots of grandchildren! I don’t want to become stale so I want to push myself to do something. I am doing a counseling course–because again, we have been told that we should educate ourselves and I take that seriously–and then my plan is to do a further degree at some point in the future to allow me to work at something I enjoy if I want or need to work. It’s a deliberate choice to prepare for the future without negatively impacting the family. You never know what is going to happen. What is your testimony of motherhood and the partnership you share with God? I have had a lot of amazing experiences as a mother. I remember when Laura was born–I have never felt closer to my Heavenly Father. It was just a miracle, and I remember watching her and looking at her and experiencing this “trailing clouds of glory” feeling, this “Wow, she was just there!” moment. I don’t think there is anything more sacred or more wonderful than motherhood. I hope and pray that my children are all able to have a family of their own because it has been such a wonderful experience for me. It teaches you how much Heavenly Father must love us, because of the love you feel for each one of your children, you would literally do anything to help them and that sometimes involves doing really hard things that they don’t want you to do. It has taught me about the relationship that Heavenly Father has with us and how He must feel when we do things wrong, and when we do things right. I think it just gives you this huge insight. How we feel about our children is such a powerful motivating force. Fiona Phillips and Some of Her Children I am quite sensitive to the fact that not everyone has this opportunity, I can only imagine how difficult that would be. But I do know that the influence of such Sisters can really make a difference – I am grateful to a number of such women who have sacrificed on behalf of my children and have blessed their lives. I sometimes think about what it will be like to be older. I’m sure that my happiness and fulfillment will come from my testimony of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and in knowing that my family is safe and secure in their testimonies. This motivates me to keep myself focused on achieving this goal. It’s interesting how the Lord blesses us by giving us children; it is one of the most demanding things we will ever do and yet it is one of the most precious things we will ever do. At A Glance Name: Fiona Phillips Location: Hampshire, England Age: 43 Marital status: Married for 22 years Children: 6 children ages 21, 18, 17, 15, 12, 6 Occupation: Mother Schools Attended: Portland Comprehensive school, Birmingham University BSc in Psychology Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Be Still My Soul” Current Church Calling: Primary President Interview by Louise Elder.

On June 10, 1990, Galina Goncharova became the first member of the Church to be baptized in Moscow, in what was then the Soviet Union. In this interview she describes her journey to the Church, the ravages of alcoholism on her family, and how the gospel has helped her to forgive and given her power to change her relationships with others. How was it for you to be the first person to be baptized into the Church in Moscow? Were you nervous or scared to join a church that was new to you, and that came from outside the Soviet Union? I’ve contemplated this a lot. I had been attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, and there my friend gave me the Book of Mormon. I trusted him when I listened to him. I watched him, listened to his story, his description of his relationship with God. I felt the Spirit the very first time I took the Book of Mormon into my hands. At the AA group meeting he had asked, “Could you stay behind? I want to talk to you about something.” I heard what he had to say, how he felt God, how he would sometimes be close to God, and then sometimes distance himself from God, and how he sometimes was angry with God. I thought, “How can he feel the love of God? Interesting!” My belief in God had generally been based on two ideas. First, I thought that God exists. My mother had sometimes said, “There is a God, and He sees everything, He knows everything, and He will give.” When I was a little girl I would lie down in the evening with my sisters to sleep. We would play and argue, and there was no way we were going to sleep. She would say, “Girls! Don’t you dare! Don’t play around at night! God will punish you!” So secondly, I knew that God will punish; and also that He protects in some way, but this protection for me seemed faraway. I began to read 1 Nephi. I was reading the first chapter and came to a verse (Nephi 1:14) “Great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God Almighty! Thy throne is high in the heavens, and thy power, and goodness, and mercy are over all the inhabitants of the earth; and, because thou art merciful, thou wilt not suffer those who come unto thee that they shall perish!” At this moment I really needed God, that God which was living inside me, but who I didn’t know or understand. I immediately felt the Spirit so strongly, and it was a spirit of love. I cried and cried a long time. I sobbed and then I read it again. From that very moment I memorized this verse. The notion that God would not let me perish because he is merciful filled every cell of my body. He loves so much that He wouldn’t allow me to perish, or anyone to perish. And probably thanks to this, the fear left. He created in me courage I needed in important moments in my life. I had courage when my friend suggested that I go Sunday to the meeting on Leninsky Prospekt. Could you describe that first church meeting in Moscow? How many people were there? What was it like? It was the end of 1989. We had come to the place and there was a policeman standing there. He told me that yes, this was the building. There were six of us at the meeting in an American diplomat’s apartment. I felt such a responsibility. But there wasn’t any fear that would have normally gripped me, or a suspicion that this was some kind of dangerous cult, or the thought that I was doing something bad. No fear that I would be detained. I think obviously it was the Holy Spirit. I am really grateful to my friend because he conveyed to me that he really loved the Church. What he did for me, it’s simply a miracle. He passed on his spark of faith; he believed in God, he believed in Jesus Christ, he loved them. Every Sunday I saw the policeman that stood guard. At subsequent Sunday meetings, I saw that there was a lesson, there was the sacrament. I went to other churches with my friend from work. I noticed many little differences — the subtleties. It’s the small things you judge, and I didn’t feel comfortable in other churches for various reasons. This confirmed to me that I was where God wanted me to be. Tell me about your baptismal day. I wore my own wedding dress: white crepe, silvery like a snowflake, with a flower. There was no baptismal dress in Russia. At that time we didn’t yet rent swimming pools or a public bath. So we waited for June. That June, spring came cold and late. I knew a place with a pond we had gone to with the children near where my husband, Sasha, was born. My husband had promised to go with me. He had been sober for six months. My sons and I found joy in this miracle, but it didn’t last. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday he was drunk. I didn’t know the way to the pond well. I cried and prayed. My son Sasha said to me, “Mama, I will go with you. Don’t worry. I know very well how to get there. Everything will be fine.” He was fifteen at the time. We left the house at 5:40 am to make the first train out of Moscow. It had rained all week and was still raining. When we came to the pond there was a fisherman who sat on one of the banks, but no one else. We began to walk along the shore to look for a place to change our clothes in the bushes. When we came out onto the banks to pray, we looked up to see the clearest blue sky appear. It was such a miracle. What person can do that? We prayed and then went into the water. It was the first time for all of us. It was all so new. He told me how to hold my nose, how to hold my hands. When he let me down into the water, and when he brought me up, the sun shone down upon me and there was such happiness. It was the sensation that something was born again inside of me. And we left smiling. When we arrived at Leninsky Prospekt for sacrament meeting afterwards, it was raining again. Is this not God? And I am His loving daughter. This is a miracle. This is the truth. On the one hand I understand the gospel. To me it is truly a simple plan. It is only complicated when people are complicated. I was a difficult person. I had a complicated attitude toward life. I exaggerated much. I took a lot upon myself, a lot of which no one gave to me do. I had the impression that I must suffer, that I must endure, be tormented. But it turns out it’s not necessary! To learn to live with unsolved problems, this is the example of God. We have the hymn “And God No Longer Suffers.” He suffered. He fulfilled all, everything. And now He lives wonderfully, He is joyful—and He allows us to live with this freedom. On one hand He says, “Do you want to be happy? Then please, take this road, and you will come to joy. If you take the other road, then it is your own, and no one knows where it will lead. But I am not there.” That is how I understand the nature of God. What was life like for you in the Church after your baptism? In the beginning it was not easy. It was very difficult. I wanted everything to happen quickly, to do everything quickly—so that I could immediately be good and righteous. But the most unpleasant thing was that I wanted everyone around me to quickly become so pure, sincere, devoted. I remember how during an interview with the first mission president I said, “Oh! President! I just can’t do it! I can’t watch these people, I can’t listen to them! They are so selfish. Oh! It is so terrible. I just can’t do it!” I am so grateful to President Browning. He was so wise and patient with me. My pride betrayed me, this judgment of other people. I thought I was obligated to speak up or we would be left with only selfish people in the Church. He so wisely said, “Sister Galina, It’s so wonderful that these people have the opportunity (he didn’t accuse them, didn’t defend them) to come to God, that they have come to the true church. It’s here that God gives them the opportunity to become cleansed from everything—this will be their work, and of course God’s work. All we have to do is be there with them.” But he also said “And we too must learn.” I also judged the Russian Orthodox Church the same way I judged members of the LDS Church. I still very much respect the Orthodox Church, which really does have so many good and sincere faithful people. I no longer feel this struggle with them. I no longer feel this competition between who’s better, who’s worse. Truth does not contend, rather it simply lives its own life. How did you find and become involved with Alcoholics Anonymous? I was in terrible despair. I had put my husband in the hospital. I had tried going to different folk healers. He had already spent a year in prison. Our sons were growing up, they were fourteen and twelve. I tried going again to the substance abuse counselor and asked, “What do I do now?” I wanted to speak to a doctor, but the head doctor of the clinic had just died and his funeral was that very night. I later learned he was also an alcoholic. Even the doctors who worked with the alcoholics were alcoholics. Two years earlier the leaders of the Ministry of Health had traveled to America to do something about alcoholism in Russia. They became familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous programs and our doctors and psychologists began to lead AA programs in one of the hospitals. In 1988 there were about fifteen alcoholics who had agreed to meet as the first group. One of them had been sober for six months, and he understood that if he would take this information further, these ideas, it would help. He went to the clinic in his area, where I also lived, and asked if he could post announcements. I read one of those announcements. I immediately ran there. They met me and said, “We understand you. It is difficult. We have been there. Please, come.” I gave Sasha the announcement and a booklet. If he wanted, it was there. We went together Saturday and Monday—I was allowed to go with him so he would go. Galine Goncharova In the beginning Sasha also liked the idea of AA. Just as we say about the gospel, many people like it, many people want the results of the gospel—the joy, the happiness, the freedom, the sincerity, and even communion with God as if by telephone. But we also have to do our part—just like in AA. The way the program works doesn’t require or force alcoholics to do anything. They simply say “Look at my life.” That is why I believed. They told about their own lives, and that had been my life, exactly like mine. I am so grateful for those twelve simple steps. They are definitely like the plan of God. It is very simple. Alcoholism is a constant battle within one’s self. An alcoholic struggles within himself. When the light is lost then the battle begins. I also struggled with my husband’s alcoholism. I thought, “How is this possible? He loved me, and I loved him-we truly loved one another. How is it possible that love can’t conquer this?” Even love cannot conquer alcoholism. When there is alcoholism there is always injustice—it isn’t fair. Alcohol deceives the alcoholic. It promises joy and freedom, promises to solve his problems. But it is a lie, fulfilled only in his mind. Since that first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, you have participated in the founding of many AA groups in and around Moscow. Do you still attend AA meetings? Yes, I absolutely continue to attend twice a week. In the first place, I need to. Alcoholics Anonymous has been working for 76 years and in more than 150 countries. In Russia, even in some faraway corners and small villages there are AA groups established. When I came these people were there for me, and now I want to be there for them. If it wasn’t for them, where would I be now? How did alcoholism affect you and your family and your relationship with family members? On the one hand, I considered myself completely worthless. On the other hand, I had a lot of power. In families of alcoholics, if the husband is calm and quiet, then the wife is the head of the household. She controls everything and plans everything. And that’s how it was with me. I upgraded our apartment, I arranged for the children to go to summer camps, and so on. And even though my husband was highly educated—he was a wonderful doctor, a wonderful person— I was the one who got him hired at two or three different jobs. I did it all. I elevated myself above him; there was nothing good about it. It’s never good when one family member elevates herself above another. We say that the husband is the patriarch of the family, but that doesn’t mean he exalts himself above his wife. It is so incredibly important to know and understand this, for both the husband and the wife. It is not God’s plan to force another person to be someone. It doesn’t help to try to force people. You can’t rule over them. Once, my husband took the children on the train to visit his father. He and his father got so drunk they couldn’t find their way back to the train. The children came home terrified! It was after midnight. I understand now that he didn’t do this to me or to them, but at the time I was in such a rage! I wanted to kill him! I was furious! They were crying, it was winter, I was running around, I didn’t know where they were. There were no telephones. Where was he? And where were the children? There was no note, nothing. It was madness, insane actions that caused terrible harm. I blamed myself; it’s really difficult to live with that kind of guilt. When I felt malice I felt despair. I had a husband, but I was always alone. I understand now that while I was suffering he was also suffering from my actions. We were in such a state that we couldn’t be together. Alcohol not only destroys the lives of people who drink. I quickly learned it had an absolutely destructive effect on me and so I quit. I felt that I was becoming a completely different person. But there is always a danger. This kind of dependency might be emotional. The family I grew up in wasn’t healthy either; my father and mother also had problems with alcohol. For relatives of alcoholics, codependence is also an illness–a deep melancholy that arises inside. I am only where I am today because of the pain I experienced. It’s a blessing from God that I found Alcoholics Anonymous as well as the Church on my path. Now I remain involved with both. How did you reconcile the problems within your family and in your marriage? I counseled with a Church leader and asked what to do. He said that perhaps a physical separation would lead to a resolution. The separation did help. I calmed down emotionally, I began to feel safe. Sasha never hit me, but I was afraid that he would steal our money. I worked. He hadn’t had steady work for several years; he would leave at night and return again at night. I was afraid of who he would bring home with him. This tension did not allow for the kind of freedom and the love we once had. I am grateful to God for helping me when I had to tell my husband, “I don’t know where you will be. There’s the hospital, there’s the AA group, friends, the Church, a lot of help, but I don’t know how to help you.” I tried to save him. But I myself was dying. Because of the decision to separate, I developed warmth, charity, and compassion, and I came to better understand him. I told him he could return if he didn’t drink for six months, but by that time he no longer wanted to return. It was more comfortable for him with his illness to be with his mother. But he and I still stayed close. How were you able to find peace and forgiveness? Forgiveness, as I now understand, doesn’t mean that I forget. Forgiveness is freedom from the pain I’ve lived through. Most importantly AA helped me understand that I suffered. He suffered. Those who are now alcoholics suffer. Alcoholism is a disease. Sasha didn’t plan to become an alcoholic. There had been love between us, but it dissolved in a pool of alcohol. I had tried everything, to endure it all personally. But it didn’t amount to anything. Before his death forgiveness did come. Little by little God helped me. I came to understand, to sense that if I continued to blame him, then I wouldn’t be working on myself—nothing good could come of it. My mother-in-law is also a member of the Church. I know that she loved her son very much. It was very difficult for her, especially because he lived with her the two-and-a-half years prior to his death. More than ten years ago everything was painful for me. She supported her son and blamed me. She believed I was at fault. She said he hadn’t been an alcoholic with her, but became an alcoholic at home with me. There were misunderstandings on her part and on mine. There was a time when I blamed her too, just like she blamed me. I blamed his father for drinking with him. There were times when we all behaved like children. That’s all going away now, leaving a deeper place inside me for more love and understanding. Miraculously, for the past ten years I’ve had a wonderful relationship with my mother-in-law. She came to understand Sasha’s alcoholism was an illness, that I wasn’t the reason he drank. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him, as she had accused. I’ve forgiven her. It’s all forgiven. Now my relationship toward her is sincere. She is ninety-six. Once or twice a week I go to her house, prepare her meals, wash her floors. We read and we pray together, tell each other things. God does not force me to forgive at gunpoint. That’s not forgiveness. Forgiveness is when gradually I understand. With the help of the AA program together with repentance in the Church, with these two inseparable parts, I am somehow whole. The repentance process is continual, thank goodness. I need to repent of the mistakes I make, some of which might be very serious, but it is a great privilege. I wish I could take a pill, drink some water and wake up humble, patient, loving and kind. But that is not God’s plan. The most important thing in AA is to be honest with yourself. In the gospel, too, you have to be honest with yourself. The gospel also helps me be honest with others and before God. If I feel that something is not right, then I can change it. If I feel something is amiss in my life, then I can change. Not just change in the sense that I can drink coffee one day and the next day not drink coffee. Not that today I engage in dubious activities and tomorrow look upon the cross. That kind of repentance is, of course, important, but beyond that, I can change the way I relate to another person. The first commandments are to love God and your neighbor. God is not here among us, our neighbor is. I think that this is the opportunity to change. I was afraid of all my weaknesses, my sins, my imperfection, and therefore, I was afraid of others, people who displayed weakness; when one looks on from the sidelines, others’ weaknesses are always so much more apparent. But little by little there was more friendship, more trust, and more openness. In this soil, love blossoms ever wider and wider. This is my life and I have a place. I have people around me who know me and understand me, and I have a personal relationship with God. You’re a psychologist professionally. Do you enjoy your work? How does being a member affect your relationship with your colleagues? Very much. It’s a big part of my spiritual growth. My colleagues know that I am a member of the church and they very much respect my religion. I talk with them about the gospel in simple terms. They like the principles, and even more that I live these principles, not just that talk about them. They don’t suggest I work on Sunday. They don’t swear in my presence, they walk away from me when they smoke. I try not to participate in gossip and bad jokes. I’m responsible and can be relied upon. I don’t elevate myself above others. It’s amazing what kind of work God is doing inside of me. There’s never a guarantee against mistakes; we should notice errors and ask “How can I do better the next time?” I think mistakes are part of our growth. Without mistakes it is impossible to know what is better—how to do better, become better. In the Church I continue to learn much, to humbly step back from my controlling nature. How wonderful it is to love God and know that although He is far away, there is something godly in each of us. At A Glance Name: Galine Ivanovna Goncharova Location: Moscow, Russia Age: 64 Marital status: widow Children: Two sons, 36 and 34 Convert? June 10, 1990 Occupation: psychologist Schools Attended: Srednaya Technological Languages Spoken at Home: Russian Favorite Hymn: “Love At Home” Interview produced and translated by Marintha Miles. Portrait by Marintha Miles.

This dynamic mother of five grown children shares her love of travel, of reading, of science and her admiration of her own mother. Camilla serves as the Church’s Public Affairs representative in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she further contributes to her community by being a trustee of the National Public Radio foundation, the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, the San Francisco Interfaith Council, and Clog America. I grew up in a big family with seven siblings. My place in the family was special because I was five years younger than my next older brother, the only girl born between four boys. As the youngest girl, I was in a great position and very close to my mother. What was your mother like? For a Mormon woman of her era (she was born in 1907), she was a free woman, meaning she did what she wanted to do. That had a lot to do with my father, who wanted her to be happy. That’s a great gift, to have a husband like that. As the older children grew up, we helped with the family responsibilities and my mother felt totally free to travel every summer and leave the younger children with my father and the older children. It was a pretty unusual situation. My mother had enormous energy and interest in many areas. She felt it was her right to pursue those interests. My mother worked a full-time job all of my life. She taught school. She was also a natural-born leader. She was a poet, published three books of poetry and five of prose, a member of Pen Women and was a member of the Utah Poetry Society. When she was in college, Mother received an efficiency award. She’d say, “Efficiency is the best, the most, in the least amount of time. Time is always an element. You try to do the best you can, but always remember that you can’t overspend time on it.” I grew up with my mother’s philosophy and a real sense that I had a responsibility to the community, particularly the church community. Mother felt a responsibility to all of her communities and to the Mutual Improvement Association (MIA) as a general board member. Another thing she was very talented at was making me feel that I was her favorite child. When I talk with my siblings, each one has something they particularly shared with her, so she had a way of figuring out what you were interested in so you felt special. It wasn’t artificial, she truly was interested in you. For example, I loved literature and writing and wanted to be an editor. When I worked for The Putnam Publishing Group in New York as an editorial assistant, I would send her books we were publishing. She read everything, and would say, “Oooh, that was pretty sexy.” Camilla Smith You attended graduate school at Columbia University in the 1960s. How did a Mormon girl from Utah end up in New York City and how did it change you? I went on a BYU Study Abroad to Grenoble, France during my sophomore year of college and that opened my horizons. Additionally, both my mother and father were very broadminded people. My father cared most about whether or not you were a good person. It wasn’t whether or not you were a good Mormon or were rich or poor or were of a certain class. Because my father spoke Spanish so well he translated for the migrant workers who lived in the community. He always did that, kind of quietly. Mother was much more of a social person, but she had friends from all walks of life and all situations, and dealt with them equally. For example, two men lived next door to each other and were her friends from her poetry group. I remember her saying to me, “Oh, they’re probably homosexuals. Isn’t it too bad we have to label people?” This was early on, maybe in the 1960s. My parents’ worldview helped me feel that I was not just a Mormon girl, but I had further horizons. I felt very free to travel and after my senior year of college, I worked for the National Association of Food Chains in Washington DC. (an editing job). I loved my job in Washington BUT my friend Sally Ann said, “You have to come to New York, it is the place for you.” I felt, “Okay, that’s the thing to do.” So I moved to New York. I always went to church while I lived in New York City. But I remember having a crisis of faith when I was in graduate school and we were studying literature. I was taking a course called “Black Literature,” and one of the authors of an assigned book wrote about how he had given up what he called “tribal religions” to become a Bahá’í. Why? Because he viewed Christianity, Judaism and Islam as tribal religions. The nature of a tribal religion is that it excludes anyone who is not part of the “tribe.” I thought about that (and of course Mormonism is very tribal) and agreed with him that tribal religions were destructive. I remember thinking that I could give up the church because excluding others is not what a loving God would do. Then I started thinking about family and how important family is for the development of a child and obviously a baby would not survive without a family, which is actually just a small tribe. So the tribe was probably not the problem. Everyone needs a family and that tribe to give them strength, but then that strength should be focused outside of the tribe and community rather than trying to keep people huddled together. That’s really at the core of my religious faith. I am a very religious person. I am a very religious Mormon. But the purpose of the church is to make people strong in order to reach out to the larger world, and not to keep us isolated from the world. What other organizations have you been involved in—besides your family? Certain issues really interest me. One such issue is learning what it is to be human. It’s so mysterious to me. I’m a believer in the evolution of man, so I naturally question what is the change that took place between the anatomically human person that existed for a million years and what evolved about 50,000 years ago as the modern human? There’s something that took place. It probably had to do with language and symbolism. . . something happened in the brain. We were anatomically human making simple stone tools that didn’t change for a million years. Then something happened that affected humans’ ability to learn, innovate, and seek for new ideas. This interest is why I’m a trustee of the Leakey Foundation, which does research into human origins and ape studies. Other organizations? A friend introduced me to the University of California-Berkeley Bancroft Library specifically to help them with their newsletter, so I got very involved with the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley and I write the newsletter for their special collections library. I love such positions. I love associating with scholars and researchers. I’m also a trustee of the National Public Radio Foundation. For that endeavor, I am particularly interested in public education and science education in which we are woefully lacking in the United States. I also love my church job. I do public affairs work for the church. I’m on the executive committee for the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s a long-term job; it’s not a job that changes every two years or so. With public affairs work, I form long-term relationships within the community. I work on interfaith relations and on foreign consulate relations. So has this been a difficult job for the last few years with the recent political discussions about same sex marriage in California? Yes, but it’s an interfaith council. We have Catholics on the council and Muslims—all of whom feel similarly to Mormons about same-sex marriage. The interfaith community is interesting because we understand that we will disagree on moral issues but there’s warmth and an understanding of differing opinions. Some interfaith organizations say, “Don’t give prayers or say anything that would be offensive to other people.” But our group says, “We want authentic expressions of faith from you. So we expect you to pray before us as you would pray in your church or synagogue. That’s a very freeing experience.” People pray to Allah, and you really do get to understand what other people feel. Camilla Smith and Her Family There was so much negative media with Proposition 8 (The California Marriage Protection Act) on our church and protesters picketed at the temple. When I went to an interfaith board meeting soon afterwards, there were nothing but expressions of sympathy and understanding that this was a very painful issue for Mormons. The other council members may not agree with us, but they didn’t want us to be the target of such hostility. It was quite a remarkable experience for me, especially because I personally do not support Prop 8. I think families come in different forms. But my church supports Prop 8 and I represented them and I found the interfaith community support for my church quite remarkable. You have five adult children. Have your notions of what it means to be a success changed as you’ve raised your children? That’s an interesting question. I’m a big believer in education, so it’s easy to feel successful when you see your kids wanting to be educated and work in fields like medicine or education, as three of my children do. When you have someone like my son George, who is focused on music and hasn’t graduated from college, defining success is harder. If anything, he’s the brightest of our kids. I adore him and want the best for him and it’s somewhat of a hard life that he’s chosen. George has probably influenced you in ways that wouldn’t have happened if everyone had followed a path similar to the one your other kids chose. Camilla Smith in Antarctica That’s true. Because of George, I actually went to a rave. George was organizing a rave party [all night dance party] so I went. He met me at the door with earplugs. At the end there were a bunch of teenagers dancing all night. His comment to me was, “See, they just want to have a place to dance.” You’ve learned not to look at his path as a limiting path. It’s a different path; a creative path. I think it’s dangerous sometimes but I don’t see it as a failure. It’s interesting because he kind of wants to be on his own, but at any family event, he’s there. He always attends. Can you tell me about some of the most interesting places you’ve traveled? Recently my sister Rosemary and I went to Antarctica, which was fantastic. It was an expedition with National Geographic. We went on Zodiacs [inflatable boats] out to the shore and walked among the penguins. We learned a lot! Travel is an educational thing. I don’t think travel is somewhere to go just to sit; you go to learn something about the people and about the terrain and about history. My husband and I went to Mongolia, where we stayed in round tents called “gers”. Mongolians had the largest land empire in history. It was brief and they did not leave behind what the Roman Empire left because they considered language sacred and did not want other people to speak their language. Mongolians were mainly interested in trade. Camilla Smith in Mongolia I am also an advisor to Clog America [a world performing folk dancing troupe] and have traveled with them for four years. That has been particularly interesting because I meet local people who share their own traditions. I’ve been to Sardinia, Slovenia, and to the South of France. We recently had a festival in Istanbul and I was there for a week and dancers from Sierra Leone and South Korea attended (and did such a marvelous dance!) The folk dance the South Koreans performed was from early Korea. Korea was settled by Mongolians and a third of Japanese noble names are Korean. I knew that the Japanese tea ceremony originated in Korea, but I was talking to the Korean dancers, and their choreographer in particular, and asked her where the dance came from. That was a revelation to me, because it’s clearly very ancient and I think probably from Mongolia. Folk dances kind of pull all of that history together. When you see it, it’s kind of a gestalt—it brings it all together. Has travel affected your relationship with the gospel? When I first went to the temple, I was surprised that the temple is so ritualized and mysterious and has little to do with what I normally love about the church—which is that it’s a lay church and we all try to help each other be better people. Another time when I was at the temple, I was thinking about the humans in the Lascaux cave [one of a group of caves in southwestern France famous for its Paleolithic cave paintings]. Early man did not live in those caves—they used them for ceremonies. There is something in the human psyche that needs ceremony and symbolism. The seed for the modern human can be seen in those caves in France. When I go to the temple, that’s what I think about. I think that I’m doing a ritual that goes back to original rituals. Not that our temple ceremony has evolved from that, but that our need for ritual is part of what it means to be human. Understanding such things from having seen these places helps me to make sense of church teachings and practices. At A Glance Name: Camilla Smith Location: San Francisco, CA Age: 64 Marital status: Married Children: Four sons and one daughter Occupation: Writer/editor, Trustee: National Public Radio Foundation, LSB Leakey Foundation, San Francisco Performances, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Music & Menlo, UC Berkeley Library Advisory Board, UC Berkeley Bancroft Library Council of Friends, Interfaith Center at the Presidio. Schools Attended: BYU (BA), University of Grenoble, France (Certificate D’Etranger), Teachers College at Columbia University (MA) Favorite Hymn: “Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing” Current Church Calling: Bay Area Public Affairs Executive Committee Interview by Shelah Miner

The anonymous creator, brains and author behind Tiffany/Amber/Megan/Nicole shares why she started Seriously, So Blessed, the highly popular Mormon mommy blog spoof. She speaks candidly about how she responds to Mormon culture as an author and as a member, and why humor is such a powerful tool for helping us look at ourselves in an honest light. What was your motivation to start “Seriously, so Blessed!”? I started the blog on a bit of a whim, just as a joke with a few specific friends in mind who I knew would enjoy it. A few summers ago, I stumbled on some personal blogs (you know, “friends of friends of friends” and such) that were just so unbelievable to me. Some recurring themes became pretty obvious. As I laughed, the thought occurred to me that it might be fun to try to make my own. So I threw together a stereotypical post, wrote a stereotypical profile, and sent it to a few friends for a laugh. It was a fun creative writing exercise to try to get the tone exactly right (“We have non-stop fun all the time and are LOVING married life!”). It was definitely a joke that just snowballed. Part of what is so bizarre and awesome about the Internet is that random junk takes off with no warning. Where do you find your inspiration for posts? Inspiration is all over the place. I keep expecting to run out of ideas, and then I look around and think, “That will never happen!” I’m a lifelong member of the LDS Church and have always been a part of the culture but simultaneously a participant and observer. I’m a people watcher by nature so I feel like I’ve always enjoyed noting little idiosyncrasies or patterns of behavior. A lot comes from my own life experience. I jot down ideas everywhere and then piece them together for posts. For example, last year, a waitress asked me if I was in the mood for “Eye-talian food,” and I instantly reached for a pen and thought, “How has TAMN not said ‘eye-talian’ yet??” I also read a lot of personal blogs, and readers are constantly sending me blogs for fodder. (What’s weird is that it’s always their sister-in-law’s blog. People are constantly sending me their in-laws’ blogs. Isn’t that funny? It’s never their sister or their cousin or their aunt. It is ALWAYS their sister-in-law.) So yes, I cull material from all over, and it’s pretty fun. Of course I don’t think all Mormon women are like TAMN. In fact, I’d say most Mormon women are wonderfully far from TAMN. I know and respect tons of smart, capable, thoughtful, sharp, strong, non-materialistic, substantive, self-aware, kind, righteous, talented women who are nothing like TAMN. Except maybe with their Diet Coke addictions and their love of reality TV. But you get my point. Is there a tendency for LDS women to hold themselves to an impossibly high standard or feel pressure to conform? In any highly homogeneous culture we all feel pressure to be and look and think and act a certain way. Many Mormon women are hard on themselves because they’re good and want to be good and in our culture we do a lot of self-reflection and introspection on how we can improve. Part of being a member of the Church and part of being a person of faith and a follower of Christ is always thinking of how you can get better. With a lot of young American Mormon women that quest can get out of hand quickly. You start to think you need to be absolutely perfect in every area. You need to be having nonstop fun all the time, your marriage needs to be perfect, your kids need to be perfect, and you need to have to have pictures of every activity. I get emails from readers saying that there’s this unattainable standard that they see people around them portraying (or seeming to portray) and that the blog helps them realize that nobody’s perfect and it sounds ridiculous if you make things seem perfect all the time. That’s what’s been fun for me about writing SSB is that there are lots of serious things that weigh on women’s minds that are not on TAMN’s mind at all. For example, in one post TAMN and her husband were in Washington DC just for the summer. She introduced herself to the bishop and said that she wouldn’t have time for any callings unless they were really visible. So she could be president of something, but if she needed to be on a committee she wouldn’t have time because she had the twins. TAMN doesn’t value important things, but rather places a lot of value on what she can be seen doing or what she can brag about doing. Are there any topic or issues you won’t poke fun at? There are lots of things I don’t mock. There are no jokes at the expense of any gospel principles, the temple, the importance of marriage, basic Christlike attributes, or what TAMN sincerely wants for her kids. Actual Church stuff is on the periphery of a lot of the humor. It’s not a “Church” blog; it’s just a young, talkative, ridiculous mom. Whenever I get hate mail about how I’ve crossed the line or am making the Church look ridiculous, I always laugh and think, “There are lots of lines I could be crossing that I don’t.” I just know so many young moms who are so good and who are trying so hard. Not young moms exclusively, but it’s a set you see blogging most often. It’s a thankless stage of life and I appreciate that often they seem to be the ones laughing the hardest. Why do you think people sometimes have difficulty distinguishing doctrine versus culture? Numbers and things are more visible and easier to measure. I don’t know that you can measure, “Today I was full of charity – check!” the way you can measure, “I always look fantastic,” or “I was back to my pre-baby weight five weeks after the delivery.” It’s easier to shop at the right stores or see that your blog has the right design or gets so many comments. They provide validation or pat on the back. There are lots of ways that we can hope that we’re successful or feel that we’re successful, but that’s not as visible as when you see someone with a new model of car, or living vicariously through their husband’s fancy job, or whatever it might be. TAMN is more wrapped up in it because she feels more competition with her friends since they are into comparing husbands or outranking each other. Not even themselves, but just what their husbands do. It’s an added pressure when women compare not just themselves, but what other people are doing that somehow reflects on them. How do you view the role of humor in LDS culture and specifically among LDS women? Humor is vital. We definitely have a tendency to take ourselves way too seriously. Again, that stems from a really sweet sincerity, of people who are trying hard to be good and who always want to be better. But in our quest for improvement we often forget to laugh, which is easy to do, since we’re so busy. But laughter is important to your sanity and to your health. Marjorie Hinckley said, “The only way to get through life is to laugh your way through it. You either have to laugh or cry. I prefer laughing. Crying gives me a headache.” I agree. How would you advise women to stay true to themselves? How have you done it? Part of it is recognizing what is important to you and what’s not. If it’s important to you and worth your time, go for it, and if it’s not, leave it alone. I don’t do my hair every day, I don’t spend that much time on it, and I don’t feel bad about it. That’s kind of a shallow example, but I’ve noticed that me being comfortable with myself gives other people permission to be normal too. I’ve found a lot of kindred spirits that way. With the blog, I’ve been amazed at how many people I feel really close to that find the same things funny as I do. I would have never known how much we have in common or just how much we click if I hadn’t made the joke to start with. You can find lots of substantive things to bond over besides superficial things. For me, it’s important to just recognize what you enjoy, embrace it, and shrug off the rest. Do you see blogs as a blessing or a curse? Both. Blogs are a blessing in that they are a great way to stay connected with other grownups, to help stave off feelings of isolation that are common in moms with small kids and to feel part of a circle of support or friendship. Blogs are a people-watcher’s dream because they give you a fun peek into people everyday lives. But they are a thinking person’s nightmare, because it’s so easy to compare your real self with someone else’s fake self. They’re a curse because they’re like a nonstop Christmas letter, a daily update where you see every polished detail about someone’s life. If people read enough personal blogs they can really end up with a complex. How much time per day do you devote to blogging, between research and writing? It’s tough to gauge. I really enjoy it and think about it throughout the day, as I’m looking for different ideas. But there are entire days where I don’t have any time and others when I do a lot of catch up. There’s no specific time set aside to work on it. I should be more structured, but I have a hundred balls in the air that I’m juggling and the blog is just one of them. At certain points I have more creative energy, depending on what’s going on in my personal or family life that particular week or month. Sometimes I feel like I can’t even capture all the ideas and other times I feel like it’s a little bit of a chore. Overall, it’s an incredibly fun creative writing exercise. I use different brain muscles that I do in anything else in my life. The feedback is a joy, the positive and negative responses are always funny, and it’s a real treat to have an audience for the stupid things going on in my head and to try to tweak things to get the tone just how I want it. How would you describe your motherhood style? I’m relatively new to being a mom. My kids are still pretty little, so I haven’t done a lot of the real mom stuff that’s ahead of me. I enjoy my kids a lot more than I anticipated I would, which might sound silly. I’ve never really been a “kid person,” but it turns out that when they’re your own they’re really delightful. We like the park, we love the museum, we love to just stay at home. We’ll spend a couple of hours going up and down the stairs, playing with the toys at our house, or hanging out with other families. All the regular kid stuff is more fun than I thought it would be. There’s also more emotion now that I have kids. For example, we just got some family pictures taken and I couldn’t believe the mushy noises I was making looking at the pictures after – it was kind of embarrassing. I didn’t know I had this side of me! What are your interests or creative outlets? None of TAMN’s hobbies are mine. I’m not a crafter or a photographer. I’m not sure what I can share without spilling too many beans. I’m pretty normal. Well, and awesome. Do you find TAMN fulfilling or draining? What is your relationship with her? Mostly fulfilling. It’s a real delight to write 99% of the time. There have been a couple of times, like when I had a baby or was finishing school, when other things in my life took so much of my time and energy that I didn’t feel like I had any left over. That’s when I’ll put it on the shelf and come back to it because it’s not a top priority in part of a real everyday life. But it’s a fun thing to do, to always be watching for. To come up with ideas or to glean different ideas from emails people write, or comments they make, or blogs that they send me. I feel like she’s this ongoing collage. When I think of TAMN as a person, I didn’t used to like her at all when I created her, but now I kind of find her endearing. She’s obnoxious, but the stereotype she represents is pretty sincere. She’s naïve and shallow and materialistic, but she means it and she just doesn’t know any better. TAMN would be appalled at how obnoxious people think she is. Does writing your blog ever infringe on your spiritual life? TAMN isn’t church related for me. She’s another aspect of life, but I don’t see TAMN on Sundays. She’s not part of my spiritual life at all. That’s some other feedback I’ve gotten from people. They’ll catch themselves thinking like TAMN and it gives them pause, which I take as a huge compliment. I think that’s fantastic. Why don’t we all think about how we can de-TAMN? My sincere hope is that we can all walk away a little better than we were before we read it. How many people know your true identity? A few. I know a number of people who are swear-on-their-life sure that it’s someone else, which I love. I don’t think anyone really wants to know. It’s more fun not to know. On a similar note, I am still amazed at how often people assume and/or are totally convinced the blog is written by a guy. How much of TAMN do you see in yourself? Yikes. I see more of her in me than I’d like to. We all have bits of her in us. I love a good Cafe Rio salad (though unlike TAMN, I eat the whole thing). I’ll catch myself blowing things out of proportion and recognize it’s kind of a TAMN-esque reaction. Times or ways in which she’s particularly shallow or makes a big deal out of things that aren’t that important. I’ve also been in callings where I’d think about how TAMN would respond, and then do the opposite. TAMN says that things are perfect, but she’s also really whiny. When really, how could her life be easier? I catch some of that in myself as well. It’s like TAMN wants a trophy for existing. I’ll catch myself being whiny and think, “Wait, why I am being such a baby? I deserve a trophy for what? For living, for doing things that everyone does all the time? Pull it together, quit being a TAMN.” There was one post where her husband had to work a lot and so she said she was basically “pulling an Emma,” with the implication of huge sacrifice. What’s Emma Smith about having to clean up a diaper or getting to spend all day playing with your kids while JJWT is in law/biz/medical/dental school? What a blessing to have a family, to have a spouse that has a great job or is getting such good training or whatever it might be. We often lament our pretty high-class problems. At A Glance Name: Author or Seriously, So Blessed Location: USA Age: 28 Marital status: Married Occupation: stay-at-home mom/part-time professional Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Sweet Is the Work” Current Calling: Young Women’s President On the Web: www.seriouslysoblessed.blogspot.com Interview by Nollie Haws.

After a difficult childhood, Kimmie joined the Church in Korea. Now a successful business owner, Kimmie talks about how the healing properties of the algae supplements from her cosmetics company help people overcome debilitating illness. She has started a non-profit to help those who can’t afford the treatments have access to their benefits. You’ve faced quite a bit of adversity in your life, especially in your childhood. Can you tell us about that? I would say mine is a dysfunctional kind of family. I was the sixth child. The firstborn was a son who died when he was a baby. Then came three girls. My mom had a really hard time with all of those girls. In Korea at the time, girl babies were not as respected as boy babies. After the three girls came, another brother was born, and then I came. I wasn’t welcome because I was another girl, and I was strong. My father would say, “Oh the girls are all the same! They are so worthless!” I had to be kind of invisible when I was around my brother. I had to keep my distance from him. Whatever was given to my brother wasn’t allowed to me. My parents were also very busy. My mom was so busy taking care of all her children, as well as a nephew and niece who had moved into our home. They had a farm to take care of. My father was an herb doctor, so he had to take care of his clinic. Because they were so busy, I was left to be cared for by my grandma, who lived with us. My parents just didn’t have much time for me. I know it didn’t mean that they didn’t love me, but I felt all alone. I felt like I was an outcast. I felt like no one cared about me. How did you deal with these lonely feelings when you were a little girl? I started to read books. Whenever I went missing, I could be found in the library. The librarian loved me. I found my peace and my sanctuary with all of those books. I read a lot at the time, even philosophy. Many of those books talked about a superpower. From this, I knew there was some Being stronger than my father, stronger than my grandma, and stronger than anybody else–someone who knew me as I was. I tried to find out more but I didn’t know where to go to find it. My family had a big house, and we rented rooms to a few people. When I was eight or nine years old, a Roman Catholic family moved in, and they went to church every Sunday. Watching them go together to this church and seeing them wear the veil over their face and head looked really nice to me. I wanted to have that veil on my head, so I asked them if they wouldn’t mind taking me with them to church. I was overwhelmed by the serenity that I felt there. I knew the people there were looking for the same thing that I was looking for. I saw a statue of Saint Mary and also the baby Jesus. When I saw Jesus I felt like I knew him. I didn’t feel that kind of a feeling for Saint Mary. I couldn’t say exactly what but I felt something different about this little baby. I started asking around, “Where can I get that baby Jesus?” I wanted to have that doll. I had to have it. I had never asked for anything as a child, but I had this burning desire for the baby Jesus statue. Then something miraculous happened. I discovered one of the girls in my classroom had a small baby Jesus doll. She would let me play with it if I gave her a bowl of my corn soup or a small loaf of bread. Whenever I had that baby Jesus, I had this warm feeling inside of me. How did this experience shape your young womanhood? I continued to seek out Jesus. I asked the nuns many questions about Jesus and religion, and they always said, “Huh, you are full of questions!” Sometimes they couldn’t answer me; they couldn’t answer me simply because they didn’t know the answers to all of my questions. During this period I started to think seriously about religion. Whenever I went to church they offered the sacrament wine. I knew it was the symbol of Jesus’ blood, and I thought, “If I take the sacrament, then I will be different. I will be healed. People will love me. People will care about me.” I wanted to have that so desperately. I wanted to find peace inside of me. I wanted someone to look at me the way I was. I tried to find some relief in religion. I considered becoming a Catholic nun. I already acted like a nun in that I didn’t have my own personal time, my private time. I was out there to help others. I spent a lot of my time serving others. When I walked along the street, if someone needed help, I was the first child to get there with a helping hand. I was different. I had this tendency toward helping less fortunate people. I think I got it from my mom or my grandpa. My grandpa was called “father” by beggars all throughout Korea. When he passed away, our place was flocked by beggars and homeless people from all the provinces. When were you introduced to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? When I was eighteen, my sister met the missionaries. I was also, coincidentally, contacted by my classmate, who was a Church member around the same time. I went with her to the LDS Church, and I met the bishop. He was a really nice and very kind man. In the building, I saw a painting of Jesus stretching out his arms. It had such a glorious background, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. I knew that was Jesus. While I was listening to everyone, all of my attention was on that picture. It was beautifully done. I just loved it. Later I talked to my sister, and she said, “Oh I’m meeting the missionaries.” I thought, “Hmm, ok, I have to find out what the LDS Church is all about.” I started to read the Book of Mormon, and I asked Heavenly Father if the book was true and if it was really from Heavenly Father. I asked that my heart feel a burning sensation. I didn’t get anything. I didn’t even get a burp. So I thought, “Hmm is it true?” My sister was baptized but I wasn’t baptized because I still wanted to be Catholic. But I also wanted to be supportive and to understand her more so I told her that I would like to meet the missionaries. I met the missionaries out of my love for my sister. After I met the missionaries, I got baptized. To tell you the truth, when I got baptized I didn’t really have the conviction that I have now. I didn’t really have the belief. Eventually, I stopped going to church and moved to America a few years later. Why did you move to America? My mom and dad wanted me to marry a man I wasn’t in love with. They said, “You’ve got to get married to a man that we think is worthy and is good. Marry this guy.” I said, “No, no, no I don’t want to get married.” In Korea, you cannot go against what your parents say to you. So I tried to find a way to get away from home. I tried to get as far away from home as I could, so I moved to America. I lived in America for three years and got married while I was there. My husband abused me and raped me. I felt all alone. One day I started to pray, “Where are you, Lord? I’m so stubborn. You have to let me know that Jesus lives, that he cares for me, that I’m still loved, and that I’m not all alone. Please let me know.” I didn’t get any answers. Then I wrote a letter to Heavenly Father. I tried to write everything. After I wrote it, I was going to burn it. I thought, “The ash will reach Him.” I was about to burn it when all of the sudden I got a phone call from a missionary who knew me in America. He said he was studying his scriptures before going to bed and all of a sudden I was there. He said he had this strong urge to call me. He said, “Are you okay?” I tried not to cry on the phone. I didn’t say one word because I was crying and crying and crying. He said, “If you are in trouble, know that the Holy Spirit is always with you.” He concluded by saying, “Know that I called you because I was led by the Holy Spirit.” That moment I knew I wasn’t alone. From that point, I became really zealous. I started going back to church, I filed for a divorce, and I moved back to Korea. When you moved back to Korea, you started a health care business using algae as a healing agent. How did this come about? I think I was destined to get involved in the algae business. I often went to a chapel to pray that medicine could be used to heal unhappy people. I promised God I would offer my own life in return if He answered my prayer. In my late 30’s, I found favor among people who harvested algae which has incredible healing properties, especially for damaged skin. The limited knowledge I had about microorganisms somehow impressed them, and I was offered a business opportunity. This opportunity to work with algae helped shape my plan to start a non-profit charity organization that would provide inexpensive algae supplements to less fortunate people who desperately needed to improve their health. I realized that I needed some high-end products to generate the funds for the non-profit and decided to use cosmetics as my high-end product. I began using algae as a skin-care ingredient and making my own formulas for troubled skin. How have your spiritual beliefs informed your business? When I give algae supplements to those who suffer from various—often serious—ailments, I first pray over the product to ensure that it is given with the right intention and that the healing properties will be fully realized. I also ask that those who take the algae do so with prayer and faith. I witness many miracles daily. People heal and recover from all sorts of ailments by using the products and advice I offer. They eventually realize they were given a unique opportunity to think about their bodies’ limits and potential power. I know that it is the grace of our Lord Jesus that makes them whole and healthy again. His absolute, unconditional love has incredible, incomparable healing power. I also act as a member missionary through the interactions I have with my clients and co-workers. Some people I meet through work have shown sincere interest in my religion and some eagerness to listen to what I have to say about not only physical, emotional wellbeing but spiritual wellbeing and the restored gospel. I won’t stop my constant struggle to do business in a manner with which the Lord would be pleased. I could be surrounded by charming business people whose main interest is how to be beautiful, healthier, and gain more. But I chose a life where the Savior can use me as an instrument in His hands. I’d rather be surrounded by the sick and the suffering. I know I’ll serve them with my heart; these holistic products will benefit them physically, emotionally, and spiritually because they are enhanced with ingredients like unconditional love, my humble prayers, and many people’s blessings. What sort of future do you envision for your business? Even though the future of my business may not be free of occasional ups and downs, I will continue to employ ethical management models where honesty is always the best policy and charity comes before profit. I hope our eco-friendly products will contribute to changing concepts of what defines a successful business and a career woman. I also hope that nature-oriented products will be introduced and distributed throughout the world and that algae will be used for affordable but powerful treatments. Ultimately, I envision my small business becoming the foundation of the global algae community and becoming a steward company that shares the gospel with the meek and the sick and works to make the world a better place to live. There’s no doubt in my mind that as long as I walk in the light and continue to gain my strength from the Lord by reading scriptures and visiting the temple, my business and I will be sustained. God lives! A very insignificant person like me has become a tool to help people. I pray that my business continues to be used as a tool in God’s hands! At A Glance Name: Kimmie Matthews Location: Seoul, Korea Age: 52 Marital status: Single again Occupation: Entrepreneur Convert to Church: 1984 Schools Attended: Chosun University Languages Spoken at Home: Korean Favorite Hymn: “Because I Have Been Given Much” On the Web: www.Bioe3.com; www.klamathbeauty.com Interview by Krisanne Hastings. Photos by Heather Willoughby and Robyn Larsen.

Christie moved to New York City by herself at age 20 to work in a salon. Now ten years later, her clients include celebrities and magazine models. Christie talks about battling the stereotypes facing hair dressers and how she has gained confidence in her skills, intelligence and spiritual understanding despite not having an academic education. Christie also reveals how her sister’s death from a heroin addition brought her divorce-torn family together and healed her personally. Within ten years, you have become a successful and celebrated stylist. How did you get started in the industry? I grew up in McLean, Virginia, which is a very education-oriented, intense sort of place. When I finished high school in 1997, the question on everyone’s mind was, “Where you going to school?” My friends were going to MIT and Johns Hopkins and other prestigious schools and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I decided to go to Utah to be closer to my father and his family there. One of my aunts owned a really successfully salon in Utah. She suggested that I try beauty school. It would only be a year, so if I hated it I could just try something else. I wasn’t one of those girls who grew up braiding everyone’s hair; I was a total tomboy. I’m still a tomboy, which is ironic because I’m in the beauty industry. I loved beauty school. From the day I started, I fell in love with it. I think my aunt hoped I would work for her, but I knew that I wanted to go back to the East Coast where I felt so comfortable. You were just turning 20 years old when you finished beauty school and you decided to move, alone, to New York City. What motivated you to make that move? Once a month at my beauty school, we would have guest artists come to do presentations for us. One of the presenters came from a salon in Stamford, Connecticut, and I became enamored with that salon. So, I got a job there and I worked in Stamford for six months, but every weekend I went into New York to go to the singles’ ward there. I soon met a fashion photographer who in the bishopric there, and I started working with him on his photo shoots. I was coming to the city two to three times a week — church was there, my freelance work was there, all my new friends were there — so it seemed natural to move into the city. Christie Somers After moving into the city, I started working at Cutler Salon on 57th Street in Manhattan. The owner, Rodney, is a fantastic guy and wonderful to work for, and he would always say that he liked having Mormons work for him. How did you manage living in the city alone financially? It was really rough, honestly. I didn’t have any help from my parents. I was really independent growing up and I wasn’t one who was going to ask anyone for money. My first place in New York City was a three-bedroom apartment I shared with five girls. I slept on a bunk bed. We were on 106th Street and we had cross-town busses screeching outside our windows every night, and it was in the type of neighborhood where the couple next door yelled at each other constantly. I learned to sleep with a pillow over my head! I started as an assistant at Cutler. I was making about $200 a week and working 50 to 60 hours a week. So, every night after work I would cut hair out of my apartment or I would go to people’s houses and cut their hair. That’s how I got to know so many of the members in New York, and I became really close to many of the families there. The months that I couldn’t make rent, my roommate would come shopping in my closet! She would look through my clothes and she’d say, “What can I buy from your closet this month?” Even though she would always ask me for beauty and fashion advice, looking back, I totally see she didn’t need my clothes and was just being kind to me. She is a great friend, and one of the people who helped me get by month to month during that early time when I was scrapping by. Where do you get the motivation to stick with it, even though it was financially difficult? I’m a pretty optimistic person by nature, but there were times when I said to myself, “What am I doing? This is ridiculous.” But I was always surrounded by really good people, like the roommates in my apartment. At first glance, my roommates and I didn’t seem to have a lot in common and I was worried that we wouldn’t mesh, but they ended up being fabulous. They were really great influences on me. I also think I got lucky with the salon where I worked. As I said, the owner was very positive and encouraging. Every week, the assistants had to go to a class called “People Skills.” It meant a lot to me that the owner would take the time to sit down with the assistants – his lowest-level employees — for an hour every week and talk to us about how to be successful. All of the things he taught us fell in line with Mormon philosophies. So, I was around really good people in every part of my life who motivated me. What were your responsibilities as an assistant at Cutler? As an assistant, you’re basically someone else’s slave for two years! It’s not actually that hard to get in to be an assistant, but it’s two years of really intense work where you’re in the salon from 8AM to 8PM every day, you’re washing hair, you’re on your feet all day. There was one day a week when the assistants could do hair for a model. When we’d have our model days, the other assistants would never have their own models to do. But for me, being Mormon, I had everyone in the world wanting me to do their hair, so I would recruit my friends to come in. Always taking advantage of these model days set me apart from the rest of the assistants. I used the sister missionaries as models for the longest time. They would come into this fancy salon on their preparation days and get their hair done for free. I would highlight their hair and blow it out. The Manhattan sisters always had really, really good hair! I just had an endless stream of friends and ward members coming to support me and help me practice, and the other assistants didn’t have that kind of network. Christie Somers I remember there was a Mongolian sister with very dark hair who came to me several times, and the last time she came was right before she went home to Mongolia. I highlighted her hair and made it really light. I think the mission president must have wondered, “Who is this Christie Somers girl, giving the sister missionaries highlights all the time?” Towards the end of my apprenticeship, as part of my testing to get my own clients, I had to pass on a “double process” which is an all-over bleach blonde. And it had to be a virgin double process, meaning one done on someone who had never colored their hair before. thought, “Where am I going to find this person in Manhattan?” I called my friend who is half Japanese and half Hawaiian. He was studying for the bar exam and needed a break, so I said, “Come on over here! Today you are going blonde!” About a week before he started work at a really conservative New York law firm, I turned this Japanese/Hawaiian guy into a blonde! When you get done with your apprenticeship you have to put on a fashion show to showcase your work over the two years. I used girls in my ward for my models and I made all my friends come. I had a friend who’s in a great band come and play for my show. As they were unpacking all of their equipment, I could see the owner of the salon wondering, “How loud is this show going to be?” It looked like a real miniature version of a show you’d see at Fashion Week, and was a much bigger production than the other assistants put on. So after that I was on the floor everyday; I started taking my own clients. Eventually, I think I had about half of the Manhattan stake as my clients. At one point, the owner was like, “So, the Mormons are keeping us in business right now!” How did you move into styling for fashion photography? I got started doing photo shoots with the fashion photographer who was in the bishopric of the ward. He took me on shoots to do hair, but one day the make-up artist didn’t show up. I had never done make-up for anyone else. As I said, I was kind of a tomboy and I didn’t really wear makeup myself. So he said, “Well, just run down to Duane Reade and buy some make-up!” Now, I would be appalled by going to Duane Reade for make-up! After that unglamorous beginning, I started assisting some of the big editorial stylists on shoots and then continued meeting people. The creative world in New York is much smaller than you’d expect, so my network grew quickly. I did a lot of producers’ hair, a lot of creative directors’ hair, and they referred me to photographers. I just built relationships with people and that seems to be the most successful way of doing business. Do you have one story in particular of a funny or high-profile client that you’d be willing to share? I’ve done Fashion Week. My clients include Norah Jones and Rachel Ray, and I have done makeovers for Good Housekeeping and other magazines. The story I like best is probably about a woman named Dorothy Rabinowitz, who’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. She has a column in the Wall Street Journal and a syndicated column. She’s a spit-fire lady. She looks like a tiny Jewish grandmother, but she is very intimidating! The first time that I ever did her hair, the owner of the salon said, “This woman is a big deal. Do not screw up her hair!” I was really nervous. The first appointment was great: we chatted about her dog and stuff. I think she enjoyed it because most people want to talk about politics with her, and I think she was just happy to come in and talk about her dog. She liked her hair and made another appointment with me. The second time she came in and sat down in my chair, I started asking her how she liked her color and she interrupted me with her low raspy voice, “They tell me you’re a Mormon.” I thought, “Oh no!” But then she said, “I love the Mormons!” I was so relieved because — not that I was keeping my religion a secret or anything — but I just didn’t want to go head-to-head on doctrine with a famous journalist. That would have been way out of my comfort zone. But she just talked about how much she loved Mormons and we created a great bond. We were unlikely friends, but we loved each other. All my coworkers in New York defended me to the ground if anything came up about the Church in a work setting. There was a girl I worked with who was really confrontational and she and I locked horns on everything because she had a more negative attitude and I had a positive, upbeat attitude. My way wasn’t better than hers, but we often just butted heads. I remember one day I overheard her talking to a client and the client made some crack about Mormons and she totally let her client have it. I was so surprised! Of all the people in the world to stick up for my people, I did not expect it to be her. But I think people appreciated that I was open about my religion and willing to answer questions, but that I never tried to push it on them. Did you feel supported in your career by your family? My dad and my step-mom were totally on board, but my mom wasn’t too keen on it. Education is very important to that side of my family and they didn’t know quite what to make of me. My mom was really upset at me for the first few months of beauty school because she was so disappointed I wasn’t going to a fancy college. So, I’ve definitely fought with the beauty school stereotypes. I remember about five or six years after I’d moved to New York my brother came up to visit during the Christmas holiday. He went to Oxford and George Mason University… very intelligent and very educated. In New York, it’s customary to tip everyone in December — your doorman, your mailman, your hairdresser — and you typically tip your hairdresser the same amount you would pay for your hair that month. There’s a funny tipping culture in New York which I didn’t know about until I was getting these $250 tips in December. So, that whole week my brother was visiting I was coming home with hundreds of dollars in cash at the end of each day. And my brother said teasingly, “You’re the only person who’s ever made me reconsider college!” Even though it was said jokingly, it was still reassuring because he was acknowledging that I was really good at what I do and didn’t just become a hair dresser because I was some dumb blonde who didn’t have other options. Even the other night, I was playing Scrabble with one of my friends and I beat her and she said, “You know, you’re actually pretty smart!” I said, “Why is that surprising?” And she said, “Oh, because you’re a hairdresser, and you’re blonde, and people just look at you and they don’t think you’ll be intelligent.” I think I’ll always battle that stereotype, no matter how successful I am in my career. What was it that kept you active in the Church during your time alone in New York? The bishop of the singles’ ward was hugely influential in my being active in the Church in New York. When I moved to Utah right out of high school, I had a hard time with the culture there. I remained active, but I was not totally committed at that time. When I moved to New York, there was a huge void in my life, not having any family out there or any support system and being so entirely independent. So, I threw myself into the singles’ ward there. Initially, I felt really out of my element there in New York and I was really intimidated by the people I met there. I would call my brother after Sunday dinners with ward members and I’d say, “Not only could I not add one thing to the conversation, I didn’t even have any idea what they were talking about!” I felt like I was in over my head since I hadn’t gone to school, and hadn’t served a mission. Christie Somers Where did you get your confidence? Well, I’ll tell you a story. My first home teachers in New York were one guy who was getting his PhD at Columbia, and another who was part of a huge, academic Church family. I remember the first time they home taught me about the Old Testament I just sat there and thought “Whoever reads that?” That was actually a really funny experience because I tried to make some witty comments while they were there, trying to make myself feel better about having no clue what they were talking about. I made some comment like, “How important is the Old Testament, really, to your spirituality?” And they both looked at me totally appalled: “It’s SO important!” When they left I burst into tears. I cried to my roommate, “I don’t know anything about this religion that I profess to believe in!” I was really overwhelmed. But the lesson I took away from that experience was that it is okay to find your own spirituality. People come at it in different ways and that’s okay. At a very young age, I had to face who I really was: what I could do and what I knew was right, and be okay with that. I also think New York was a really great place to discover that about myself. There are members there who are from every walk of life who make Mormonism work for them. I think the bishopric of my ward was a perfect example: there was a fashion photographer, a teacher, and a banker; three totally contrasting careers and they all made it work. I also think that in an environment like that you see the real need for the Church in your life. You come together as a family with the other members and there’s this support system. So for me, all the elements of the Gospel became very real and you can see and feel them in that city environment. Why did you decide to relocate to Utah? I was sitting in General Conference in the Manhattan chapel when I got a call from my dad. I checked my voicemail and my dad was crying. My little sister, Jani, had died of a heroine overdose. I had been aware Jani was having problems but I didn’t know the extent. I decided right there I needed to go home and be with my dad for the funeral. I was nervous to go to Utah because I’d had a lot of problems with my dad and stepmom when I’d lived there for beauty school, and they hadn’t been a big part of my life since I’d moved back East. I actually hadn’t even talked to my dad for a long time before the call about Jani came. There had been a lot of hurt and disappointment and dysfunction that had occurred in my family and that had left a lot of scars. But as soon as I saw my dad and my stepmother, all of that pain and vulnerability and anger was just gone in a second. It was the most bizarre, but spiritual, healing experience I’ve ever had in my life. They felt it, too, my dad and step-mother and step-siblings. Our relationship had always been strained, but in that week surrounding Jani’s funeral, we just found this incredible love for each other. I had been working in the Manhattan Temple, which I think was important because it made me more receptive to those spiritual experiences, but it was interesting to have something so painful in the past turn into something so bright. I was a “Life New Yorker.” I was never going to leave. New York has this way of getting into you and you can’t possibly consider living anywhere else. But when I came back to New York after that week of being in Utah with my family, I was a basket case. I burst into tears at everything, and I’m a pretty stable, optimistic person! All of a sudden it felt like there was a huge void in my life, like I needed to be close to my family and I needed to heal those relationships. Within a couple of months I decided I was going to move to Utah, which I assumed was going to be the kiss of death for my career! It has been a really healing time, and I’ve even been able to stay busy working. I bought a townhouse when I got to Utah — because I was sick of paying rent in New York! — and I had my older brother and younger sister come to live with me, which was wonderful because we’d been totally torn apart as kids by divorce. I think if you saw us today, you’d never know we’d been through what we did as a family. All together, I have nine brothers and sisters, plus a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law. There have been a lot of marriages and divorces and re-marriages, and it’s all very confusing. Technically, you could say that I’m an only child because all of my siblings are half- or step-siblings, but I don’t really worry about those distinctions. I was just at my brother’s sealing a few months ago. We have the same mom, but different dads. As I looked around the sealing room, between he and his wife there were three dads and four moms present. The only “full blood” relation my brother had in the whole room was our mom. But the room was stuffed full with our family, even if many of the people there wouldn’t even fit on a traditional pedigree chart…unless they start making spaces for your mother’s third husband’s second wife. But he counts them all as his family because they love him and he loves them, and because we all know that the power of the sealing is going to make it all work out. That’s what makes my crazy family stick together. Would you describe what your dad is doing to combat future drug-related deaths like Jani’s? My dad is a sort of rough-around-the-edges kind of guy. He’s not the sort who’s just going to lie down and take stuff. So, when he found out my sister, Jani, was doing drugs, he decided he was going to fight and he was going to try save his daughter. He started finding out who her dealers were, where they were dealing, and who they were getting their drugs from. He started getting familiar with the drug community in an effort to save his daughter. The one dealer in particular who provided Janie with most of her drugs had six felony warrants out for him already, so my dad would call the cops and say, “Okay, here’s where he’s dealing. Here’s who he’s dealing to. Here’s where he’s getting it.” But for the life of him, he couldn’t get the dealer arrested. He felt so frustrated because he felt he either had to take matters into his own hands, or he had to watch his daughter die at the hands of this dealer. This dealer was super aggressive: he climbed up to my sister’s room in the second story of our house to give her drugs through the window one time she was trying to detox. He texted my sister 37 times one day. Finally, after a few months, my dad put a bounty out on the dealer to have him arrested so that anyone who turned him in to the police would get $500. Within three hours, the dealer was in jail. Of course, my dad gave the money to some little druggie kid who had dirt on the dealer, so that strategy wasn’t sustainable. But it got him thinking about ways that he could get involved in the system to make a change. He started a foundation called Dads Against Drug Dealers and he’s received tons of national press — the ”Good Morning America”, Fox News Channel, People magazine – for trying to change the landscape of drug dealing in the United States. My dad calls drugs “the secret combinations of our times.” He made reference to that on ”Good Morning America” and my siblings and I were like, “Dad, that doesn’t make sense to anyone else who’s not Mormon!” If there is one thing you would encourage other LDS women to do, what would it be? I can only speak from my own experience obviously, but I feel that when you’re exposed to different people, different cultures, and different belief systems, it makes you more tolerant and more loving. love God’s children even more because of my experiences in New York and in my career. I hope every girl chases after opportunities — whether they’re career opportunities or opportunities with children — lives a full life and keeps upbeat and positive, realizing the differences in people are the beauty of God. At A Glance Name: Christie Somers Location: Salt Lake City, UT Age: 31 Marital status: Single Occupation: Hair and make-up artist Schools Attended: Paul Mitchell School, Provo, UT Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Abide With Me: ‘Tis Eventide” On The Web: www.christiesomers.com Interview by Neylan McBaine. Portrait by Alisia Packard.

Pauline Sanchez was born in her grandmother’s hogan on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. From the age of eight until graduation from high school, Pauline spent her school years living with a white family in northern Utah as part of the church’s Indian Placement Program. Pauline describes feeling lost within different worlds and how her native language helped her understand the value of her experiences. She is on the Advisory board at The Anasazi Foundation, a wilderness treatment program for troubled teens and their families. She, with her husband Ezekiel, were honored as the 2001 Arizona Parents of the Year, and in 2002 received the National Excellence in Parenting Award. From 1961 to 1972, you participated in the church’s Indian Placement Program, which placed Native American children in LDS families for the school year. What was that like for you and your family? Pauline Martin Sanchez I struggled with being part of three different worlds all at the same time: my Indian world, my Mormon world, and then my American world. As I grew, I realized there are so many variables, so many points of view, and so many ways of doing things in life. In my native life, for instance, I was expected to go through certain rites of passage and maintain a certain way of living spiritually which was different from what I learned while I lived with my foster family in Utah. I thought, “How do I stay tied to my heritage, to my people? How do I live my new found faith along side what is expected of me on the reservation? ” It is Navajo tradition to bury a daughter’s umbilical cord stub in the hogan in hopes that she will make a good home. The burying of the umbilical cord also symbolizes the child belonging to the family. I wanted to maintain that tie. But some of the things in my native culture I couldn’t bring into my membership in the church. I had to ask myself how to resolve that dilemma. My native family faced all kinds of different challenges as a people. Living in nature without a lot of modern facilities was surviving day to day. But there were wonderful things they gleaned out of that life, like the value of life itself, the value of being tied to kinship. That kinship is sacred. That there is a Creator. That kinship is valuable, and our life is valuable. My father did not know any English. I maintained my tie to my culture because of the necessity of the Navajo language in our home and interpreting for my dad and the older people. The generation of my grandparents’ spoke Navajo on the reservation, so that’s what we spoke. Would you describe how you became involved in the Indian Placement Program? How did your family make the decision to send you away to school? There are many of us who left the reservation because of necessity, the need to be educated better.Because my father was never allowed to go to school, he saw this as an opportunity for me not only to gain education, but for other opportunities as well. In their love for me, and I believe guided and directed by the Spirit, my parents sent me off so that my life might not be limited. It was brave of my parents, who often needed me to interpret for them when they talked with doctors and others who spoke only English. Pauline Martin Sanchez with Her Foster Sister and Brother We lived way out there. The closest school on the reservation was in Tuba City. In order to go to school, we had to get up really early and catch a bus so we could make the 45 mile trip with stops to pick up all the children on the way to Tuba City. And even before that, there was building a fire, getting us dressed, and getting all the food cooked without running water and electricity and then get to the trading post. If you missed the bus there was no transportation because we didn’t have a car. So when the case workers came and explained the Indian Placement Program, my parents signed me up because they trusted these people, the ones that came speaking for the church. The United States government required that participants in the Indian Placement Program had to be members of the church. The program took kids off the reservation; it was all done in a legal way so the children taken were accounted for. The tribe could also ensure that the children were well cared for. It was an act of faith on the parent’s part. As time went by my eight siblings joined me in the program, one by one, with varying results. And so I was baptized that summer when I was eight. I don’t know if I was taught the gospel, but I do remember vaguely being in some kind of class. I was so young. I remember being taken to Tuba City on the reservation and being dressed up in white. I remember singing a hymn and being baptized, being brought back home and running wild again until it was time for them to put me on the bus to Utah. As the bus moved north toward Provo, Utah, passing my birth place and familiar surroundings, my heart would get that hollow feeling as tears rolled down my cheeks. I was heading to the land of abundance while my family on the Reservation was moving into the winter months, without electricity or running water. Life was difficult in the small one-room square home built by my father, with two windows, one full size bed, one twin bed, one crib, boxes of clothes, and a wood burning stove. During the school year, when I went back to Utah to go to school, I could not live up there like I did on the reservation. In Utah, I turned on the lights, I had electricity. I opened the refrigerator, it was full of food. I turned knobs and switched on things, and traveled at a faster speed than on a horse. The schedule in my Utah life was the greatest challenge. On the reservation, life was based on certain works that I did. I had to build a fire. I had to nourish myself. There are things that need to be done, but at their natural pace. When I would go back to the reservation, I put the clock away. I lived as the sand moves, and the sky. It was so much simpler! I could enjoy being with my family and enjoy the learning that took place. They supported me and encouraged me to do my best. Every year I would leave my natural parents wearing new clothes, bought by their meager income. As I grew into my teen years, it became harder to leave them. This time, instead of them buying me new clothing, I would leave whatever was left of my meager summer job income with them. What were the most difficult challenges for you culturally, going back and forth from your reservation home to your Utah home? Outward appearance was more important in Utah than it was on the reservation. On Sundays I had to wear a dress. I had to wear nylons and my hair had to be just-so. When I was a child in Primary, there were classes and tasks we had to complete and banners with check boxes to fill in. That is how children earned honor. This was very different for me. I really enjoyed those years, but as a child I had to absorb two very different cultures. Back in Navajo life, in the hogan, there are no windows. The door faces east and there is only a smoke hole. When I went on placement and into my foster home there were three doors, one that faced north, one that faced south, and one that faced west. They had all these windows and they divided the house into all these different rooms. The hogan was just one big room where you did everything. You cooked there, you slept there. It was the classroom, it was the kitchen, it was the living room. We all come differently. We’re all living life tailored for our own experience. It doesn’t matter who we are, we have been all blessed with a power to become better than we thought we could become. In doing that, we have to accept that we are going to be different, that people have different languages and different ways of looking at life. We experience different things. Some of us experience two parents in a home. Others experience one parent. Others are orphans. Some are like me: because of my Utah foster home, I have two sets of parents and I have six sets of grandparents that I claim as my own. If someone sees life from a different point of view and they share it with us we think, “Wow! I didn’t realize there was that way of living.” Most of the time we are filled with gratitude and we honor what somebody else has gone through, but we generalize too much about each other. A lot of times we look at each other just visually. I look at somebody who is Caucasian and think they are different from me. “They don’t understand where I’m coming from. Their life has been easier than mine because they’ve had the advantages of science. They could afford things that I couldn’t afford when I was younger.” I judge them on their possessions or on their opportunities compared to the lack of opportunities in my life and the catching up I’ve had to do to stand equal with them. Pauline Martin Sanchez It is important for all of us to honor our pasts so we can be blessed with gratitude and appreciation for who we are and what we are. Where much is given much is required. Life has been given us to grow. In that growing we can’t grow alone. Alone it would be like surviving in the wilderness. We can’t survive alone. We need to be tied to others in a way that we can develop trust, in a way that helps us grow well together. I struggled at first to adjust with the strangeness of this new world I was entering. Looking back, I am amazed at the trust I had put in the decision made for me, by my father and mother. I cried when my foster parents were introduced to me as “my new parents.” In that moment I realized how far away from home I was, and that there was no going back. I came to love and trust them and their children. I inherited more grandparents, more uncles, more aunts, and more cousins. As I grew among them I was not just “the placement student,” but I became “our Indian daughter Pauline,” “our Indian sister Pauline,” “our Indian granddaughter Pauline,” and “Aunt Pauline.” This family and the extended families have been the most wonderful examples of kindness and generosity. They created a belonging place for me in their family and in the community. They opened up the world to me in a safe way by their love. They encouraged me to be better than I thought I could be. The Placement Program became a saving opportunity for me. The greatest gift my natural parents gave me was allowing me to live my newfound faith and accept that I might not come home to stay for a long time. This gift of allowing me to own my own life has given me the freedom to choose the best of the different cultures that I lived in. My experiences off the reservation brought me back to enjoy the rich goodness of my heritage as a Native American woman, and equally live my divine nature as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Indian Placement Program began in 1947 and ended 1996. Do they have better schools on the reservation for the children now? I have visited some of the schools. I visited one where I am from. After fifty-four years they finally built a school near the place of my birth for seventy-four children. The Navajo Nation is trying to improve the educational systems on the reservation. It takes funding, good educational leadership, dedicated teachers, and supportive parents. In some areas of the reservation conditions are similar to third-world countries, but children are learning and graduating. It is good to see them succeeding. I admire the parents who do all they can to support their children’s education. They are trying. It’s difficult and the children struggle a lot with it too, sitting in a classroom all day and being forced to read out of books. I think like me a lot of them are visual learners so they need to get up. They need to touch, to make, create, to understand what the words in the book mean. As a mother to your own seven children, how have you incorporated your culture as you’ve tried to teach them the gospel? Have you been able to mesh the two? It’s not so much the traditions of my people, but the language itself that has enhanced the gospel principals in our lives in a way that our children and the children of The Anasazi Foundation have responded to them. The children are so used to the English labeling of things. Some words have come to have a negative connotation. For instance, religion is a bad word. Being a virgin is a bad thing. Good things aren’t ‘good’—they are ’bad’ or ‘wicked’. Pauline Martin Sanchez and Her Family The role of parents has been tainted. They are no longer people that these children honor; they’re caretakers, “Oh that’s just my parent, my old man, old woman. They don’t care.” They’re not tied to their children as they used to be because the language has begun to change. The words have lost that special meaning they used to have. The Navajo language is different, it does not change. In Navajo, ‘wicked’ doesn’t mean good; it means wicked. In Navajo, when you address your parents you say shi’ma’, which means ‘my mother’, or shi’azhe’e, ‘my dad’. Already they are yours, and there is a connection to them. The language has a kinship foundation. You come from a family group. You’re born to a family group, through your mother. You’re born for the family group your father belongs to. Families are very important, and you must memorize the family group name of your mother, and the family group name of your father, and those of your grandfathers’. I am tied to four different families called clans. I have a responsibility, I have a stewardship to act my part. No matter where I go I am always part of a family. Navajo is a spiritual language, and because of that I can teach my children in ways that make them feel it in their hearts and paints a picture for them in their minds. They learn and feel it so it lasts and lingers in a way that makes it valuable to them. For example, in Navajo we use the walking language. The question with which you greet someone is “Do you walk well?” It’s a positive thing. It’s a goal, it’s a searching question. “Do you walk well?’” It is the same in the scriptures: walking with God, walking upright, walking forward. There is a visual association with that. How do you walk with God? It causes you to stop and create a picture in your mind about how you personally would walk with God. It takes you a step forward. You’re obligated to have this uplifting experience. You have to look up and say, “How do I walk with deity? How do I walk with this pure perfected being? Is it possible for me?” You begin to search for how you would dress. How is he dressed? Not in clothing, but what are his attributes? The inside, the inward characteristics of who this person is, is valuable. You have to take that journey into what kind of experience that would be like, or how you picture it. It takes pondering and making choices. It’s like painting with words. Pauline Martin Sanchez Members of my tribe often call each other shi’a’we’e’, which means “That’s my little one”. They honor that we belong to them. I love going home to my people. They take our temperature, or feed us, or ask about us. They sit down and start telling stories about when we were little, bringing back wonderful memories of us or our families and those wonderful memories that we can’t remember or that we have forgotten. They again recreate it the way they saw it. They paint it beautifully so that it is good, not only for us, but because these are the sacred things they continue to carry with them. I think, “Wow! I didn’t realize I was that important to them, that I am still that important to them! They really do know me, they really do care about me. I’m really tied to them. I really do belong to them.” I would come back home to the reservation and my family would hug me and hold me and tell me stories and cook for me. They would invite me to serve them by chopping the wood, cooking with them, butchering the sheep with them, weaving the rugs with them, walking with them, riding horses with them. Whatever it is they just bring me in, taking me in with them. Pauline Martin Sanchez's Wedding Day with Her Foster Parents and Her Husband's Parents I come home as a married woman and they want to hear about what life is like now. Are you walking well as a married woman? Are you happy? Is he making you happy? When I come now with children, they not only enjoy being with me, but also look at these beautiful beings that have come. They, and my children, are all joined together. I put the babies in their hands. They delight in us coming home to them and having these little ones. How does your language help you understand and teach the gospel? My language has been very valuable in teaching about spirituality. The name of deity is still holy and sacred. He is still a holy and a sacred being. I always try to convey who he is to my children so they feel his sacredness. That comes from my language, speaking words in a way that it lingers, speaking in a way that it is pressed into them and painted like beautiful murals on the walls of their hearts. I am trying to paint beautiful pictures about love, about compassion, about how much they are loved. I’ve tried to find a word for sacred and holy because in the English language these beautiful word have lost that feeling. How can I help others understand what that word means from the experience I’ve had with it? I finally came to a definition that I hope conveys the feeling of the words “sacred and holy”. If we are sacred, we are of immeasurable worth, beyond price, beyond anything earthly. Our value expands. There is no beginning and no end to our worth. Painting that picture of who we are I hope conveys that we are sacred beings. We are of immeasurable worth. Our power to create is unlimited, our ability to grow is unlimited. In my native language, things are said in a way that gives more meaning to the things that really matter. It is a spiritual language. As I began to look back as an adult, I loved it and thought, “Why does it sound so pleasing to me?” When I look at the gospel of Jesus Christ, I realize it’s another way of looking, another point of view, another way of describing and putting into pictures what I was experiencing, creating a picture so when it was done I understood it better. It was beautiful. It was nourishing. It was pleasing. You are the mother of seven children and now a grandmother. How do you describe your experience as your family grows and expands at this stage of life, and what do you tell your children and grandchildren about their rich heritage? I tell Ezekiel, my husband, that through having little grandbabies we have been given added years. We are living our lives with our seven children, and then now we’ve got more years that have been given us to live with our granddaughter Grace, and more years to live with her sister Serenity, and more years to all these others that will come. It multiplies our years. Not physical years, but it gives us years of experience living with somebody else, knowing another person. The word that comes to me in describing living lives with others is ‘kinship’. I picture living with them horizontally, walking back and forth through them, finding and sharing good things of the soul and heart in pure moments, sharing spirit to spirit, and being blessed with and enjoying some of the heavenly dividends in each of those kinship. I keep telling my children we are really blessed because we are living so many lives. We’ve just begun, earth life is just the Primary. We know in the pre-mortal life we were there with our Heavenly Father and our Heavenly Mother. We were there in this wonderful place where we learned with each other, but in a very sterile situation. We are let free here on the earth. We are a little more expanded, experienced. We won’t experience everything because we aren’t capable of experiencing everything yet. But there’s going to be enough joy and enough sadness, enough light and darkness in our lives, enough storms and enough suffering to enjoy the blessed peace and love and happiness so that we can move forward to another experience. The Anasazi Foundation, a wilderness treatment program in Arizona for troubled teens and their families, has had hundreds of children come through the program over the last twenty years. You are on the board of directors, and your husband Ezekiel is one of the co-founders and widely recognized as a pioneer in the wilderness treatment industry. What have you both learned as you’ve watched the program over the years? The word ‘Anasazi’ means ‘those who walked before,’ full of wisdom. I know that it was an inspired program. There’s not another word for it. I’ve been an observer and a participant. I’ve walked with some that came these twenty years; the children themselves and some of the parents, our wonderful staff and those supporters who have been a great blessing to us over the years. It’s a family experience. Some of the children come with more than one set of parents, sometimes two sets of parents, sometimes three sets of parents. I think about the statement of one young walker before he came to Anasazi: “I’ll either be dead, or I’ll be in prison.” For a child so young, that’s a tragedy. We’re in a country that’s rich. Our capacity to do good is unlimited and yet here stands within this country among us a child who thinks the only two directions he can go is either prison or death. It’s a sad commentary. But after he leaves those choices no longer linger in his heart. He can move on. He is unlimited in all the good he can do and the value of that is immeasurable, not only to him as he moves forward, but to his parents and all those that care about him and love him, all those who will be in his future, the young woman that will stand by his side, the children that will be in his future. You often see children who went through the program return as adults to work for you. What is it like to see them return? It is so awesome to see them. One day I was sitting in a parents’ seminar and we were going around in a circle and telling the others who we were, where we were coming from, why we were there. When it came to this young man he said, “I am here because I have come to repay a debt.” At that time I thought, ”Your debt is paid. Your debt is paid to the one who paid your debt.” I thought he should be somewhere getting an education, and not feel burdened with something that has already been paid for. But it was an honor to sit with him. I realized nevertheless, it is good for him to be here. What he can give to those he walks with in the desert is amazing. I looked at this man that first day and thought, “I don’t know if those children he walks with understand who this person is.” But they did. They saw him and who he was and what he had, and they wanted what he carried with him. He shared that with them. I know he walked away satisfied with his giving. It’s been a great joy to Ezekiel and me to see these Young Walkers now stand as leaders and loving and caring for the children in a way that the children can feel their Seed of Greatness. Our lives are of immeasurable worth because we are tied to each other, and we tie ourselves to so many other lives that are of immeasurable worth. Once in a while it’s nice to stop and just look at the rippling effect and the good that it’s doing. It gives you hope that there’s still good in the world, that there are miracles to be made, prayers to be answered, and sacred beings to return to a holy place called home. At A Glance Name: Pauline Martin Sanchez Location: Mesa, AZ Age: 57 Marital status: Married to Ezekiel Sanchez 36 years Children: Seven –Jacob 35, Nephi 33, Lehi 31, April 29, Sariah 26, Rachel 24,Moroni 22 Occupation: Everything! Schools Attended: Tuba City Boarding School, Tuba City Public School, North Summit HighSchool, Brigham Young University Convert to Church: April 1961 Languages Spoken at Home: English, Spanish, Navajo Favorite Hymn: “I Believe In Christ” Current Church Calling: Ward missionary On the Web: Anasazi.org Interview by Marintha Miles

Noelle Pikus Pace is a world-champion skeleton athlete. In 2005, she was ranked number one in the world when she was injured during an accident at the Calgary Olympic Park. The story of her miraculous recovery is told in the documentary 114 Days. Eventually she was barred from competition at the Torino, Italy, Olympic Games in 2006 but she reclaimed her Olympic dreams when she came in fourth at the Vancouver Games this past winter. How did you get started doing skeleton? I ran track and field at Mountain View High School in Orem, Utah. When I was about sixteen years old, they were recruiting track and field athletes to try bobsledding in Park City. I went up during my junior year and fell in love with it. The following year I went back up to do it again, and they had taken away the junior bobsled program and told me that if I wanted to be a better bobsledder I should learn skeleton. I saw this cookie-sheet-looking thing on the ice and the coach said, “Okay, come here, Noelle, you first.” I’m thinking, “This is crazy–I have no idea what I’m going to do.” He takes a helmet, he puts it on my head, he takes lacrosse padding and puts it on my shoulders, and he tells me to lie on my stomach, head first, and just hold on to these little railing things on the cookie sheet. So I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is the weirdest bobsled drill I’ve ever seen.” He kicked me off down the hill and I started screaming, “Oh my gosh!!! I’m gonna die!!! Holy cow, get me off this thing!” Then all of a sudden, I was like “Woo hoo! Woo hoo! This is awesome!!! Put me back up there, I want to go again!” From that time forward you couldn’t get me off of it. I was hooked. That was my introduction to the skeleton. Noelle Pikus Pace In college you were also an All-American track and field star. How did you decide where to place your emphasis as an athlete? I loved track and field. I started competing in track and field when I was about twelve years old and I knew that that’s what I wanted to do when I was in college. When I was in high school I competed in basketball, softball, track and field, soccer, bobsledding, and skeleton. My mom often said, “You gotta pick and choose what you want to do, or else you won’t be great at anything–you’ll just be okay at everything. Decide where to put your focus.” I knew it was track and field. I got a full-ride scholarship to the University of Utah for the heptathlon, which is seven events: high jump, long jump, shot put, javelin, hundred meter hurdles, the two hundred and the eight hundred. I also did discus. Then after I was there for a year, I met my future husband. We were married in July 2002, after my freshman year at the University of Utah. At that time I transferred to what is now Utah Valley University and continued competing on a full track and field scholarship. I also kept doing skeleton. During the 2002 Olympics, I thought I had the potential to go to the Olympic Games in skeleton, and even though I loved track and field, I kept getting injured. I saw more potential for myself with skeleton at that time. You said earlier that you did a little bit of everything when you were in high school, and it seems like the heptathlon really played to the breadth of your skills. Has that been a recurring theme in your life, to do a little bit of everything? I just never wanted to be bored. I’m always taking on something. I was going to school full time, taking seventeen to nineteen credits, competing in Division I Track and Field, and competing on the World Cup tour, and trying to do it all at that time. I guess that’s always how I am. Noelle Pikus Pace What is daily life like for a skeleton athlete? From October to March we travel. Most of the time it’s in Europe, anywhere from Japan to Norway to Canada, New York, Italy, Switzerland, Austria or Germany. We get a week off for Christmas, and then we’re back in Europe competing. During the travel season, we train all the time. We wake up at seven in the morning, we’re at the track at eight o’clock. We’re sliding from nine until eleven, watching other people slide from eleven to one. We go back, we eat, we work on our equipment from two until five, then we go to the gym and train for a couple of hours to get a workout in. During the evening we watch video from training that day, then we go to bed and do it all again. So we’re gone quite a bit, and then during the off-season months, from March to October, we do some of our training on our own, and we have strength and conditioning coaches that plan our workouts. I do a lot of sprinting, lifting, and plyometrics. Training during the off-season usually takes about three to four hours a day. It’s a pretty full schedule. A lot of my teammates live at an Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, NY, and all of the athletes are welcome to live and train there, but I’m married and I have a little girl, so it’s just not practical for me. I live in Eagle Mountain. It’s about an hour drive to and from the track in Park City. Would you give me a bit of background about how your career progressed up until the Olympic trials in Calgary? My first time down from the top on a skeleton sled was in January 2001. In 2002-2003, I ended up making it onto the World Cup team, that’s the team that everybody wants to be on, the Olympic team. I was only on the team for half of the season and finished nineteenth in the world. 2003-2004 I was on for the full season and I finished fourteenth in the world. Going into 2004-2005 I was the third girl on the team, competing with a gold medalist and a silver medalist. There were some people who were disappointed that I had finished fourteenth the previous season, and at the same time some of my coaches didn’t expect that much because a lot of eyes were on my teammates, the gold medalist and the silver medalist. Noelle Pikus Pace After the 2003-2004 season, I didn’t know if I wanted to keep competing. My husband and I had talked about it and competing entailed a lot of time away, a lot of stress, and it’s not the lifestyle that I necessarily wanted to be around. First of all, I was the only married one on the team, the only LDS one on the team, so the standards just weren’t how I had hoped they would be. That summer, two weeks from the start of the season, my husband and I knew it was time to fast and pray about it. We went to the temple and felt very strongly that I should continue to compete. During that season I won a gold medal on the World Cup circuit for the first time. I continued to do well and win medals, and actually ended up first in the world in overall rankings and second at World Championships. Noelle Pikus Pace Going into the 2006 Olympics, I was ranked first in the world and expected to win. My husband and I knew that continuing to compete was the right choice. Every year we try to make sure that we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing and we’re in the place that we’re supposed to be in. Just before our Olympic team trials, I was praying and fasting and going to the temple and just feeling like it was right, feeling like I was where I was supposed to be. In October of 2005, I was in Calgary for the trials, waiting for one of my teammates to come down the track. I had just finished a training run, and was sitting there with four of my teammates talking. All of a sudden we heard a loud noise coming, and we turned and looked at the finish line, and we saw a 1,400 pound four-man bobsled just screaming towards us, going 60 or 70 miles an hour. I tried to take a step to jump out of the way but it hit me from behind, and I flew 25 or 30 feet. I did full flip in the air and landed on the asphalt. I immediately tried to jump to my feet, but I couldn’t. I tried to jump to my feet again, and I couldn’t. I looked down and that’s when I saw bones sticking out of my leg. Even from the beginning I don’t think I ever thought, “How could this be?” or “Why me?” I immediately had comfort, because I knew beforehand that I was in the place where I was supposed to be and I knew that everything was going to be okay. The doctor said that I wouldn’t be able to walk for two or three months and I was walking in two weeks. They said I wouldn’t be able to run or compete for a year, and six weeks later I was back competing on the World Cup circuit in Austria. I know it came down to the faith and the prayers and the blessings I received. It’s interesting because everyone was telling me, “You’re recovering so quickly, you have to be able to go to the Olympics, that must mean that you’re supposed to be there.” In my heart I always knew I wouldn’t make it to the Olympics that year. I was trying to be as optimistic as possible, but I felt comforted knowing it was going to be okay, that maybe there was a bigger story to tell in the perseverance of things rather than the end goal. I was planning on retiring after 2006, but after I missed the Olympic Games, my husband and I both knew it wasn’t enough, so I went back to compete the following year and ended up winning the World Championships by the largest margin in the history of our sport, which was awesome. Going back that year to compete for World Championships was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do. I was so drained–mentally, physically, spiritually. I was just shot. I didn’t want to compete, but I knew if I didn’t I probably never would go back. That’s the year I ended up winning. After I won that race, I needed a break. My husband and I wanted to start a family so I took the 2007-2008 season off and we had a little girl, Lacee. Were people surprised by your decision to start your family when you were at the very top of your career? Some people completely understood, and some thought it was crazy, but for us it was the only option. If I chose not to go back to competing after having a child, I had to know I was ready to be done with the sport if it was taking away too much from my family. I had to know I was ready to give it up, and that it was going to be okay. Talk a little bit about how your family continues to support your career, especially now that you have Lacee. My husband has been an amazing support from the beginning. Anytime when I would be down on myself and say I probably shouldn’t keep going, he’d be right there saying. “You can do it– this is a dream that we’ve got to go for.” My mom was always the one to drive me back and forth from Park City when I was in high school. We have a big family, and she was working full time, and she’d just take days off of work for me. Both my parents were amazing. My sister Amanda and her husband were the ones to watch Lacee for the past two years, almost every single day that I was gone, nearly every single day that I had to travel or compete. My sister took her in like one of her own. Noelle Pikus Pace Your husband also made your sled. How did he get involved in the technical side of your training? People don’t just up and build a sled. It’s really complicated, and this isn’t his profession. I was having troubles with my old sled a year ago at World Championships in New York. When I shipped it to Lake Placid, it broke and I couldn’t ride it. World Championships is like the Olympics; it’s a race where you want everything to be perfect, and I had to borrow one of my teammates’ sleds. It didn’t fit right, and you want your own equipment and you need it to be a certain way. My husband said, “That’s it. I’m going to build you a sled. We’re going to make this thing work perfectly for you, and I’ll know how to fix it when problems come up.” Last summer, every spare minute of every day he was studying the rule book and learning how to build it and designing it. I’m not going to lie, the first time I took it down I was a little bit nervous, but it was perfect. It fit like a glove and did everything I wanted it to. That’s the one I ended up competing on in the Olympics, and Lacee helped me decorate it, so it was a family affair, I guess. Will you talk a bit about what your experience was like at the Olympics this year? Oh, it was so amazing. I guess you dream of what a day might be like, or what it might be like to obtain your dream, and you have this picture in your mind. I did; I had this picture in my mind, especially of Opening Ceremonies, and my competition day. It was much more than I ever could have dreamed. It was an incredible experience to be able to represent the United States and also to have all my family there cheering for me in the stands. How do you think your faith and your cultural and spiritual upbringing have brought you to the place you are today? I couldn’t have done anything that I’ve done without it. Having faith in things greater than ourselves, knowing things happen for a reason, and that we’re not alone, plays a huge part in my life daily, and I hope that I can do my part. What are some of your future goals, and how do you see yourself continuing to balance having a family and being a world-champion athlete? I retired from skeleton after the Vancouver Olympics and I’m working now on a company called Snowfire Hats that I started with my husband and sister and her husband. The company and my family are really what I want to focus on now. We’re licensed through the NCAA, so we’re making hats for BYU, Utah, Utah State, UVU, and pretty much all the schools throughout Utah. They’re kind of crazy hats, knit hats with hair on top of them. They are fun for fans, fun if you’re going skiing or anything like that. We made them for the Olympics with USA written across the front, and it was a lot of fun to see everybody in the stands wearing them, and my family raved about how it made them feel united. We’d see people walking down the street we didn’t even know and they’d be wearing one of these hats. Going to the Olympics was my dream and I’ve been the overall World Cup Champion. I’ve been the World Champion. Obviously, I thoroughly missed out on a medal in the Olympics and so for that reason a lot of people think I should try to go back for another four years, but I have so many other goals and dreams to obtain, too. I gave it my best, and I’m happy with my result. So I think it’s time to close this chapter in my life and begin a new one. At A Glance Name: Noelle Pikus Pace Location: Eagle Mountain, UT Age: 27 Marital status: Married Children: One (Lacee Lynne) Occupation: Owner of SnowFire Hats Schools Attended: Mountain View High School, Utah Valley University (B.A. Community Health), Colorado Technical University (MBA) Languages Spoken at Home: English and Lacee has her own language Favorite Hymn: “How Great Thou Art” “There Is Sunshine In My Soul Today” Current Church Calling: Youth Sunday School Teacher Ages 14-18 On The Web: www.snowfirehats.com, www.noellepikuspace.com Interview by Shelah Miner. Noelle’s portrait by Jac Scott.

Saren Eyre Loosli, co-founder of the Power of Moms website, talks about how her educational background and her personal challenges as a mother of five young children led her to create a website that seeks to empower moms by creating networks of support and meaningful mothering resources. She also talks candidly about her own struggle to balance mothering with a desire to make an impact in the world, and how, ultimately those two goals are intertwined. Would you describe the path that led you to help found the Power of Moms website? I always had in my mind that I’d finish my undergraduate degree and then get married pretty soon after that. But that didn’t work for me. I didn’t find the right person until I was twenty-eight. So that gave me time to pursue a career, to get a master’s degree in education, to live in a lot of different places, to go on a mission (to Bulgaria). I believe the Lord designed it that way for me; with my personality, I would have felt quite trapped if I’d jumped straight into having kids right out of college. I think the Lord knew that, so he said, okay, do all these things! And then when you do have your kids, you’ll be able to focus on them. My big dream coming out of college was to travel the world and to help third world countries by setting up educational programs in those countries. But then I started to realize that that was not going to work well with having a family—which was my other big dream—and trying to put my dream to make a real difference in the world and have a wonderful family together in my mind has been a really hard thing. Saren Eyre Loosli and Her Children The question for me has been, “How do I balance these righteous desires to be a great mom with these righteous desires to help the rest of the world?” Power of Moms has been my answer, but it’s not something that came overnight. It took twelve years basically trying different things, doing this training here, working in this school there, and then finally coming to this. Right after finishing my master’s in Education at Harvard, I started up a company with a friend and we ran after-school programs in the Boston public schools, mostly in some very needy schools. It was a great program, but we couldn’t make it work financially. So we closed that company and I worked for the National Institute on Out of School Time (NIOST), part of the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College. They do training all over the country for people who are trying to do high quality after school programs. I set up regional training conferences all over the country for them in partnership with the Corporation for National Service. Around this time I met my husband, who was going to school at MIT. We lived in Boston for a year while he finished his degree. We ended up accepting a job for him in San Jose, California. When we moved, NIOST asked me to keep doing the job remotely. I worked from home while I was pregnant with my first child. When my son was a little baby, he just sat in his swing while I made all my conference calls. I even took him with me to a couple of conferences when he was an infant and kept my fingers crossed and said my prayers that he wouldn’t scream at the wrong moment. It was a little stressful, but it worked out fine. It was a great job: they respected my work and I was able to be involved with a lot of interesting things. But this transition to motherhood was trickier than I’d thought it would be. I had this colicky baby who was either in his swing or was screaming at the top of his lungs and didn’t really want to snuggle or be held. At the same time, I’d just come from Boston where I had all these fabulous friends from college and couples in our ward that we’d really connected with. I didn’t feel I clicked with anyone in San Jose. Because of my job, I was so involved with people who were still in Boston and I didn’t really fit in with the local moms that had little kids. I didn’t have coworkers per se and I couldn’t hang out with the other moms and their babies because I was working—I was working when they were off to the park. So it took me a while to kind of ease into the whole thing. I got into my groove more once I had my second son. I tried to just totally focus on my two kids for a few months, but when a new project popped up to evaluate after school programs in the San Jose area, it felt right to jump into that. Saren Eyre Loosli and Her Family I think it’s interesting that people talk about being stay at home moms or working moms; I’ve always been at home with my kids, but I’ve always been doing some big project on the side – heading off to a school to evaluate a program with a baby on my back. In some ways it feels like going back to the pioneer model: all moms were working moms, you’re out there taking care of the chickens and you’re out there picking the crops while you tend your kids. There’s no such thing as a non-working mom. Every mom works, a lot. It’s just a matter of whether the work she does has to do with hobbies or paid employment, whether she’s going out of her home to do it or staying in her home. For the most part, being involved in part-time projects worked well for me, but it’s always a huge challenge when your heart’s tugging you this way and that at the same time. Every time I was offered a new project, I asked myself, should I do this? Or is this now the time that I should focus totally on my kids? my kids? When I was pregnant with my third child, the decision was made for me: Almost right at the time when we found out we were expecting, I was asked to be the Relief Society president. I was completely blindsided. Not only was I pregnant and already had a baby and toddler, but I needed to keep my job because I’d committed to the project, we needed the money since my husband’s job had slowed down and he was only getting paid part of his salary. I said to the bishop, “Do you know we’re expecting our third child and I work?” He said, “I didn’t know you were expecting and I didn’t know your whole situation, but the Lord knew.” The bishop went on to explain that he’d gone to the temple twice because he kept fighting the Lord on this calling, thinking that I couldn’t possibly be the right person. This was a ward that had over 400 women in it, and I would say fifty percent of them had pretty serious needs. It was really one of those moments when you think: can this be the right thing? I just remember thinking, how can we do this? The bishop encouraged me to pray for my own answer. The answer was yes. While still finishing up my school-evaluation work, I stepped into this huge project of being Relief Society president. I took the kids with me (my oldest was three at the time and my baby was another colicky one) and we went to the bishop’s storehouse and we went to convalescent homes and we took care of the things that needed to happen. There were days when I thought, I can’t do this. How can I deal with all these needs when some days I couldn’t physically take the kids with me to the hospital, and my husband was in Singapore or France half the time on business. But that calling made me get out of the house and be involved in other things and made me meet with other people. I needed to do that for me at that time of my life. I also got to use all my training experience: we really trained visiting teachers like I had trained my after-school teachers and held people accountable. Also, people really stepped up to help me, because they could see me with my three little kids and they knew that I couldn’t do everything. It was truly a faith building experience and a wonderful chance to be thoroughly involved right in my own community, as opposed to trying to help people all over the world and all over the country that I wasn’t personally invested in. This experience taught me a lot about lifting where you stand. Saren Eyre Loosli and Her Family After two years of being in that calling, we decided to go ahead and have our fourth and final child. So we got pregnant, and we found out we were having twins. I was going to have five children in five years. At that point, I did go to the bishop and say, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” I was released, and I was then in a position to need help very much from others. I ended up needing an emergency c-section with the second twin, our oldest turned five one week before the twins were born and we didn’t have any family around (my parents travel around the world for work). So the ward stepped right in and it was a wonderful thing to see first-hand how a ward family can really work. As Relief Society president, I had been on the giving end, then I had a chance to be on the receiving end. People would show up during the times that I was the most desperate and say, “Hey, why don’t you just go to the grocery store by yourself for half an hour and I’ll be here with the kids.” Or people would bring us all their extra diapers and formula. Or they’d bring play groups to me, because it was such a hard thing to even get in the car with five kids in car seats. This experience really gave me a chance to see what the gospel’s all about. Shortly after this, we felt guided to move to St. George, Utah (we simply could not fit in our house in San Jose anymore and my husband needed a career change) and this is where the Power of Moms really got started. Soon after we moved here, a friend of mine and and I worked together to schedule a weekend retreat where moms like us could get together and have serious training conferences for their chosen profession of motherhood, just like workers in any other profession have. We put the first retreat together five years ago. People flew in from all over the country when they heard about this concept, it just resonated with people. Women left saying, “My life is changed, I’m a different mom and a different person than I would be.” The concept was so powerful we decided to drive forward with that and put together a website and an actual instruction manual so people could put together similar types of retreats for the mothers that they knew in their own circles. My friend and I got to a point in our lives where we just couldn’t work on the retreat concept anymore, so it got put on the backburner for a while. Then, a couple years later, my mom met April Perry who’d started a similar website to help moms called the Power of Moms and suggested I should get to know her a bit. Something kept nagging me at the back of my mind: “You need to talk to April.” So we emailed back and forth a little bit. We decided that we should combine our efforts, and the Power of Moms went from a little website that April was working on to a much bigger project that also incorporated my motherhood retreats. We launched last Mother’s Day 2009. Since then, thousands of moms have gathered to our website. That’s been really fulfilling. There have been times when I’ve asked myself, why am I doing this? – especially when it’s 1am and the back end of the website is giving me fits. But we felt so guided. Every time I’d hear a Conference talk or read the scriptures, I’d open to something that said to me, “Do this. The moms out there need you to be doing this, to be a catalyst to bring them together.” The whole point of the website is to bring moms together so they can all share what they know and we can have conversation around this career of motherhood. Saren Eyre Loosli and Her Family I really searched, together with April, to find resources that help mothers really take care of the person inside the mom and become their own best sort of mom. We found tons of websites that are about fashion, the best baby products, potty training, or how to deal with kids’ behavior issues that come up, and there are tons of chat rooms that seem to focus on husband bashing or complaining about how hard it is to be a mom. But it seems that so many moms want to progress and grow through motherhood – not just get through it, complain about it, or look good while doing it. We couldn’t find much that seemed truly uplifting and truly empowering to moms. So we’ve spent thousands of hours building the Power of Moms. The Power of Moms website states that the aim is to help moms be really and truly happy as mothers. How do you see the site helping moms tap into their potential as mothers? Motherhood is not just about getting the kids from point A to point B. Motherhood is about developing who we are as women and as individuals. A lot of the happiness we feel in life comes when we’re progressing; the gospel teaches us this, but it’s true in any walk of life, whether you’re religious or not. And when we feel like we’re in a rut and we’re not progressing, when we’re sad or feeling useless, then we get down about everything in our lives. The whole point of the Power of Moms is to help moms feel the joy of progressing. It’s not just our kids we’re trying to help progress, it’s ourselves. And that matters. It matters enough that we need to make time for it in our lives, whether it be getting involved in an online community or figuring out in your own personal way, what do I want to improve? Who do I want to be? What aspects of my personality should I be developing? What talents should I be developing? What can I do with my kids? How can I do those in conjunction with what I’m doing as a mom? One of our big focuses is taking care of the person that’s inside the mom, where a lot of the other websites are trying to take care of the person outside the mom: let’s see how she looks, let’s see what products she has, let’s see how she acts toward her kids. We thought, let’s start on the inside with how we feel about ourselves, with how we feel about our job as a mom and then let’s build from there. I want mothers to say, “I’m not just barely treading water, but I’m making motherhood into the joy and the progression that it should be.” For me personally, I’ve come to realize that by being the best mother I can be, the best wife I can be, that will help me become the person that’s going to make me happy. By working on Power of Moms, I feel I have a team of mothers working on my goals with me. I’m asking them for their answers. I feel the sense of empowerment from not only learning something for yourself, but being able to share it with others at the same time. My biggest hope for the Power of Moms, for myself and other moms is the chance to progress and to connect. Being a mom can be very lonely. I’ve been very lonely and I still am sometimes, but to be able to connect with others, without even leaving your home—that’s why mom blogs do so well, I think. How can moms take the skills and education they’ve accumulated and apply it to motherhood? I think that’s the big issue that so many of us who stay home with our kids struggle with. We’re trying to be the best moms we can be, but we need an outlet, we need a chance to share what we’re learning and learn more. No one in any profession is going to do a great job unless they share what they’ve learned with someone else and learn from others. Motherhood is taking all these wonderful things the gospel teaches us about love and our role as nurturers and the role of eternal progression in our own lives and then putting it into daily practice. We hear all these great talks, but the how tos . . . the daily practice is often the mystery. We’re not going to have our General Authorities stand up there and say, “This is the schedule you should follow” or “This is what you should do with your kids each day.” It’s up to us to figure that out. In my own life, I try to take my strengths and interests and use them in mothering. As an educator, I know all the different types of curricula out there, so when one thing isn’t working well for my child at school, I understand that there are other approaches we could try. I think my kids have a real love for learning and a lot of that comes from the background I have in education. I love art, and I’d love to be more serious about it, but that’s not going to happen in this phase of life. But I can do it a little bit; I pull out those art supplies and do art with my kids. I love reading, and I can’t read as much as I’d like because my kids need me a lot and I have other projects going on, but I can read books with my kids. I really make a point of searching out the best chapter books for their age groups, Newbery award winners and that kind of thing, and we really love to read together. I love traveling and I want to go all over the world, that was a big part of my growing up experience and I’d love to do it with my kids. Right now we’re kind of stuck with places we can drive to, because seven air plane tickets? It’s not going happen. But we still travel all the time. We drove down to Mexico because we wanted our kids to see what it’s like down there. And we drive to California, we go to different places all the time and try to expose them to all that we can, because I need that and I think it’s so good for my kids. And I think it’s something they will develop a need for, the need for different kinds of people and different sites and sounds, different opportunities in life, different ideas. How have your experiences as a mother changed your views on the ways we can make an impact in the world? My husband and I went to Bolivia and Africa when I was pregnant with my oldest because I have this passion for going other places in the world and helping people that are really needy – we crammed those trips in before having kids. But after I became a mother I learned that the difference I’ve been able to make when I was Relief Society president, the difference I’m able to make in my own home and in my kids’ school right now, that means more to me. I still have big ideas, but my idea of what is big and what really matters have fundamentally changed. I think I can make a big difference by the things I do with my own kids, these five little people that I can send out there to be great catalysts for good things in the world. That can be a big ripple effect right there. Every mom can do this. It’s not that I think, oh, I’ve arrived. Every day, it’s hard; I have to decide, Should I finish that project on Power of Moms that I really need to do or should I go and help the kids with homework right now? I feel this tug all the time. Of course, if push comes to shove, I know that Power of Moms will go on the shelf and my kids will get the attention, but it’s not that black and white. It’s not like, choose one or the other, it’s like, I need to choose less of this so I can choose more of the other. That is the perennial issue that I struggle with. I know that I’m doing the right things, but I don’t know how much of which things to do when. This question of finding the right balance is also something we’re trying to help moms with through the Power of Moms. I think that what I’m trying to do is what every mom is trying to do: better herself, take care of her family, plus do a little beyond. We want to take care of ourselves, we want to take care of our families, and then we want to take it a little step beyond that and feel like we’re leaving a little print in other people’s lives, that we’re being a “light to the world” in our own way. At A Glance Name: Saren Eyre Loosli Location: St. George, Utah Age: 39 Marital status: Married Children: Five, ages 5-10 Occupation: Mother; Wife; Co-Director of The Power of Moms; Director of The Joy School Company Schools Attended: Wellesley College (B.A. 1992), Harvard University (M.Ed. 1997) Languages Spoken at Home: English (and some Spanish – the kids go to a dual immersion school) Favorite Hymn: “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” Current Church Calling: Teaching the Valiant 10 class in Primary On the Web: powerofmoms.com, joyschoolco.com, personal blog: Five Kids in Five Years Interview by Rosalyn Eves. Saren’s portrait by Saydi Shumway Photography.

After her fourth consecutive miscarriage, Heather Oman turned to blogging to express her feelings about her experience and Mormon Mommy Wars was born. Heather also founded Living With PKD, an online community for people, like herself, with Polycystic Kidney Disease. Heather talks about what she does to take care of her body in the face of chronic illness and the important role of online support communities like the ones she’s founded. You cofounded the popular blog Mormon Mommy Wars in 2005. How did you get started blogging? My husband, Nathan, had a blog. Frankly, it sort of bugged me that he spent so much time on it. He tried to combat my frustration by suggesting that I participate in his blog, and then suggested that I start my own. He had seen my writing, which at that point was pretty minimal, and wanted to encourage me. At first, I wasn’t interested but eventually I changed my mind. Mormon Mommy Wars started in 2005 in the middle of a particularly difficult time in my life. I was recovering from my fourth consecutive miscarriage. I was hurting and found that I craved other women’s stories. I wanted to read about how others managed miscarriage. I was also captivated by other mommy blogs—stories that weren’t about miscarriage but were a revelation to me—a light that said, “Hey, other women feel the same way!” My husband didn’t peruse mommy blogs, so I hadn’t realized this kind of stuff was available. While I was going through this healing time, somebody wrote a comment on my husband’s blog about stillbirths and how muddled Mormon doctrine is when it comes to babies who are stillborn. I read it and there was a comment about miscarriage that I felt was flippant and disrespectful of the pain that miscarriage can cause. In the middle of my own miscarriage nightmare I thought, “What right does this man have to dismiss miscarriage? What does he know about how I’m feeling?” I locked myself in the bathroom, cried for ten minutes, came out and said to my husband, “I need a blog.” I wrote two or three posts, recruited another mom to help, and Mormon Mommy Wars was born. I think one reason that MMW is successful is because our topics range from potty training to sleep habits to divorce to illegal immigration. I love that we can talk about so many different things and the diversity of our readers never ceases to amaze me. It’s a great testament to the fact that Mormons have different life perspectives and that you can have a different opinion than your sister in the gospel and still be a part of the greater community of Saints. Heather Oman In 2006 you broke the news to Mormon Mommy War readers that you had been diagnosed with Polycystic Kidney Disease. What is PKD, and how has your diagnosis affected you and your perspective on life? Polycystic Kidney Disease is the most common genetic disease in the country, but nobody has ever heard of it. It means that cysts that are growing in my kidneys are slowly replacing my kidney matter. As the cysts grow, so do my kidneys to compensate for the loss of function. Ultimately the cysts take over and the kidneys fail, requiring dialysis or a kidney transplant. My kidneys are now five times bigger than normal. My cysts vary in size, ranging from the size of a quarter to the size of an orange. There is no treatment for the disease, and no cure. There is also no pattern that anybody can point to as a prediction for how the disease will progress. Everybody progresses differently, so I could need a transplant in three years, or in ten. Right now it’s just a waiting game. I look at my body differently now. I treat it better and view it more as a gift. After I was diagnosed, I thought about what would be my regrets if and when I ended up on a dialysis machine, and I realized my biggest one would be not using my body better. I want to get everything I can out of my body before it quits, so I started a serious exercise program. Previously, I was a girl who only exercised when it gave me an excuse to meet boys, so you can imagine how often I did it once that was no longer a priority. I never thought of myself having an unhealthy body and I certainly led a full life, but I was never particularly fit. After I made this exercise commitment, I started running races (short races initially) and then longer ones. Last year I finished my first half marathon. Currently I’m training for a duathlon, which involves a 5K run and an open ocean swim. I’ve never done anything like that before and I’m hoping I don’t drown! I’ve learned that there is nothing like pushing your body beyond what your expectations and having it deliver. I hope that keeping myself as fit as possible will help my kidneys and delay the transplant as long as possible. Shortly after you were diagnosed, you started a blog to support others who have Polycystic Kidney Disease. What have you gained from creating this network and how have you seen it help others? Not long after I was diagnosed I attended a conference for the PKD Foundation. It terrified me. I sat there thinking, “This is my life now?” It was confusing and overwhelming. I felt the same way I did when I had my miscarriages. I craved to hear other people’s stories. . . to find something to which I could relate. The Internet offered almost nothing, and the only support group I could find was through a list-serv. The problem with the list-serv is that I would get too many emails from people reporting all the bad things that were happening to them. I found it overwhelming and scary. I couldn’t deal with my own emotional adjustment and take on everybody else’s grief too. I unsubscribed from the list-serv and started my own blog, Living with PKD. I wanted to talk about what it was like living with this disease. I didn’t want it to be all about my labs, numbers and bad things. I wanted it to be about life in general with PKD. My Living with PKD blog has afforded unexpected opportunities. For instance, I was contacted by the PKD Foundation and, for a while, I wrote a column for their patient magazine. That was a lot of fun and gave me a finger on the pulse of the community. In a roundabout way, my blog put me in contact with Dr. Steinman, one of the leading PKD researchers in the country. Dr. Steinman is running a drug trial out of Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and I was able to learn about the study and be part of it. Heather Oman The best part about the Living with PKD blog is the emails I get from readers. Readers share their stories, they ask me questions, they tell me that reading about my life is a comfort. One woman wrote, “Your life is so normal!” I’m glad that I can fill that need—the need to find something solid and normal when it feels like the ground is shifting underneath you. There was nothing like that for me when I started blogging and it’s nice to know that I can provide that for someone else. Knowing that another person is going through the exact same trial that you are going through makes that trial, any trial, more bearable; whether you’re a mom who can’t get her toddler to stay in a crib, or a patient trying to figure out how to read a lab report. I think at the end of the day, that’s what blogging is about. In the blogosphere, you are careful to protect your family’s privacy. While you write about your life, you don’t place photographs of your family on your blogs. You also don’t use your children’s names. Why is that important to you? I am extremely careful about names and photos on the blog (photos really more than names). It’s important to keep your kids’ images off the Internet because you don’t know where those images could end up. It makes me uncomfortable having pictures of my children on the Internet for strangers to look at. I also feel like with everything else I’m revealing about my family, my kids deserve a boundary. My son is old enough to have opinions about what I blog about now, so much that he even asks me not to blog about certain things. It’s a fine privacy line that bloggers ”walk.” Before you had children you graduated from Boston University in Communication Disorders, and completed a master’s degree in Speech and Language Pathology at George Washington University. You left your career to raise two children. Was that a difficult decision? My transition to a full time stay-at-home mom was a gradual one. Up until about four years ago I worked in some capacity in speech and language pathology, even if it was only eight hours a week. Then I became unexpectedly pregnant with my daughter. The pregnancy was high-risk so I quit working altogether and have been full time at home ever since. I know it was the right decision, but yes, I’ll admit that it was hard to leave the profession altogether. Being a speech and language pathologist is an exciting, dynamic and interesting career. On the other hand, being a mom is the best thing I’ve ever done, but it’s not exactly always the most exciting. Before staying home, I worked for six years with the adult population in hospitals and care facilities, assisting patients with strokes, dementia, voice and swallowing disorders. I had some pretty big career dreams and still do. I can’t pretend that giving them up was easy. Still, even though I struggle with my decision to be a stay-at-home mom full time, I have never regretted it. Struggling with a decision is different than regretting it. How did you decide to go into speech and language pathology? It started out as a fluke. My senior year in high school I was taking a life skills class at the University of Utah for college credit. I took a personality test, and the results said that I would be good at speech language pathology (SLP). It sounds silly, I know, but I had never heard of it so I started researching the profession. At the time, I was really into singing and debate. A speech and language pathologist came to our debate class to discuss proper vocal use and I was fascinated. Being a SLP seemed to combine my love of all things voice and all things language. I wasn’t a big science person, so the first part of my education came as a shock. I struggled through the anatomy and physiology requirements of my major, but ended up loving that part of it. Ironically my career has been completely focused on the medical aspect of the field, something that I wouldn’t have predicted when I signed up for the profession. Heather Oman Do you feel that education has enriched your life as a mother? My son jokes that I know everything there is to know about the body, and we’ve had some fun pouring over my anatomy books. My children also know that education is a priority in our family, which I hope is a reflection of their parents’ educational choices. I think my education enriches the way I mother, but it’s hard to tell how anything really affects what you do. I think more than anything, my education provided me some interesting experiences, which definitely shaped part of my personality. And I also have some fun stories to tell my children. At A Glance Name: Heather Bennett Oman Location: Williamsburg, VA Age: 34Marital status: Married 11 years Children: two, ages 8 and 2 Occupation: Speech Language Pathologist, now a SAHM Schools Attended: Boston University (BS in Communication Disorders), George Washington University (graduate school—MS in Speech Language Pathology) Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief” Current Church Calling: Gospel Doctrine teacher, Assitant Stake public affairs director On the Web: mormonmommywars.com Interview by Marintha Miles.

Although promised in her patriarchal blessing that she would be married in this lifetime and be the mother of children, Genie turned 39 still single. Demonstrating exceptional patience and humility in her prayers, Genie then met and married the father of seven children. The couple has since adopted two abused teenagers as well. Genie talks about being a stepmother and the challenge of giving up one’s whole will to the Lord. I had polio as a child. To look at me, I don’t necessarily look handicapped, although I walk with a limp and my right arm has a pronounced look about it that is different from normal. It always draws attention. I joined the church at the age of 19. No matter whether a gentleman belongs to the church or not, most men do not care for handicapped women. At least at that time, a handicapped person was considered damaged goods. I did date, but with most guys something always seemed to get in the way. And like most young girls, love and a family were what I longed for. When I got to be in my late-20s I thought, “Well, okay. I’ll focus on the career.” I had a very fulfilling career as a department head for a county library system, but it was not the same joy as raising my own family. My patriarchal blessing told me I would marry in this lifetime and have children. So when that didn’t happen as I thought it should, you can imagine what went through my head: “What have I done to be denied that blessing? What did I do?” I got into my thirties and, as I approached 35, I started resigning myself to the fact that I was going to be single the rest of my life. My hopes and dreams for a family ended. I came to the conclusion that I had really done something bad to screw things up. This created a tremendous spiritual crisis for me. There was a time I did not live by an LDS church building and had trouble finding transportation to church on Sundays. My attendance at church during that time was not consistent, but a new job gave me the opportunity to move to another state. I made sure I was living near a church meetinghouse so that I wouldn’t have the same problem and could be active again. My new home teachers were so kind to me and decided to bring a singles group to my apartment for Christmas caroling the first Christmas in my new apartment. It was then that I saw my future husband for the first time. I was at a point in my life where I was feeling pretty downcast. It seemed clear that marriage wasn’t going to happen for me. I hadn’t been to church consistently in quite awhile which bothered me. I wasn’t living every principle of the gospel in its fullness and felt a heaviness of heart. Eugenia Hancock A distant cousin and I are the only members in my family to join the church. Since I didn’t have a lot of contact with my cousin, I had to figure things out on my own. So I got down on my knees and told Heavenly Father, “I don’t know why I was told in my patriarchal blessing that I would be married in this lifetime and have children and that the Lord would help me know who this person would be. I don’t understand this. I don’t understand what I did wrong to lose that blessing.” I told the Lord that the only thing I knew to do was to pray for the gentleman who was supposed to be my husband. After a lot of tears I prayed, “If this is the result of a transgression that I am not aware of, then I pray for the man I was supposed to marry. I pray that you’ve already given him a wife and family and I ask that those blessings that were meant for me will go to this gentleman and his family.” That was a very difficult thing to do. It’s the toughest thing I’ve ever done in my life – to let go of a promised blessing that was precious and dear to me. And for about a year and a half to two years, that’s what I would pray. During this time, in my new ward, there was a little five-year-old boy named David who latched onto me for some reason. I was waiting for Sacrament Meeting to start one Sunday and David said, “Genie, why aren’t you married?” How do you explain to a five-year-old why at the age of 39 you’re not married? I simply responded, “I haven’t met the man who Heavenly Father has prepared for me.” And he said, “You have too! You’ve met Brother Hancock.” David pointed to a man sitting toward the front of the chapel seated with his children. This little boy did everything he could to connect me with this gentleman. If there was a ward activity, David would take my hand and pull me over to Brother Hancock and get us to talk. But it still didn’t click in me that this was the man I would marry. Personally, I believe Heavenly Father created a conspiracy of sorts as David was not the only one playing matchmaker. I had an aunt and uncle who were always telling me about a man in their area who was perfect for me. I was never given a name. But they mentioned him frequently and gave me updates on his family life. Finally, I had to tell them, “I can’t have you tell me that this man is so perfect for me but that he’s married and has seven children.” I requested that they not say anymore about him. After our first meeting though, it became clear that this was the gentleman whom my aunt and uncle had been talking about all those years. The difference was that he was no longer married. Things happened quickly after that. David didn’t believe us when we announced our engagement and said it wasn’t nice to tease him. However, he became content after he saw my ring and insisted on being in our engagement photo. We were married for all eternity about six weeks later in the Chicago Temple. I was forty years old. I learned that the Lord’s promises are real and are true if we will remain faithful – no matter what our age – no matter what the circumstances. What did you think about his having seven children of his own? I had always wanted a large family so the number didn’t scare me. My attitude was always “the more the merrier” where children were concerned. But I had to confront the ramifications of being a stepparent. My husband’s children ranged in age from about 20 to 9. I knew enough to understand that each age brings its own set of situations – and while I recognized that I was not officially a biological parent, I understood that I would be impacting their lives as much as they would impact mine. Eugenia Hancock What was the greatest challenge for you in accepting this new family into your life? Things happened so quickly for us. My husband and I had met in January, become engaged by the end of July, and married about six weeks after that – all in the same year. It was fast for us let alone for the children. So naturally there was a transition time for all of us. I had never been married before which brought its own set of challenges. Combine all that together with becoming an instant stepparent. It was a joyful roller coaster ride that I wouldn’t trade for the world; but it did bring its moments. I believe we all grew as a result. We survived, but there were times when it was a challenge. I didn’t just inherit stepchildren as part of my new family, I also inherited an assortment of other relatives that played a key role in their lives. Several of the children had not come to terms with the divorce. A couple still wanted mom and dad to get back together. So when Dad remarried, they often directed their anger towards me or acted out in unhealthy ways. I was often reminded that I was the intruder into “their” family. Mostly I got the cold-shoulder treatment or received the “You’re not my mother” sort of thing. But the Lord gave me strength beyond my own. Prayer and a few favorite scriptures got me through. One in particular is from Jeremiah 33:3 : “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.” I clung to that promise that the Lord would answer my prayers and show us great and mighty things with our new family. He did and continues to do so. Eugenia Hancock and Her Husband A challenge came in trying to mesh the parenting style of three adults. I believed strongly that the mother of my stepchildren needed to be treated with respect. I also believed that the children needed to see us all unified – as unified as we could be given the situation. Consequently, if we came to pick up a child at their mother’s house, and that child hadn’t finished the chores their mother had asked them to do, we wouldn’t take them with us. We would send them back to complete what their mother needed done. At times it was difficult, but I believe it was worth the effort and energy. She was the mother of the children and deserved to be treated as such, just as I did not deserve to be treated like the wicked stepmother. During the transition period it was rare to find a time when everyone was happy. We prayed and fasted and fasted and prayed. We explained to the children, “This is the pain of divorce. And this is why it’s so important to make sure you choose your eternal companion carefully. Hopefully you can avoid this.” Oddly, in the midst of all this, I was called by our Stake President to a unique calling: he wanted me to train local leadership on how to help church members who were going through divorce, dealing with stepparenting issues, former spouses, etc. using only articles from the Ensign. The result was a 200-page notebook designed for church leadership. A second notebook on abuse issues was also created. Would you describe the circumstances that led you to take custody of two abused teenagers? We had never tried to prevent pregnancy after we married, but all the medical treatments I had had as a child hindered my fertility. That, coupled with my age, which was 40 when we got married, seemed to close the door for me to have children of my own. Our first came to us when he was 15. I was 52 years old at the time. Over the years we had considered adoption, but for a long time there was an age limit that made it impossible for us to consider it. When that requirement was lifted, and after much praying and fasting, we decided to move ahead – to open our hearts and see if we could adopt. We understood that it might not be an infant, but we felt we could provide a home where love abounded. The day we were to have our first meeting with Family Services, we hadn’t even gotten out of the car when the counselor ran up and told us they had an emergency with a teenage boy, Daniel, who needed to be removed from his home and placed in a safe environment. She asked us if we would be willing to go across state with her to meet him. After the initial meeting, we invited Dan to come to our home for a weekend to see how he would feel staying with us. He came and never left. It was amazing to meet a child who had never seen or tasted jello, who had never had a suit, or who had never slept with sheets. About two years later we got a phone call from Family Services saying they had another teenager in need, a 15 year old girl, and if they didn’t find a safe place for her to live within 24 hours, they would be required to put her into the foster care system. We were not foster parents, but had been been awarded full legal guardianship of Dan. When we got this call, it was Dan who said, “You have to take her. You have to protect her. You can’t let her go into the foster care system.” With just a couple of hours to decide, we held a family counsel. The decision was unanimous and immediate preparations began to make room for our new addition. We were awarded full legal guardianship of her as well. Is Dan still living with you? Dan moved out when he turned twenty. The severe effect of abuse reared its ugly head and he started getting into things that went against his baptismal covenants. It’s one of the sorrows of my life, to be honest. I remember the day he told me he didn’t deserve to be loved and didn’t trust any adult who claimed they loved him. Eugenia Hancock Our second teen is still with us. She is in college and doing well. But I worry for her as I still worry for Dan. She, too, does not always trust authoritative figures and sometimes seeks counsel from inappropriate sources. So I continue to pray trusting the Lord with my petitions. What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned from your life experiences? I’ve learned that the Lord is someone I can rely upon and trust in a very real way. I’ve learned that patience and humility are essential in all our lives. I’ve learned that even though It’s hard to acknowledge my personal weaknesses before the Lord, I need to do so and be specific in my prayers. I have always thought myself to be a good person. But to have to acknowledge to the Lord that I might have lost a promised blessing because I hadn’t been as good as I thought, was a tough thing for me to do. It certainly was the experience of a lifetime… and the blessing of an eternity. At A Glance Location: Genie Hancock Location: Mesa, AZ Age: 59 Marital status: Married Children: Nine(ages 39 – 20) Occupation: Commissioned Artist Convert To Church: 1970 Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “When Faith Endures” On the Web: A website for products featuring my art www.cafepress.com/eshancock Interview by Neylan McBaine. Photos by Amy Fraughton.

Vicki Dalia is the mother of eighteen children, eight of whom are adopted. She also runs a family business and a non-profit orphanage in Guatemala. She sees the hand of the Lord guiding her work helping children. In this interview, Vicki tells of the trials and rewards of establishing the orphanage and offers a helpful perspective on parenting and living a gospel-centered life. How did you discover the Church? My husband and I had been married for just a short while. He was my second husband, and I had a nine-year-old son from my first marriage. And then we very quickly had one child and then a second child together, just fourteen months apart. I decided I needed a mother’s helper to help with two little ones. And I knew our marriage was in trouble. We were fighting a lot. We happened to move to a neighborhood that was a block from a stake center where the missionaries often tracted. And the mother’s helper I hired was a member of the Church. We were impressed with her family. My son, who was then eleven, and I started taking the discussions. And we were baptized six months later, and then my husband was baptized a year later. That was thirty-one years ago. How was the transition to the Church? Well, my husband had grown up Catholic, I had grown up in the Baptist Church. Neither of us had gone to church for quite some time. We were hippies, and we’d been living a hippie lifestyle, which didn’t really form the basis of a good marriage. And all of a sudden we had three children, but our marriage wasn’t strong. Our new membership in the Church satisfied both our need for a religious foundation as well as the family element we needed to strengthen our marriage. We had five children in six years. We both had a lot of baggage we brought with us from our families of origin. Although we went to church and we were mostly active, it took us seven years from when we were baptized to when we were sealed in the temple. So it was a work in progress. But we have been temple recommend holders now for a long time. Our fifth child is on a mission. How did you come to adopt eight children? My husband and I had eight by birth, and I had my son from my first marriage whom my husband adopted. So that was nine children for us. I was forty-one years old, and the doctors told me that I wouldn’t have any more birth children. But we felt like we wanted to raise more children. We had both grown up in unsafe, dysfunctional homes, and we really felt like we wanted to give children an opportunity to have a safe home. We thought at first we would go through the state foster care system, but that didn’t work out because they said we had too many children of our own to adopt through the state. So then we did private adoptions. We adopted black and bi-racial children, and we have a Hispanic Down syndrome child. The oldest of our adopted children is seventeen; the youngest one is four. We actually ended up having one more birth child after that. She’s fifteen. We just like raising children. As the years went by, we finally started having a little bit of money, and that made things easier. We both have worked at home our whole married life so the children have both parents here. Now it’s even better because the business we started that enabled us to work at home is now being run by our oldest daughters, who have their master’s degrees. Were the adoptions from within the States? Were they from other countries? They were in the States. The for-profit business we started from home is AdoptionAdvertising. I have a degree in social work, and I had completed a year of law school before I quit when I married my husband. So I networked and worked with attorneys to find our adopted children and then people started asking me to find children for them. Eventually, we turned those searches into a business. That business has worked really well for us as far as enabling us to work at home, allowing our daughters to go into business with us, and making enough money for us not only to support this large family but a lot of the work we have been doing in Guatemala. How do you balance family, business, and non-profit work? It’s a daily challenge; it is not something that you learn and then you are through with it. You learn because you made a mistake the day before and you say “Okay, I need to focus on my family a bit more tomorrow.” We now have five family members who are employees of our business, so it is a constant, balancing act between being the mother they need and the boss who gets the best out of them. We want to make sure we have a good, ethical, efficient business so our clients will be well pleased, but we also enjoy the family aspects of the business. We still have nine children at home, so they require a lot of attention. For instance, today we spent the first hour and a half getting the kids up, getting them fed, getting them dressed, getting them to the bus. And then my husband and I did our scripture reading, which we do every day to strengthen our relationship. And then we spent about an hour talking about some issues in the business that are challenging right now. We spent another hour and a half dealing with various problems that some of our adult children are having right now, trying to help them out. After that it was time on our program in Guatemala. So it’s a constant balancing act each day, pulling open our day planners and looking at what needs our help the most. And for sure if our kids are having a crisis or need some help, we’re there to help them. But we also are very committed to what we do in Guatemala. If it’s something the children can manage on their own, we’ll tell them, “You know, we have a job here we’re doing, too. It looks like you can handle this issue on your own.” How does the gospel help you in your family life in keeping priorities balanced? I can’t imagine my family life without the gospel. I start out the day with scripture reading and prayer. I take the challenges that I know are going to come up during the day and I take them to the Lord right then. I work hard to live according to gospel principles so that I can receive personal revelation. We feel that Family Home Evening and the principles we teach our children are so important. Do we ever quit needing the gospel? What is an example of a situation where you needed to seek personal revelation? The thing that comes to mind right now is that I have two children in their early twenties. I learned, on the same day, of issues that both of them have—challenges that really knocked me for a loop. They’re adults, and I can’t control their lives, so I struggled with how I could best help them. I became quite depressed. As I prayed about it, the answer came: “Take ten minutes a day to pray about these two children only. And each day you’ll get inspiration on how to help them.” So that’s what I’ve done. And then I’ve followed the direction I’ve gotten during that prayer time, simple things like, “Call this child,” or “Help in this way.” It’s working really well. I am impressed that the Lord can take something that weighed so heavy on my heart, and in just ten minutes a day, I can help them. How did you get involved in the work in Guatemala? Our business, AdoptionAdvertising, started doing well enough where, for the first time in our married life, we had a little bit of extra money. We’re not very materialistic people. Three of our daughters were interested in humanitarian aid missions in college, so we paid for the girls to go to Haiti and work with an orphanage down there. They discovered there was not nearly enough room in the orphanage for all the children, so we donated five thousand dollars for the orphanage to have a much bigger house for a year. We wanted to become more involved, financially and emotionally, but we wanted to have some control over how our money was spent and the organization was run. I started looking online at opportunities in Guatemala. I have two children who went on Spanish-speaking missions, and the third one, Sarah, was getting her master’s degree at Columbia University and spoke fluent Spanish and was looking for a job. At that time, six years ago, we were reading the scriptures in the book of Luke when Christ is talking to Peter, James, and John about making them fishers of men. And for some weird reason my husband and I both at the same time had this inspiration that we were supposed to open an orphanage in Guatemala. Vicki Dalia and Children We hired Sarah when she graduated, to work for our for-profit business as well as become the director of the orphanage work in Guatemala. We located housing and did the legal work, and that was how it started. It became apparent pretty quickly that our new orphanage needed more supervision than we were giving it from our home in Virginia. Our daughters who had been major players in the establishment of the orphanage were starting to get married and have children of their own, and it became more and more difficult for them to go down to Guatemala. So we felt like we were supposed to move down there. And we did. We moved down there with those children we still had at home. We lived there for three years and had some pretty awesome experiences, from good to horrible. We got run out of one place by banditos. It was just a whole different world. But we fell in love with Guatemala. We ended up moving back to Virginia a year and a half ago because six of our adopted children have proven to have special needs. We didn’t have the education in Guatemala that would enable them to fulfill the measure of their creation. And now they’ve been thriving. My husband and I go down to Guatemala every couple of months for a few weeks at a time, with the help of our married children who come in and watch the children who are still at home. Our facility now holds sixty-four children in the orphanage building, but it needs to be bigger than that. We’re in the middle of 1.5 million Mayans, and we do launch feeding programs; we do formula feeding programs; we do nutritional feeding programs; we do tutorial programs where we hire teachers and they tutor the kids three hours a day; we do student scholarship programs. We’re building a clinic right now; we host medical teams, and with the clinic we’ll have our own birthing center so the local women won’t have to give birth anymore on the dirt floors of their shacks. And now we also have seventeen grandchildren under the age of six, so we’ve got to add that part into it, too. We don’t want to miss our grandchildren growing up. What have been some of the most fulfilling things about your work in Guatemala? We take in street children at the orphanage. Seeing their lives turn around–taking in teenage boys who have lived on the street and a year later are passing the sacrament, taking in a family of four children who had been beaten and abused their whole lives and watching the oldest child, a boy, embrace the gospel–those things really mean a lot to me. I mean, I can still cry watching these boys pass the sacrament. Taking in little girls who have been raped, picking them up from the hospital, working with them, knowing that I’m helping children who’ve gone through the same thing that I went through as a child but now they have a place to live where they don’t have to worry about that anymore–those things. A little boy, Samuel, was brought to our orphanage by his parents. He was almost dead. They didn’t have the money to take him by bus into the city to the hospital. Our orphanage director called me and said, “If we don’t help them, this child is going to die within the hour.” And I said, “Give them the money to buy a bus ticket to the hospital.” They took him in. He ended up having spinal meningitis. With the help of the wonderful email support group we have for the orphanage, we were able to raise $2,100 and get him the medical care and the medicine that he needed. Three weeks later he came home. And when I was down there in January I got to meet him and his mom. Watching his mom cry as she thanked me for saving his life, and watching Samuel smile, was really touching. We had a medical team there last week, and the physical therapist worked with Samuel for four days. He hadn’t been able to walk since his illness. But she got him so he could stand, and he took two steps. Those things just mean a whole lot to me. Since going to Guatemala, how has your work there strengthened your testimony of the gospel? Have you continued to see the Lord’s hand in what you’ve been doing? Yes. That’s why I love being down there: I feel the Holy Spirit with me so strong when I am there. Yes, I see His hand. It was Heavenly Father who whispered to me, “I want you to start some feeding programs for the community children because some of them are starving to death.” And so we started the feeding program. We subsequently found out that our gardener’s sister-in-law’s baby died because she had no breast milk and she couldn’t afford formula. We knew that Heavenly Father was talking to us then, prompting us to start the feeding program so more babies like that don’t have to die. “Help this child,” He said. There is no question in my mind that we are doing what the Lord wants us to do. My kids don’t ever question it either. I mean, I’ve been surprised. I have a couple of kids who like their material things and beg for money for this and that. But they never say, “Well, you don’t have to be doing your work in Guatemala. You could be giving that money to me.” All my children are involved with this. It’s just a family project. How do you respond to different models of mothering you see in the church? Where do you fit in? I’m very different in my mothering from the other families in my area. Nobody else has eighteen children. My daughter Erin, who’s almost thirty, had a friend ask her, “How did you get the parental attention you needed when you were growing up with that many children?” And Erin said, “Well, I probably didn’t get as much parental attention as you did, but I got a ton of attention from my brothers and sisters. And we’re really close even today.” And that’s kind of the way it goes. I delegate a lot. My older children help with my younger children. All the older children have chores. Usually we start about age four—well, we start younger than that trying to get them to pick up after themselves—but we start trying to give out assignments like “Clear the table” or something like that when they’re about four or five. They’re not overloaded; I’m talking about half an hour a day during school days. And then we try to do family cleanup for two hours on Saturday if my mental health can stand it that long. It’s very difficult to get nine children to do family cleanup for two hours on Saturday! I know all of the kids’ needs as well as someone who parents fewer children, but I may not be the one who helps them with each of those needs. For example, I have two ten-year-olds that have a lot of homework right now in third grade. And I have a fifteen-year-old who loves to help with homework, so she gets paid to help her sisters do their homework. In another family, the parents might feel they need to be the ones to help with the homework. We just do things a little bit differently. I watch other mothers and learn from what they do. I have attended a million parenting classes. With adoptions you just attend a lot of parenting classes. But I don’t feel like you ever finish learning as a parent. It’s like a continuing process. I watch people at church, or any place else that I am, and think, “That looks cool. Maybe I can incorporate that into my parenting skills.” Or, “They did that really well. Maybe I can tell my daughters about that so they can do it with their children.” What do you do for you, to take care of your needs outside of work? One thing I do is I pay attention to exercise. No matter what else is going on I get thirty minutes on my bicycle every day. Period. I make sure that I eat healthy, that I’m not so rushed that I’m having to stop at McDonald’s for my meals. I love music, and so I take out a week each year where I go to a music camp. I have lots and lots of CDs, and some of my favorite times are the 25 minutes it takes to drive to the bus stop to pick up kids from school. I get that time just to listen to some of my favorite songs. I love to sing, and I take Tuesday nights to jam with a group nearby my home. And my husband and I take a couple of nights every month to collect ourselves from all the chaos that we live in to attend the temple. I think it’s very important for a mother to address her needs. I think she can be a better mother if she takes time for herself. At A Glance Name: Vicki Dalia Location: Guatemala and Virginia Age: 60 Marital status: Married Children: 18 birth and adopted between the ages of 4 and 42 Occupation: Owner and fundraiser for Casa De Sion Projects in Guatemala, when I am not being a mother and wife Schools Attended: North Carolina State University, North Carolina Central Law School Languages Spoken at Home: English, some Spanish Favorite Hymn: “As Sisters in Zion,” “If You Could Hie to Kolob” On the Web: www.casadesion.blogspot.com Interview by Elizabeth Pinborough.