Somehow, though I shouldn’t be by now, I’m still sometimes surprised by the little things you guys pick up on. Sometimes I expect comments on the little things I slip in because I put them there purposely to get a reaction, but most of the time I let my word vomit spill out over the screen without giving much thought to how vastly different we all are and the ways I could never imagine you might react to the things I consider commonplace.

The latest example of this manifested in a comment left by one of my favorite e-friends, Cate, on my Thanksgiving post:

Also, gotta say, I found it weird how you put a smiley after the bit about how the women did the washing up while the men relaxed. Does this really make you smile? Did the women do most/all of the cooking too? (I’m not judging, I’m just interested. As I’ve said before, you and I have so much in common, but then some things about our lives and attitudes are so different, it makes me find those differences extra fascinating because of the similarities I think.)

I love Cate because she’s able to call me out on stuff without coming across as rude. I really believe her when she says she isn’t judging me. She acknowledges how different our backgrounds and beliefs are, and it’s true, we are very different. But then we also have lovely similarities that make me hope we can meet up for elevenses someday with our babies and compare notes.

But to answer her question…

This year for Thanksgiving TH and I were given three different assignments, to bring sparling cider, a dish made with green beans, and a pie. I went out shopping for all of the ingredients and bought the Martinelli’s all by myself*, came home and prepared them all without any help from TH (a process that took several hours), and washed all of the dishes after it was all over. Although I do not know for sure, I imagine the experience was similar for my cousin in regards to the amount of participation her husband had with dealing with the food and planning of a holiday meal for 12. Her husband did carve the turkey, but I don’t think that would satisfy many in a discussion like this about gender stereotypes and assumptions of female roles as that is a job typically deferred to the man of the house. (Presumably because it involves meat and knives(?))  The other two women in the group were single so they did not have husbands to ask for help. When the meal was finished the women gravitated toward the kitchen with handfuls of dishes and began rinsing and drying while the men made their way to the game room to watch football or the living room to sit and talk.

Source

When laid out in such a simplistic manner, life looks rather unjust for the women, does it not? If only life were so simple!

We stayed at my cousin’s house for about 5 hours on Thanksgiving day, and then we drove home and TH sat on the couch and began to work. He worked through the evening, through the night (first night of no sleep), through the next morning, through the afternoon, through the evening, through the night (second night of no sleep), got up and went and took the GMAT (scored 10 points better than his previous score!), came home and worked through the rest of the day, into the night, slept 4 hours or so, got up and went to church for 3 hours, came home and worked through the afternoon and late into the night once again. He stumbled into bed a few hour after midnight, the first time we had slept in the same bed for several days, even though we had been in each other’s presence the entire time. Periods of non-stop work like this present every few months, the rest of the time he pulls 60-80 hour work weeks on a regular basis.

What does my life consist of? I sleep in as long as I want. I spend hours and hours each week writing posts for That Wife and Jenna Cole. My “job” consists of doing something I absolutely love, creating photographs. I’ve made no money so far, only spent it at a very rapid pace.

So yes, I may seem oppressed because all of the household responsibilities are on me. I do the cooking, the cleaning**, the laundry, take out the trash, vacuum (sparingly), the grocery shopping, and all other typical housewife duties. But my husband works himself into the ground to put food on the table, a roof over our heads, clothes on our bodies, fancy cameras in my closet, and all of the other things we need/want in life. If not being the one who has to work for “the man” means I have to make a pumpkin pie from scratch all on my own and then clean up the dishes afterward please sign me up!

I have 6 aunts that I grew up seeing on a regular basis (we all lived in the same state for much of my childhood so getting together for many different occasions throughout the year wasn’t very difficult). Though things are a bit different now, as most of my cousins are out of the house or old enough to care for themselves, when I was younger I believe all of them were primarily SAHMs***. My mother worked outside the home when my parents were first married because they were dirt poor, but through much of my childhood she did not. I believe it was the same for most of my cousins. Most of these women are married to farmers, men who work themselves tremendously hard from March-October. During the busiest times at harvest/planting I was lucky to see my dad for 30 minutes in a day, as he would be up around 5 am, eat breakfast before I left, eat lunch on the tractor, and come home to scarf down dinner before heading back out again to work late into the night. My paternal grandfather is over 75 years old and still puts in many hours every week driving back and forth between central Washington and northern Oregon to care for his ranch. My maternal grandfather is over 70 and still works all day every day running his dairy. In my family, the men work hard, and the women can see that. Though caring for children, digging through mountains of laundry, endless rounds of putting food on the table and cleaning the mess up again can be exhausting and frustrating, the women are still the ones who manage household affairs, almost exclusively. When it comes time for Christmas celebrations, Thanksgiving dinner, or family reunion potlucks, they do the planning, the cooking, and usually the cleanup.

If you were to show up and look at Thanksgiving or Christmas as an isolated experience, you might see what the women do and how the men act, and judge the entire thing as unfair and in need of change. But when you back away and see my uncle baling hay all day and all night to get it in before the rain comes, my grandpa herding cattle in the oppressive heat and the biting cold, my dad bouncing back and forth between running his business and managing the harvest of acres of land from July-October, my own husband pulling back-to-back all nighters because his manager paged him once again with a request that has to be fulfilled by an early morning meeting,  I think it’s a little bit easier to understand why we women aren’t complaining about our lot****.

With these experiential examples noted I must add my religious beliefs to the mix as well. The LDS Church is very clear in its declarations concerning the roles of men and women in the home. The importance of having children is well understood by members and so when one marries the usual assumptions concerning parenthood revolved around “when” not “if”. In a letter written by the Church leadership the roles of mother and father are clearly outlined:

By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners.

Whether it is because of my own familial background or because of my religious belief system I watch each Thanksgiving go by with the women doing most of the work. And when I joined the world of adulthood I rolled up my sleeves and happily learned about the perfect mashed potatoes and what not to do when attempting to make one’s first batch of homemade rolls. I may grumble and slap a few pots on the counter with unnecessary force during the cleanup, but somewhere inside of me there will be the memory of 5-month pregnant Jenna, the night after the night after Thanksgiving 2009, stumbling to the bathroom for her 3 am visit to the porcelain throne to relieve her aching bladder. She’ll glance over and feel a pang of grief at the sight of her sleep-deprived husband on the couch for yet another night, scrambling to get his slides polished before the sun comes up and his boss comes a callin’. That Jenna, even with her swollen ankles and bursting bladder, with a body working so hard to grow their baby, knows that a few dishes and yet another load of laundry are the least she can do to try find the balance necessary to make a marriage work.

*It should be noted that TH has been walking with a cane for several days now, and was relying on it heavily around Thanksgiving so it’s possible I could have sent him out for stuff if he had been well, although I don’t think that would have been the case.

**TH was the last one to clean our bathroom though and he did a superb job. I love him.

***Stay At Home Moms

****I admit we do complain. My mom complained. I complain. It’s still hard not to feel under-appreciated, or get caught up in the “my role in this relationship is just as hard as yours game”. But I’m not fighting to switch places with him or lessen my workload by adding more to his (at the moment, things will change when the baby comes and he has been sufficiently warned). Our workloads are currently not even close to being balanced in their current state.

Today marks the first of what I know will be many wedding anniversaries for us. How do I know? Because we aren’t going to make it happen. We aren’t soul mates. We were never “meant to be”. We chose this, and we are going to continue to choose to make it work for the rest of our lives and beyond.

I’ve written a lot about our wedding, 29 posts to be exact. If you want a detailed summary of the entire experience visit my last post about the wedding experience and scroll down to see a list of links to all of my recap posts.

For this anniversary post I went through a few thousand photos (literally) and chose 5  that describe some of my favorite moments of the day.

I can remember the way I felt at our “first look” so clearly. The endowment ceremony and time together in the celestial room the day before had been so calming. Everything felt so right, and we couldn’t stop smiling at each other. I was so sure I wanted to be with him forever.

This was moments after we walked out of the temple as husband and wife. Right behind the camera stood a ring of our closest family and friends, clapping and cheering and waiting to come forward to hug us. We really did it! We were married!

I hadn’t placed a lot of importance on making sure we got a classic temple shot, but now I’m so glad we did. A year later and the scaffolding  on the spire doesn’t bother me at all. Pretty golden Moroni can still be seen and it’s truly what is inside that matters. Our sealing in the temple means absolutely everything to us. It gives us an eternal perspective when marriage is hard. It’s what will keep us from ever giving up.

The first dance was just one of the many my new husband showed me how much he cared about me, and what he was willing to do to make me happy. He took some lessons with me, practiced with me, and on our wedding day he got up and performed in front of everyone. One year later and he still continues to make sacrifices for me and for our marriage.

I think this photo describes the way we approached our marriage in the beginning. We jumped in head first, giving it everything we had and learning a few tough lessons along the way. I love my husband ten times more today than I did that night, and I expect that love to grow exponentially each year. When we welcome the baby into our lives next April we’re going to have to work even harder to keep our marriage strong, but I think we’re up for the challenge.

I chose him. He chose me. We’ll continue to choose each other, eternally.

Tonight we will be sleeping here:

Eating this:

For dinner…

.
La Duni Restaurant

And at the hotel….

with cheesy crispy crackers from Whole Foods

cake from Society Bakery

And celebrating doing this 1 year ago:

Yes, we’re a bit early, but for us it’s not about celebrating an exact day, more about taking time out of our lives to celebrate, just the two of us, at least once a year around this time. TH still had some of those free hotel nights expiring at the end of this month (the ones I’ve been using for all of my travels lately) so we booked a night at the W in Dallas for a relatively inexpensive yet luxurious feeling escape. We’re planning on checking in, going to dinner, spending the rest of the night playing relaxing in our room, and then sleeping in the next morning before we head to the temple for the afternoon.

I can’t think of a better way to celebrate our marriage. I hope it happens like this every year from now on.

Tomorrow I’m meeting up with a fellow LDS photographer who just moved here from Utah. She takes beautiful pictures like the one below and I secretly want to be just like her. Except now I wrote it on the blog so it’s not a secret anymore. Her name is Bethany Jackman and she actually knows Kelli Nicole from BYU. It’s a funny little Mormon world we have.

I would post a picture of her but someone recently stole her identity and copied all her photos and pretended to be her on their own blog. It was incredibly creepy and now she has disabled right-clicking on her personal blog, which I completely understand. So maybe I’ll take her picture tomorrow so you can see how darling she is. Or maybe she’ll let me post a link to her personal blog, but I’m not going to do that yet since she just had her identity stolen.

I’ve told TH many times that I’m incredibly excited about this meeting because I’m secretly hoping that we as a couple will become best friends with her and her husband. They are both LDS. They plan on moving around a lot. She’s a photographer, she’s having a baby, she loves blogging, she has a photography blog and a personal blog. So far all I know about her husband is that he graduated from BYU with a Masters in Information Systems, but that just so happens to be the exact same degree that TH earned as well. This is a couple match made in heaven, right?

TH has been rather skeptical about the idea of finding a couple for us to be BFF with because the two of us are so different. The women I click with have spouses that just don’t do it for him. The men he likes most will have a spouse that just doesn’t have interests that line up with mine. I think this is a thing that all newlywed couples struggle with, finding not just one friend, but a matched pair. Yes, girls nights are possible. And he can spend time with the guys. And we have been to dinner parties and game nights and gone out to movies with couples, but that connection between wife&wife and husband&husband hasn’t been easy to find.

Sunday night we found the first couple that we both think will be a good fit for us. She loves photography and I’m encouraging her to launch her own business in the near future. I want her to design a website for me and teach me about couponing. He wants to be retired yesterday, just like my husband, which was reason enough for TH to want to talk to him all the time. The wife and I are thinking that getting them together might not have been such a good idea, since they both seemed to spend the majority of their time talking about how to make our grocery, household and personal spending budgets even smaller than they already are.

Tomorrow I’m hoping I’ll meet up with the wife of BFF couple #2. No pressure for Bethany or anything.

I wish I could embed this. Alas, Wordpress doesn’t believe in iframes although Google loves them, and the two can’t seem to agree. The quotes in the slideshow are all unaltered, but the media experience isn’t quite the same. I was able to embed two video clips that I wasn’t able to insert previously (the magic of advancing technology!), and I added in two text quotes to go under the pictures that used to have audio quotes under them. You’ll get the basic idea. I created this for TH somewhere around February of 2007.

He mentioned the reasoning behind it, but I thought I would refresh your memory. We were best friends, spending all of our time together (my roommates couldn’t figure out where Jenna had gone all the sudden), but neither of were dating. I wasn’t dating because I was overweight. He wasn’t dating because he chose not to (and figured he could just marry after he retired at 40), and it was killing me that this fantastic guy who I had such a huge crush on was acting like he wasn’t even going to consider dating me. So I started working on breaking down his “marriage isn’t for me” mentality. I knew it was risky, because it might mean he would decide to start dating, date someone else, and then marry them, but he was graduating and moving to Texas soon so I knew I only had once chance to give it a try. One thing he established very early on in our relationship is an unwavering belief in modern day prophetic counsel, meaning if a prophet of the LDS church declared it as doctrine or a sound warning, he would obey. So I began combing LDS.org, looking for every single quote on marriage I could muster. I didn’t look for secular statistics because that wasn’t what this discussion was about. I was arguing that our belief system stated that family is of the utmost importance, and that God would not take his decision to delay marriage deliberately lightly.

After viewing it one more time, I wondered if showing this to you was going to be a good thing. You are inevitably going to have questions about the LDS church’s attitude toward those who do not marry.  In 2007 it was quoted by a prominent church leader that 1/3 of adult members of the church are single. There is a place for singles in the church, although it cannot be denied that a large part of our belief system is based upon the idea of reaching for exaltation, a state of being that neither man can reach without the woman, and woman cannot reach without the man. As I explained in previous Sunday posts, we believe in not just life after death, but eternal progression, which provides hope to those who never have the opportunity to marry in this life.

Singles have been told by church leaders:

Some of my closest and most admired friends have never married in this life. One of my mother’s dear friends, who served as her counselor in the stake Relief Society presidency, was a retired lieutenant colonel from the United States Army. She was a beautiful, cultured, intelligent woman whose encouragement was of great value to me and many others. She died with faith and poise, having earned a great reward. I know she yet will have an experience equivalent to that enjoyed by women in choice mortal families. No joy, priesthood ordinance, or family experience will be denied her.

Think of all who have been cut off from life in infancy, in war, or through disease. Heavenly provision is made to ensure that they will enjoy all the fruits of the gospel.

If it begins to appear that you will not have the opportunity to marry, continue to be active in good causes, to develop your talents, to improve your mind, to love and serve your friends, and to stay strong and secure in your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Be active in the Church. Elder John K. Carmack

This post isn’t about singles in the church, it’s about the marriage powerpoint, but I knew that I would get several comments about how hard this doctrine is if I didn’t address it right now . It’s important to remember that I compiled these quotes for a singular purpose, to convince That Husband (then That Boy), that he needed to start dating. I dug for the most intense hard-hitting quotes I could find so I could prevent him from making any more excuses. It worked!

This is getting really long, and you’ve probably clicked over to see the powerpoint already, but I’m going to share one more quote with you, that I really think sums up what I believe is the LDS viewpoint toward finding someone to marry:

… “Soul mates” are fiction and an illusion; and while every young man and young woman will seek with all diligence and prayerfulness to find a mate with whom life can be most compatible and beautiful, yet it is certain that almost any good man and any good woman can have happiness and a successful marriage if both are willing to pay the price. …

Two individuals approaching the marriage altar must realize that to attain the happy marriage which they hope for they must know that marriage is not a legal coverall, but it means sacrifice, sharing, and even a reduction of some personal liberties. It means long, hard economizing. It means children who bring with them financial burdens, service burdens, care and worry burdens; but also it means the deepest and sweetest emotions of all. Spencer W. Kimball

I showed him the powerpoint. We talked. We dated. We weren’t soul mates. We were willing to “pay the price.” We married. We’re happy.

Click Here to View the Powerpoint that Snagged Me a Husband

LDS readers,

Don’t you just LOVE this line from President Kimball:

I shall feel sorry for this young man when the day comes that he faces the

Great Judge at the throne and when the Lord asks this boy:

“Where is your wife?”

When I presented this to That Husband (we sat down together and went through it in my kitchen at the Yellow Brick House at BYU, a cute little place located right behind Brick Oven) I remember saying “Spencer pities you if you consciously decide not to marry. He PITIES you.” Haha, I think it really got to him.