On Sunday the kids unwrapped some more activities and we spent a lot of time playing games. There was a lot of laid back together time where we all just enjoyed being together. We neglected to take pictures.
We also visited my mom in the morning and after Abe dropped me off at home because I was feeling hot and tired. Abe took the kids to Bridal Veil Falls and they all biked and scootered for a couple hours.
When they came home Abe took a nap and then we all had home church. I joined and discussed Mary’s upcoming baptism with her. I tried to support her decision, affirm her choice, and encourage her to study Mormonism’s sacred texts. It has been a long journey trying to feel at peace with the idea that my children study a white supremacist text and call it scripture, but I had a conversation right before with a dear friend that was helpful. I was so grateful for her courage in engaging the conversation and explaining the ways she reconciles anti-racism with Mormonism. That conversation gave me the clarity and peace I needed to support Mary in her religious path.
While my friend explained to me that she trusts God to resolve all of the tensions between Mormonism and anti-racism, I realized that I am swimming in the exact same murky waters as my friend in the area of childhood education. Although I do not feel racially motivated to send my kids to a private school for the first couple years of their lives, I do recognize that racism and classism make my choice possible. So my hands aren’t clean, and being horrified that my children are actively immersing in white supremacist text is somewhat disingenuous when my own active choices still prop up a racist system.
Even though I feel very alive to the ways I still cave to societal racism, I still did my best to give Mary some general guidelines for a healthy approach to Book of Mormon study. I reminded her that it is not historical so that she can have the mental and spiritual freedom to take the good and to dismiss the bad. Lydia then tossed out several instances of racism in the Book of Mormon and demonstrated her ability to think from her moral center. She referenced conversations where she had the courage to confront her church teachers when they were teaching things that were unnecessarily unkind, and that was very reassuring to me.
She has a heart of pure gold, and so does Mary. At the end of the day, I kind of feel like all of my angst about my kids internalizing racism from church is just a reflection of my own trauma from doing that myself. I trust my kids are smarter and have better hearts than I have, and I trust their good minds and hearts will prevail against anything they encounter that would make their minds and hearts smaller or colder. I also trust that embracing their religious heritage will (hopefully) affect them more positively than negatively. And I truly am proud that Mary made a decision for herself, even though she knows I would not make the same choice myself.
Also, as someone who had a parent who resisted my baptism, I know that resistance would just make her more resolved. Practically, I think loving and supporting and believing in my daughter will do more than fearing continually that she will be led astray.
At the end of the conversation, Lydia thanked God in her closing prayer for our family conversation, and that made me feel so warm and happy. I also can not overstate how grateful I felt to have realized I can trust my kids to make good choices. That felt like an incredibly connective and liberating moment.
After this warm and fuzzy conversation we all had dinner, ate pie together, and played more games until bed time.