Happy Birthday Avery

Happy birthday to our bright eyed Avery Grace. This year it took courage to stand amongst such a large crowd of more seasoned actors when you tried out for the professional production of Peter Pan. You prepared fervently and you showed up fully, 

hoping to get one of the few kid parts.  You believed you could, but you didn’t get a part. In life this will sometimes happen - you will try your best but you won’t get the part or the grade or the job or whatever it is that you are hoping for. 

What happened next was where I saw your wise strength emerge! You were determined to attend the play and show support. We walked into that theater and you held your head high, you smiled, you clapped, you chose joy for those who DID make it, and you were truly happy that night.

What that told me about you then, and through so many other similar experiences, is that you are confident enough to learn something meaningful in any experience. THAT, to me, is the essence of the words on this t-shirt!

I feel so thankful to have confidence that you will embody what it means to truly believe in yourself. That you will face both triumphs and tribulations in a skillful, healthy and confident way. 

I am so proud of you my happy 13-year-old birthday girl!

Change

Dear daughters,
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Remember that you have the choice to experience yourself and the world anew everyday! As you gain more education and have more life experiences, YOU WILL CHANGE, and that’s a really good thing! Life offers us an incredible landscape through which we have the chance to learn and discover and grow throughout our lifetime. Who you are and how you see yourself in the world is a fluid, evolving and dynamic process. 

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Be deeply thoughtful about the world around you. Surround yourself with people and places and experiences that are supportive of who you are continually becoming. 
Offer space and understanding to others in your life who will also change. 

The desire to keep everything the way it always was can be rooted in fear, and fear has the power to handicap our ability to grow. Part of growing is the willingness to face a brave journey of unlearning - a shedding of cultural conditioning, a releasing of people’s opinions and a letting go 
of inaccurate conclusions we’ve drawn in the past. 

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Continually slow down and tune into your inner wisdom as you face upheaval and change, for this is the beautiful and bumpy road towards expansion. I will stand by your side, with unconditional love, as you bravely embark and evolve throughout your life.
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Love, Mom

The Courage to be Disliked

I was recently eating breakfast with my friend Anna Gertz and she asked me “Leah, what do you feel most proud of recently,” and this is what I shared:

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I am most proud of having the courage to be disliked. 

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When I started my business people told me that I was “deceived.” They said that I’d been “fooled” into joining a multi-level marketing scheme. I was “unfriended” by some and others walked away from me entirely, insisting that I had “changed.” And you know what…that was really okay. 

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I had done the research and I knew I was not deceived. I had this amazing business to offer and I was was not ashamed of that. I accepted that others would tell themselves whatever story about me that they felt they needed to, from their unique lens, but their story wasn’t mine to carry. 

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This business has offered me such abundant gifts, I simply cannot begin to quantify it. Facing the fire of building it has taught me things about myself, and others, that have enhanced my life in profound ways. I am not ashamed about choosing to build a business that has positively impacted so many lives. 

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When I decided to be open and honest about our faith transition people told me I was “deceived.” They said I had been “fooled.” I was “unfriended” by many, while others walked away from me entirely, insisting that I had “changed.” And you know what…that was really okay. 

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We had done the research and we knew were weren’t deceived. We had this life-altering experience to offer that could really help people, and we were not ashamed of it. I accepted that others would tell themselves whatever story about me and my family that they felt they needed to, from their unique lens, but their stories are not ours to carry.

Our faith transition has offered such abundant gifts, I simply cannot quantify it. Facing the fire of being open about it has taught me things about myself and others that have enhanced my life in profound ways. I have no regrets about choosing to publicly share the most difficult transition of our lives, because by choosing to do so we have positively impacted so many lives.

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When I was an infant my father gave me a blessing, in it he said “Leah, you are as strong as a Lion.” I’ve thought about that line, a lot. I think being strong means a lot of things, but in my 37th year of life it meant being willing to risk everything to speak out openly and honestly about a journey that deserves to be shared without shame or scorn. 

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The day this picture was taken I had a slew of wonderful teammates supporting my success and encouraging me along. I felt strong and brave…but the many, many days spent all alone, sitting in this same car, contemplating if I had the courage to be looked down upon by many of the same teammates, by family and friends and by our local faith community, those are the days when my inner lion began to truly roar and I felt a new kind of courage emerge.

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As I look back upon my 37th year of life, I answered to myself. I can home to me. I demonstrated to myself, and to my daughters, that when we choose to listen to our inner compass and act upon it, we will often be required to have enough courage to be disliked, to sit alone, to be unfairly labeled and looked down upon. To me, THAT is a big part of what it means to be as strong as a lion. 

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I have changed, yes, absolutely. I’ve recently felt as strong as a Lion, and perhaps for the first time ever, it truly has nothing to do with what others think about me. 

Having the courage to be disliked has set me free. 

Remembering our Time of Transition

I don't think anyone checks this blog anymore, but I am going to start adding content here for our children to access in the future. Dear daughters, I want you to remember my heart and our courageous awakening as a family - so this is for you - in the future. 

Below is a post that I shared on several post-mormon support forums. In witnessing so many families transitioning, often their number one concern is their children - and so I've made efforts to encourage those families, those mothers, 
with ideas as they move forward.

It’s always been a priority for me and my husband to parent in a deliberate and intentional way and the church felt like a huge part of that equation for us. I always felt the church programs, values and community would make up for my shortcomings - I felt it was like a wonderful safety net. 

Needless to say one of the most terrifying parts of leaving Mormonism, for us, was facing the reality that we would loose the community and structure in which we had been raising our children for fifteen years! We would lay in bed just sobbing, night after night,  about how this was going to affect our children. I simply can’t begin to count how many nights of sleep I’ve lost as my mind races to methodically navigate this huge shift in parenting.  

I have yet to discover a book on “How to rip your kids away from the church and community you raised them in and continue to parent intentionally when your entire framework for life has shattered into a million pieces,” however, over the past year we have picked up the pieces, examined them, and decided which ones we want to keep as we create a new solid and grounded foundation from which to parent. 

Based on many interactions since our Mormon Stories podcast aired, I know that we are not alone in the gripping fear that leaving Mormonism can have on parents raising children. So if you are feeling scared and worried about this, you are not alone!!  After another message today about this parenting dilemma, I thought that there may be an audience for sharing a few tips about how we are now structuring our parenting framework.

I am going to be as concise as possible here, sharing a few of the initial changes we made and a little bit about how we are implementing new teaching methods.

1. Create a family list of CORE VALUES. This advice came directly from John Dehlin during our “freak out” time, and it has been the anchor by which we have framed our new foundation. You can see our list of values in the show notes of our MSP on Mormon stories.com
2. Create folders within You Tube/Facebook/Internet browser titled something along the lines of “to teach our children.” Then go on the hunt for Ted Talks/Documentaries/Lectures/Articles/interviews that have a message that aligns in some way with your families list of core values. The teaching resources available are LIMITLESS! 
3. PODCASTS for them. There are excellent podcasts for children of any age. We love listening to one called Kind World with our kids. There is another great one for kids called Dear Anxiety. Go on the hunt for podcast channels and episodes that align with your families core values. 
4. PODCASTS for you. There are WONDERFUL parenting podcasts, mindful podcasts and masterclasses available on apps like CALM. Learning and growing our own horizons is at the root of teaching our children as we are engaged in becoming the best version of ourselves - whatever that looks like to you.
5. FIND your people. Connect with just a few families who you respect and admire. Ask these adults/children if they would be willing to Skype or join you in person to share a lesson on a core value that you appreciate about them. 
6. Have a book or two on hand near the kitchen table or living room, like Kitchen Table wisdom or Rebel Girls, something with short lessons or stories that align with your core values. 

LIBRARY - so once you’ve done this you will have created a robust “library” of lessons, in a variety of forms, that can help you powerfully drive home your families decided upon core values. These resources are easily accessible in saved folders, you can even create “saved lists” by titles of each core value.  

LEARNING - for our family it works best not to call teaching time anything formal. If we say “okay, family lesson time everyone,” just forget it - we have teens! However, we have family meals, family moments before bedtime, family car rides, and countless other togetherness times where we can just casually open up a book, bring up a topic from our “library” or click play on a Ted Talk. We find the pockets of time and do our best to fill them with intentional conversation around our values. Then we talk, we listen, we ask questions like “what would you do in this situation,” or “what core value does this lesson teach us.” 

Something else we do is highlight the value centered efforts we observe our children making. “Wow Reese, you are really choosing kindness by making breakfast in bed for your sisters.” Or “Brinley, sticking up for that child who was made fun of at school, that really demonstrates what a compassionate and empathetic person you are becoming.” If you watch carefully, there is always something your child or children are doing that is worth praise and acknowledgement. Tying their efforts to your family values helps them identify this structure, this foundation you are creating together as a family. 

In the morning ask them what core value they are going to work on that day. At the end of the day check in and see how it went. Ask them what core values they see in the person they admire or that teacher they respect. What core values do their best friends have? What values can they develop to be safe and loving people for others? 

The conversations are literally limitless. The resources are abundant BEYOND measure! Wrap it all up around the values (not truth claims but VALUES) that you want to center your lives upon and then find time to teach them. 

When you get far enough away from the pain and devastation of your new reality, you may even realize that you are able to be a BETTER parent(s) than you were before. You just may look back and realize that the church didn’t give you as much as you thought it did as a parent. Perhaps you will come to realize that some of it was actually very unhealthy. That’s our story. I absolutely believe that we can be better parents than we were before! I have a deeply rooted belief in US now and in our ability to be even more healthy and grounded as parents than we were before - AND I absolutely believe that YOU CAN TOO! 

I am sure this is long enough for today. I hope some here will find these thoughts helpful. There is so much more on my heart that I may share in time! I have also created a list of 80+ of my favorite books, many of which are parenting books, and I am going to start sharing these once a week on social media. I will hashtag these posts #leahslist.