Monday, November 17, 2008

me and my bad example

this sunday in Relief Society (it's a family ward) I was sitting on the edge of an aisle. this little girl kept walking in circles around and around the set of chairs. she was probably somewhere between one and two years old, a guess i'm basing solely on the fact that she couldn't walk very well. every time she went around the group of chairs she would pass her mother sitting in the front row paying no attention whatsoever to her kid and then she would pass me. over and over and over again. her hands were covered in mushed up nasty gram crackers and each time she stumbled by she would reach her hand towards me to touch me. this of course bothered me, not only because i was wearing a nice dry-clean only dress but because...gross. i would scoot away from her each time in an effort to avoid getting gooed. the woman who was teaching the lesson had been sitting across the aisle from me and her sans-zipper purse was sticking out a little from under her chair. there happened to be a box of colored-pencils in there and when the kid discovered this she clumsily pulled the purse out and removed the pencils. when i glanced up, all the women on the other side of the room were shaking their heads at me, implying that i should stop her from destoying the purse. or the pencils, i don't know. so i took the pencils and put them back in the purse and told the kid that they were not hers. now, anyone who's ever had an interaction with a toddler will know that this was definitly not the end of it. she pulled them out of the purse again, and i replaced them again. then she started kicking the purse, which of course is made of a fragile straw-like material. to get her attention to make her stop i had to touch her. i tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around, looked up at me, and started laughing hysterically. i know, i know, i'm supposed to smile and think 'how cute.' but let's face it, i'm not exactly what you would call a 'good sport'. i just looked at her and said "don't do that," which she obviously didn't understand because she doesn't speak English, and she went back to kicking the purse. to top all of this off, i kept getting rude looks from other women, as though she were my child or something. what am i supposed to do? pick her up? not gonna happen.

so after relief society ended my mom was telling two women about how funny it was when i moved away each time the kid tryed to touch me. they all thought it was funny too and in my defense i told them that i was wearing a nice dress and didn't want to get mushed crackers on it. and then one of them said "well, it's just a part of motherhood."

just a part of motherhood? when did i have kids? oh wait, i DIDN'T. i haven't chosen to get married and pop out babies, which is why i can still buy and wear nice dresses and other clothes with the expectation that i won't get gram-crackered, drooled on, spit up on, or otherwise slimed. this is one of the privledges of being single. let me enjoy it and quit expecting me to take over your role as parent. you're the one who's supposed to get barfed on. not me.

and come on, is it really expecting too much to think that a person should pay a little bit of attention to their kid? or at least clean their kid up before letting it wander around bothering other people and stealing their things? i don't think so, but apparently i'm wrong.

hmm...what else has happened at church lately? oh yes, i was used as a bad example in a talk at stake conference by guess who...a member of the seventy! yes, you read correctly, elder someoneorother came to our stake conference and told everyone that he'd seen a girl on her cell phone right before the meeting he'd attended earlier that morning. he said that when we attend a meeting we should arrive early and sit silently and reflect on the music and the spirit and all that.

so what happened was that he'd spoken at a meeting for just the single adults in the stake, a meeting i attended only because i would get to see lisa and which took place in the relief society room because there are only like 20 single adults in the stake. when we got there we sat in the front row, so we were probably about five feet away from this general authority. also, lisa was no where to be seen. so i texted her. to make sure she was coming. and he saw this. and told everyone about my bad example.

oh come on. yes, maybe it was rude to be texting (before the meeting even started) but isn't it kind of rude for him to assume that what i was doing wasn't important. i mean, what if lisa was inactive? wouldn't it be a GOOD thing that i was making sure she was coming? and let me tell you, when i was a missionary, we were never sitting in the meeting room reflecting on the music and whatnot because we were always on the phone making sure someone was coming to church like they promised they would. so technically, this is a pattern i learned on my mission. aren't those things we're supposed to keep? i thought so.

so you're not supposed to follow my bad example. quit texting at church. and what about me? i'm going to continue texting during meetings, because if i didn't you wouldn't have a bad example to not follow. :)