Exponent II's Blog, page 41

Midwives Belong in our Nativities

I collect a few things: Beatles records, broadway playbills, mugs, and nativities.

Every year, I unpack my nativities from the Christmas boxes and set them up around my house. Seeing them brings me joy during the holiday season. Even my children love to take them out and fight over who gets to set up which one.

My nativity collection has grown to over twenty different sets, all in a gorgeous variety of mediums, colors, and origin. I particularly love to collect nativities from different places around the world. My in-laws sent me several from Africa; my brothers each brought me one from their missions in Ecuador and Italy; I’ve picked them up on islands at cruise ports. If a friend or family member travels abroad, I always ask for them to look out for a nativity for me.

I have nativities with fat Target birds, Little People toys, even giraffes and zebras.

But not a single one, from anywhere in the world, has any women besides Mary.

There’s always shepherds, their animals in all kinds of varieties, Joseph, angels. The Wise Men didn’t even come for days, or possibly years, after Christ’s birth but they still get to be part of the nativity display.

According to scripture, no women came to attend a birth of a first-time mother, who may have been as young as 14 years old, in a time before hospitals and meal trains.

I find this impossible to believe.

Women had to have been there. Midwives had to have been there. But like so many other places in scripture, the women are simply erased or ignored in the narrative.

Let’s back up.

The New Testament tradition begins the story of Christ’s birth with Caesar Augustus declaring a tax or census. The text states that all were required to travel to their ancestral homeland for this accounting. However, scholars have pointed that this isn’t backed up with historical data. For starters, the census of that era, the Census of Quirinius, took place 6 CE, approximately 10 years after Christ’s likely birth. Second, there’s no evidence of residents being asked to return to their ancestral land. It doesn’t make much practical sense either; disrupting a wide region for people to travel back and forth in a time period where walking was the main form of travel would’ve caused major issues for economy and trade.

Biblical scholar Dan McClellan discusses how most likely Luke 1 & 2 containing the story of the nativity was written by another author after the rest of the book had already been written. The idea of the census and having to return to Bethlehem was possibly an invention by this author or old tradition in order to correlate Jesus’s birth with prophecies from earlier scripture about the birthplace of the Savior.

Either way, Mary most likely gave birth around family members or friends that she was familiar with. There would’ve been no reason for her to be alone during her travail. Even if they did have to travel for a census, Joseph would’ve brought them to a family home, which leads to the next part of the narrative.

The story goes on that Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room for them in the inn. We’ve all seen the depictions of Joseph leading a donkey carrying Mary from inn to inn, only for each door to be slammed in his face until someone takes pity on them. However, this tradition most likely came about from mistranslations.

The Greek word kataluma has been translated as inn, when it was much more likely to be used to mean upper room. An entirely different word would’ve been used to describe an inn full of strangers. Instead, the upper room refers to the top floor of a Palestinian home around the 1st century. The family slept and ate upstairs in a large upper room. A lower, ground floor room was used for every day living and cooking, and was also where they brought in their animals at night. The lower room would’ve been filled with straw and also had a trough for feeding the animals.

Cross-section of a first century Palestinian home with an upper room.

Jesus was most likely born among animals because there wasn’t room for Mary to give birth in the upper family room above. This could’ve been because there were too many visiting family members staying in the home. Or, in my opinion, the author of Luke 2 just wanted to make sure Jesus was placed in a manger to further fulfill prophecy.

Either way, Mary gave birth in a family home. Not a lonely stable or cave. She would’ve been surrounded by family members—and yes, women! The women around her would’ve have followed the standard protocol for births during this time period.

Midwives would have attended the birth. They would’ve prayed over and blessed the mother and child, along with working to safely deliver the baby and performing aftercare. Men were absent from birthing world during this time.

It was women who helped Mary be as comfortable as possible as she struggled. They held her hand through contractions and assured her when the pain became too much. They welcomed the baby into the world, guiding Him from the birth canal, and were the first to hold Him. They cleaned up the blood and buried the afterbirth. They swaddled Him and placed Him at His mother’s breast. And perhaps also in a manger.

(I want to stop and make a quick note that not all Christian traditions believe that Mary gave birth the same as other women. Some believe in a divine C-section, a bloodless birth, a painless birth, and/or that she remained a virgin even after giving birth. I understand that within those traditions, the presence of any other person to aid Mary might not have been necessary. I greatly respect these beliefs. For this post, I’m approaching the story of Christ’s birth from the Christian perspective I was raised with, which didn’t include Mary’s divinity.)

Throughout my life as a Mormon, I’ve heard many times in church classes and over the pulpit people wondering how Mary did it. How she gave birth all alone. I’ve heard all kinds of theories on how this happened too: angels told Joseph what to do; Mary just blacked out and the baby came out; the Holy Ghost was some kind of pain medicine for her. But usually, I hear both men and women suggesting that Mary simply went through the entire process alone and amazingly, no complications or issues arose.

I suppose that could be true.

But I think it’s far more likely that God helped Mary through the birth by simply calling women to her side.

Isn’t that how most of our own prayers are answered and miracles performed? It’s through others who come to serve and help us in our times of need that we feel God’s hand in our lives and Their love.

Maybe we can look back on the author of Luke and admit that he, like so many other men, just erased the women from the story because they didn’t fulfill his rhetorical goals. Those women were simply cut from the narrative, deemed unimportant or uninteresting or unnecessary in a patriarchal world.

I think it’s finally time to reclaim these women, untold and hidden from the pages of the Bible.

Women were present at the birth of the Savior. They belong in our nativities. They deserve to be on displays. Their hands safely brought Christ into the world. We wouldn’t have a child to celebrate at Christmas without them.

We should talk about them openly. Discuss them with our families as we set out nativity sets and read the Christmas story. State their role as God’s miracle workers over the pulpit. And the more we acknowledge the role of women in Christianity’s past, the more we’ll see women’s value in Christianity’s present.

*This post was originally posted on my substack with the title “While Midwives Watched”*

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How We Teach Polygamy is Contributing to Modern-day Sex Abuse

The LDS church is becoming more forthright with its history of polygamy. Going away are the hand wavy stories about it being primarily for widows who lost their husbands crossing the plains (because somehow God couldn’t think up a church welfare program to feed and clothe the single moms that didn’t require them to also have sex with their priesthood leaders). This past week the church released a new section on their website called “Plural Marriage: Faith to obey a law from the Lord, even when it’s hard” for kids, a rather whitewashed version of history complete with cartoon images, as if this was all a fun children’s story instead of systematic and institutionalized sexual abuse of women and girls.

To anyone who has previously gone down the rabbit hole of polygamy, this particular retelling will sound a bit absurd. If you don’t have the energy to read the whole cartoon story right now, I’ll summarize it for you.

It (basically) says: “Joseph Smith was reading the Bible and didn’t understand why some prophets had multiple wives, so unlike the many other barbaric biblical practices of rape, incest, genocide and slavery, he decided to ask God if he was supposed to do it, too.

It was really hard for Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. They didn’t want to collect women into their eternal harems via a loophole in the law of chastity that commanded them to sleep with dozens of women and girls other than their legally and lawfully wedded wife, but they reluctantly obeyed.

Joseph was sometimes commanded by God to command other men to give him their own wives, but the prophet’s heart was moved with compassion for his brethren when he saw the pain polygamy caused these men. Concerned for them, he would permit them to give him one of their teenage daughters instead.”

Actually, I quit. You get the idea! If you want to read it go to the church website for the official version – it’s very short. The main gist is that early church leaders didn’t come up with the idea, they were super reluctant to do it, and also…let’s not talk about any details.

Below are some clips from the story. It’s genuinely wild how much is left out.

This type of explanation for predatory behavior works literally nowhere else, and when you hear it in a slightly different context it is absolutely horrifying. For example: 

Serial killer Ted Bundy was reading his scriptures one day when he noticed how many men of God were called to murder people. Nephi reluctantly killed Laban, Ammon had to violently cut off the arms of men and watch them bleed to death in complete agony, and Noah watched all of his friends drown in terrifying watery deaths. Why did God want his prophets to be so comfortable with gruesome death?

Ted decided to pray and ask God about this question. 

God told him it was right and necessary that those prophets killed people, and asked Ted if he would be willing to do the same. Ted didn’t want to kill anyone, but he trusted in God and killed dozens of women anyway. 

People didn’t always understand that it was God who had called him to be a killer, and they persecuted him. When he was arrested, faithful members of his branch wrote him comforting letters as he suffered in jail.

(Psst – did you know that Ted was baptized into the LDS church during his killing years, and people in his branch turned out to support him when he was arrested? This is an actual card his branch members sent to him to encourage him when he was taken into custody. Just because faithful members support a person in jail doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be in that jail! (From the Netflix documentary “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes”.) Anyway, continuing on…)

Ted was martyred by those who didn’t understand his calling and hated him.

Ted didn’t want to hurt all of those women, but he was obedient and did what God told him to do – even though it was hard for him.” (Notice how uncomfortable this type of explanation sounds when used for literally anything else.)

Worst of all, guess who takes advantage of the church’s unwillingness to call out the sex abuse of women and girls by its early prophets? Modern day sexual predators in the church!

I unfortunately once associated closely with a convicted sex predator as a student at BYU almost 25 years ago. He was a recent convert in my freshman ward who’d joined the church after his Mormon high school teacher taught him about obscure early church history – including polygamy. My ward (full of inexperienced teenagers) mostly saw him as kind of quirky and embraced him as a new convert with a non-supportive family. I felt bad for him and his difficult childhood, and even accompanied him as his moral support when he paid a surprise visit to his father who had abandoned him as a child. He was already an expert at grooming and manipulation by the time he left to serve his mission. I eventually cut him out of my life but still feel the scars of my own association with him almost 25 years later.

Around the age of 28 he was married, graduated from BYU, living in another state and about to finish law school when he was arrested in Utah County (where I lived). One day a free newspaper arrived in my mailbox and as I tossed it onto my kitchen table his mugshot stared up at me from the front page, taking me by surprise. He’d been arrested after flying to Springville to meet a 15 year old girl for sex. He’d begun communication with her when she was 14 and had been out to Utah to visit her before, but this was the time he was caught.

She was a Mormon girl in Utah, and he was an older married man in Illinois. How did he convince her it was okay? By telling her that Joseph Smith also married 14 and 15 year old girls! He’d convinced her he loved her and promised to marry her in the temple someday. My heart shattered for that girl (who is a woman in her late twenties now). She was a child dealing with an adult psychopath who used her youth, religious beliefs, and the abhorrent history of Mormon church leaders to manipulate her into fulfilling his predatory sexual desires. 

This man was convicted of sex abuse and went to prison for years. I looked him up on the internet and found him with a big smile in his current sex offender registry photo, as if it was a dating profile image. I resisted the urge to chuck my phone across the room when I saw his face. He does not seem to be ashamed of what he did at all. And why should he? He was just following the prophet, after all. 

This man is not the only one to be drawn to the church because of its teachings about polygamy or who has used it to victimize women and girls. There are countless news stories of seminary teachers abusing girls in their classrooms, bishops and young women in their ward, and even a mission president who convinced several sister missionaries they were called to be his plural wives. My friend Kristy Money is a psychologist who worked in the prison system rehabilitating sex offenders. She’s written op-eds in the Salt Lake Tribune on the topic of polygamy and sex abuse, such as “LDS history of polygamy still used to victimize women” and “LDS Church should make clear Smith was wrong to take 14-year-old wife” because of what she experienced professionally. 

Why are modern church leaders so reluctant to disavow something as obviously wrong as adult married men secretly courting underage girls? Why is the safety of young girls a sacrifice they’re willing to make to protect the reputations of men who have been dead for 150 years? Unfortunately, the only answer I can come up with is the obvious: if they admit their predecessors were wrong about polygamy, they’ll finally have to admit that they can be wrong about things, too.

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Refrigerator Rescue

Read by author

You could say I’m a people pleaser. (Only if you want! No worries if it doesn’t work for you!) 

I realized it was a problem while trapped by a fridge. 

As a people pleaser, I’m embarrassed to even mention that it happened while redoing my kitchen. I know it’s silly to talk about a home remodel as if it matters, and you might say being trapped under a fridge was exactly what I deserved (for sure! I totally agree!). But, look — I had a flood, insurance would pay for part of it, my friend was a designer, and the whole thing just spiraled from there. And despite my escapade, I certainly wouldn’t want to complain about a contractor who was just trying to do his job — my home looks beautiful now, in spite of it all. 

Said contractor had delivered and plugged in the new cabinet-front fridge that day and his workers had told me it was all secure; in retrospect, I think they were probably in a hurry and everyone thought someone else had screwed it into the cabinetry. I began to put in food while listening to Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More audiobook, thinking about all the codependent people I knew who really should read it.

I’d put in one bag of grapes and lifted a gallon of milk into the door cubbies, when all eight feet of Thermador fridge suddenly swayed forward, then tilted, then teetered, then toppled around me.

Both doors caught mercifully on either side of me, resting on the just installed island, but the empty drawers sprang out, pelting me as I shrieked. 

One part of me immediately blamed myself for misinterpreting the installers when they said, “It’s ready — you can put your food in it,” and actually putting food in my fridge. (So sorry — I must have heard them wrong!)

Another part of me hoped my family would lie in my obituary, because a true obituary would have been too embarrassing.

Another part of me hoped my family would lie in my obituary, because a true obituary would have been too embarrassing. I imagine now what they might have written: Amanda Erdmann, aged 38, died alone at home, pathetically crushed underneath a fridge she only picked out because her fancy aunt had had one in her house and she wanted people to think she was fancy too. 

I got that far before I decided if I could think about my own obituary, I probably wasn’t actually dying and could stop screaming. 

The plastic drawers weren’t heavy, and I wasn’t outwardly harmed, but I was still in a predicament. The fridge weighed too much for me to tilt it back. Any attempt to shift the fridge did not budge it, but sent the drawers careening back into me instead. And, I wondered, could my just-installed island actually hold the tremendous weight without cracking or collapsing? What would I do if it couldn’t? 

My future obituary writes itself: Amanda, though pleasant, worried too much about what other people thought. She had known her fridge was available to be installed for months, and instead of speaking up, had traveled out to the garage for food and used a Costco folding table all summer long because she didn’t want to inconvenience the contractor she was pretty sure she was overpaying to ignore her home and leave it mostly unfinished, with exposed framing and nails sticking out of the walls, poking her kids’ bare feet and tearing holes in her sweaters. The contractors only returned after she sent a very plaintive email where she tried to represent both how long-suffering she was and also how long she had suffered. When they apologized, she immediately apologized right back (as one does).

I began calling or texting people from the relative safety of my fridge teepee: my husband, the contractor, my friend who’d designed the new kitchen. All were too far away to be useful. There was one person working in the garage on a separate project, but he did not hear either my screams of terror or shouts for help. No one else was home; no one could rescue me. I thought I would likely be stuck there until the contractor whose miscommunications had caused this problem would return whenever was convenient for him, and I would say how embarrassed I was to have given any trouble and how I hoped it wouldn’t affect our working relationship, and how I had survived perfectly fine on the grapes and milk that had fallen on me (thanks so much for asking!).

While I waited for no one to save me, I relived moments where I had rescued others before myself, often paralyzing myself to avoid confrontation: Amanda tried to make sure everyone liked her all the time. Once, after a boy punched her in the face at school, she brought him cookies. Another time, a girl called her a brat when she was in charge of a group project, and she decided never to run for any office, though she was voted most likely to become president by her senior-class peers. At some point, she decided that in order for everyone to like her, other people’s needs would just always be more important than her own. So being crushed by an external weight feels a fitting death for Amanda, after all. May she rest in peace, knowing that at least she never disappointed anyone.

I don’t know how long I would have stood there encircled by fridge doors if my doorbell hadn’t rung. When it did, after either five minutes or fifty years, I looked around me and realized I wasn’t trapped after all. There was a gap between the doors resting on my island and the floor, where the freezer drawer had not opened. All I had to do was duck down, crawl out, and I would be free.

But, and I cannot stress this enough, the real reason I rescued myself was not because of my own ingenuity, courage, or clear-headedness. Not at all.

It was because I did not want to keep the person at the door waiting.

The visitor was the man working in my garage, asking for a stepladder. “Of course! I can get that for you right away,” I said, my voice wobbling. “I’m sorry I’m emotional, but I thought I was going to die underneath a fridge. I was screaming for help but no one came, and I’m a little frazzled.” He shrugged, took the ladder, and went back to work, with almost no comment.

As the relief of my own escape settled, I sat in my room, shaking and crying in delayed shock. My husband came home furious and yelled at the contractors, “I just thank the Lord my wife wasn’t killed by your incompetence.” He disputes now that he yelled; I admit it may have only sounded like yelling to ears overly attuned to conflict. Even then, I was embarrassed that he was speaking in a way that might hurt their feelings — I still had to see them, after all, and we needed the work done, and would they still do a good job even if we said they had been negligent? What if they stopped liking us?

Amanda’s house never did get finished, because the contractor took offense when her husband yelled at him, and Amanda in turn, died of embarrassment from it, instead of from the fridge. Without Amanda doing everyone’s laundry, the house fell into squalor and filth. Eventually the children left home and became itinerant vagabonds while her husband languished away, as he always said he would, like the dog in Where the Red Fern Grows.

I don’t know exactly when I began to see the refrigerator as a symbol of my unhealthy desire to be liked. But as the months have gone on, I have learned that the weight of it can become truly too heavy to shift or push back off of me. I feel exhausted by days when I rearranged my own life to swoop in and help other people, offering furniture, housing, hours of time, when often others were perfectly capable of helping themselves. I feel overwhelmed by the moments I let it become my responsibility to save friends or family, fix their problems — not because I wanted to love God, feed the hungry, or clothe the naked — but so I wouldn’t have to confront their ordinary disappointment or dislike. And yet, in spite of the heaviness and exhaustion, the only person who can actually free myself from this Thermador fridge of other people’s needs is. . . myself.

I don’t know exactly when I began to see the refrigerator as a symbol of my unhealthy desire to be liked. But as the months have gone on, I have learned that the weight of it can become truly too heavy to shift or push back off of me.

Now, I try to notice the teetering, the tilting of my world, so I am prepared for when I might feel the weight of imagined expectations pushing on me. I am training myself to say no if it feels too heavy, and to be okay with occasionally letting other people down. I’m learning to calmly duck down and out from underneath these imagined expectations, so I don’t become trapped by them, cowering in an emotional place where no one will hear my screams.

I hope they write a better obituary about me than the one I imagined under that fridge. Maybe something like this: Amanda died in a perfectly normal and reasonable way after a long and happy life, filled with meaning, purpose, and love — the kind of love that is equally balanced between giving and receiving. The best thing she ever did was to recognize that she could choose to say no and it wouldn’t kill her, and that saying yes all the time actually might! This helped conserve her energy for the bigger things that mattered to her physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Amanda’s dreams came true through her own efforts and the choices she made to prioritize them, and her life was filled with abundance, not scarcity; energy, not exhaustion.

You might say now that I’m a people pleaser in recovery — and I don’t care if you want to or not. Mostly. (I’m good either way!) 

Amanda B. Erdmann (she/her) teaches writing at BYU, parents four children with her husband, Alan, and is finishing her basement without a contractor this time.

Artist Statement:
“gяL feinting”
Caitlin Connolly
@_caitlinconnolly_ | caitlinconnollystore.com

On Imagination as Revelation

In the 2023 film All of Us Strangers, main character Adam (Andrew Scott) initiates a healing journey for himself. Adam’s parents passed unexpectedly when he was eleven years old. Since then, he has struggled with intense feelings of being alone. Adam imagines and writes about what could happen if he could visit his parents in his childhood home as they were the year of their death, 1987. What would it be like if parents and son could reunite 36 years later, now that Adam is a professional writer in his late 40’s?

The audience witnesses a series of Adam’s imagined encounters with his parents. We see his parents’ joy in seeing their child all grown up with a career they are proud of. Adam comes out to his parents as gay, something they didn’t live long enough to learn. His parents come to grips with this important part of his life. Adam also has the opportunity to connect with his parents over his experiences being bullied and suffering from anxiety and loneliness as a child. 

They relive and expand on various points and parts of their lives, now with Adam as an adult. In one encounter, Adam comes home for Christmas. The parents grow to fully embrace adult Adam. They encourage him in a potential relationship with a neighbor he is interested in. They want him to be happy, loved, and fulfilled. We watch Adam and his parents embrace one another and weep together in unrestrained joy, grief, and love.

In addition to Adam not having the opportunity to come out to his parents while they were alive, they also weren’t there to support him through the struggles of teen years and young adulthood, or the anxiety he felt during the AIDS epidemic. While he is comfortable with his own sexuality, he has never fallen in love. All this has left gaps in Adam’s life that he seeks to fill through his creative spiritual work. His visualizations help him come to terms with parental loss and get in touch with his desires to live a more relationship-focused life.

I highly recommend this beautiful film. There is a lot more to it, including Adam’s relationship with his neighbor Harry. The themes about queer love, mental health, and what it means to live a fulfilling life make this a compelling, educational, DEI-relevant film for adults (it’s R rated).

What Adam experiences can be understood as a series of visions. They are not visions in conventional terms. They remind me of the kind that Gnostic thinker Meggan Watterson describes: “[A] Shaman taught me how to have a vision. Or, she taught me how to become aware of the fact that the majority of us have them all throughout the day, whether we’re aware of it or not. She taught me how to begin to see with a different form of perception by going deeply inward…It seems like a strange concept. But it’s actually not strange at all. It’s the most natural thing we humans do. We vision. We use our imaginations. What we don’t realize, or what we don’t really get sometimes, is that what we imagine can actually affect and change us. What we envision with our imagination isn’t just our “imagination” (Mary Magdalene Revealed 64). Our imaginations are conduits to our souls’ wisdom, inspiration from God, and more. Vehicles to inspiration, healing, and revelation.

I grew up thinking that revelation happened to you as a passive recipient. I assumed people were like empty containers waiting to be filled with God’s responses, and that a “vision” was grand and obvious. Certainly, such things seem to happen sometimes. Yet now I recognize that we have capacities to co-create sacred experiences. We collaborate with God as active agents in our moments of inspiration, healing, and meaning-making. As we face life, we respond with imaginative vision-making with divine help in response to our own questions, longings, and needs as active agents.

LDS scriptures back up this idea that we can and should be active, creative agents and collaborators in spiritual things, for example:

D&C 58:26-28: “For behold, it is not meet that I should command in all things; for he that is compelled in all things, the same is a slothful and not a wise servant; wherefore he receiveth no reward. Verily I say, men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness; For the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves.”

D&C 9:8: “But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.”

and D&C 88:118: “seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

We’re not meant to be passive, helpless recipients when it comes to our spiritual learning, revelation, and spiritual discernment, but co-creators with God, who offer Their own contributions and guidance as we go about this to help us.

So much potential for sacred meaning-making can be uncovered within each of us, and this is the case whether we are working in a faith context or not. Adam’s imaginative visions, for example, do not have any religious pretext (that the audience knows of), but are nonetheless full of poignant meanings that can be understood as sacred for many reasons, including that they help him feel deeply connected to and seen and loved by himself and his deceased parents. Adam does his sacred work in the same way that so many people across the Mormon spectrum do theirs: through writing about his inner life, family, needs, longings, pain, and personal mysteries.

The minds’ imaginative activities are not always helpful. They can lead us down rabbit holes of catastrophizing, for example. But it can be valuable and empowering to recognize that our imaginations also have the potential to help us get in touch with our subconscious wisdom, spiritual desires, and purpose, as well as feelings of love, peace, and belonging.

We can notice and cultivate imaginative visions by bringing greater attention and intention to them. Strengthening  trust in our inner selves and our personal intuitions can be an important aspect of this. From Watterson’s experience, she explains, “Once I stopped questioning everything that happened [in my imaginative visions], once I trusted that what I heard and felt and experienced was real in the sense it was really the wisdom I needed, then it all came effortlessly to me. My greatest obstacle was believing it could all be this simple; ask for what I need, and receive it from within. Which is also to say, my greatest obstacle was believing that I could ever be that powerful” (Mary Magdalene Revealed pg. 65). 

Both the character Adam’s creative activities and Megan Watterson’s perspective invite me to see my imaginative experiences in new ways. Recently, I was hiking when a visualization came to my mind. I had been thinking about a challenging Mormon feminist writing project I felt inspired to work on that brought me great fear and overwhelm at moments. In my mind, I visualized my grandfather, a high school history teacher who loved writing, there with me on the mountain. I imagined the compassion he felt for issues I was grappling with in life. I imagined my grandfather telling me he could see that the project I dreamed of completing was a good thing, and something he would be there to support me through. He said I wouldn’t be alone, that others who came before me would also see and understand what I learned, and they would rejoice in my efforts to reach out to others and be a compassionate voice. As I descended from my time on the mountain, I wept tears of joy. It felt remarkable that I could feel so close to my grandfather 19 years after he passed. This “vision” actually offered was a level of closeness beyond what we had during his life.  

I have had these kinds of imaginative experiences for many years, but never framed them as spiritual visions. I let them pass by without recording them or giving them much weight. Now they show up as powerful and pertinent.

What our imaginative visions may interact with and reveal to us is open. Meggan Waterson emphasizes the subconscious and hidden inner wisdom of the self. Depending on our personal spirituality, spiritual imagination can show up as revelation, encouragement and guidance from God, messages from those in the spirit world, or prophecy.

Pondering the role of imagination in the process of revelation helps me feel greater understanding toward religious leaders’ missteps. A friend who also read Mary Magdalene Revealed told me that she thinks some of Joseph Smith’s instances of inspiration and revelation were of this type (imaginative visualizations). This helped her feel more compassion for him; it’s nothing she looks down on. Receiving inspiration as a leader for others seems more difficult and perilous kind of work than we acknowledge in the LDS Church. We talk about leaders’ revelation as a kind of pure art, as if they receive and hear the Savior’s voice with clarity. In reality, we always bring pieces of ourselves, own subjective desires, and blind spots/limited knowledge. While seeking imaginative visions to guide us in our personal lives requires a deep trust in ourselves, trying to receive revelation for others requires caution, checks from others, humility, and moral interrogation. This need for check and balances is part of why women, not just men, should be revelators in the Church.

A visionary path is hazardous. Sometimes God’s voice might be muffled or silent. Messages we tune into may turn out biased or incomplete, even if they are partly divinely inspired. Religious leaders might not have the right imaginative makeup, personal context, or receptivity to receive the wide spectrum of insights God has to offer on a topic. In some instances, we might think we’re getting a revelation, but really we’re having some kind of experience of desire, ego-inflation, confirmation bias, anxious impulses to fix something, or self-gratification. This often becomes evident with time, and we can speed up the process by questioning if our “revelation” is guided by and conducive to love, compassion, and good works.

Despite the risks, moving forward, I want to pay more attention to my imaginative spiritual visions and how they might interact with God’s love and inspiration, and I want to be more engaged in healing imaginative writing of the kind Adam exemplifies on in All of Us Strangers.

Halloween

I was eleven, I was Artemis,
goddess of maidenhood

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Why Should I Care About Polyamory?

I’ve had polyamory on the mind lately. And it’s not because all the buzz around the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives “soft swinging.” A few years ago, a close friend shared that they had opened up her marriage of twenty years. She was raised in the church and married in the temple. If she could go back and do it all over again, she would not have chosen monogamy from the start. But ethical nonmonogamy was of course never presented as a fork on the covenant path.

I have been struggling recently with regrets for a life that felt chosen for me. My track was the covenant path. Seminary. Temple. Mission. Marriage. Yes, I chose all of those things, but I wasn’t truly allowed an alternative path. The choices were presented: Obedience or spiritual death. Obedience or loss of belonging. Obedience or damnation. 

Looking back, I would have chosen things differently. But I likely would have still chosen monogamous marriage. It works for me and in truth it’s something I choose to recommit myself to every day. But my choice for monogamy is no better than someone’s choice for non-monogamy or someone’s choice to remain single.

Learning more about polyamory has allowed me to examine the stereotypes and biases I hold, as well as think of sex, love and relationships in a more expansive way. I have had to parse out notions of what makes a relationship ethical. Coercion is wrong no matter what context it’s taking place in. Abuse is abuse and is never justified.

The multiamory podcast has been a fantastic resource for me to broaden how I think about relationships. They recently interviewed Brett Chamberlin, the director of OPEN – Out and Empowered: Protections and Visibility for non-monogamy. He talked about the importance of the laws that have been recently passed in Cambridge, MA and Oakland, CA. 

“It is about liberating human connection from the social scripts that usually play out through mononormativity, but that there’s a range of other relationship structures and relational structures, not just in terms of romantic relationships, that are prioritized, right? So it’s about moving away from the society where we elevate the monogamous romantic relationship to the very top of the stack, and it’s about giving people more freedom across the board to pursue the types of family and relationship structures that are rewarding to them, whether that involve romance, intimacy, or just committed connection with a platonic life partner, and allowing all of those relationships to have equity.”

Laws recognizing or protecting polyamorous relationships have not been on the books long. In 2022 a case came before a New York State court. Several BYU professors declared the courts would destabilize marriage through the legalization of marital polyamory. Katie Rich wrote a wonderful response to this, pointing out the issues of consent and power imbalances in Mormonism’s own history.

Mormons may be triggered by the idea of polyamory precisely because of our history with polygamy and the unequal sealing practices that still exist today. I can also empathize with those who have been harmed by infidelity, this being a major factor in my parent’s divorce. I also know Mormons to be kind and thoughtful people. 

I care deeply about my friend who opened her marriage and I’m grateful she felt comfortable sharing that part of her life with me. A 2021 study by the Kinsey Institute found one in nine people have been involved in a polyamorous relationship. The study also found that of people who were not personally interested in polyamory, only one in seven respected people engaged in the practice. Many people choose to remain closeted about their nonnormative relationships, fearing ramifications in their personal and professional lives. Openly talking about polyamory can make a difference in their lives.

Lux Alptraum points out, “Monogamous people (particularly heterosexual ones) often take for granted how much freedom they have to reveal even mundane aspects of their personal life without fear of repercussion or backlash; for poly people, being able to claim some of that freedom for themselves removes a tremendous burden.

And that, for many non-monogamy advocates, is the most important reason of all to come out. In the same way that queer visibility has helped change the public perception of same-sex relationships from “freaky sex thing” to just another way of being in love (and led to anti-discrimination laws, marriage equality, and the end of sodomy laws in the process), vocal non-monogamists hope that public education and visibility around their lifestyles will help reduce stigma, increase social acceptance, and potentially even lead to legal protections.”

One of the legal protections needed is custody rights. Misconceptions abound about polyamorous individuals and the effects of alternative relationship structures on children. If we truly care about families and children, let’s do the work to protect them and support healthy relationships no matter what form they take.

Our 2024 Pushcart Prize Nominees!

We are so proud of the voices we publish in the Exponent II magazine. Each year, small presses and magazines are invited to nominate six pieces from the calendar year that demonstrate top literary merit for the Pushcart Prize. While this is never an easy decision given the many incredible pieces we publish, we are thrilled to nominate two poems and four essays spanning our Winter 2024 through Fall 2024 issues:

“What I Mean When I Say Las Vegas,” a poem by Terresa Wellborn in Winter 2024“Confessions of an Old Maid,” an essay by Tesia Tsai“Manufactured,” an essay by Jenny Taylor Moodie in Summer 2024“Born Again: Transgender Insights on Spiritual Rebirth,” an essay by Dani Blatter in Summer 2024“Refrigerator Rescue,” an essay by Amanda B. Erdmann in Fall 2024“Zippers,” an essay by Ashley Mansfield Hoth in Fall 2024

Congratulations to these writers! We hope you enjoy reading their phenomenal work. Consider subscribing to the quarterly magazine to get more pieces like this delivered to your mailbox.

Vol. 44 No. 2 — Fall 2024

More pieces in this issue forthcoming:

Stranger Than Fiction

Greetings from a maze of cardboard boxes as I rest my back against the bare wall of my now-empty apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My forehead pulses with fatigue. My dry fingers are taped with Band-Aids. I feel like I have not sat down here, or anywhere, in a week. I’m grateful for this rare opportunity to pause. My mind buzzes with anxiety and fear of loss while my heart skips with joy and excitement for what is to come.

Here be dragons, hic sunt dracones. Painted on the far edge of medieval maps, artists placed dragons, sea monsters, and other lurking beasts that they believed existed in the wild unknown.

I’m still holding out for dragons, but life has offered me its own kind of magic and danger in the territory of my lived experience. This, unlike a flattened map, casts itself in many directions, shapes, and textures. As I reflect on the past twelve years I’ve spent in this city, in the place where Exponent II was born fifty years ago, I’m thinking about choices, coincidences, and change. If I would have told my younger self all that would unfold for me in this chapter of my life, she would struggle to believe it.

Is there anything so mysterious as our own precious lives?

Among the boxes, piecing together my life after four years of upheaval, I am still struggling to believe it. Is there anything so mysterious as our own precious lives?

I am no genre snob. I devour every story I can get my hands on, no matter where I find truth and beauty. But as an author of both memoir and novels, I can honestly say that — more often than not — reality is stranger than anything I could possibly invent. And if you are still in doubt about that statement, keep reading: this issue is ripe with proof that reality is a peculiar thing. The art, interviews, poems, features, and essays offer a dazzling array of perspectives on this theme.

this issue is ripe with proof that reality is a peculiar thing

We see a love story so implausible it could only be real in Cynthia W. Connell’s essay, while in Myla Godbout’s piece, we see a life posing as a love story when, in fact, abuse is the horrible reality. Tia Thomas unpacks a shocking turn on her mission while confronting the too-real problem of gaslighting while Ashley Mansfield Hoth describes the sensation of a rare health crisis (and the long-term effects of something like being struck by lightning) on her mission. Kathryn Ott finds a spiritual boost in an unexpected lesson outside of our faith community, Kathryn Paul follows the spirit in surprising directions, and Aisling “Ash” Rowan contemplates mortality through a sobering tour of tarot cards. In a similar vein, the heartbreak and coincidences in R.A.Davis’s essay extend well beyond the boundaries of any made-up narrative.

We hope you especially appreciate the humor found in this collection of work. Sometimes, in this strange, wild life, we can’t help but laugh. Because what else can we do? Rosemary Fiala Davidson’s essay shows us a resilient (and very pregnant) narrator who stalls a car on the Bay Bridge while people-pleaser Amanda B. Erdmann rescues herself from being trapped by a refrigerator.

As editors, we always try to balance pieces to host a number of perspectives and subjects. But when we got not one, but two essays about furry primates with attitudes, we knew we had to publish both. What are the chances? In their essays, Kyra N. Krakos and Amanda Waterhouse tell us all about their encounters and what those battles taught them about themselves.

Stay safe out there, everyone. As these contributors show us, it is a weird world. Thank you, as always, for witnessing. May you witness the strange beauty of your own life in return. Let me know if you find a dragon.

Photo by Kadarius Seegars on Unsplash

Refrigerator Rescue

Read by author

*
You could say I’m a people pleaser. (Only if you want! No worries if it doesn’t work for you!) 

I realized it was a problem while trapped by a fridge. 

As a people pleaser, I’m embarrassed to even mention that it happened while redoing my kitchen. I know it’s silly to talk about a home remodel as if it matters, and you might say being trapped under a fridge was exactly what I deserved (for sure! I totally agree!). But, look — I had a flood, insurance would pay for part of it, my friend was a designer, and the whole thing just spiraled from there. And despite my escapade, I certainly wouldn’t want to complain about a contractor who was just trying to do his job — my home looks beautiful now, in spite of it all. 

Said contractor had delivered and plugged in the new cabinet-front fridge that day and his workers had told me it was all secure; in retrospect, I think they were probably in a hurry and everyone thought someone else had screwed it into the cabinetry. I began to put in food while listening to Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More audiobook, thinking about all the codependent people I knew who really should read it.

I’d put in one bag of grapes and lifted a gallon of milk into the door cubbies, when all eight feet of Thermador fridge suddenly swayed forward, then tilted, then teetered, then toppled around me.

Both doors caught mercifully on either side of me, resting on the just installed island, but the empty drawers sprang out, pelting me as I shrieked. 

One part of me immediately blamed myself for misinterpreting the installers when they said, “It’s ready — you can put your food in it,” and actually putting food in my fridge. (So sorry — I must have heard them wrong!)

Another part of me hoped my family would lie in my obituary, because a true obituary would have been too embarrassing.

Another part of me hoped my family would lie in my obituary, because a true obituary would have been too embarrassing. I imagine now what they might have written: Amanda Erdmann, aged 38, died alone at home, pathetically crushed underneath a fridge she only picked out because her fancy aunt had had one in her house and she wanted people to think she was fancy too. 

I got that far before I decided if I could think about my own obituary, I probably wasn’t actually dying and could stop screaming. 

The plastic drawers weren’t heavy, and I wasn’t outwardly harmed, but I was still in a predicament. The fridge weighed too much for me to tilt it back. Any attempt to shift the fridge did not budge it, but sent the drawers careening back into me instead. And, I wondered, could my just-installed island actually hold the tremendous weight without cracking or collapsing? What would I do if it couldn’t? 

My future obituary writes itself: Amanda, though pleasant, worried too much about what other people thought. She had known her fridge was available to be installed for months, and instead of speaking up, had traveled out to the garage for food and used a Costco folding table all summer long because she didn’t want to inconvenience the contractor she was pretty sure she was overpaying to ignore her home and leave it mostly unfinished, with exposed framing and nails sticking out of the walls, poking her kids’ bare feet and tearing holes in her sweaters. The contractors only returned after she sent a very plaintive email where she tried to represent both how long-suffering she was and also how long she had suffered. When they apologized, she immediately apologized right back (as one does).

I began calling or texting people from the relative safety of my fridge teepee: my husband, the contractor, my friend who’d designed the new kitchen. All were too far away to be useful. There was one person working in the garage on a separate project, but he did not hear either my screams of terror or shouts for help. No one else was home; no one could rescue me. I thought I would likely be stuck there until the contractor whose miscommunications had caused this problem would return whenever was convenient for him, and I would say how embarrassed I was to have given any trouble and how I hoped it wouldn’t affect our working relationship, and how I had survived perfectly fine on the grapes and milk that had fallen on me (thanks so much for asking!).

While I waited for no one to save me, I relived moments where I had rescued others before myself, often paralyzing myself to avoid confrontation: Amanda tried to make sure everyone liked her all the time. Once, after a boy punched her in the face at school, she brought him cookies. Another time, a girl called her a brat when she was in charge of a group project, and she decided never to run for any office, though she was voted most likely to become president by her senior-class peers. At some point, she decided that in order for everyone to like her, other people’s needs would just always be more important than her own. So being crushed by an external weight feels a fitting death for Amanda, after all. May she rest in peace, knowing that at least she never disappointed anyone.

I don’t know how long I would have stood there encircled by fridge doors if my doorbell hadn’t rung. When it did, after either five minutes or fifty years, I looked around me and realized I wasn’t trapped after all. There was a gap between the doors resting on my island and the floor, where the freezer drawer had not opened. All I had to do was duck down, crawl out, and I would be free.

But, and I cannot stress this enough, the real reason I rescued myself was not because of my own ingenuity, courage, or clear-headedness. Not at all.

It was because I did not want to keep the person at the door waiting.

The visitor was the man working in my garage, asking for a stepladder. “Of course! I can get that for you right away,” I said, my voice wobbling. “I’m sorry I’m emotional, but I thought I was going to die underneath a fridge. I was screaming for help but no one came, and I’m a little frazzled.” He shrugged, took the ladder, and went back to work, with almost no comment.

As the relief of my own escape settled, I sat in my room, shaking and crying in delayed shock. My husband came home furious and yelled at the contractors, “I just thank the Lord my wife wasn’t killed by your incompetence.” He disputes now that he yelled; I admit it may have only sounded like yelling to ears overly attuned to conflict. Even then, I was embarrassed that he was speaking in a way that might hurt their feelings — I still had to see them, after all, and we needed the work done, and would they still do a good job even if we said they had been negligent? What if they stopped liking us?

Amanda’s house never did get finished, because the contractor took offense when her husband yelled at him, and Amanda in turn, died of embarrassment from it, instead of from the fridge. Without Amanda doing everyone’s laundry, the house fell into squalor and filth. Eventually the children left home and became itinerant vagabonds while her husband languished away, as he always said he would, like the dog in Where the Red Fern Grows.

I don’t know exactly when I began to see the refrigerator as a symbol of my unhealthy desire to be liked. But as the months have gone on, I have learned that the weight of it can become truly too heavy to shift or push back off of me. I feel exhausted by days when I rearranged my own life to swoop in and help other people, offering furniture, housing, hours of time, when often others were perfectly capable of helping themselves. I feel overwhelmed by the moments I let it become my responsibility to save friends or family, fix their problems — not because I wanted to love God, feed the hungry, or clothe the naked — but so I wouldn’t have to confront their ordinary disappointment or dislike. And yet, in spite of the heaviness and exhaustion, the only person who can actually free myself from this Thermador fridge of other people’s needs is. . . myself.

Now, I try to notice the teetering, the tilting of my world, so I am prepared for when I might feel the weight of imagined expectations pushing on me. I am training myself to say no if it feels too heavy, and to be okay with occasionally letting other people down. I’m learning to calmly duck down and out from underneath these imagined expectations, so I don’t become trapped by them, cowering in an emotional place where no one will hear my screams.

I hope they write a better obituary about me than the one I imagined under that fridge. Maybe something like this: Amanda died in a perfectly normal and reasonable way after a long and happy life, filled with meaning, purpose, and love — the kind of love that is equally balanced between giving and receiving. The best thing she ever did was to recognize that she could choose to say no and it wouldn’t kill her, and that saying yes all the time actually might! This helped conserve her energy for the bigger things that mattered to her physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Amanda’s dreams came true through her own efforts and the choices she made to prioritize them, and her life was filled with abundance, not scarcity; energy, not exhaustion.

You might say now that I’m a people pleaser in recovery — and I don’t care if you want to or not. Mostly. (I’m good either way!) 

Amanda B. Erdmann (she/her) teaches writing at BYU, parents four children with her husband, Alan, and is finishing her basement without a contractor this time.

gяL feinting

Caitlin Connolly

@_caitlinconnolly_

caitlinconnollystore.com