The other day in church, a woman came up to me and told me that she loved sitting behind my little family. “Really?”, I thought. What I wanted to say was, “It doesn’t distract you to have my kids crying, thrashing around, wrestling with each other, making their toys talk to each other as loud as possible, and having to get up with them 5 times in the middle of the meeting?” She was trying to give me a compliment, so I took it. She said that we looked like such a “normal mormon family” and that my husband and I were “so cute together”.
It made me smile to myself since usually after sacrament meeting (which is last in our ward) I am feeling totally beaten up by my children. I’ve already done 2 hours as the primary president before I make it to sacrament meeting, so it is a surprise to me that anyone can feel anything radiating from my family besides exhaustion and frustration. But, after 9 years (almost) of marriage, I do still love my husband….and like him. And, in some ways, having children to wrestle during church makes us turn to each other and laugh. Maybe that is what she is seeing….us looking at each other with knowing eyes, silently saying, “I just want this to be over so I can go home and take a nap!!”
But, I started thinking, “What is a normal mormon family these days?” When you look around my ward, there is a lot of variety there. Part member families, widows and widowers, single people who have never married, divorcees, and other families whose kids are growing up and moving on in life. There is no picture perfect family, really. This is one thing I’ve learned from watching some of the videos over at mormon.org in their section, “I’m a Mormon“. There is not a typical mormon family. Sure, we strive for the ideal. A mom, a dad, functional kids that grow up to be lawyers and doctors, or whatever. But, life doesn’t always happen so perfectly. That is part of our mortal struggle. The church is not free of broken homes, or drug addiction, or families who have lost loved ones to a wayward path. But, it is the love that radiates from each of us that people will be drawn to no matter if we have the picture perfect family or not.