After all, don’t I have kids? Don’t I know what it’s like to be looked at by people who don’t have kids? Don’t I know how frustrating it is to have to miss out on things simply because you’ve given birth to a needy infant?

Don’t I like to take my kids to the movies? (Yes, at the FAMILY DOLLAR THEATER TO SEE KIDS’ SHOWS.)

But really. People pay 8 bucks a ticket (or work hard enough in their careers to be given complimentary tickets) to attend a PG-13 movie on opening weekend, and you bring your crying baby, and sit right behind me.

And I? I have spent two hours of my Friday afternoon making calls to potential sitters, and shelled out twenty-five dollars of my hard-earned blogging money (which you know took me two weeks to earn) for a babysitter, and I’m out on the town on a date with my husband, without my kids, enjoying a fantastic movie, and you expect me to LISTEN TO YOUR FREAKING CRYING BABY THE WHOLE TIME?

Major fail, Mother with the crying baby, major fail.

Please stay home, or get a babysitter, before you give all mothers a bad name, and me a major pain in the hiney.

When John was a little boy, his mother shooed the kids out the back of the house while she showed it to potential buyers. One afternoon he was charged to keep his younger brother and sisters in line while a particularly great prospect came by. John used his new pocketknife to whittle a spear. His younger brother Tim wanted a chance throwing the spear, but John convinced him that playing spear-boy, retrieving big brother’s throws, would be just as fun.

It was fun for several minutes, until John grew tired of seeing how far he could throw and aimed instead for how high he could throw. He forgot, however, to warn Tim that he was throwing up, and, as Tim raced to where the spear should land, it struck him on the head. He ran to and fro, hollerin’, the spear flopping back and forth like a bobblehead on a taxicab dashboard.

John tried to shush him and yanked out the spear himself, but the sisters heard, the mother heard, and seven stitches, one “barely noticeable” scar, and thirty years later, John’s brother has “completely forgiven” him.

The point is — story is everything. As soon as that good brother finished his story and moved on to some doctrinal explication of (forgiveness?) (choosing the right?) (listening to promptings of the Holy Ghost?), the audience as a whole sat back, turned to chat (quietly) to their neighbors, and started thinking about all the things that needed doing as soon as church was over.

My other point is, go see the movie Australia. I’m a big Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge) fan anyway, and even if you didn’t enjoy those, you will enjoy Australia. It’s got romance, adventure, Hugh Jackman, lovely music, gorgeous lush lighting and scenery, Nicole Kidman, and HUGH JACKMAN.

And, it’s got story.

As the Drover says, all of your possessions can be taken from you, and in the end, all that you really own is your story. Australia is a great story, not least because it encourages me to find, tell, write, rewrite, discover, share, never give up on, fight for, defend, live my story.

Jane

p.s. Happy Thanksgiving. I hope, if you’ve read this website for any length of time, that you know what I’m thankful for. If you have no idea, then I’ve done a very poor job of expressing what is in my heart. (And if I haven’t said it before, I AM THANKFUL for readers who stop by for a little part of my story).

I have three daughters. My sister has two daughters and a son. (I was going to say that she is lucky to have a mix of genders, but I don’t know how to phrase that without making it sound like I regret having three daughters, which I don’t, except when I think of poor Dick never getting to teach his own flesh and blood to write his name in the snow.)

When my youngest, Spot, and her cousin, Track, are together, they act how I would expect twins to act. One minute they are making up silly games like Touch The TV And Fall On Your Bum In Gails Of Laughter, Repeat Ad Nauseum; and the next they are pouring sand on each other and guarding their own siblings’ shoes from the nefarious clutches of That Cousin You Have To Watch Out For.

Now that Spot is racing towards potty training (on a very, very slow horse), I can tell you that I think I will probably have one more kid, despite the fact that when people warn you to “enjoy this stage because it goes by so fast,” they are completely lying.

Babyhood and toddlerhood in fact creep by, but now that it is my youngest doing the creeping, I feel an intermittent and uncontrollable craving for newborn neck to gobble.

Or maybe I am looking forward to Twilight more than I expected.

Sorry about the background. I must have been asleep during film-making school.

Passage to Zarahemla, a new movie in the Mormon genre directed by Chris Heimerdinger, author of Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites, has a plot with an intriguing idea. Placing a modern person back in Nephite (50 BC) times reminds me of movies like Back to the Future and other time-travel epics.

But unfortunately the movie falls short of ever delivering on this intrigue because we never see Zarahemla at all. All you see is literally the “passage to” Zaramhemla. The passage is a spot in the woods in Leeds, Utah, where a lone Nephite guards a path he thinks Lamanites will use to invade Zarahemla.

Much of the anticipation of the protagonist stumbling into an ancient city, into Nephite homes and other Zarahemla environs, is never realized.

That said, the movie has its moments. We see the slow conversion of the main protagonist from a situation of unbelief to someone whose heart is softened. We see a Nephite literally speaking from the dust. The sci-fi portal, where characters pass from one world to another, always gets my attention.

But overall, it’s definitely a B movie produced with a low budget. The Nephite and Lamanite costumes look like they’re borrowed from a Manti pageant (as one character in the movie even suggests). The female protagonist wears frumpy Eighties clothing that are anything but California cool. I can live with these shortcomings, but the caricatures of the Nephites and Lamanites are tiring.

(I think Dick is not the authority on female fashion that he would like to think he is. Probably her clothing is the latest thing, only, we are not up on that).

Is it possible for a Mormon movie to portray a Nephite with real depth of character? The Lamanites are just one notch above barbaric cannibals. Each party is fixed in a single, predictable mindset.

Overall, despite so-so dialogue and feeling cheated of a glimpse of the filmmakers’ vision of Zarahemla, the movie kept my attention on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

(I would also point out that the gleeful use of violence while shrinking from even the mildest of epithets made the characterization highly problematic. As if it’s fine that gang members like to shoot people but would never befoul their mouths with a profanity. Not that I want to hear swearing, mind you, necessarily, just that such an imposed cinematic value system is odd and contrived.)

(I know, sorry, this was Dick’s review. But I had thoughts. And then I had to share them.)

But I’m turning over a new leaf. I’m becoming a model mother. Getting involved so I can say (honestly), No, we don’t homeschool, but we’re completely involved with the kids’ education.

Actually, when I checked the little red heart box indicating I’d be ‘happy to help out with the Valentine’s Day party,’ I kinda hoped that the Don’t You Feel Guilty For Not Volunteering paper would get lost somewhere between our car and Mrs. Machol’s classroom.

Instead, turns out that everyone signed up to ‘help out‘ with the party, and no one to ‘take the lead.’ Which shouldn’t be that surprising. If you don’t even get to ‘be in charge,’ why would you sign up to get all the responsibility and none of the power?

Possibly because she sensed what a great party planner I’d be (or that I was ripe for guilt-induced effort), Mrs. Machol asked me to take the lead.

I did and it was fantastic. Sally thinks I am the best mom ever. The end.

Here’s what I learned for next time. You might want to take some notes, especially if you (like me) have irrational (or not so irrational) fears of being like Kurt Russell’s drunk dad in Follow Me Boys.

I’d much rather be Fred MacMurray, the Disney dad/boy scout troup leader extraordinaire. Fred would never be twenty minutes late to an important scout night, dripping melting ice cream on the other parents.

How to not be like Whitey’s drunk dad

1. Don’t put off printing your bingo cards until the night before.
2. Don’t put off buying a new ink cartridge till the night before.
3. Don’t live in a state with sudden bad snowstorms the night before.
4. Do have good friends with printers and ink to go in them.
5. Do befriend over-coordinated room-grandmothers who just happen to pick up awesome supplies (cookies, juice boxes, and fruit snacks) during their monthly Sam’s Club run.
6. Don’t call the other mothers after 9:45 pm unless you know they’re on the way to their 10-4 shift at UPS. And if you do know that, don’t call anyway, because dwelling on the fact that another mom works nights so she can be with her kids during the day and help out with school parties ON PURPOSE will only make you feel greedy, inadequate, and lazy.

All that excruciating preparation minimal planning and moments of blind, staring panic paid off in the sweetest way possible. Mrs. Machol told me it was a great party and probably doesn’t think I’m a delinquent mother anymore.

Sally ran up to hug me during the party. Three times. And introduced me to all her friends. I’m afraid to help out with more parties; at some point, in one year or two, maybe five if I’m lucky, she won’t run up to me like that and she might hope no one guesses we’re related. (Might?) Of course, I could always pull out Follow Me Boys and threaten to bring the ice cream if I don’t get some love.