Yes, I was also a leader in YW and I really did care about my girls. To this day I wonder where they are at. The thing is, most people serve in a church calling, some don't care for it because, let's face it, some callings are all about just keeping your busy and it is annoying both ways (to the giver and receiver). Others really do care.
It helped that I had a very small group, only 4 girls in my class, and they were very nice girls. I also really wanted children for many years, so I treated them well. If we wanted to do some fun activity and there was no funding, I would pay out of pocket. If a girl was stranded somewhere and could not reach their parents, I would go pick them up. Of course, all parents knew this and all of them were provided my number. I never did the sneaky thing and go behind any parents' back.
my YW leader and I went to Bennigan's and I was fifteen and told her I didn't believe while her mouth was full of potato skins.
she chewed. and chewed. and chewed. cute little old lady gramma PERFECT TBM. chewed and chewed. swallowed. looked at me and said- 'well you were always on the fence dear. now are you going to be a misery for the next three years or are you going to try and be constructive about it?'
killed my rebellion quite mercilessly I think.
she taught me how to knit and do all manner of YW appropriate skills.
eighteen years later and my entire day is shot because i sell handmade crocheted hats and afghans (i love paying my bills with TBM acquired skills) and I have the giant craft market tonight and tomorrow. so my apartment is drenched in yarn organization so i can go do set up in a couple hours.
She cared about me as a person and she took a situation that could have easily been three years of total misery and made it into something that would give me skills, talents and interests that I could apply regardless of what I went about my life doing. And now I profit off those hobbies financially and love yarn to the point of insanity. YW was still miserable but I was treated like a person and got what I could out of it.
she took my black sheep self and taught me how to make my wool work for me!
I don't think she had rainbow afghans and Slayer in mind when she introduced me to yarn but hey- it is a general skill that can be applied in so many ways!
As horrible as being mormon was she made me take something I could use and enjoy out of it. Amen.
I also had a little granny for a YW and although I never rebelled until later, she was a wonderful lady and she treated everyone quite well. Somehow I really enjoyed having a little granny for YW because it felt like my own granny, where you can talk to her, but not your parents. I can't complain.
The YM guys I had were busy, and they had their own families. It wasn't so much that they were trying to make us into robots and thereby neglecting us - it was just that the calling was a job.
Do it, do it quick without getting crap for it, and get back home to their real families.
Mine didn't even know my name!! They always forgot who I was...I was one of the only people in my ward from another town so nobody in my church cared about me at all- and I was there for like 12 years!! It was pathetic. My young women's leaders were pretty big biotches though. I dreaded going to young women's.
My visiting teacher who had never missed a single visit---leaving me a Christmas package the last day of November (with a written message) when she wasn't going to be there the month of December, NEVER CALLED ME AGAIN or VISITED after I stopped going to church. She never even gave me the courtesy of hearing my story or why I stopped going.
My YW leaders were wonderful!! I am still friends to this day with two of them who were best friends and took me and my bf under their wings. They would talk to me for hours about life when it was really really hard, and it was. The one bought me stuff because she knew we were tight on money, and she bought me special things.
She also took me to David Bowie for my 16th birthday present!!! Damn he was hot!! She is 63 now, and when I left the church she sent me a book about the pre-existance and stuff. It was a cool book. She was sad that I left.
She lives in SLC now but I haven't seen her in years. We email and facebook, but I am scared to see her face-to-face and have her ask me why.
She was so nice to me that I am scared to tell her, I don't want her to be dissappointed in me.
But yeah, I had great leaders, but of course I lived in the "mission field" too, and I think that made a difference for whatever reason.
Also, I was YW leader for a couple years, and while the lessons were buckshot, and I hated that part, I loved those girls and was sooooo sad when they released me to be a cub leader. I let them drive my car, upped my insurance so that they would be covered if we got into an accident (some were very poor) and actually talked to them about life. They loved the honesty. But it was here in Utah, so I had to play some of the game. I was just biding my time and being good because we were waiting to adopt a baby from LDS. We had awesome activities. One leader's sister had a luxury cabin in Midway right next to tommy's cabin. How funny that we thought that was so ferkin cool.
We had the best parties there though, of course with a bit of testimony tears too. Still worth it though. If I could do that and never deal with adults I think I would still go!! But I know things have changed and they can't have fun anymore. We had campouts all the time, went swimming, activities up the ying yang, and they were fun. So, yeah, that was fun, also got some drugs too then. Nice.
But it was easy to tell they actually cared about us.
I was a YW, and in the big ward (my first 3 yrs) I was ok although I felt just like another girl among many. In the big branch (my last 3) part of the time I felt like they cared, but some I didn't. Same thing with bishops and br. pres.
When I was a YW leader, I loved the girls alot and tried my best. I even fought when they wanted to as a group (leaders' decisions) to finish the meeting early and go see an inactive girl without anouncing ourselves first. I was so angry but also, I was sensitive to the possibility of how the girl could end up feeling because I suddenly was able to imagine myself in that situation and I started to feel sick inside at the thought that a bunch of churchy girls and women would invade my privacy. And as rmw said, I still think about them and wonder how they are (and hope that they were able to see through it all and have found there way out)
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/02/2011 02:45PM by quebec.
I can think of only a few YM leaders I ever had who seemed only to care about making me part of the sheeple. It was usually the young, return missionaries who were assigned as leaders that I very quickly grew to hate and despise. All the rest were older and were very honest, good, caring men. They are all still very good friends to this day... I see them around my parents' neighborhood when I'm visiting and stop to talk to them regularly.
One of our daughters was the proverbial wild child. Her YW leaders were nice-ish to her face, but trashed her behind her back constantly. She kept trying to go, hoping that someone would like her just for who she was, but these women were petty, mean-spirited, nasty witches who fawned over the goody-two-shoes, and made no bones about who their favorites were. One night our daughter headed over to Mutual yet again - they didn't know she had arrived and, when she approached the classroom where they were talking (with their backs to the door) she heard them call her a slut and a whore. She HEARD them do it, IN the church, right before yet another prissy, fake, holier-than-thou YW meeting. She headed right home, told me about it (unusual for her - she was quite secretive much of the time), and asked if she could never go back. I promptly gave her permission and compiled an immediate s*** list comprised of every woman who betrayed her in this way. One woman in our ward loved her for who she was and never turned away from her for a minute - we love that woman to this day and often mention her true love and loyalty. The rest of them...there is a special place for people like that. These women, BTW, were the ones who always sat near the front of the chapel, heads held high, because they were so much more holy than everyone else. There are no words for how I feel about it even to this day.
I was a convert who missed YW by *thismuch* so I never had to worry about it. However, I did end up in the YW leadership and I cared very much for those girls. I tried my best to give them useful activities and lessons they would enjoy instead of the gender-biased garbage I was assigned to give them. They all seemed to appreciate it, and when I run into one they always seem honestly happy to see me instead of the fakey-nice crap I get from my former peers in RS.
And, most of my leaders/advisors were good people. Most were not the militant mormons, but people who liked to help the youth grow up. It was if we went through the motions for the mormon stuff, but then enjoyed life outside it when activities allowed. The priesthood leaders were different than the advisors... they were tolerated.
Seminary teachers were good too, but they appeared desperate to make sure we all stayed on the mormon path.
This was in the 70s, and from what I've read, it appears many of us think it was a happier, more fun time than the youth have today.
I'm going to guess mine were just nice women fulfilling a calling more than anything. I wouldn't give them credit for even attempting to turn me into a little sheeple. Because I literally don't remember a single one of their names. And I was a goody-goody, Molly Mormon in those days who went to everything. But none of the women cared enough about me to make any impression on me, either to help me improve my life or to help me be better programmed. I remember one woman did my hair before a small-town beauty pageant I was in because she was a hairstylist. And this same woman taught us we should never, ever have all the food on our plate the same color. And this was before that was a health rule. She just felt that it was part of being a good homemaker to make meals that were not just delicious, but visually attractive as well. I actually still think about that if I make something like potato soup with bread rolls and spiced pears. I think "Whoops" and make sure the rolls are rye and the fruit is watermelon instead.
Imagine those candies with a wonderful, sweet outer coating...then the sticky, sour surprise inside. That is what my YW leaders were like.
When I was converted, I was showered in love by them. They really seemed to care! I'm sure they did...but what is it they say about small communities ...ah yes. Small minds. Their attitude changed when I befriended a home schooled person and became good friends with them. Apparently they didn't approve of home schooling and certainly didn't approve of me having a friend as such. We were close...too close, I guess. One of the leaders bluntly asked if I were a lesbian with my friend. I remember being so shocked and hurt I just walked away. Of course, things fan like wildfire in smaller communities. For the next month I had to deal with the fact that every female in my class who were LDS made it a point to stay clear of me.
Between that fiasco and how my YW leaders seemed to enjoy telling me why I wouldn't be with my mom when we got to heaven and that she did not deserve to see me get married one day and would ultimately go to hell (mom is innactive-no longer believer but not resigned), I did NOT have a good experience with them...
Not the leaders, exactly... but I absolutely found it hilarious that the boys in YM would call me on Wednesday afternoon, telling me how much it'd mean to them if I attended Mutual, and if they could pick me up, etc... Then I'd see these same boys at school, and they'd be calling me a nerd, a loser, etc, and I wasn't allowed to be anywhere near them, because they were the "in" crowd. I never cared (still don't), I just found the hypocrisy funny even at that young of an age.
The ym leadership for my son right now, don't care at all about him. He is just a number to them. They don't know is name, or even call to invite him to ym. He doesn't go to church, I don't make him, because I don't go. I can't stand the place. But you would think they would try to reach out to him, but they don't. We had moved out of this ward for this reason, and then they redid the boundries and we were put back in it.
You say that neither you nor your son go to church, and that you can't stand the place. Does he want to be included in the YM activities or not? I'm guessing that one or two phone calls could make that happen if that's what he really wanted.
It seems to me that the YM leaders are respecting your boundaries, something that exmos and nevermos consistently ask Mormons to do.
When we had the "get married in the temple" lesson when I was a Laurel, I had one YW leader actually tell us that its OK to marry a non member in a civil ceremony because that's what she did. She's the ONLY one I ever heard say that in Church, and I really admire her courage for getting up and saying it. None of the "oh, he won't let you raise your kids in the church so only marry an RM" crap that we always heard. I can't remember her name, but that lesson has always stuck with me.
Since I was in a small ward, all of us were very close. Somewhere we must have all gotten the same message because all but one of us is an exmo. The one active one is a McConkie, but I would venture to guess that if she didn't have those ties, she would be an exmo like the rest of us (she got her master's degree, works in DC and didn't marry until she was 26...I bet she'd like to be like the rest of us!) Only two of us has married (me and the McConkie) The other girls are all in their late 20s and either going to school or working good jobs. We are ALL college graduates, several with Masters degrees and one is in med school. Not a single one of us married at 19, even the few that went to BYU. Since we all left en mass like that, I can only guess that somewhere along the line we had a YW lesson that stuck with us and pushed us out.
I would love to tell those women THANK YOU for letting us think for ourselves and question what we've always been told. Apparently it worked =)
... from sincere and caring YM/YW leaders to cold, robotic, and shaming ones. And those remembered in particular by our RfMers tended to be at one end of the spectrum or the other.