Posted by:
Joy
(
)
Date: August 09, 2013 06:17AM
In the outside-of-Utah ward I grew up in, there were cliques, but I was "in" because of my GA relative, and my mother was RS pres, and my father was Bishop. We had enough money to keep up. The neighbors used to joke about all the fancy cars parked in the church parking lot on Sunday, "like a car show." But, the wards began shrinking, and they consolidated our ward with two wards from "lesser" neighborhoods. I liked the new boys, because they were more down-to-earth, and less uptight, but my mother didn't like me to date them. These young men were far better men than my brothers turned out to be. Many of them went to BYU, and I dated them there.
Here in Utah, the women seem to enjoy a status comparable to their husband's calling. Well, I had no husband, so that put me at the bottom of the pecking order. The widows were single, but still retained a status well above the divorced women.
My children had lesser status, as children from "a broken home" as they called it. We left the cult, and achieved a good amount of success in education and careers. One poster brought up a restaurant incident. My daughter, now married to a handsome, Mormon with a great professional career, and living in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, ran into two sisters, who had been stake president's daughters, and had snubbed my daughter in high school. They also came back to live in the same neighborhood. My daughter had to sit at another table, just like the other story. Her daughter was excited to see the snob's daughter, who was in her class at school, so she went into the playground area to play with her. Soon, my granddaughter came back to the table, crying, because the other two girls wouldn't play with her. My daughter was so furious, that she immediately left. Mormon cliques are carried out from generation to generation. There is safety in numbers, and my granddaughter knows so many little girls, and has so many cousins, that she hasn't asked to play with the snotty little girl since. Avoidance is the best strategy. Let them gossip and snark at each other--and leave us out of it.
I would rate our former ward a 10. It is a joke that the snobbiest high school girl clique ended up drinking, and sleeping around, and several got pregnant. As Mormons do, they adopted out their babies to LDS adoption services, or whatever they call it, in Idaho. If I became a grandparent, I would never give my own grandchild away! But it was OK, because their parents had high church positions, and the girls went on to marry returned missionaries from other wealthy families. One girl concealed her pregnancy, had a live birth in her room and hid the baby in a drawer, where they found it dead. There was a police investigation. Two years later, this girl married a returned missionary in the temple, and life went on. If a female is in the right clique, they can get away with just about anything.
My daughter had skipped a grade in school, but as soon as she grew boobs and became beautiful overnight, the girls wanted her to hang out with them. They called her a "guy magnet." Mormon clique prestige depended on your money, your family connections, your ability to attract men, and your general popularity. At YW on Sunday morning, these girls would brag about their sexual conquests, in detail. They would also tease an overweight girl in the class, until she cried. When they asked my daughter to be the YW class president, she would stand up every week, and tell the girls to shut up. She didn't want to hear all that smut in church, or ever. She also made sure they stopped being cruel to the large girl--at least while my daughter was there. The clique pretty much destroyed the girl, whose parents were going through a divorce.
The reason I know these girls learned this from their mothers, is that I had to deal with almost the same thing. They bragged about material things, ragged on people who had less money or who were not well dressed, or who didn't have a man. The woman who was living with a handsome guy was accepted, though. There were more women who were NOT in the clique, and they were good human beings. The cliques get themselves more attention, that's all. A few of those mothers got themselves banned from the girls volleyball and baseball games, because of their screaming and swearing at the referees. Bad example.