I’ve spent the summer healing from a tunneling wound. No one wants to hear the literally gory details; your health problems are your own. I have learned this, not because anyone has been unwelcoming or unkind to me as I’ve shared my health issues (except my own children, who are supremely grossed out, and have banned the words wound and fluid from our home), but because of the way my own eyes tend to glaze over when I start reading a detailed recitation of health issues. So personal, we can go into great detail about them. But except for childbirth, they are unique enough that you have to go online to find a community of others who can resonate with your exact problem.

How many other people in the world have had scar endometriosis lumps removed this year? How many of them developed a seroma that formed a tunneling wound? How many of them carry the open bleeding place on them as they walk around, sitting down every so often when the pain of standing requires it? Do they pack the wound every night and morning with saline-saturated gauze, gasping as the spot reopens when they pull out the gauze again?

I have no idea. But however unique my own story is, it’s ridiculous to imagine that I am the only one who walks around with open wounds, however hidden they are right now. We are all wounded, walking around with various wounds in various stages of healing.  Even a scar still carries the memory of pain.

My stake’s goal this year is to spend an hour a week on family history. I like this goal because it’s specific but not too specific. I can spend an hour a week typing up my mother-in-law’s journal, and that counts. Or I can look up my family’s stories on Family Search. If I’m lucky and choose the right line on descendency view(it’s like I’m blindfolded, stabbing with a push pin to get the right spot) I might find someone whose work needs to be done. It astonished me the first time I did this. I finished the last endowment yesterday. There are still sealings I need to get done.

Today I looked at pictures and read stories about Levi Thorpe. He’s my grandma’s grandfather. He was very poor as a child:

Levi Thorpe was born April 11, 1860 in Belper Derbyshire England of very poor parents. His childhood days were very unhappy as he seldom had sufficient food to satisfy his hunger. I have heard him tell of slipping over a fence and stealing a carrot or turnip and how he relished it. I also remember hearing him say he was sent to buy some molasses once, and was so hungry he kept sticking his finger in the bucket and licing his finger each time. When he arrived home his mother accused him of it, child like, he denied it, but he was punished severly for it. Another time he said he was so hungry after coming home from work, he took some flour his mother kept in a jar and stired it up with water to make a cake out of it, no shortening or baking powder. His brother George, older than he, came home before it was baked so father took it out of the oven and hid it until George was gone, then finished baking it. He said he broke it into pieces nd he went into he woods to eat it. When his mother came home and missed the flour, she accused his sister Hannah of taking it. Father said he felt so bad to have his sister blamed for what he himself had done, but was afraid to tell the truth. Father said when he was a small boy he would thread needles or run errands for a dear old lady named Mrs. Barns, and she would give him tread and treakle or syrup as we call it. When father was very young he worked in a spool factory and from there he went to work in the coal pit or mine. When he and his brother got home at night they would find their supper placed under a bowl.

He came to America, worked hard, bought land in Springville, raised 12 children (two died young), including my great-grandfather. I’ve know his name vaguely but never known his story.

I think that’s my favorite part of family history: discovering stories. I don’t remember them all clearly; I often forget them and then rediscover them later on. But I’m really glad when I find a story attached to a name in Family Search. Baking up a cake of flour and water and hiding it because you were so hungry. I’m glad he earned abundance later on in his life.

Yesterday I went to a viewing for a baby in my ward. She came to earth for five and a half hours and then departed. On her parents’ faces, pictured just after the birth, I saw grief and joy.

Yesterday I also went to the temple and did initiatory work. This is the place where body and spirit come together, that initiatory booth. When I go I sometimes feel the presence of the women in my family on the other side of the veil: my grandmothers, my husbands’ grandmothers, my mother-in-law. Women I cannot see who bless my life, who made the gift of my body possible.

I do not see my body as a gift most of the time. It’s not how I want it to look: it’s scarred and dimpled and rolled. But circling around in the initiatory booth, I am reminded that God gave me my body, a home for my spirit, and the two intertwine. And I am reminded that where I am right now, flawed but still entering the temple of God, is enough to receive great blessings.

I think about the sweet mother in my ward who gave her baby a body. She endured pregnancy knowing that the life within her would not last, but she did it anyway, so this baby could have a body, and come to earth. What a gift, what a sacrifice. Her daughter will one day be resurrected, with a whole and perfect body, and grow up to call her mother blessed.

We went to the new Church History museum yesterday, and saw the winners of the contest “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus.” My favorite painting was Brian Kershinik’s “Jesus and the Angry Babies,” because I have thought for a long time that the children sitting on His lap were likely wiggly and annoying and that is why the disciples wanted them taken away. He wasn’t holding perfect angels–they might have been snotty or poopy or whining, and yet he did not want them to leave.

And the other favorite–it has to be a tie, really, was one whose title and author I do not remember, but it was of the woman with an issue of blood who touched the Savior’s garment and was whole.

Looking at it I thought, for the first time, of that story as a metaphor for all women. She had an issue of blood–an eternal period–for 12 years, and the laws of her time meant that having an issue of blood caused her perpetual uncleanness. She couldn’t touch men, or sit where they sat. She was permanently exiled for being extremely female, for having the most female of problems.

The Savior healed her.

And sometimes I am frustrated because it’s hard to be a woman, to bear and bear with children, to have rules and laws and customs that bind you because of who you are. It can be hard to be a woman in the Church–although I have been blessed with good leaders, I know that many women have been hurt by customs, rules, thoughtlessness.

But looking at that painting, I thought this: the Savior was aware of her. She was hidden, or pushed away, the way so many women are, the way so many problems inherent to womanhood have been for centuries, and yet He healed her, and acknowledged her need for healing and her faith.

I think He sees all of us and He is absolutely willing to heal anything we bring to him in faith, any problem that comes from being a woman. In all their afflictions, he was afflicted–it is true of men, and true of women too.

I was reading R a Babybug tonight, with a two-page poem that had trucks. We finished it. He flipped the book back so I could read it again. Then he just turned to those two pages and wanted to read them over and over. He would not let go of the book to go to bed, but took it into his crib. Matt got a picture of him lying on his tummy reading it.

He is at a delightful age. He’s twenty months, two in April, and talking up a storm. Every day he says new words or puts old ones together in a new way.