Panel of moms describes LDS woes

"There's a disparity between what church leaders say about motherhood and any identity of mother in heaven," she said.

When she told her husband she planned to give their daughter a mother's blessing following her baptism, he told her she had gone too far.

The church teaches that a mother's constant care and nurturing is critical to her children's development and that there is no acceptable surrogate for a mother. Yet by failing to talk about a heavenly mother, the church fails to give women the same kind of spiritual identity that talking about a Heavenly Father gives to men, she said.

"Until we find her definition, we will struggle to define ourselves," she said.

Sarah Ray Allred is working to balance motherhood with two small children along with post-doctoral work in neurobiology. She said while top church leaders laud motherhood as sacred, the practicality of daily life at home, within her ward and with her LDS friends is where the faith's talk of support for mothers either does or doesn't happen.

She sees that daily interaction and efforts in some wards to truly meet the needs of mothers with a variety of different special interest groups, like book clubs, as the key to finding support for motherhood, despite difference in age, employment and marital status.

Her ward in Seattle was full of such activity while a subsequent ward in Washington, D.C., offered no formal opportunities for such supporting activities outside the weekly Relief Society meetings.

When she and two other young mothers decided to meet at the church weekly because their apartments were too small, the bishop nixed the arrangement because a priesthood leader couldn't be present during their meetings.

Some LDS institute programs are "mother-friendly" because they help facilitate child care, while others are just the opposite, she said. Consequently, women need to look beyond formal church programs and reach out to others with the same interest and needs.

Marguerite Driessen, a mother of five who resigned as a law professor at Brigham Young University in August, said she believes the core of the gospel and LDS theology outpace the ability of church members to truly live by its principles when it comes to diversity, non-traditional roles and unknowns like a heavenly mother.

As a black woman working full time at an LDS Church-owned university, she found a discrepancy in practice between what the church teaches about developing oneself personally and motherhood being a woman's most important responsibility.

Though the school seeks a diverse faculty, "I was told if I wanted to make tenure that I would have to demonstrate that I had reliable child care," she said. "In my mind, that's telling me I need to choose between being a law professor and being a mother, and that was an easy choice."

She's now a full-time mother and wonders how long it will take for such attitudes to shift.

She's heard all kinds of theories about why blacks were denied the priesthood until 1978, but after much research has come to believe those explanations were simply the inventions of men uncomfortable with changing the status quo. That's the price people have always paid for living in a fallen world, she said.

"I can either choose to talk about all the progress in race relations, or about the stuff I'm still having to deal with," she said. "It's the same thing, both in the church and without."

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E-mail: carrie@desnews.com