My CEO wanted to have lunch with each project manager on the team, so I planned out our lunch appointment carefully. I outlined two successes that my team had experienced and two things I thought our team could be doing better. I even thought carefully about what to order at lunch since my CEO had chosen an Asian restaurant close by, and my CEO is Jewish. I usually ordered the pad thai at that restaurant, but I thought it might be disrespectful to eat pad thai with shellfish included. So I had planned ahead to eat the tangerine chicken instead.

What I didn’t count on was that I’d have to choose sides that weren’t offered with my usual order, and choosing rice proved to be a little sticky. “White, brown, or ham-fried?” the server asked me. Without even thinking, I said, “ham-fried.” Then it hit. Seriously? I couldn’t believe myself. I knew enough to plan out nearly everything, but then in a moment of being off-guard, I go ahead and order pork in my rice.

Kmillicam’s post about Gender Bias in the Book of Mormon, and the DoM podcast that inspired her post, got me thinking about other ways that language is used to distinguish women from men, and one  way we do this is through the use of middle names, or lack thereof.

When I was born, my parents decided not to give me a middle name. They did the same for my sister three years later, but both of my older brothers have middle names: my dad’s name for my oldest brother, and another favorite boy’s name for my other brother. The reason they changed tradition with me, they always told me, was that when I was married I would use my surname as a new middle name. Unfortunately the use of my maiden name as a middle name, and I have been questioned why my parents gave me a boy’s name as a middle name because my old surname is also a boy’s first given name (like Scott).

As a busy professional, I often struggle feeling connected to people in my private life. I admit that a lack of connection is one of the hardest parts about being a liberal Mormon in my family and ward. But after an amazing 18-hour car-ride and conversation with Amelia, Stella, and a few others, I have been thinking more about the holiness and godliness of human connection, and so I’ve decided to magnify the connections I have in my life, to see how I can improve them.

Around my wrist is a bracelet of simple white yarn wrapped three times: Once for my mother, once for my grandmother, and once for me. I wrapped this bracelet a couple of weeks ago at a Blessingway for two Exponent friends and their babies.

In this recent Huffington Post article, “The Trouble with Bright Girls,”Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson describes how professional women and men typically see their talents and their opportunities differently. Professional women, while often achieving lower levels of authority and power in their organizations than men, often view their skills and professional worth in fundamentally different ways than men. Women seem to have more of a closed mindset, meaning that they see abilities as innate and fixed, rather than subject to change and expansion (see Mindset by Carol Dweck). By contrast, professional men seem to view their skills as open to adaptation and development, and they do a much better job of selling their skills to their employers and overcoming challenges they face on the job.

With snow-white veil and garments as of flame,
She stands before thee, who so long ago
Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe
From which thy song and all its splendors came;
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I’ve always been pretty orthodox in my garment wearing. I’ve worn them under the bra as I was instructed. I also wore both tops and bottoms together, feeling that the garment wasn’t complete unless I wore the set. I found that I get the most out of my garments when I think about the symbollism of the Atonement. They play an important part of an archetypal story that goes like this:

Eve found herself vulnerable outside the Garden of Eden. Her world was now open to strife, sickness, and death. Then Jesus, the Creator of Earth, told her that He’d make a way for her to overcome these ills of the new world. He would descend to Earth and lay down His life for her and her posterity. And as a promise that He would do this, He gave Eve a coat of animal skin, a sacrifice in similitude of His own future sacrifice: A sacrifice that would serve to cover up Eve’s vulnerability to this new world and the death that exists there.

Because this is the narrative I use to understand the garment, I have appreciated wearing it. I tend to look better with more clothes on, so making sure it’s covered hasn’t been an issue. In many ways I liked the sense of equality, that both men and women got to wear it, and that ordaining women to wear the Garment of the Holy Priesthood has got to mean something about an endowed woman’s Priesthood power, even if we don’t fully understand it yet.