Episode 187 (Transcript) Embracing Your Journey: A Conversation with Amy Watkins Jensen

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener, Anne Law, for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on Substack.

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SH: Hi, I'm Susan Hinckley. 

CW: And I'm Cynthia Winward. And this is At Last She Said It. We're women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of today's episode is Embracing Your Journey, a conversation with Amy Watkins Jensen. Welcome, Amy. 

AJ: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. 

CW: Welcome. Welcome. 

SH: We are absolutely delighted to have you and our listeners might know you from your Instagram account, which has had a meteoric rise to stardom I do believe, actually it's gone fast, hasn't it?

AJ: Kind of.

SH: Maybe it's that ours didn't go that fast, but it seems like yours has gone fast and I think it's because it was born in this maelstrom of things going on and I'm sure we're going to get more to that later, but would you mind just introducing yourself for our listeners who may not know you, whatever you'd like them to know about you and maybe, anything that you can think of that might give context to our conversation today.

AJ: Sure. So I have three daughters, married to my wonderful husband, Andy. We live in the Bay area, California, and we are active in the church. We are extremely active in the church, actually. We're always..

SH: We call that hyperactive or sometimes overactive. 

AJ: Yes, right. Pick a moment, pick a word. Yes, it’s all of those things. We're always happy to serve. We believe in building community- it’s one of our favorite things about being members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that we really get to mold community, make our communities better. And we are really active in that endeavor and in that, and what we really believe is an important work.

And right now I'm in the stake young women's presidency, for example. My husband, not too long ago, got released from the bishopric in our ward, so we love the church and we do a lot to try to make it the right place to be for many people. And I'm also a middle school teacher. I teach humanities.

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CW: Bless you.

SH: Right?

AJ: It's so funny, it makes me seem so saintly that I teach at middle school, right? But actually I love it and I teach at an all boys- it's actually a day school for a professional boy choir. It's really niche. 

SH: Really? Interesting. 

AJ: So I teach all boys and at home we've only had girls, because we only have daughters. So I get the yin and the yang of it all. And that's me in a snapshot. 

SH: I love it.

CW: You said you teach humanities? Is that right? 

AJ: Yes, exactly. So that means I teach like the core subjects, English, history. 

SH: Shaping tomorrow's youth. Today's youth.

CW: Just the boys.

SH: Shaping tomorrow's adults. The boys. Well, Cynthia, the boys matter, actually, because, unfortunately, they're in charge of everything. So I'm glad that they're in your hands. 

AJ: Boys matter- they really do and actually that's one of the reasons I love single sex education in middle school because they can get really vulnerable in a way that they maybe don't feel as comfortable doing when there's a lot more different or energy, let's call it that.

CW: Totally right.

AJ: Yeah. It is beautiful work to be with the boys that age. Yeah. 

SH: Bless you for doing it. We all owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude, so thank you. Today we're gonna have Cynthia lead us through the discussion, and I don't wanna kill one more second before we get into it- there's so much in your notes that I'm excited to talk about, Amy. So take it away, Cynthia. 

CW: Susan, you alluded to Amy’s social media account: Women on the Stand, but I'm guessing that's where a lot of our listeners, if they know you, Amy, that's where they know you from, but also I'm going to guess wider America knows you from your New York Times article- “Does the Mormon Church Empower Women?” and a picture of you was the lead photo- there were other women quoted- I was one of the women also interviewed for that article. We will link to that, in our show notes on our website, as well as social media.

So yeah, Amy, we're so excited to get to talk to you today because I'm sure these last few months have been quite a unique experience in your life, and so we're hoping as we talk about your life as a Latter-day Saint woman that some of those experiences come out. So let's just start out with, can you give us a quick snapshot of your Latter-day Saint life? Have there been specific experiences in your life that kind of shaped your Mormonism, that shaped the woman that you became? We'd love to hear more. 

AJ: Yeah. So I grew up in Chicago and I think because I grew up in a place where there weren't very many members, our ward family was really important to us, and I had a really wonderful experience growing up in the church. I felt loved and cared for, and I felt like I had a place to belong. And I did belong. I did everything. I participated in every activity. My best friends were members of the church, so going to a dance, a stake dance or participating in a road show or all of it. I loved it. I would just sort of drink it up- I would look forward to girls camp every year, which was on sort of the banks of the Mississippi and it was unbearably hot and just bugs everywhere and I honestly loved every minute of it.

So my life as a Latter-day Saint young person, young woman, was kind of idyllic in a lot of ways. But at the same time, I was a kid who, I just really refused to bear my testimony. There's always those teachers that will challenge the youth to get up and bear your testimony next Sunday- and I really took exception to that. When I was young, and I would be like the one kid that would just sit in my bench with my family with my arms crossed and was like, “not doing it, I don't care how many people look at me”.

And I think it was because, well, I know it was because, I thought that you had to know the church was true beyond a shadow of doubt, right? That's the language I always heard as a young person, and I didn't think I could say that. I felt like I would be dishonest if I got up there and I said, “I know the church, every fiber in my being…” 

SH: Right. 

AJ: “.. that this church is true.” So I, I just didn't, I wouldn't, and at some point, my best friend, Debbie, who is really important in my life. She's one of these people that has just always lived her religion out loud. And I've always been one of these people that lives my religion sort of to myself- at least in high school, I was very much that way. And, she was the kind of person that she'd go to girl’s camp and then make a t-shirt with puffy paint that said, “I'm a Mormon” and then, wear it to high school, right? And there's, like I said, there's very few of us- she went to a different high school than I did, but she was that person. And one day she asked me why I refused to bear my testimony. And when I confessed to her why, she said, “well, that's just stupid. That's so dumb. Why don't you just get up there and say, I believe, or I hope!?” And I was like- wait what!? I can do that? And that was a real gift to me because it sort of released me from the black and white thinking that I've always been uncomfortable with just sort of, my personality doesn't understand that- I don't think. So I think that released me to be able to go on and really start to think about my beliefs and who I was and what I cared about. 

SH: And about being able to share those.

AJ: 100 percent.

SH: Which I think is really important. It's so interesting to me that you were so sensitive to that- you are so sensitive to that Amy, that you wouldn't bear your testimony at girl’s camp- like who doesn't bear their testimony at girl’s camp!? The whole thing is set up to create a place for you to do that, so that really says something to me. It's really resonant for me to think of someone having a really good experience in the church as a young person, but then it sounds like there was also this thing, like it wasn't perfect, right? There was this place where you didn't quite feel like you fit comfortably.

AJ: Yeah, I think that's right.

SH: To be able to get up and say the things that you heard everybody else saying, so I love thinking that you were in that wrestle, even as you were having a really great experience. 

AJ: Yeah. I love that word wrestle because I honestly think that's what we're supposed to be doing a lot, right. That we were supposed to be wrestling with our, with God, right. We're supposed to be wrestling with our religion. We're supposed to be wrestling with our relationship. It's what we're supposed to be doing. And we, the culture of our church doesn't always message that. 

SH: No. And I think specifically for youth, it does not message that it's not presented as a, here's an opportunity for you to step [00:10:00] into some- a really growy space where you're going to be handed big ideas to chew on and wrestle with and that's your job during these years. 

AJ: Yeah, it's interesting because I, in some ways I understand that.

SH: Sure, sure.

AJ: And when, especially with our youth, but I also think there has to be space for meeting them when they are wrestling. And not pretending.

SH: Right. 

AJ:  So if they're not wrestling, we don't want to say you must wrestle because maybe they'll get there.

SH: No. But being, having it be a place where they could show that they're wrestling because you obviously did not, would not have felt that space based on how you describe not being able to stand up and say what you did believe. 

AJ: Right. So creating space for everyone to sort of be where they're at and be happy that they're there and meeting them in their needs- that's idyllic. 

CW: And also, can we just give a shout out to your friend, Debbie, because my goodness, we need so many more Debbies, I think, in the church who are like, you just say what you believe. You just say what's important to you, whether that's an actual bearing of the testimony officially or commenting in class. I just think what a gift your friend was to you to kind of free up. 

AJ: I think that the other thing was that I think was important to my own understanding growing up in the church is that I always felt called to go on a mission and I kind of  would suppress that thought and think, I don't know, I don't want to do that, I don't want to do that. And then felt very called to go on a mission.

So I served a mission when I was young, I went to Argentina and that was also a really formative experience for me. My parents are converts. My mother is the only member in her family, she comes from a family that was in a mixed faith marriage. My grandmother was Catholic-I thought my grandfather was a Methodist and that made her feel like she was going to find her church when she was out of the house. And yeah, so it really called her to seek and search, and she went to lots of different churches. She was an Indiana girl and moved to Chicago for her first job when she was 19 or 20 and just started visiting churches every Sunday and eventually found the Mormon church, prayed about it, felt that it was the right church to belong to.

And that's sort of part of my origin story, right? Having known that my whole life, that was a choice my mother made in her seeking- has also been really important to my own faith and my dad, the same thing. My dad joined the church with a part of his family, not his whole family, a few of his siblings and his mother in Chicago. He was a teenager and at the time, he was a high school dropout and he was not going to many good places, I wouldn't say. And so he has always told the story of the church really saving his life. He joined the church in Chicago and there were like medical students and dental students there and lots of college graduates- and my dad didn't come from a family of college graduates. He came from a family of sharecroppers who moved to the city to give a better life to their children.

But the church showed my dad this other possibility- and inspired him to be the first college graduate in my whole family. And so that is also another part of my story that has been really important to me because I knew how changed my family was because of the church.