The Saturday Blogger

Remember the old Primary song “Saturday”? It has a swing that delights young children and goes, “Saturday is a special day, it’s the day we get ready for Sunday…” When I was a child I loved it when we sang that song because our chorister would get out her props—shampoo, nail clippers, and all those other things you’re supposed to use on Saturday—and if I were really lucky, I’d get to go up front and hold one of them up at the appropriate time in the song.

Unfortunately for most of us, Saturdays aren’t so simple anymore. We don’t just have to “brush our clothes and shine our shoes,” we have to do all those loads of laundry and ironing we didn’t get done throughout the week so everyone’s white shirts and dark slacks and pink dresses will be clean and dry and pressed for Sunday morning. We also need to “clean the house and shop at the store”—words that roll off the tongues of singing four-year-olds but somehow cause older children to writhe in pain when their mothers suggest they participate in such activities. (This odd phenomenon can easily stretch tasks that should only take a few minutes into all-day ordeals.)

Then, of course, there are the big projects we couldn’t do the rest of the week, like mowing the lawn, painting the house, and cleaning the septic tank. And there are the fun things we’d love to do with our families that we’ve deemed inappropriate for Sundays, and also don’t fit well into weeknights—visiting amusement parks, going to movies, canoeing, swimming, fishing, building an extension on to the tree house…all these have to be crammed into Saturday as well.

And just when we think we finally have some time to relax, we suddenly remember to prepare the lessons and talks we have to give the next day in church. (Yes, we know we should have been working on them all week. Yes, we really did tell ourselves we’d have more time later. Yes, we really did believe ourselves even though we knew it wasn’t true.)

With all we have on our plates on Saturdays, it’s a wonder that so many of us make it to church the following morning in one piece. Yet there we are, scrubbed and clean and dressed in our beautiful clothes, walking serenely down the aisle of the chapel as the organ plays the prelude music (or, sometimes, the opening hymn…or the sacrament hymn…)

Hi, my name is Katie Parker. I’m the author of the LDS novel Just the Way You Are. And the fact that I have chosen to blog on Saturdays should tell you all you need to know about my current state of mind.

If you never hear from me again, you’ll know I drowned in the Saturday stew.