My Sunday: Rachel Rueckert
Rachel Rueckert is the editor-in-chief of Exponent II, a Mormon feminist quarterly that was established in 1974. She is an award-winning writer, editor, and teacher. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University as well as an M.Ed from Boston University. Her first book, East Winds, will appear in November. It is a memoir describing her external and internal journeys to wrestle with what marriage means while backpacking through South America, Asia, and Europe as a millennial newlywed.
Rolling out of bed. Sunday morning is the only day of the week that I do not have an alarm set, so I get to just roll out of bed. I joke that I'm not a morning person or a night person, I'm a day person. I do a Wordle to wake up. It's better than checking my email. Lately, I've been doing this thing to center myself: I identify different shards of my psyche that are running around in my head and draw them. This is not art; it's capturing who's showing up that day in my life and bringing the pieces together for a kind of roundtable discussion. These little doodles on notecards help me center, especially on days where I'm feeling really angsty, which is sometimes Sundays.
Pancakes with syrup from Vermont. My Sunday morning routine is having pancakes with a big jug of real maple syrup that we got in Vermont. It's almost like a food storage thing. You have to use up that maple syrup. We have a pretty small apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I share it with my husband, Austin. But I also share it with a roommate, my friend from BYU, who is like a brother to me. He's gay and estranged from his family, so we have a family here. My roommate needs the kitchen for most of the day to make a meal that will last him the whole week. He'll make all of his dinners and lunches at once—it's an operation. After the pancakes, Austin and I get out of the kitchen and get ready for church. That's our morning.
What Sunday means to me. In my life, my Sunday has gone through stages. As a child with a bit of a fraught upbringing, Sunday in our house was a list of things you didn't do. You didn't swim. You didn't play golf—like dad and like bad people. You didn't do those things. That was what I understood Sunday to be. Then I graduated from BYU and started my first career in teaching. I got really depressed. Sunday became the Sunday blues. I would really dread Sundays. Now, it's kind of lovely. I wouldn't say it's a day of rest, but it is a day of openness, just learning to enjoy Sundays and make them my own. Thinking about Sundays makes me realize how profoundly grateful I am that I made changes in my life to be able to not dread my Sundays and to have the kind of job I do.
My Sunday book bag. I’ve tried to be deliberate about what I read on Sundays. I've been reading a lot of Buddhist spiritual books lately. I really love Thich Nhat Hanh, Richard Rohr, Tara Brach, and Pema Chodron—I bring these Buddhist mindfulness thinkers into my own spirituality. I always have a book that I bring to church. Right now, I’m reading Matthew Wickman's Life to the Whole Being. If it's not that, it's The Book of Mormon for the Least of These series by Margaret Olsen Hemming and Fatimah Salleh. I always have something in my bag because sometimes I find church to be a little stressful, especially as an introvert. If I have one of my book friends along I feel better, like there is a little solidarity going on.
Our gift to the neighbors. Ever since Austin and I started dating, he makes spaghetti and Brussels sprouts. We have that every Sunday, so I've eaten that every Sunday for years. It's so plain and simple—just dripping in olive oil. We eat very unhealthy amounts of it, but it's such a comfort food at this point. I live in this apartment building where there are six units. When you walk in on Sundays, the whole building smells like Brussels sprouts. So that's our little Sunday gift to everyone else.
Writing for others. I love to go to bed early on Sunday. For me right now that's about 10 o'clock or after an Exponent II board meeting. It took me a long time in my life to accept that it's okay for me to want to be a writer. I love my job, and I love my work. I’m kind of a one-person circus between writing, teaching, and editing. And I adore it all. I could spend my whole life working because I love it so much, which makes me very grateful. My transition to the upcoming week starts on Sunday nights. I co-founded a company called Kleio that does family history story writing—it’s mostly mentoring folks working on telling their own family stories or ghostwriting them for other people. My grandmother just passed away a month ago, and my grandfather will probably be following her soon. On Sunday night, I am writing his stories, based on interviews I had with him. It's not going to fit in the work week otherwise. It needs to be kind of deliberate time set aside right now. That’s Sunday night. It’s sacred and meaningful to me. I feel honored to get to witness his stories and to try to shape them into something that can translate to other people and his posterity.
