Growing Confidence: A Conversation with Lisa Shumway - Episode 43

In this episode, Candice interviews Lisa Shumway, a mother of five and an active moderator in the Bridges Facebook group for LDS parents of adult children. Lisa shares her deeply personal journey of raising children who have stepped away from the LDS Church, the complexities of their individual paths, and her own evolving faith. She discusses the impact of her children's unique challenges, such as medical issues and autism, on her family dynamics, and how these experiences shifted her mindset away from a transactional view of faith. Lisa also reflects on her changing political views during the pandemic, particularly regarding LGBTQ issues, and how she reconciled those with her religious beliefs. The conversation delves into her nuanced relationship with the church community, including coping strategies for dealing with challenging church messages, and underscores the importance of self-acceptance and following Christ's teachings. The episode concludes with Lisa's spiritual confirmation of God's love for her children and her commitment to helping others in need.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:52 Lisa's Family Background
01:46 Challenges with Children's Faith
04:50 Navigating Family Dynamics
09:15 Health Struggles and Realizations
12:03 Shifting Perspectives on Faith
25:22 Political and Social Reevaluations
28:00 Current Church Experience
33:24 Spiritual Experiences and Conclusion

You found me! If what you heard on the No Empty Chairs podcast gives you hope for more help, please schedule a free Conversation with Candice. You can also visit candiceclarkcoaching.com for more information about how coaching tools can help you keep your relationship with your children and your faith. While you're there, be sure to pull up a chair and sign up with your email to be the first to know about news and events for moms whose kids don't come to church.

It's going to be okay, and even better!

Transcript

  Hello everyone. Welcome to the podcast today. I'm really glad you're here with me. I have a parent interview as promised to do more of those this year and I'm excited to bring you my friend Lisa Shumway.  Welcome Lisa. 

Hi, 

Thanks for being here. Lisa and I met in the Bridges  Facebook group. It's support for LDS parents of adult children and we are both moderators in that group and  keep that a place where people can share their stories and I'm really excited that Lisa has agreed to come  and be with us today to share some of her story.

So Lisa, what would you like us to know about you? 

I am the mother of five children ages 18 to 30. My husband and I were married in the temple. I think almost 34 years ago. And I was raised in the church. We both served missions. We did all the things. And I have five Eagle Scouts. And only my last one didn't quite graduate from seminary.

But I, I tried my best I homeschooled as well.  tried my best to do the right things by my kids.  

Thank you for sharing that with us. And I think all of us moms are trying to do the best that we can by our kids. Yeah. Thank you for that.  Well tell us a little bit about your journey of becoming a mom of kids who don't come to church. 

Well, I'm very positive and I, I imagined that my oldest son, that he would be a bishop someday. I don't know if it's just a young mom thing, but I thought he was extra special and he is extra special but it, when he was 14.  He sat us down and he said, Mom and Dad, I just don't believe in the church. And I've had to be honest with the bishop and tell him that I don't believe and he isn't going to allow me to go to the temple anymore. He said, I'd like to go to the temple, but the bishop said no. 

So this was your oldest child at age 14. Okay.

So he's 30 now. So,  That was a ways back. My husband and I were it was kind of earthshaking for us. I mean, we had been doing scriptures and prayer every night. You know what I mean? We were doing family home. We were doing all the things that they tell you will lead your kids to be faithful and  we were with the program 100 percent and trying to make it right.   But we couldn't help but respect him for his honesty. My sister, I told her about it and she said, Oh, when I was that age, I would have just lied to the bishop. 

So, tell me a little more about what that was like for you hearing that at the time and if you had complicated thoughts and feelings about it, or, 

It was kind of challenging. In some ways, I had help in some preparation for that in that my parents are both counselors and my youngest sister, she's 11 years younger than me. When she was in high school, she stopped attending church and told us she no longer believed in the church.

I had talked to my mom about that quite a bit because that really upset me. I cried and cried when that happened. I thought that we'd lost her. That was how I felt about it.  But my mom some years later when I asked her about it again, I said, doesn't that bother you that she's left the church and that she won't probably be in heaven with us.

And she said, no, she said, we're here this life to learn and to grow.  And she says, why would I want to limit her from making the best choice she can and learning from it? 

Hmm.

 I think that helped me when Riley made his choice  but it was still a confusing time.  And our Bishop tried so hard with him he's an awesome person. It's not like he was doing bad things or being rude.  He was supportive of us going to church.  He came to church with us, went to seminary. He just was being honest about how he felt about things. And  that was confusing.

It doesn't really match the narrative that you're taught at church. 

 Yeah.  That is a challenging moment when things are not lining up for you the way you'd thought they would be. So where do you go from there then, Lisa?  Most of my kids were older when they stopped going to church. And so I'm just trying to imagine having a 14 year old and four younger children

Well, He still attended church

okay.

and we were actually much stiffer with our oldest child than we were,  that's how a lot of families are, where as you go along you find out being hard on your kids doesn't necessarily pan out.  And we required him to have a BYU haircut, he wanted to grow his hair out and we said, no, not till you're 18. And he just was an easy going and he was emotionally close to me and we were good friends. But I did continue to, you know, Oh, can you read this? Maybe if you prayed about this, And he would do what I asked and then he'd come back and say, I still don't really feel good about it. Now, the last couple of years, as I've made my own growth and progress, been through my own faith expansion as I've talked to him, he tells me that when he was 14. As he looks back, he says he just had a bad feeling about it.  And later he went to E. F. Y. And he told me I felt there what you would call the spirit. But he said, well, there was a couple things. My husband and I had been through 10 years of a lot of conflict  we went to therapy.  And my oldest son, of course, was witness to all that. And my husband suffers from some depression. So my son said, just because you feel a certain way, doesn't mean it's, something's true.  Because he'd seen that his dad felt things that were not accurate. 

That's interesting.

And then he says later when he was 18, he did start really researching the church and that would have been about  2015  and he found things on the internet about Joseph Smith looking into a hat and translating the book of Mormon from a seer stone.  And that was before the church had come clean on that and talked to people about that.

And so that did not match his experience in primary, when in primary the golden plates are hidden. It just, it didn't match. And he felt a lot of betrayal and he tells me about that now. But at the time, he wasn't as open about what was really going on.  He mentioned the hat and at the time, he said, would that make a difference to you and your testimony?

And I said, well, I don't know. I mean, I don't know the details, 

what was that like for you as you were going along with the teenager bringing this to you?

No, he didn't tell me about  The hat and seer stone until the last

Oh, into later. Right.

he went through that when he was about 18. And, he didn't argue with us. We would just encourage him to read and to pray. We'd share things with him and he would, come back not feeling any different.

For me, I had some anxiety about that. 

Okay. So you have a 14 year old who is still going to church, still participating in the family. He's just not doing temple trips.

Right, right. 

Okay. What's the next phase? There's

My second child when he was 18.  My second child is autistic. And so,  Jamie just It never said a lot, because Jamie struggles with speaking. When he was 18, he said to me, I just don't want to go to church each Sunday anymore.  And I said, okay, you're 18, you can make that decision. Because as a mom, I only have so much power to control other people. And I'm relieved, when my kids turn 18, it's time for them to make some of their own decisions.  So I said, okay.  We still, tried to encourage Jamie to serve a mission. And Jamie said, well, I don't think that would work since I can't really talk.  And so there that was. And then my third child he really had some serious medical problems going on and we didn't know about it. He just was angry all the time and sleeping, about age 14, he started sleeping more and more during the day. And we were like, oh, he's awake all night. Well, he was awake some at night, but it turns out he was just mostly sleeping all the time.  It took maybe by when he was 17, I finally asked the doctor to do a thyroid test. Cause that runs in my family.  And he found that and referred us to an endocrinologist.

And gradually, we started uncovering all these different health conditions. But he was just angry all the time. We couldn't even have family dinner. It's not like he would  overtly do something. But do you know how it is when you go in a room and you feel that feeling? That someone's angry? 

tension.

Yeah. And so when we would call him down to eat, and of course he's asleep, Or laying down or trying to sleep. Yeah. And then he wouldn't say anything, but we could all feel it. And over time, in my prayers, I came to the conclusion that I was run to push for a family dinner. That just because it's in the check off list at church for being a good mom, didn't mean that was necessarily the right thing for our family. 

Yeah, that's a hard one.

Yeah. 

Those lessons to try to actually give yourself permission to be open to inspiration for what actually is what your family needs. I've found that to be pretty tough.

Well, I just kept pushing him.  I thought that was my role.  And I didn't know what was going on with him.  He was more and more depressed, even suicidal. But over time we uncovered The sleep apnea. He didn't snore. You couldn't see him wake up, but he was actually waking up 55 times in one hour when he was asleep.

We found out eventually, his tongue was quite large, and so it would block off his airway when he relaxed. He did BiPAP for a few years and he worked so hard that he'd get holes in his skin and eventually they did a surgery and moved both his jaws and his chin forward and his sleep apnea has been completely relieved and he's like a different person.

He isn't angry all the time. But he has other health problems too autoimmune disorder.  He's 20, coming 25 next month. And he's still at home, sleeping a lot, doing not a lot.

So, what has it been like for you trying to navigate these experiences with your kids? What has it meant to you?

Well, it's just really confusing. I think as a young mom, I just believed the narrative presented at church that if I checked off all the boxes, kind of a transactional idea, a prosperity gospel idea that if I did all the things that then I would get all the blessings.  And while these things were happening with Joey, we were also having drama with my youngest child who was born with a series of defects. He's now 18 and he's had 16 surgeries and some of them quite, I mean, 14 hours out at Stanford. He's had three back surgeries now. As well as for every other part of his body where he had a defect.

He's a sweet, wonderful person. He's 18 now, weighs 82 pounds. And stands 4'11 And he sits in a booster seat that he drives. And he goes up to the college part time.  He's still probably going to have another surgery this next year and he doesn't want to get too loaded down.

But during his babyhood, he had pneumonia over and over and over and over. This was happening concurrently with my third child, Joey's Illnesses. Well, I mean, we didn't know. We just didn't know. And we were just trying and pushing him and making him go to young men's, and he didn't want to go to young men's and he was cranky with his leaders and they would play basketball every week and he didn't have any eye hand coordination at all.

Oh, yeah. Those wards where the young men play basketball every week work great for the young men who play basketball.

They do. And then they're wonderful. But for him, he just sat by the side and was uncomfortable every week and the leaders would try. They were good, loving people, but we just couldn't quite fit in to the box that was presented to us.

Right.

couldn't do it. 

Yeah. So you talked about having this transactional mindset early on.  Can you identify when that started to shift for you?

I think Daniel's birth really did it. In a lot of ways. And then also  when

Is that your youngest?

my youngest, that started to really cause me to rethink and to realize, cause I would sit there in church and they would be telling me to go to the temple. Every talks about going to the temple regularly or whatever.

And Daniel has a G tube. Okay. He requires constant care. it's not like my husband and I could just head on up to the temple.  No. Other families, they take a vacation off to Hawaii or somewhere. And Daniel has medical needs that required our presence on a regular basis.  we had to take care of. We would do a getaway at a hotel down the road and then come back and do his medical stuff and then go back to our getaway. Once a year we'd try to do something.

creative problem solving there. 

Yeah. Yeah. But I just don't think people at church  I mean, what I learned is I originally thought I could just explain anything to anybody and they'd understand me. 

Hmm, 

But I came to find that our experience wasn't something that we could really share with other people and have them understand it.  It was a lot of times better to just remain quiet. I spent a lot of time, I think, trying to,  I wanted to.  I don't know. I think I was seeking approval, so I wanted everyone to understand where I was coming from I had to mature to accept myself as myself and accept that whatever anybody else thought, it didn't matter.

My mother said something one time that really made a difference. She said for them to really understand. They would have to go through some of the things you've gone through. And she says, and I don't know that we'd really wish that on them  if that's not the right time for them to have that experience.

hmm, 

You have to accept it's in God's plan that they aren't going to understand me and that that's okay. That's okay.

As you came to realize that you didn't need other people to understand you, or even if you wanted them to, they weren't necessarily going to , what came after that for you? How do you find acceptance? 

I just have a strong feeling I had to stop seeking acceptance externally from other people. And I think that was important too in my marriage because therapy was hard and we did it for a long time. But the one thing that made a difference was for me to have some confidence. 

So, when my husband would be upset with me and saying that I'd done the wrong thing, I came to realize, over and over I would say, no, no, I wasn't attacking you. I wasn't trying to put you down. But that is how he felt. I understand that's how he felt, but it was never my intention.  My parents had a really egalitarian relationship.

They were equals. And they argued. And they argued publicly because my mother's parents didn't and my mom felt uncomfortable with that. And so

I have a friend who talks about,  if you never argue in front of your children, how do they learn how to resolve conflict? 

yeah, that's exactly her point of view. 

Okay.

My husband came from a family where they didn't resolve conflict. Where pretty much you just let it go. You didn't talk about it. I don't want to blame his family. He has his own way of thinking and functioning.

So he wasn't comfortable when I would come to him and say, Oh, let's do this this different way. Oh, this didn't work for me. To him, that felt like an attack.

hmm.

To me it never was an attack, and he would respond, he'd have a fight or flight reaction.  And respond with things that really weren't helpful. 

Mm hmm.

The thing that  really helped with that was just at a certain point I stopped trying to reassure him. I stopped trying to have him understand. I stopped trying to Convince him that I meant well, I just knew that I did. And I just would say, you've misunderstood. And I would turn around and walk away.

So, you developed a confidence in your own ability to assess both your intentions and what you've actually said and done  that made you feel comfortable with yourself,  even if somebody else was upset with you, even if that was your husband.

I do feel like it links into the gospel because I just had to come to a point where I decided, okay, this really isn't about the kind of husband he is to me. It isn't about how he treats me.  It's about who I am and how I choose to respond to that.  Do I respond with a way that sets a boundary and protects myself and my children?

And that also protects him. Or do I respond in a way that, perpetuates the problem? I came to a point where if I felt good about what I did, that was enough. Yes.

So, it sounds like you were having opportunities to develop some relational skills. both in your marriage and with your children. 

Yes, if I feel I'm following Jesus Christ in what I'm doing, that's enough. 

Thank you. 

 As you developed these skills and had your mindset shift away from this transactional mindset, what did that look like for you? How did that change your experience of your family?

It was really earth shaking, when we did find out that Joey was having that sleep apnea at that moment, I knew that all the things I had been thinking about him were wrong.  And I had been pushing him and pushing him and pushing him and trying so hard to be a good mother.

I had friends that were telling me, Oh, you can't put up with that and you need to make sure, you know,  this idea that as a mother I controlled the situation and that I could make him do what he needed to do.  I  went through a paradigm shift  Where I knew that just wasn't true, that there are so many things that are just out of my control and out of his control.

And we often imagine things are in our control, but that was very convincing. It just changed the way I thought.

Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. Sometimes these heavy things Really, our opportunities for our growth. 

At this point in my journey, all my kids were still going to church more or less. We were making Joey go.  As awful as that was for him,  he fell asleep in the church one time after seminary and they locked the doors and left him there. They didn't know that he'd gone for a walk during class around to the other side of the building and he'd fallen over and fell asleep on the floor, probably some narcolepsy or something.

Hm.

he's only had one or two incidents like that when he was that age. And they locked him in , well, he could get out, but it was two o'clock before he woke up and called me.

Wow. So at what point did you become a mom whose kids don't come to church? 

Well like I said, Riley, my oldest, stopped attending when he was 18 and moved out, and so did my second son, and my third son, Joey didn't want to participate in life at all, so, when he was 18, we stopped pushing him, and Then I have kind of, they call them Irish twins.

My fourth child is just 14 months in front of my youngest, who was a surprise. They went to church for a long time. My fourth child, he loved church, really enjoyed it. But He wasn't honest with me about how he felt about it. When he turned 18, I opened up to him about some of my faith. Some of the things I had been studying and thinking about in terms of my own faith transition about the church. And then. He finally opened up to me. He said that he had been praying that God would help him since he was seven years old about some incident that happened in the neighbor's house seeing some pornography by mistake and that he never felt better and he never felt like God responded to his prayer and When he prayed about the church he didn't get an answer and he all that time had pretended that everything was perfect And hadn't told me. And he kept going to church after that, even after telling me that he didn't believe in it. He enjoyed the social situation. And then we went to a family reunion the fall after he, graduated from high school. There was a family member at the family reunion who was transgender and had recently come out.

One of his cousins wanted to do a makeover for this family member.  So what she did to give him some cover from the older generation is she did black fingernails and black lipstick on all the boys. Okay. So we came home and my fourth son had these black fingernails and the next day was church. He couldn't bring himself to go to church with the black fingernails. He knew there'd be too many questions and he didn't want to talk to people about it. But he couldn't bring himself to remove the black fingernail polish either. He felt like he needed to leave it on to support  his transgender relative. In the end, he never went to church again. Well, it's not exactly true. He's come with us  like at Christmas or something like that. But not for his own good. You

Not regularly.

yeah, yeah, 

Yeah. Because church isn't a place where he can show up with black fingernail polish.

that's how he feels about it, that he can't be his real self at church, he's told me that maybe at some point he will go back I've encouraged him to see  the community, that there are good things about the church, even though support for his transgender relative is not one of them.

He says he'll think about it, so who knows.

So how is it for you navigating that difference? What you just described about support for your transgender relative, not being one of the things you find at church.

I don't like it. I look back on myself from when I was younger. My younger sister she apparently had a transgender friend that was her date in high school. And she never told me about it.  But then when Prop 8 came out and I supported it and I tried to talk to her about it and get her on board, she was so offended and so upset  she stopped talking to me for two years because I supported Prop 8 and was arguing with her on email about it.  So you can see that where I am now is a very different place. What happened really for me is during the pandemic, there was the COVID, and my youngest son had had all these hospitalizations with pneumonia when he was young. Now, in the end, the COVID was not a problem for him, but we didn't know that. And his pulmonologist was very scared of it.

And she went to great lengths to get him the vaccine, even when it wasn't available to everybody. And I felt it was a kind of scary time for me.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, I live in an area and all my friends, everyone I knew were Republican and me too. But I was pro vaccine and masking and taking care of our family.

We have three asthmatics, my husband and also joey are asthmatics as well as my youngest son.  And It was really hard to have people act like it was nothing but politics. We even had a home teacher that came over and wanted to teach, speak to our kids and tell them not to be afraid of the pandemic  we had to ask the bishop to remove him,  that we couldn't have him visit anymore. That was really, really hard.  But in the process of it, I had to re evaluate all my political positions 

Hmm.

Doing that caused me to re evaluate the church's position on LGBTQ people. I had to consider if it would be okay for me to vote for someone that supported that.

 I joined Mormon Women for Ethical Government.  There's a lot of Democrats in that group. It's a nonpartisan group,  it's a support group for members of the church that are women, that have political ideas. You can't really necessarily share in most forums. With my interaction with them I started just thinking a lot more. Before that, I had never been on social media. I avoided it. But, I needed to be able to say to somebody, your refusal to mask or to be vaccinated can impact my child. I had to say that. I had to say it publicly and I was determined to do that.

And in the process of joining MWEG and evaluating all my political positions, My heart was softened about LGBTQ people, when my relative came out, I was ready to support them,  as all my kids have. Even before that, LGBTQ issues were an issue for my oldest.  He'd talk to me and say, well, this isn't, and the other thing was women's issues, and so, for him. 

How is it for you at church now? 

 I love the people at church. I like to attend. I've had some struggles lately. Right now, I'm feeling comfortable. But I want to keep in mind because for a while I was attending and feeling comfortable and I thought everything was fine. But then when President Nielsen did Think Celestial, And I thought I was fine, okay?

President Nelson has done a lot of good things. I'm not trying to say anything against him.  I support many of the changes that he has put forward. But, For me, when Think Celestial came out, and even now, when they say it at church, and they, I'll quote them, Think Celestial, unfortunately, what goes in my mind is I say, Think Telestial, because I'm thinking Telestial. I'm not going to be up in the Celestial Kingdom without my children. And I know that doesn't even match my more mature way of thinking about it because it isn't that black and white.  But it hurts me every time I hear it.

talk was hard for a lot of people. And I think the people for whom it was not hard have trouble imagining why. So do you mind sharing a little bit about what you found upsetting about that talk? I actually did a whole episode talking about it and some of the unintended consequences of some of the things in that talk, but I'm curious for you just to help people understand. what is upsetting to you when you hear that?  Mm-hmm

 It's just kind of idea that, he said, this life is the time to prepare for the future, which I believe in, you know, prepare for the next life, but he's putting all the focus on that, and the idea that if you don't, he said it really clearly, if you're not married in the temple, if you're not heterosexual, And married to someone of the opposite sex, right in the temple, then  salvation is not for you.

He said it pretty basic. There was no fudging.  No fuzzy edges. It was pretty clear  and he was saying  how you act in this life being sealed in the temple to someone of the opposite sex will determine what kind of body you have in the next life. He went that far. It will determine where you live in the next life. So he's saying that people who don't meet those criterion, they're excluded. So it's an exclusive vision that only applies to certain people  that fit the criterion that he's going under. And, on top of it, just how it might apply to my transgender relative, and my kids who aren't going to comply with being sealed in the temple.

On top of that, having had the experience of having disabled kids, we did not fit. We did not fit. We never fit. And so the more that you draw this little box and you say, you must fit in this box or you're worth nothing and you're gone and lost the more I just say, Oh, I don't believe that.

I can't believe that. It's wrong. It hurts me inside instead of having the spirit. Tell me that it's right. 

Thank you for sharing that.

I do want to add that the scripture that he quoted from the Book of Mormon, there are conflicts, he says, oh, this life is the time to prepare to meet God. Well, later on, you can read in the Doctrine and Covenants things that conflict with that because we have Doctrine and Covenants 138, where people who are dead are preparing, there's still time after you're dead to prepare.

And we have, Joseph's magnificent vision where he saw Alvin in the celestial kingdom when he thought that Alvin would be excluded.

Hmm.

And we have Doctrine and Covenants 19 where Joseph, quotes the Lord saying, my punishment is eternal punishment. And then he goes on to say, but that just means it's my punishment.

It doesn't mean it'll necessarily last forever. 

Yeah. Eternal is a quality, it's means godly. It doesn't mean a length of time or an unending length of time.

Yeah, I, felt like, for me at least, that talk was very short sighted. And I know a lot of people are taking the idea of Think Celestial in a more positive way and they think positively about it  but it's still hard for me  I pull out my cell phone and I will read books and other things when there's talks that kind of tweak me. Because I want to go to church. I want to be part of that community. I can't watch General Conference again. It'll surprise me. I've had that experience of it not being positive for me. I'm just not willing to have that experience again and maybe not be able to attend church at all. 

Yeah. I think that. When our experiences are outside the norm, they're not general, and things set in general conference to, the center of the graph I don't know that it's always considered how it lands on someone in a particular situation, and that can be really painful for people. 

Yeah.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with us, Lisa? 

Sometimes at church, there have been talks and presentations where they've told us not to be on social media. And I didn't do it for lots and lots of years, but when I did, it was an enormous blessing for my life. I had a special spiritual experience in connection with the At Last She Said It podcast. I was listening to Susan one day and she was describing her experience with her daughter couldn't go into a temple dedication with her family and how she felt about that and how she prayed about that and how afterwards the spirit told her  how valuable her daughter was and how she didn't need to be worried and stressed about it.

After I listened to that, I turned it off and I was alone in the kitchen and I had an experience  like a waking dream or a vision where I could see myself in the temple with all my boys there in the beautiful robes of the temple and all of us standing in a circle.

And I could feel that love and I could feel God's love for all of them. And we were all together there it was a really powerful feeling that I had very reassuring and from the spirit. I don't take it to mean that they're all gonna come back to church or something. I just think it means that God has them, that they're on their own path and there's nothing wrong with them or their path. 

They're wonderful, good people learning and growing. And I feel that all the way down.

Thank you. I just have one more question, Lisa. How has having your children not go to church brought you closer to Jesus? 

When I think of Christ, what comes to me most strongly, what I feel deeply committed to in my heart is to follow Him. To follow the Christ in the New Testament that sat down with the Samarian woman, That helped the lepers. The Christ that said, if ye have done it unto the least of them, ye have done it unto me. I know that more now than I certainly did, before I had my children. I understand a lot better. I feel that deeply to follow Christ. And I've remained close to be able to pray and to feel that love. I've continued to feel that all the way through. One thing I have improved on, I have a friend that She's very poverty stricken, and sometimes she contacts me and asks for some help.

 She's disabled, and we help her. I don't think I'd have done that years ago. 

Thank you. Thank you for sharing some of your story and some of your heart with us, Lisa.  I can see and feel the love that you have for your children and for Jesus. I really appreciate your being here. 

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it, Candice.

It's my pleasure, remember, there are no empty chairs.