Motherhood
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First Sunday of Advent: Bearing Life into the World
Nine months pregnant. Aching back and feet. Exhaustion. And on top of it, traveling by donkey for three whole days in order to fulfill a command from a far-off governor to count the inhabitants of Bethlehem. Yet – Mary never claimed exemption because of her circumstances. I probably would have tried to claim exemption. I have claimed an exemption for jury duty for much less than three days on a donkey at my due date. Why didn’t she refuse to go or claim an exemption? Why didn’t she make it easier for herself? Caryll Houselander puts it in hauntingly simple terms: “...Mary never claimed exemption from the common lot, from…
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5 Things I Learned in 5 Years of Parenting
I cannot believe my baby girl is turning 5 this week! It feels like just yesterday I was experiencing parenthood for the first time, from morning sickness, to childbirth, to toddler tantrums. I can’t say whether the last five years have flown by or lasted forever. Maybe that old adage is true “the days are long but the years are short.” But in these past five years, I’ve learned so much about myself, marriage, and parenthood. Some are things I heard my own parents say but couldn’t appreciate until I lived the experiences myself, some are things I’ve learned on my own, while some are silly and others are profound.…
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Pudgy Tummies and Tired Eyes? Not Through Childlike Eyes.
“Allow the children to come to me… for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” Luke 18:16 (NAB) I think small children see things through a God-like lens, as he would see the world. The childlike see with love and simplicity and purity. I think there’s a real reason why God says that the childlike are the ones who will inherit the kingdom. Yesterday morning I was getting ready to run. In a sleep-deprived daze, I put on my black joggers, long sleeve tee, running shoes, and threw my morning hair back in a big headband. I didn’t feel cute, I didn’t feel beautiful. I’m running mainly because…
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Are You Wasting Your Time on Your Children?
Our society is hyper-focused on productivity. I could see it in high school students who were in twenty different time-consuming activities while taking ten different high level courses all while trying to hold down a full time job. Alright, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but whether you’re a high school student trying to build the resume for college applications or parents trying to provide all the best opportunities for their children, there’s a high societal (and also internal) pressure to perform, to win, to be the best, to have the best, to do the best. I’m a stay at home mom with two little children. I often times feel…
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My Little Cloister
The cloister of Carmel is called by Claire Dwyer, author of This Present Paradise, “an inheritance of silence and solitude and perpetual prayer” and is one of many paths to holiness. Great saints and Doctors of the Church have arisen from this tradition. St. Theresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Therese of Lisieux, and the somewhat lesser known St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, to name a few. Family life is very different. And though many great saints have arisen from the tradition of silence and solitude, many great saints have arisen also from the great tradition of noise and chaos, of love and laughter, otherwise known as…
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The Hidden Holiness of Parenthood
Do you ever feel like being a parent isn’t “holy”? Some days I’m left feeling the monotony of parenthood. Other days I’m left feeling inadequate. Still, some days I feel as though I failed my children, whether it’s because I lost my temper again or spent too much time looking at my phone. Raise your hand if you can relate. When I was discerning back in college (and for several years after), I couldn’t shake the idea that being a religious sister was the holier option. Religious sisters get time built into their schedule every single day for mass, prayer, silence, and yet still more prayer and time to be…
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Receiving the Gift of Newborns
Pure gift… words I dared to utter about our new babe. We named him Nathanael, which means “gift of God” because, after all, after loss and waiting, it’s harder to take the gift for granted. The first time around, I was so overwhelmed by all the newness that it took awhile for the magnitude of the gift to really settle in. So, this time we are acutely aware of what has been given to us. Gifts can be funny though. Sometimes we receive gifts we don’t want or didn’t ask for. One year when I was teaching middle school religion, a family gifted every teacher with a bottle of wine…