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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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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…