daughter

  • Life

    Life

    As the calendar got ready to flip to April and the promise of spring, I was sick. On Holy Thursday, I croak-sang through six preschool music classes and by the time I got to mass that afternoon, I was mouthing the words to every song. My duties as a music teacher had spent the last…

  • Carried

    It had been four days of flu as I went to sleep last night, the night before the secondary pneumonia and sinus infections were diagnosed. I fell exhausted into bed, slightly lighter than I have been due to almost a week’s worth of suppressed appetite. My head hit the pillow and as I breathed shallowly,…

  • Up

    Up

    On the way home from a walk or run, I’ll often stop at the statue of Mary in front of our neighborhood chapel and pray. If I stand in front of her, I put my hands in hers as I ask for her intercession on my two children. I pray that she will be a…

  • Frozen

    I went for a run on a freezing day and I was surrounded by ghosts. Surprisingly, I can run longer when the air is cold and the sun is bright, and it was a day just like that, so I took myself down the road past my kids’ old elementary school. The school is closed…

  • Hero’s Journey

    This fall, my daughter took a half-year course called “A Hero’s Journey”, which delved into the theory of Joseph Campbell that all of our favorite stories resonate with us because they follow the same narrative pattern. A hero is separated from what she knows, is tested, receives help, battles and wins, and returns home, not…

  • Meal

    Over the span of my life, I have eaten a lot of delicious bites of food. The first bite of caramelized onion butter on warm sourdough at The Foundry, the sea salt dark chocolate caramel from Hilliards, the sharp, buttery taste of Kerrygold Dubliner cheddar. These are just a few. But it takes many more…

  • Daughters

    All of the mother-daughter pairs were at the craft store today, and then they all followed me over to the Paper Store. These girls and women stuck out to me all day long. They were a variety of ages…children to elderly, and some were sweet and others were annoyed. After all, this is the essence…

  • Dad

    When I doubt and worry and despair, I sometimes need to check myself regarding what I believe about the nature of God. If I feel abandoned, that must mean that God is careless. If I feel shaken, maybe I believe God is not powerful. If I feel lonely, maybe my image of God is not…

  • Yarn

    It seems to me that a life spent with young children is made of varying textures and materials. There are the structures that give shape to your daily life, like the school day and activities and sports. These provide the skeleton of a schedule and also tend to dictate your community. These structures are brick;…

  • Son

    A few nights back, my daughter, Maura, and a friend saw what appeared to them to be a supernova, a star that grew bigger and brighter and then was gone from the sky. Both she and my son were fascinated by the idea that if it actually was a dying sun that they saw that…