family

  • Repost: The Spiritual Practice of Mothering – Raised Catholic episode 123

    Repost: The Spiritual Practice of Mothering – Raised Catholic episode 123

    The following is a transcript of a Raised Catholic Podcast episode. To listen to the episode, click here. Today is episode 72: The Spiritual Practice of Mothering Hello friends. As we approach Mother’s Day this year, I’m reflecting on my own experience as a mother, and on my own mother who art in Heaven, and…

  • Walk – 2020

    Walk – 2020

    For the past several years on New Year’s Eve, our sweet hosts have pulled out a sheet of cardboard on which everyone writes their goals for the year ahead in permanent sharpie.  One year I wrote that I would find our dog, Bailey, and I did. Another year I wrote that I would run a…

  • Small

    Small

    I met and held the teeniest, tiniest, most perfect baby today. She was so impossibly light, both in luminescence and weight that it was hard to believe I was holding a real live person; she is so small. As a Mom of college kids, it’s easy to forget. My two babies were small once, just…

  • Wrong

    Wrong

    There was something wrong with me but I didn’t know what it was. I was ten years old and sitting on my twin bed, trying to figure it out. For days, I had been burping far more than a tiny ten-year old should, and the smell that came out of my sixty-pound self was…foul. There’s…

  • Over

    Over

    Structures are falling down all around us. In our country, church, and world, we’re finding our shared values are shared no longer. Institutions are collapsing under the weight of abuse and scandal. The world feels as though it’s spinning off its axis. During troubled times, we tend to look to those things that are immovable,…

  • Puzzle

    Every night before I climb into bed, I try to read from my ‘One Year Bible’. For every day, there is an old testament reading, a new testament reading, a psalm, and a proverb, and it’s a manageable little bit to read, no matter how tired I am. I want the last words of the…

  • Settled

    I was sitting on a bench trying to make out a song I heard coming from a truck across a parking lot. I was waiting on a message. As I walked the dog today, I asked God to open the door to my heart and come in for a while and speak. It had been…

  • Bailey

    One year ago, we brought our dog home from a rescue shelter in New Hampshire. It was a long journey for her, from Arkansas to New Hampshire to here, and she had at least three different names along the way. It was a long journey for us as well. For many years, I was the…

  • Last Day

    Given the choice, how would you spend the last day of your life?  On November 2nd, 2012, we were told that our Christmas-loving, enthusiastically gift-giving mother had very little time left.  Dealing with end-stage ovarian cancer, we had hoped she would make it to enjoy her favorite holiday.  She had already online-shopped for all of…