Kidding
Short answer: being a working mom is NOT a moral question and it makes me crazy crazy when people say it is. Full disclosure: I’m not a working mom. I primarily take care of our three kids. I make their meals and clean them up. I drive them to activities. I read with them and help them nap (protest nap). I semi-tidy the house. I would consider myself a simple stay-at-home mom. I wrote a few years back on how I came to the decision to be at home, as a lawyer. I do work in the cracks and creaks between their busy days. I write this blog and sometimes get paid to write elsewhere. I sew organic baby clothing and sell it (when I’m not on hiatus like right now). I serve as Managing and Content Editor for Blessed is She, Catholic women’s ministry. I co-author a series of scripture studies called Waiting in the Word. These are semi-paid activities. Like a billion moms out there, I volunteer lots too in spare moments. I get to MC galas like the Radiance Gala for the Guiding Star Project and conferences like Finding Your Fiat next week in Illinois! I get to talk occasionally on SiriusXM Catholic radio with Jen Fulwiler. I get to do lots of non-mom related activities. And some weeks I do nothing but violin practice and baseball in the backyard. There’s a balance. But when a woman in casual conversation praises me for giving my daughter the great…
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While I’m parenting at a sub-par level. The mornings are long and seemingly without end but then lunch & naps start around 11 so it means my nap is nigh at hand too! During these mornings, my children have experienced a few of their new favorite things while I lay around with them, occasionally running after the toddler who*still* wants to throw things into the toilet. 1. Baseball cards. SuperBoy will sit with a bundle for over an hours, carefully examining who he has, what positions they play, their stats, and then work out a paper-version of fantasy baseball, setting them all around the kitchen floor. We get the cheapies one and a time from Target for good behavior, but we have about 100,958 so really he’ll play with any of them. 2. Sticker books. SweetPea really destroys these by ripping out all the stickers at once and then putting them anywhere but where they belong in the book but I’m all lalalalal looks like you’re having fun! about it. This Curious George one was a hit. 3. Dollhouses. We have three. Yes. Three. One is this mansion one that my dearly deceased Godmother left to me. It’s gargantuan. The second is one my dad built in the 70’s for his (then) two little girls (and is the tot’s now). The third is one recently acquired because someone survived swim lessons for a year and was usually pretty cooperative (I bought myself a few boxes of these to celebrate my survival). This third one has been hours…
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I wish I could write comprehensively about pregnancy, loss, infertility, secondary infertility, and death of a child. Not that I wish I had endured all of these, but that’s a basic range of the female reproductive experience. It’s our sisters, our friends, our acquaintances. It’s the ladies we see on the subway that we don’t know struggle, and the ones sharing their journey with the world. I wrote about the thin space of being pregnant a few weeks back. Instead, I can only write authentically about my experience, one that’s ordinary and run-of-the-mill, and, in many women’s eyes, ridiculously lucky. I experience fairly textbook cycles. Charting and planning and abstaining when avoiding to conceive has “worked” for us insofar as our kids haven’t been surprises. When we’ve been hopeful for another pregnancy, the baby’s been there. It’s my reality, and my journey, and I feel guilty often about it. The guilt goes two ways: for my ease of conception and carrying to term, and for my sharing anything about the struggle of hyperemesis–all day sickness//all night. It’s like shut up that you’re pregnant again combined with shut up that it’s hard to be pregnant because, see part 1, you’re pregnant again. There’s no way out of feeling bleh about both spaces, so please forgive me if both annoy the heck out of you. That being said, I can share my/our trepidation about another pregnancy, given those parameters. Fear of pregnancy is something I hear from women a lot. Women I don’t know well, women…
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Since we expect my pregnancies to render me nearly non-functioning, it’s a family affair when the all-day sickness kicks in. For the last few weeks, my husband, parents, and sisters have been driving my kids around, feeding them, cleaning up after them, playing with them, bringing me ice water, bringing me random food that rarely tastes as good as it sounds. My friends, organized by my sweet friend Anna!! have been bringing dinners by and saving all of us from nachos (again). And yet, we are surviving. Here are my tricks. 1) Lower low expectations. I put my etsy shop on vacation once I found out I was pregnant. If I can slide up into my chair to sew, great, I have some family project to work on. If I can’t (and that’s been more the case), I’m not under pressure to somehow make it happen. Getting together with friends for playdates or me-dates or us-dates isn’t an option. I miss the company and my kids do too, but as I get light-headed and it isn’t always safe to drive, we’re finding little ways to keep our house an entertaining place for them. The house is messy and dirty. A lethal combo. But AA did laundry this weekend, and I wiped the counters after breakfast today, so it’s not as bad as it could be. Maybe you’re in the place of pregnancy. Maybe you can cut back on taking on extra projects at work, if possible. Maybe those volunteer positions at your…
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Who are these youngsters?? Okay, we’re coming up on seven years of marriage at the end of this month. I simply cannot believe it’s been so long but so quick. My friends Laura and Nancy and I were talking about our anniversaries that are all coming up soon and the vows we took when bam! we realized our next scripture study should center around marriage vows. We brought on a superstar to write on the fourth vow: Jenna Guizar, creator & founder of Blessed is She. She’s simply remarkable and one of my fav people in the world. Monday May 16th you can download your e-study guide right here for Waiting in the Word: Our Vows. We cover the four vows used in most Christian marriage ceremonies: 1) Love and Cherish, 2) Promise to be True, 3) For Better or Worse, and 4) Until Death Do Us Part. I wrote on being true. And it took a turn I didn’t expect. On our wedding day, I thought being true meant not having an affair. I’ve come to learn it that for me it means being invested in a rich intimate life–three kids later, even through extremely hard pregnancies, his long work hours, blah blah blah. There’s always a reason to not be emotionally and physically available to each other, and honestly open to treating the other with attentive love. We hope you’ll join us. It works a lot like our other Waiting in the Word scripture studies: you get a study with…
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Yes! I’m expecting number four around Christmas and YES! we hoped for this baby and yes, I will probably throw up for 8 months straight as has been the norm with the other three. I feel like I’m in a thin place, a place of between ness. My joy is along side the suffering I’ve witnessed and experienced in our friends and family this past year: struggling to conceive, or to find a partner they want to conceive with, or to hold their live baby in their arms, or to hold their live toddler in their arms. I’ve wept with the people I love, crying out why why why take this love from our midst? Why deprive us of this potential for joy? This delight? And now, why do I get to easily conceive another baby, a fourth? Part of me wanted to wait even longer to stop using NFP to abstain from sex during my fertile times. Part of me wanted to hold out from going through my usual physically challenging pregnancies, and after my last recovery that took a full year to function normally again, that too. Part of me didn’t want to get pregnant to have to maybe lose my baby. To have to say goodbye, as my friends had. The other part of me listened to my dear friend Laura’s pain and insane hurt and decided that I, too, could find hope in a new life for our family. If Laura can find hope in her daughters’ deaths,…
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