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everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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this is my body. given up for you.

4 Comments

The bodiliness of parenting young children.  A comment I received on this post set me to thinking about the subject early this morning, as trouble sleeping leads me to spend the pre-dawn hours writing in my head, trying to will my mind back to dreamland.

Like Amy, I have been struck by how the meaning of the words from the Eucharistic prayer – “This is my body, given up for you” – have taken on a profoundly different meaning after the experiences of bearing, birthing, and nursing a child.

I remember being overwhelmed with emotion (and post-partum hormones, no doubt) at the first few Masses I went to after S was born. I heard Christ’s words of love and sacrifice, and I could barely breath through what they now stirred up in me: the recent, raw memory of my body broken and bled, given up for another. The well-worn phrase I’d heard thousands of times since childhood now seemed shocking in its earthiness, its bodiliness, its brute power.

Pregnancy for me is not the glowing euphoria it seems to be for some women. It’s an amazing experience, don’t get me wrong – but I do not love it. I’m exhausted, uncomfortable. Nauseous in the first trimester, winded in the third. I struggle with the loss of control over my own body, and I wonder if I have the physical and mental strength to bear what it demands of me.

So when I meditate on these words and their meaning for pregnancy – “This is my body, given up for you” – I’m reminded that I do this out of love. I do not carry this child for self-fulfillment or my own delight. I do this because I am called, and because I am graced with the gift to do so.

Childbirth is the same. I did not relish the hours of laboring through contractions, riding waves of greater pain than I had ever known in my life. I did not love the long healing process or the wringer my body was put through. But I loved that child it gave me; I loved him more than my small heart ever thought possible. I gave my body up for him, and I learned so much about love and sacrifice in the process.

I can say that I did love nursing, much to my surprise. After a thoroughly unexpected birth experience, nursing S helped me to bond and heal. Months of thrush were challenging and cringe-worthy even in retrospect, but I was determined to make it through. Persevering taught me much about what I was capable of and what the gift of self was all about.

But the bodiliness of parenting is hardly restricted to maternal actions of gestating, birthing, or breast-feeding. Fathers know this truth. Mothers of adopted and foster children know this truth. It’s the sacrifice that all parents make, giving up their own bodies for the children they love.

It’s pacing the floors of a dark house, your ears pierced by the screams of a colicky newborn.

It’s dragging your sleep-deprived and throbbing head out of a warm bed to make a bottle for the baby down the hall.

It’s holding a sick and sobbing toddler through the night until your arms ache.

It’s scrubbing the toilet on your knees when the stomach flu tears through the household.

It’s standing on aching feet for hours at a time, at work for the ones you love.

It’s the panicked heart that thumps through your whole chest as you wait for the doctor to give you the prognosis.

It’s wrenching together the zillion pieces of the coveted Christmas toy until your fingers bleed.

It’s perching your tired back on rickety bleachers at fall after fall of sports games to cheer on your child.

It’s tossing and turning a worried body through sleepless nights of missed curfews and unanswered cell phones.

I imagine it never ends, the bodliness of parenting. People joke about children causing wrinkles and grey hairs, but it’s true that we bear the marks of sacrifice in our scars, our aches and anxieties. This is my body, given up for you. Out of love, out of faith, out of hope. Out of the dream that perhaps one day you, too, will give yourself up for another.

Take; this is me. There is no greater love.

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Comments

  1. Lauren says

    4 February 2011 at 4:19 pm

    Stunning.

    This reminds me of Kerry Egan’s essay in “From the Pews in the Back.” She writes about how her understanding of the Eucharist changed once she started nursing. I often think of her essay during the eucharistic prayer now…the bodiliness of sacrifice.

    Reply
  2. Sasha says

    29 September 2014 at 1:05 pm

    Laura, I am absolutely in love with all your writings. This was beyond beautiful. I am so glad to have found you!

    Reply
    • Laura says

      29 September 2014 at 1:16 pm

      Thank you for your kind words, Sasha! I am so glad you found your way here! 🙂

      Reply

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  1. when we all add up | mothering spirit says:
    1 March 2013 at 10:28 am

    […] seems right for now – this slender sliver of a season when our lives are so intimately, bodily, exhaustingly bound up with each other. These months (because we still measure in months) when […]

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

thismessygrace
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
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