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everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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the trash tells the story

10 Comments

A month ago I ran into a friend as we were both rushing into church from the whipping winter wind. She held the door for me, and I sprinted inside, breathing steam. As we shivered in the entryway, trying to warm up, she said, “Oh! I meant to tell you – I read your book. I liked it!”

“And wow, it was really personal.”

I stumbled through an awkward thank you and mumbled some self-deprecating snark about hope my kids won’t sue me for those stories. But as we kept talking and wound our way down the hallway, my stomach slunk a little lower.

Because I’ve heard comments like hers before, and I know what they mean.

You’re telling stories I’m not used to hearing.

You’re writing words I’m not used to reading.

. . .

There are plenty of topics I’ve written about – in my book or on this blog or elsewhere – that could make people blush. Sex, pregnancy, miscarriage, infertility, depression, death, and grieving.

(To say nothing of everyday stories of lost tempers, harsh words, parenting fails.)

All of this is part of “parenting as spiritual practice,” in the way I understand parenting, faith, and spirituality. Writing, too. Truth-telling is hard and holy work. Honesty is rough, but essential. Because beauty only blooms when barriers come down and we see each other, face to face.

Sometimes I envy novelists. Fiction is the highest form of writing’s art, in my opinion: not only to tell a story well, but to create characters and craft a whole world. But that’s not the kind of writing I’m called to do. It’s not the story I want to tell.

I’m steeped in narrative theology. When I started reading about it in graduate school, it felt so obvious. Wasn’t it precisely in our lives and our experiences that we came to know God? This is the way I have always understood faith. So I loved finding a body of theology to back up my hunch – that we can find our way to the universal through the personal. That we can find our way to the divine through the human.

And yet.

I’m still wary of sharing too much. My beloved ones become characters in a book when I write about them. I worry about this.

I try to stick to my own story, but lives inevitably intersect – family, friends, strangers. I have to proceed with prayer and care in the ways that I tell a tale authentically, so that I don’t cause pain or betray trust or cross a line.

All in the name of telling a good and true and – yes – personal story.

. . .

My first essay was recently published at Mamalode. It tells a story of the most mundane subject: the trash.

We’ve all got trash, heaps of it. The clinking spill of wine bottles in the recycling bin after a party. The cardboard box bonanza following Christmas cleanup. The Kleenex mountains during cold season, the gift wrap crumbles during birthday week, the pious piles of de-hoarding inspired by spring cleaning.

We empty baskets and drag bins out to the curb once a week. But when do we stop to see what story the trash tells about our lives?

When I finally dragged the whole mess out to the garbage can, sweltering in the August sun, I cried as I dumped its contents into the gaping mouth of the dark brown bin. That was the story of our baby. Gone.

While cramping with cruel empty labor on the cold bathroom floor, I had yanked the wastebasket over toward me so I could throw up. In my panicked haste, I had chipped the smooth curve of its bottom rim on our bathroom tile. Every morning since that day, I have stared at the wastebasket’s chipped edge.

A jagged reminder of the baby that died.

Click to read the rest at Mamalode.com…

The only way I know how to write is to tell my own story.

It will be personal. It will not be everyone’s cup of tea. But it might be yours. And you, the ones who read, you are the reason I keep going.

You are the reason I sit down here and try to tell some small truth about what I’m learning on this long walk – of parenting, of faith, of the spiritual life.

You are the reason I’m not afraid to get personal.

Because if something I tell in a story might touch your own life, might help you feel less alone, might let light in through the cracks, then we will change each other for the better. We will help each other become more human.

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Comments

  1. lulusgrandventure says

    14 March 2015 at 9:23 am

    Oh Laura, wow. Thank you.
    Author, researcher and speaker Brene Brown says “owning and telling our story is the most courageous thing we will ever do.” Fiction may be the highest form of writing’s art but true unembellished raw nonfiction is by far the bravest.

    “…Because if something I tell in a story might touch your own life, might help you feel less alone, might let light in through the cracks, then we will change each other for the better. We will help each other become more human.”

    In this way I can never tell if it is more healing to tell the story or to read parts of yourself in another’s story. Either way, these words can set us free.
    Thank you for letting the light in, helping me become more human and giving me more courage to write my real, honest and imperfect story too.
    ~Annabele

    Reply
    • Laura says

      15 March 2015 at 2:17 pm

      Oh Annabele, your words touch me so deeply! Courage and vulnerability – yes, it is the hardest and the most important work we can do. Thank you for sharing your own story, too. We need each other’s truths.

      Reply
  2. Nell @ Whole Parenting Family says

    14 March 2015 at 9:59 am

    Glorious and aching. Your writing is my favorite. Thank you for being personal with us. It gives us permission to feel these ways too.

    Reply
    • Laura says

      15 March 2015 at 2:23 pm

      Thank you so much, friend. I never thought about the personal being what can give us permission to feel. Yes. And oh-so-necessary, too.

      Reply
  3. Julie says

    14 March 2015 at 11:12 am

    Beautiful, Laura. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve given a lot of thought to how things (media, etc.) impact me and which of them make me feel more human (or less so). But what a thought, to consider which of my experiences and writings help others to become more human.

    Reply
    • Laura says

      15 March 2015 at 2:24 pm

      Julie, this is such a good point for me to ponder – what things, especially media & other sensory inputs, make me feel more human and which make me feel less so. There is such wisdom here…thank you.

      Reply
  4. 9jaime says

    14 March 2015 at 1:18 pm

    I love your honesty! It expresses exactly how I feel about the two early losses I have had. Absolutely beautiful how you expressed it all.

    Reply
    • Laura says

      15 March 2015 at 2:26 pm

      I am so sorry to hear about your losses, 9jaime. But I am grateful to connect here. You are in my thoughts.

      Reply
  5. Laura says

    6 July 2015 at 9:17 am

    I needed your words as I’m fresh from our first pregnancy and miscarriage…less than a week ago. I read your Blessed Is She post today on the bleeding woman in the gospel and your words about weeping as you bled in miscarriage…and I knew you understood. Thanks for writing and reminding me I’m not alone.

    Reply
    • motheringspirit says

      6 July 2015 at 11:27 am

      Oh Laura, you are in my prayers. Your words brought tears to my eyes. I am so grateful that we were able to connect in this way today. And I hope that today’s Gospel brings some peace to your heart – that you will know you are seen and loved and comforted by God.

      Reply

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About Laura

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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Watch me try not to laugh while my kids are scream Watch me try not to laugh while my kids are screaming upstairs at my spouse while I muse on motherhood & creativity 😝

Check out @grottonetwork for thoughtful reflections on relationships, work, faith, and life’s big questions. And let yourself thank someone this week for the creative work of nurturing new life in you!
Pilgrimage update! I shared in my last newsletter Pilgrimage update! I shared in my last newsletter that we were able to add Chartres & Mont-St-Michel to our itinerary, plus an extra day in Paris. Three of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, so I can’t wait to pray there with you on pilgrimage in October. Check out my bio for details.

Want to hear more about the trip? Join me on Friday, May 6th, at 1:30 pm CT for an Instagram Live with Claire Swinarski - founder of @thecatholicfeminist & leader of last year’s pilgrimage to France with @selectinternationaltours 

Claire will share her experience on pilgrimage, her favorite places in France, & her wisdom for anyone thinking about joining us this fall. 

Have you ever been to France? Or made a pilgrimage? I’d love to hear your favorites!

#pilgrimage #travelwithselect #holyplaces #travel2022 #france #thesacredway2022
For years these words hung on the wall of my offic For years these words hung on the wall of my office. A reminder to behold the beauty in the ordinary.

I took them down after grief tore apart my world. Normal days, what a joke.

But years later I pulled the words out again. Turned out they were true, of course.

I had always caught my breath at the line about war, barely able to imagine longing for boring days from bloody battlefields.

Today I keep the wise words before my eyes again, as a way to keep praying for Ukraine.

For all the places where war or violence make for (ab)normal days.

May the common rock of any ordinary day we’re given remind us to remember all whose earth is upheaved right now.
The sun came out for the first time in days (weeks The sun came out for the first time in days (weeks? gloomy where you are, too?).

So I followed every ladybug in the bedroom to the window, closed my eyes and sunned my face. I could have curled up like a cat for hours. But the sun slipped back, retreating behind the grey wall as quickly as it came.

May today hold a gentle reminder to turn wherever you find the light, to let it warm and delight you. The spiritual practice of sunning ourselves (for a whole holy second!) is not trite or toxic: we are creatures who crave what is good and this is not wrong.

If you linger there for a moment, to remember God and grace and any good gift that has been poured out upon you, unasked or undeserved, you can return for a flash to the Source of your Being.

All the Psalms about the sun sing the same. We were made for the Great Light.
I spent years wondering about the opposite of grie I spent years wondering about the opposite of grief.

Would it be joy? To hold happiness again, to have tears turned into dancing?

Would it be gain? To find what was lost? To have arms full again around the ones I love?

Would it be peace? To breathe into the space of calm? To soak up healing as balm?

This morning I rose and realized: the opposite of grief is Easter.

Joy, gain, peace, hope, love, healing—all of it rolled into one and heaps more besides.

You know that awful feeling in grief’s first weeks, after someone you love has died, when you rise and remember yourself back into reality, and the grief-pain of loss washes over you again? The terrible turning moments that torpedo the day.

Easter Monday was the first morning that humans got to experience the utter opposite.

The undoing of what seemed undone. The resurrection of what looked impossible to restore.

The flip side of every grief and loss.

This morning I pictured the women rising again on Monday, the first ones to find and preach the Resurrection.

What joy & delight & hope & astonishment must have washed across their faces in their first few moments after waking, as they remembered themselves back into a world made new.

This is what every single one of us has yearned for, in the impossible imagination after loss. What if I could wake up and they would be back here again?

Exactly what all who loved him found when they woke up on Monday morning.

Now we only taste it, glimpse it, grasp it for a moment—but one day it will rise for us and never leave.

The opposite of grief is here.
To see others in pain while you are in pain— To To see others in pain
while you are in pain—
To reach out to the grieving
while others are grieving for you—
To lift up the least
while you are the greatest—
To speak to the suffering of women
while your own body is suffering—
To stop for others
while you walk the hardest road—

Until now I never noticed how much it meant that Jesus stopped for the women of Jerusalem.

He stops for the women of Ukraine, the women of Juarez, the women of Afghanistan, women everywhere who suffer and grieve and mourn.
 
He stops for them and for us. He tells us not to weep for him but to weep for this world, not to despair of the present but to steel ourselves for the future, not to lament unless we are willing to change.

What is he calling me to grieve? How is he calling me to change?

What might he see in us—our lives, our sorrows, our griefs, even our bodies—that we have not let ourselves lament?
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