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everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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the grit and the glamour

4 Comments

Before I had children, I had a hazy image of life with kids. I don’t think I idealized it as pure ease and smooth delight, but the montage of pictures that would flash through my mind looked much more like parenting’s “best of” reel.

Taking them to the playground on sunlit afternoons. Chasing them laughing before bath time. Cuddling up on the couch with favorite books. Watching them learn to ride a bike. Spinning them around the dance floor at family weddings.

My movie montage still sneaks into my head in nostalgic moments. I know exactly why our memories choose to cement the best-of as hard truth. Because the grit which grinds through most of our days is not what keeps us going. It’s the glamour. 

I saw this desire in spades on social media in the days leading up to Christmas and New Year’s. Pictures of grinning cherubs in matching Sunday best. Families gathered beneath twinkling trees. Perfect holiday dinner spreads and champagne toasts.

No one shows the screaming toddler before she was wrestled into the party dress. Or the disastrous kitchen mess shut behind the dining room doors. Or the dreaded family dysfunction that erupted hours after the happy photo shoot.

We want to remember the glamour, not the grit.

the grit

Writing a book is like this, too. People only see the final product, the shiny cover, the glowing endorsements. How do you do it? they ask, admiring. But like curious strangers who ask busy parents how they manage, no one wants to hear about the grit. No one wants to hear that a book is born through blood, sweat, and tears. Hours of sitting in the lonely chair and writing, rewriting, deleting, despairing, procrastinating, quitting, crying, cursing, then writing more.

As a reader, I know this temptation. I imagine my favorite novels poured forth from the divinely inspired fingers of the author with ease and grace. In my mind it’s all glamour. Enviable and elusive.

And herein lies the problem. I see others’ glamour, not their grit. What we present to the world is never the full truth from behind the scenes.

You see my kids at church and compliment us on a beautiful family, and all I want to tell you is how exhausted we all feel and how everyone yelled at each other as we left the house and how this is honestly the last place I want to be.

But you don’t have time to hold all my grit. We prefer each other’s glamour.

(If you don’t believe me, try answering honestly for a few weeks whenever someone asks, “How are you?” People are taken aback if you let them inside whatever is weighing heavy on your heart.)

So how do we balance grit and glamour?

The answer for me always comes back to calling. Any vocation holds both: the beautiful moments when life shines and the irritating moments when we would gladly trade places with anyone else. This is how it works when we start to make our way in the world. We discover it is harder than we thought and also exactly where we are meant to be.

My hunch is that whatever your life’s work, you have felt this same frustration between your well-worn reality and others’ idealized perceptions. People see the product but not the process. The glamour of “for better” and not the grit of “for worse.”

Right now I’m in the midst of wrestling another book into being. I love it and hate it in equal parts. When the words flow and the paragraphs click, I marvel at how right it feels and how lucky I am to have this be my work. When I’m stuck and stressed and spitting sick of the subject I’ve been thinking about so long that it haunts my dreams at night, I want to chuck the whole project at the wall and take up woodworking.

But if I remember that callings always come with this tension – the bright and the dark, the affirmation and the desolation – then I can better hold my own grit and glamour together in the same two hands.

So that when you ask me how I did it, how I wrote another book with all these kids underfoot (and two more on the way), I will not simply smile and shrug that I don’t know, simply because it’s the easy answer, the societal pleasantry. Instead I will tell you honestly: hard work, sheer grace, lots of sacrifice from me and the ones I love. The exact same way we are raising these children.

It’s all part of our callings, isn’t it? The shining and the suffering. The glamour and the grit.

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Comments

  1. Griffin Jones says

    4 January 2016 at 11:30 am

    Impressed by the thought and energy that you’ve put into this blog, Laura. Will add to a list of infertility blogs that I’m making as a resource for patients. Will follow you on Instagram too. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.–Griffin

    Reply
  2. shelley says

    5 January 2016 at 4:55 am

    Thankyou Laura. Well done on another lovely piece. Your words are so apt for me at the moment, thanks!

    Reply
  3. Marie says

    8 January 2016 at 1:10 pm

    Okay, this may be off topic a little bit, but I think it does tie into your post and it brought a memory to the forefront this afternoon, so please bear with me. 15 1/2 years ago I was diagnosed with Stage 2 Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and underwent chemo and radiation. One of my chemo treatments landed me in the hospital down at Rochester Mayo with a horrible GI tract infection – both ends. 🙁 I will never forget this one morning, I was laying in the hospital bed and a team of colorectal doctors came by to assess me and talk about *ahem* some issues I was having. My dad was there with me and I don’t remember which one of us said this, but in order to lighten the mood, one of us asked the doctors “So, why does one choose to go into the colorectal field of medicine?” Without batting an eye one of the doctors looks at us with a straight face and said “It is all about the glamour”. After a couple of seconds, all of us busted out laughing and we ended up having a great conversation with that group of doctors. And truly, after their help with my infection, I was very grateful that there are people who do go into that field, never mind what others (such as myself) may think about it (e.g., gross, etc.). I thought of that encounter when I read your post (not because little children make me think of poop, well, maybe they do sometimes, but that is my own children…), but because not everything in life is glamorous and if it wasn’t for the grit, we would have a lot less glamorous things to look forward to (like me regaining my health and not being sidelined by this horrible infection). Anyway, something I was pondering today. Thanks for the post. God Bless and I am praying for your sweet babies in utero.

    Reply
    • motheringspirit says

      13 January 2016 at 9:08 pm

      Yes, absolutely, Marie! I think you’re totally getting at what I was trying to say here – that it’s a good thing not to go seeking only the glamour. Thank God there are so many professionals who feel the same way – we need them all! I love your story. Thanks for sharing it here. And thank you so much for your prayers, too.

      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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If our daughters had lived, we never would have pl If our daughters had lived, we never would have planted this garden. 

There are pockets of beauty in my life today that could not have existed if they had survived.

Acknowledging this does not mean I accept their loss. Or that I wouldn’t trade it all to have them here instead.

But the grieving know this strange, stubborn, saving truth: that goodness can grow in the gaping holes left by the ones we love.

I don’t know any simple ways to make sense of the hard times in which we’re living. As a porous soul, I feel it all and it breaks my heart, even as I cling to what I know is true.

But loving and losing my girls has taught me that life is both heart-breaking and resilient, that surviving is more complicated than we suspect, that most people are walking around shattered beneath the surface.

Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of it, searing as sunlight: the grief in someone’s eyes behind their anger, the burden sagging their shoulders, the past that’s poisoning their present. Few things have transformed my life more than learning to recognize pain in others.

Grief is a long letting go of a life you thought you’d have. Most of us are carrying more of it than we realize—or remember when we’re dealing with each other (especially when we’re tearing each other down).

Go gentle today. Practicing compassion and generosity of spirit will crack open more of the world and its confounding struggles. You might lose the satisfying clarity you clung to before life broke your heart in complicated ways, but you will find more of God in the messy, maddening middle.

I have learned this much from the garden I never planned to plant, from a version of life I never dreamed.
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. 
 
Since June is a month for graduations & celebrations, I’m delighted to help you celebrate with @grottonetwork .

Grotto Network shares stories about life, work, faith, relationships, and more. Check out their videos, podcast, and articles to help you reflect on where you are in your journey.
 
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To enter the giveaway, follow @grottonetwork and @thismessygrace and leave a comment below about what you’re celebrating this month. Tag a friend for extra entries (up to 3).
 
Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“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.
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