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everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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a trimester of grief

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Maggie and Abby have been gone for three months.

Some days it feels as if their deaths were three minutes ago. Sometimes it feels like three years.

Every morning I wake up, turn to the greening trees outside our bedroom window, reorient myself back to the world in which my babies are dead, and then get out of bed.

I move through motions. I make breakfast, I drive kids to school, I work, I write. I play with the kids, I make dinner, I clean up, I go back to bed.


What traps me is chronos: linear time.

It has been three months since I held my daughters in my arms. I will not get to do that again in this lifetime. Each day – sunrise to sunset, one spin of the earth on its axis – pulls me twenty-four hours further from this time when they were here.

And yet.

What frees me is kairos: God’s time.

In the eschatological view of time, each day I edge closer to joining my daughters again. And somehow I am with them here and now, beyond the constraints of chronos. When I remember myself back into the fullness of time that belongs to God, there is a rushing return of peace. And hope.

Nothing is lost. Life is changed. Not ended.

Christians have always been of this world and not of this world. We stand with one foot planted firmly and one foot edging beyond. We move through earthly rhythms, but we long to set our hearts to a heavenly pulse.

We are here, but this is not our home. 

. . .

I write all the time.

Not as much in this space, because I can’t figure out what this place is called to be now. It used to be about the ordinary. Everyday parenting as spiritual practice.

Then extraordinary happened. Now I’m not sure what to do anymore.

But I am writing a new book. And journaling as if my life depended on it. Because it does. Words are the ways I have found my God. Now they are the way I wind back to my daughters again.

The other night, I rolled over and scribbled down words that had appeared clear as day in my mind:

If we believe God is always with us,

And we believe they are with God,

Then they are with us, too. Always.

Maybe I don’t need to write another word, I thought.

Maybe this is all I needed to figure out. Maybe I simply had to write my way to the place where Incarnation met Resurrection. And then I could be quiet, there with God.

But here is what a trimester of grief means. Something new is growing, too.

Doctors and scientists tell new mothers that the first trimester of pregnancy is the most crucial for a baby. All the major systems and organs are formed within the first 12 weeks. Everything after this point only brings growth, strength, and further development.

But what matters most happens in the first three months. 

What has happened to me in the twelve weeks since Abby and Maggie died? What has happened to our marriage? What has happened to our family?

It is beyond even a book’s worth of telling. It is rebirth and recreation and resurrection. It is terrifying and reassuring and life-giving.

This new growth will take time to gestate. It will take a long time.

But I hear God whisper in the dark. Behold. I am doing something new; do you not perceive it?

Be not afraid. Be at peace. 

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Comments

  1. Melissa Borgmann-Kiemde says

    27 May 2016 at 7:33 am

    This:
    “What frees me is kairos: God’s time.

    In the eschatological view of time, each day I edge closer to joining my daughters again. And somehow I am with them here and now, beyond the constraints of chronos. When I remember myself back into the fullness of time that belongs to God, there is a rushing return of peace. And hope.

    Nothing is lost. Life is changed. Not ended.”

    and this:
    “Maybe this is all I needed to figure out. Maybe I simply had to write my way to the place where Incarnation met Resurrection. And then I could be quiet, there with God.”

    Amen.

    Reply
  2. Emmie says

    27 May 2016 at 8:24 am

    Another blog friend writes a good deal about these two time realities after losing her husband a year ago. Praying with you.

    https://gretchenjoanna.com/2016/03/12/the-kairos-in-my-week/

    Reply
  3. Beth Reynolds says

    27 May 2016 at 8:41 am

    Beautiful……………so loving and beautiful.

    Reply
  4. Clare says

    27 May 2016 at 11:24 am

    Please keep writing in this space.. Every post is so profoundly moving to me. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t fit your original plan for the blog. Lots of love to you all xxx

    Reply
  5. Nicole says

    27 May 2016 at 11:09 pm

    You are an inspiration.

    Reply
  6. Kaitlyn Mason says

    13 June 2016 at 9:53 pm

    You sharing pieces of your life with the world matters. People do not often understand that this life is not the end – but it’s not!!! God bless you. 🙂

    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
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.
 
Grotto Network has generously given 2-$100 gift cards to Bloomin’ Brands Restaurants (Outback, Carrabba’s, Bonefish Grill & more) to help you celebrate this month with friends & family! It’s a huge giveaway, because we all need to savor and celebrate whatever joy we can find these days.
 
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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