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everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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the pitter-patter

7 Comments

Their feet crush me.

Tiny toes curling, ancient reflex. Baby socks lost in the dryer like doll clothing. Toddler tiptoes to reach the sink. Preschool slip-ons for circle time. Sport shoes for season after season—cleats, sneakers, boots. 

I know their feet intimately. Kiss them at diaper changes, sweet antidote to stink. Bathe them in bubbles and dry them with duck towels. Wrestle on socks and shoes for years and years. Corral each kid and clip twenty nails, fingers and toes. Motherhood in daily details, mundane math, rote routine. But I never remember their shoe sizes; I am always shocked at the store, at their growth.

When we brought our second son home from the hospital, his big brother’s feet startled me. Suddenly giant, boy-ish, behemoth. Overnight they had soared in size. I stared at his feet, disbelieving as he crawled into my lap to get a closer look at the baby. How had he turned into a toddler when I wasn’t looking? Half blessing, half betrayal.

Today he steals my flip flops, kicks them off when I complain. They thud against the wall, and he tosses with confidence: I’ll be as big as you soon.

Bigger, I know.

I don’t fear their growing, don’t bemoan the passage of time. Mourning is meant for grief, not life. The marvel of their becoming is my miracle. I whisper thanks to God for each day they creep sunward, heads inching up toward mine, measuring themselves against me, beaming when I promise they’ll spend most of their lives taller than me.

But I hate when the mudroom pile grows like weeds, wedging the door open or shut with spare pairs. Why can no one put their shoes away, I sigh every mother’s sigh, sliding them into neat slots, the neglected organizer. Still: all these growing kids, all these scattered sizes of shoes. Gratitude for enough.

Did you know that babies born at 24 weeks are barely old enough to survive but still have perfect toes like any baby? Minuscule nails, swirling prints. Did you know that identical twins share the same DNA but have unique finger prints? Toe prints, too? I learned all this. I would rather not know it. I would rather have two more pairs heaped among their brothers’. Instead their footprints grace our mantel. I kissed them one day but never again. Never enough.

Their feet crush me. Running through the house, soles slapping against the floor. Muddy from the garden, wet from the sprinkler, sweaty from practice. Dirty on the couch, stinky from cleats, ticklish everywhere.

I cradle the toddler’s tiny sandals, passed down from three older brothers. Velcro worn, soles scuffed. One day his shoes will have swollen into boats. Today I can hold both his feet in my palm. I want him to stay small, I want him to grow old, I want him to be mine forever, I want to learn how to let him go.

It is enough, it is never enough. The thump of my heart, the pitter patter of their feet.

. . .

Told you I’m bringing blogging back! Go figure, it’s not so hard. Now I don’t have to trim my Instagram posts to fit their box, and what does a writer love more than white space to fill?

If you’re new here, welcome. If you like musings on motherhood, check out my book Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting. If you, too, have a maddening heap of shoes by your back door, solidarity! If your heart is longing for that pitter patter, you are always in my prayers.

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Comments

  1. Claire says

    19 July 2019 at 7:49 am

    Thank you for the reminder that “mourning is meant for grief, not life”. This is something I have struggled with since my son was a newborn. I mourned every time he outgrew a diaper or clothing size, every time he outgrew a toy. I struggle to get rid of toys and mementos. I look at pictures of him from a few years ago and marvel at how little he was, but at the time I thought he was so big and was nostalgic for the days when he was smaller. It’s not to say that I don’t enjoy each stage he’s in, but I want to grasp on to each stage and hold it tight so it won’t end too soon. (Spoiler alert, I’m not having much luck with that!). I don’t know if I struggle more because he’s my only (living) child, but I know I’m not doing myself any favors by lamenting how fast his childhood is going.

    Reply
  2. Melissa Borgmann-Kiemde says

    19 July 2019 at 8:40 am

    Bringing blogging back. ❤️

    Reply
  3. Mamie says

    19 July 2019 at 10:05 am

    “I want him to stay small, I want him to grow old, I want him to be mine forever, I want to learn how to let him go.”

    I love this. My youngest is 2.5 yrs old and I’m struggling lately with him growing older, especially as we celebrate his two siblings’ birthdays this weekend. My husband and I have prayed and discussed and prayed some more, deciding that it’s not feasible for us to try for another for a variety of reasons. I pray to God for strength to accept this and also that His will be done, for how do we truly know our decision is His will? In time, I suppose. God’s time Thank you for the solidarity, and prayers for you and your family!

    Reply
  4. Val S. says

    19 July 2019 at 10:08 am

    I’m not on IG (photographer though I may be). Essays are better for the soul anyway.

    Having raised at least twenty children, none of them mine, all of them gone? The weirdest phase is when toddlers simply want to try on everybody’s shoes constantly. I once lived with a family of seven, and their littlest could go ALL DAY with the communal shoe box.

    Write on!

    Reply
  5. Andrea Rentz says

    19 July 2019 at 1:32 pm

    SO beautiful! So glad you brought the blog back.

    Reply
  6. Kristin Heider says

    19 July 2019 at 4:58 pm

    Beautiful. And I love the old-fashioned blog. Bring it back, baby.

    Reply
  7. Samantha Stephenson says

    19 July 2019 at 11:04 pm

    That is heartbreakingly beautiful. Thank you for sharing yourself and your journey with all of us!

    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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