Essays
Me, the Emotional Metronome
I stared at my work calendar on the computer as a sinking feeling washed over me. I had opened the calendar to place an important appointment for a child only to realize I was already scheduled for an all-day training. I quickly dialed the doctor’s office. No open appointments for weeks. I quickly called older…
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Shadow Revelations
Everything felt heavy. My eyelids, the child in my arms, the unrelenting stretch of time before dinner. I lugged my son over to the swing set, managing to convince him that this would be an acceptable next step in our park experience. I stood behind him and pushed, the effort demanding the last dregs of…
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God’s Fingerprints On The Hardest Days
“You need to leave from here and go directly to the hospital. He needs to be admitted tonight, and he will need surgery.” There is so much I don’t remember about this moment. Was my 8-year-old son Andrew in the room with us when the orthopedist said these words to me? He must have been,…
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Never In A Million Years: Playing the Parenting Game
Most days, I pop into my teenage boys’ rooms to plant a kiss on their heads. Sometimes it’s because I walk by, see their sweet little (actually, big) selves at the computer, and have the urge to say hi. Other times I realize I haven’t seen them in awhile, so I stop what I’m doing…
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Why I Stay
There are days when I wonder why I’m still in the Church. Days when I am so jaded by the politics and hypocrisy and scandals that too often haunt our Christian communities that I wonder if there is anything left of the Church worth staying for. Is there anything left for my children to learn,…
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Fighting For Our Lives
“I am very frustrated. I don’t understand why you can’t just be confident in our care!” My perinatal specialist yelled these words to me when I was around 24 weeks pregnant with quadruplets. Why? Because I was asking her questions about what my children’s birth might look like. Up to this point, no one had…
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Becoming Mama Bear: How losing my husband introduced me to a ferocious divine love
When our children were young, my husband Rob and I often took them for hikes in the nearby Cascade Mountains outside our home in Seattle. Home to approximately 20,000 black bears, Washington’s mountains required a healthy respect for wilderness, and we taught our kids how to do it. A hearty “Hey, bear!” alerted furry neighbors…
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She Never Regretted Her Yes
During the June after my triplets’ junior year of high school, I signed up for a five-day silent retreat about three hours north of my home. Right off the bat, I thought twice about going since I knew we were heading into their senior year, the last year they would live at home. Part of me…
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Forever Intertwined: Generations Together through Birth and Death
2021 was a gut-wrenching year for our family, but it didn’t start that way. On a late January evening, my husband and I went on a much-needed date, talking over tacos and margaritas. I remember thinking that my period was late, and when we got home from our date, I took a pregnancy test “just…
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The Courage in My DNA
I grew up as an only child, born to a single mother. For most of my life, until I became a mom at 16, it was just me and my mom. She grew up in extreme poverty raised by a mother who had been raised in even more extreme poverty, and each of us had…
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Befriending An Introvert
A handmade wooden sign hangs front and center in my living room with the words “we belong to each other”—a visible reminder that God created us for relationship. The snippet is from a longer quote attributed to Saint Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa): “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that…
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Complicated Joy
For all of the beauty found in celebrating the liturgical year, I find that marking milestones by these holy seasons and rituals has a tendency to make whatever experience that much more intense and emotional for me. Pregnancy announcements during Advent—potent. Witnessing conversion and Baptism at Easter Vigil—stick a fork in me. Gifts of selflessness…
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“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed” — Mary Oliver, from “The Summer Day” I stand in an open field, watching for signs of rain. An hour…
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It was a morning like any other, except for the chainsaws. They started early—before my two-year-old was even up—and continued on well past her afternoon nap. While the coffee brewed, I peeked out the back window and saw them: hard hats in highlighter yellow dotting the tree line, and our tree in particular. Our urban…
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In the Chinese language, the word for good is made up of two parts: the word for feminine and the word for son or child. I am considered thoroughly lucky and blessed to have borne a daughter, followed five and a half years later by a plucky son. 好 It is good. It was good,…
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Outside the nursery, darkness sets. Behind the red black-out curtains, not a hint of light breaks through. I rock back and forth with my head against the chair, newborn Charlotte’s small body leaning into mine, the only light coming from a small night light across the room. Together we close our eyes to the sound…
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The mattress sags beside me as my husband sits down, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. My puffy face reveals an evening spent crying, but by now there are no tears left. My hands are balled in my lap, and the evidence of my anxiety is the half-moon indentations from my nails against my palms.…
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I lean back at the bottom of the blue plastic slide, aware of my hair sticking to the static, the sandburs piercing the soles of my shoes, and our English words echoing off the wall that lines the perimeter of the park, our clunky foreignness flittering up to the open windows. The playground in this…
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Lessons on Goodness from the Basketball Court and Beyond And God saw everything that was created, and, indeed, it was very good. Translation inspired by Genesis 1:31 (The New Interpreters’ Study Bible) I stand at center court in an old, smelly elementary school gym as eight first-grade boys stand along the baseline, squirming with energy,…
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It was a long-overdue dermatologist appointment. With my pale skin and family history of melanoma, I really need to be checked every year, but it had been more than five since I’d donned an open-backed gown; this was just one of many things that got lost in the shuffle of mothering small children. When I…
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This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you. How many times had I heard these words at Mass, even though I had converted only in young adulthood? The passion narrative punched me in the gut every Palm Sunday with the retelling of Jesus’s suffering and death.1 The same crowds…
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“Let’s be present in the rain.” It was the end of May: precisely that time of year where I’m reeling from the exhaustion of both teaching and parenting. There is so much that happens in May; it’s the busy culmination of the school year where the days get longer and evenings are peppered with band…
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“You’re doing great.” Three words from a cartoon dog were all it took to wreck me. They’re said in an episode of my son’s favorite cartoon, Bluey. (Ok, my favorite too.) The title of the episode is “Baby Race,” and in short, it’s a seven-minute emotional roller coaster where Bluey’s mom, Chili, shares the story…
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It was my second-born son’s first date night, and the cute couple had planned an evening at the Washington County Fair with his big brother and friends. That night, I couldn’t wait to hear how it went. I envisioned them leaning close in their baggy jeans standing in lines below bright jolting rides, drinking torso-sized…
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