Essays
The Greatest Gifts We Can Give Our Teens
We all love a good checklist, don’t we? “Five things you must do this fall!”“Ten ways to tell your kids you love them!”“Three things every parent must do!” Where, pray tell, is the checklist for how to raise young adults who love Jesus and never stray from their faith? I’d argue that we’ve put the…
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What the Korean Mother Martyrs Teach Us
Reading the stories of the Korean saints to me is like sparks flying when meeting a new mom at the park. There’s the thrill of each shared connection and an eagerness for more. When I learn about the Korean saints, I find threads connecting me to them in our shared Korean heritage. As a mother,…
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Loneliness, Jesus, and My Mothering Spirit
I fell apart in my kitchen a few nights after another school shooting that left children and teachers dead. My kids were asleep, and I was washing the dishes when my tightly leashed emotions finally broke free. Anger, grief, and hopelessness washed over me and my soapy, shaking hands. The weight of the vocation of…
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When Prayers Go Unanswered
In fall 2021, I was bombarding heaven with prayers for my daughter, who was starting her senior year of high school. She had received a scholarship to play basketball at an elite high school, but she had spent most of her sophomore year sidelined with shin-splints and her junior year sitting on the sidelines with…
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Called by the Swiss Alphorn Into the Arms of the Creator
Three years into living in picturesque Switzerland, I sat in a warm bath on a hot August afternoon trying to ease miscarriage contractions. I soaked in discomfort, both physically and mentally. Once again I found myself at the end of my rope, stuck at the bottom of a deep, dark pit that I didn’t have…
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Waiting for Resurrection: Depression and Pregnancy
I’m lying flat on my back in a hospital examination room, acid reflux burning in my throat. A polite male doctor scans my protruding belly as I stare at the graying tiles on the ceiling while praying hard and fast, “Please be okay. Please be okay.” It was a routine appointment until my 34-week bump…
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Pruning My Idea of a Perfect Life
At some point early in our marriage, my husband and I took a shine to the idea of living on a self-sufficient homestead. After poring over books about the Catholic back-to-the-land movement, Catholic Worker farms, and homesteading, we thought we’d found the perfect escape from the normal 9-to-5. We had our plan: purchase a house…
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Love Poured Out
I pace around our living room, wringing my hands, instinctively practicing the deep breathing of my labor weeks earlier—slow, sharp inhale…long, forceful exhale—in an effort to calm myself down. Eric holds our tiny firstborn, who sucks vigorously on one of my husband’s pinkies with all the ferocity of a ravenous vacuum cleaner. Eric tentatively ventures:…
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Keep Me Awake: Prayer as a Mother
“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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Lament for a Tree
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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Love That Overcomes Darkness
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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Grace at Night: A Bedtime Diary
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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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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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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“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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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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