Essays
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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God’s Abundance in Anxiety
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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Lingering on Saturday: As a Hen Gathers Her Brood
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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Joy Shows Her Finest
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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A Turn of the Kaleidoscope
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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Our Undoing is Our Becoming
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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Love and Hope in Troubling Times
“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 (and Other Truths from God and Bluey)
“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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Ferocious Motherlove
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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In the thick of the global pandemic when the whole world was wearied by the constant weight of pivoting to carry the newest very hard thing, our family lost its matriarch. My maternal grandmother, Margarita “Mague” Moreno, passed away on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in December of 2020. Although stricken with grief,…
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No cloud in sight, the sun shines and sparkles on the water. Isaac runs ahead of me and perches on the side of the creek, his shoulders resting on his knees with his hands clasped together. He holds this posture, like a scientist pondering the workings of the world. I come beside him and sit…
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We live in a world that is based on relationships. Not many of us are called to live the life of a hermit, and that means that we interact with people on a daily basis. Most of those interactions are favorable and bring us nothing but joy and good feelings. Other interactions are more transactional…
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I was hurrying, for no reason, really, except that that’s what grown-ups do. My four-year-old and I were taking another pandemic-necessitated walk around the block, passing houses, gardens, and cars we’d already seen dozens of times. Maybe hundreds. Judging by my son’s exclamations and endless stops to examine things, though, it may as well have…
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I grew up in a family that was very mental health literate. Both of my parents have experience with mental health challenges, in their own lives and in the lives of people they love. When a doctor suggested that I might be struggling with depression at 14, my parents were eager to facilitate access to…
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This past summer some women from church decided to gather on Wednesday evenings to read Scripture. We rotated hosting responsibilities and, after the initial chit-chat and snack table perusal, settled into backyard lawn chairs to read a chapter aloud from the book of Micah. Yes, that Micah. The Biblical minor prophet, the “do justly, love…
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I can still feel the waves of nausea that began to hit my stomach when I heard the news. My whole world was turning upside down, and I had no way to stop it. The voices in my head were swirling around like a plastic bag being blown by a cyclone. I was about to…
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It wasn’t only in the dark, when the lights were out and my thoughts had a tendency to expand and disparage themselves. It wasn’t only when the baby needed nursing at 2:00 a.m. and the street lights shone brightly across the street over our neighbor’s silver maple. It wasn’t only when I had to repeat…
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Bundled against the freezing weather, I pushed the stroller down the sidewalk. Baby napping inside, coffee in hand, a book balanced on the bar, and the big kids off on a bike ride with Jeff. This little routine had become a beloved ritual in the chaos and isolation of quarantine. But today was different. The…
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“If you’re really Native, how do you plug in your computer?” It was a question I was asked at the age of eight by another kid at summer camp. She meant it sincerely. She was struggling to reconcile her concept of Native people as teepee-dwelling museum pieces with the light-skinned kid in front of her.…
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She bounds down the concrete steps in her almost-two-year-old glory: wearing a backward t-shirt with the tag jutting out below her chin and a bright pink tutu over her pants. Her ponytail has migrated to the side of her head, sprouting like a horizontal palm tree. Thanks to the unsolicited comment from a neighbor tinkering…
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I was not excited when I found out I was pregnant. In fact, I remember staring at the five pregnancy tests in our tiny apartment in Texas trying very unsuccessfully to not fall in a panic attack. All I could think as I saw that plus sign in front of me was, “I can’t do…
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