ESSAYS
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 measurement…
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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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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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