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Mothering Spirit

everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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marriage

another, again, anew

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When we were dating, then engaged, then married, I used to catch a glimpse of him and think—God, please send us daughters. Because I had never met a man like him, so strong and gentle all at once, so humble and quietly confident, so genuinely kind and caring. I watched how he treated his mother, his sister, his friends, and me. And I knew—with all the women who suffer father wounds, who never learn that they deserve to be treated with respect by every single man they meet—that we were meant to have daughters. That he would be so good to them. That he would leave such a legacy of love to build them up for a world driven to diminish their worth. Then God gave us a boy.  And another.  And another.  Then we were going to have two girls—two!—but they went home to God as quickly as they were here. And then we had another boy. Now we are having another son. I realized I was wrong about raising daughters. Not that it wouldn’t have been amazing, … [Read more...] about another, again, anew

what love looks like now

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I had just thrown up when the doorbell rang. I wiped my mouth clean and pulled the door open to let February chill rush inside. "Laura?" asked the stranger. "Have a good day." He handed me a hulking bouquet, plastic wrapped against the wind. "Ooo, Mama!" chirped the small boy at my knees. "Those are beautiful! Let's open them!" Roses red as blood spilled their scent across the kitchen as I unwound the plastic bags, my pregnant belly pressed against the counter. I read the typed card on the tall plastic fork and it made me laugh, private jokes still funny after years and years. This is what love looks like now. . . . A decade of marriage has slipped behind us, only a fifth of the beads on a rosary chain. A small handful of mysteries. At turns joyful, sorrowful, glorious, luminous. We know each other better than we know anyone else on this rocky planet. The deep body knowing that comes from years of sharing sheets and silverware and the same strange sense of … [Read more...] about what love looks like now

and yes i said yes i will yes

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Ten years ago we started being married. It is the vow that started our vocation. But what does it mean when a vow becomes an everyday verb? When a calling is shared as a single story? When we think about a wedding, we often think about a beginning. A clean slate for a new couple. An untraveled road stretching out before them. But there were endings that day, too. The end of family units as they once were, now learning to embrace another member. The end of two single lives, now braided together to become a new creation. We have chosen this person, and not another. We are making this decision, and not another. All of these beginnings and endings will change us. Forever. This is what callings do. . . . Last week I read When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. To be honest, I read it in two days. I could not put it down. It is the story of a neurosurgeon diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer when he was 36 years old. It is the memoir of a masterful writer. It is a poetic … [Read more...] about and yes i said yes i will yes

for better and for worse

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I wanted every day to be that perfect. I did. Who wouldn't? The sky was impossibly blue, the cottony clouds perfectly plump. The sun was warm and sweet. The lilies in my mother's garden were in full bloom. The church pews were lined with beaming friends and family, just as the laughing dance floor would be packed later that night. The music was beautiful, the readings were perfect, the sacrament was shimmering. Most of all it was him. He was the best person I knew. He was beyond what I had hoped to find in a husband. He was my partner in everything that mattered most. He was the reason that day was perfect. When I looked around the reception later that evening, I remember thinking this looked like heaven. Everyone we loved, gathered in the same room, together for an instant. And the two of us, on the edge of everything that awaited us. It could not get better. . . . If you suspect this is going to take a sharp turn south, you're right. If you assume this is going to trudge out … [Read more...] about for better and for worse

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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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thismessygrace

thismessygrace
If our daughters had lived, we never would have pl If our daughters had lived, we never would have planted this garden. 

There are pockets of beauty in my life today that could not have existed if they had survived.

Acknowledging this does not mean I accept their loss. Or that I wouldn’t trade it all to have them here instead.

But the grieving know this strange, stubborn, saving truth: that goodness can grow in the gaping holes left by the ones we love.

I don’t know any simple ways to make sense of the hard times in which we’re living. As a porous soul, I feel it all and it breaks my heart, even as I cling to what I know is true.

But loving and losing my girls has taught me that life is both heart-breaking and resilient, that surviving is more complicated than we suspect, that most people are walking around shattered beneath the surface.

Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of it, searing as sunlight: the grief in someone’s eyes behind their anger, the burden sagging their shoulders, the past that’s poisoning their present. Few things have transformed my life more than learning to recognize pain in others.

Grief is a long letting go of a life you thought you’d have. Most of us are carrying more of it than we realize—or remember when we’re dealing with each other (especially when we’re tearing each other down).

Go gentle today. Practicing compassion and generosity of spirit will crack open more of the world and its confounding struggles. You might lose the satisfying clarity you clung to before life broke your heart in complicated ways, but you will find more of God in the messy, maddening middle.

I have learned this much from the garden I never planned to plant, from a version of life I never dreamed.
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
Since June is a month for graduations & celebrations, I’m delighted to help you celebrate with @grottonetwork .

Grotto Network shares stories about life, work, faith, relationships, and more. Check out their videos, podcast, and articles to help you reflect on where you are in your journey.
 
Grotto Network has generously given 2-$100 gift cards to Bloomin’ Brands Restaurants (Outback, Carrabba’s, Bonefish Grill & more) to help you celebrate this month with friends & family! It’s a huge giveaway, because we all need to savor and celebrate whatever joy we can find these days.
 
To enter the giveaway, follow @grottonetwork and @thismessygrace and leave a comment below about what you’re celebrating this month. Tag a friend for extra entries (up to 3).
 
Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
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