For years now, I’ve belonged to an online forum that has become a true on-and-offline community. Through this forum, I have sent and received “random acts of kindness” in the form of small gifts and surprises through the mail. Once, my husband made a tiny casket for a forum member, someone I’d never met in person, whose child was stillborn. When I was struggling to pay bills, I was helped through the Helping Hands fund this community maintained for members in... Read more
“Soylent Green is people!” The movie Soylent Green ends with the plea that people be told this truth–that the remains of people are being turned into food for the rest of the population. The ending leaves you room to hope that something will change as a result of this revelation. But it also leaves you reason to believe that no-one will listen to this grim, unpleasant message. What would they do? I rather suspect that the majority, hearing this declaration,... Read more
As I said in the preamble to my last post, I’ve spent a lot of time listening and talking with women in difficult marriages since my own separation, almost four years ago. When women who are struggling come together (I speak only of women because this is what I know), the worst that can come of it is a race to compare circumstances and descend into bitterness, doom-saying, dire warnings, and projection. It is easy for a few voices to... Read more
First, the disclaimer: My husband and I have problems (you don’t live a thousand miles apart if you don’t), but I have never been afraid of my husband, nor has he ever behaved in a controlling or abusive way towards me or our children. I’ve been afraid for him, many times, but never afraid of him. This blog post is a response to the stories and heart-felt struggles of many other good women, as shared with me over the last... Read more
Here are the topics jumbled up in my mind and in my conversations the last couple of days (along with too little sleep and time to really sort them out): What does it mean to have a rightly ordered heart? How do you order your heart? What is virtue, anyway? And what about heroic virtue, the kind the Saints have? What does it really mean to become a Saint–is it all forcing yourself to do the right thing against your concupiscent... Read more
After my last post, I told a few people I was planning a followup that would look past the specific experience of Mother’s Day and look more generally at the experience of suffering and the question of “sensitivity” towards suffering. What interests me, and has for some time now, is the problem of the pain that comes when a good that one lacks is celebrated. Obviously, my Mother’s Day post addressed this to some extent. But the example that was... Read more
Mother’s day has always, since its institution as a day in honor of mothers who have passed on, included a hefty dose of melancholy. Motherhood as an abstract represents a Great Good Thing–an idea of self-sacrifice that is constant and unnoticed rather than large and famous, a nostalgia for maternal warmth and acceptance that may or may not accord with the reality of messy lived lives and experiences. In a lot of ways, Motherhood is an ideal which few of... Read more
I lay in bed this morning, kids piled on top of me, and talked to them about this weekend. About what the Triduum is, and what to expect, and what we will probably do. I talked about Holy Thursday and Good Friday and that pause for breath that is Holy Saturday, before the main event. Before I got any farther, I was asked if Easter is the one with the Mass at night-time where there’s the really long song and... Read more
This morning, I slept in thanks to Family Day, which is a day off school hereabouts. When I got up, I threw on the bathrobe my sister-in-law Steph gave me over my pajamas, and went upstairs for breakfast. I made the strawberry-rhubarb tea that my friend Tiphaine sent me from France in the teapot my mother gave me, and poured it into the beautiful mug my New Orleans friend Sarah bought for me when she was in Europe a few... Read more
Vaccination has been a hot topic lately, and with all the arguing and link-posting and all the rest, it can get intimidating for ordinary undecided folks to try to figure out where the facts lie and what the best path of action is for their kids. I know how that feels. I felt much the same way with my second-born. He was a preemie, and I’d been hearing a lot of controversy about vaccination from my more ‘crunchy’ friends, and... Read more
Peace and Pekoe
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