Mother-Son Summer Book Club
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Reading Classics with your children doesn’t have to be painful.
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Finding Freedom in a Crowded House
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Finding freedom in a crowded house. My latest for Everyday Ignatian.
Read MoreMarriage: A Sacrament of Surrender
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How do you explain this great mystery in just a few minutes or words? Or try to convey to these teenagers why sex is for the confines of marriage when the rest of the world tells them otherwise?
The Prayers of My Junior High Math Teacher Have Sustained Me Far Beyond My School Years
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Touched by the reaction from my jr high classmates on this essay I wrote on our math teacher. A call to prayer for our own children caught in today’s spiritual crossfire.
Read MoreOn Being the World to Our Vision
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Contrary to popular narratives, Motherhood and Creativity might not be opposed but rather intricately, intimately linked. Read my essay On Bending the World to Our Vision for Dappled Things.
Read MoreMiddle School
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Middle school is an awkward time as it is, and now these young people have to deal with it during the disconnect of a global pandemic and wearing masks that hide our subtle facial expressions and stifle our mumbled words.
Read MoreWhat Does it Mean to Be Content?
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This year, I found out I can be a lot happier with a simpler life.
Read MoreGrace in Laughter
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I’m in my home office. I can hear my sons laughing in the room above me. My younger son, more in control of his emotions, delivers great one-liners with a straight face. My oldest absolutely delights in his brother and cackles like some sort of Amazonian bird. It’s a loud laugh — always louder than the joke calls for — brassy, joyful and free.
Read MorePandemic Parenting Requires Families to Adapt to New Narratives
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Is it just me or does every mother feel as if we are just winging it? Motherhood is the ultimate "on the job training." We read all the books, ask advice from more "seasoned" mothers than us, but nothing could have prepared us for mothering this year. There isn't an issue of "What to Expect When Parenting Through a Pandemic."
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Second Degree Joy
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My mother loved the sound of the sea. Listening to its rhythm subdued memories that shifted in her heart and soothed pain she carried in the present. There weren’t many books on our shelves at home but there were bits of the sea: sand dollars, bleached white in the sun, starfish and coral with their neon colors and iridescent abalone, mementos from childhood vacations.
Read MoreHow Can I Keep From Singing?
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My young sons cannot, will not, be silent.
It’s not that they talk a lot, though they can and do. It is that they sing — all the time.
Read MorePrayers Before Zoom School
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My children, like so many in COVID times, are in Zoom school. Each morning we take our laptops to separate parts of the house to work, but before that we have what I like to call “Casa G Academy Morning Assembly.”
We meet in the living room 10 minutes before their school check-in. I make a few announcements like, We have online violin lessons later in the day, or, We need to eat the bananas before they go bad, or, Please, if you love your mother, spend a few minutes on the puzzle today, because I’m really getting tired of looking at it on the dining room table.
Read MoreFinding Meaning in Laundry and Dishes
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I have spent more time in my house this year than any other. I know you have too.
Because I have been in my house so many hours, days, weeks, months, my life seems to be all about laundry, dishes, vacuuming and cleaning that little area right around the base of the toilet.
Read MoreTrumpet Joy
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My ten-year-old plays the trumpet. I’m not just saying this because I’m his mother or because we have the same soul-searching eyes and fiery tempers, but this kid can play. I mean, he swings. He blows, bounces, and blips like he was born in the wrong decade.
Read MoreShow and Tell
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Your childhood sounds magical.
It was not. My childhood was filled with fear and want. Love dissipated like morning fog in the afternoon sun.
Looking at shadow boxes with my son, I know his childhood is magical. I created the world he was placed in.
Read MoreQuarantine Notes: Inside/Outside
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These quarantine notes, called Inside/Outside were inspired by the Japanese poetic form Haibun.
Stripped down to its essentials, Haibun uses detached language, no personal pronouns and concentrates in sensory details.
I Know How I'll Die
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It starts with a tinge under my skin. An itch begging to be scratched. I find my pulse there, contracting, growing. I dare not touch it. I know it will embed itself under my fingernails, spreading to everything I touch, infecting my eyes, my mouth, the open spaces of my body, eventually seeping into my bloodstream, then to my heart, until… it stops beating, stops throbbing, stops breaking.
Read MoreAsh Wednesday: Making the Lenten Journey as a Family
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Incorporating children into the Lenten journey can be difficult for parents. I know it was for me, until one year, when I was at a loss, I decided to ask my sons what they wanted to do for Lent.
Read MoreSharing the Love on Valentine’s Day
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On the first Valentine’s Day I spent with my husband after we were married, he handed me a small package wrapped in pink tissue paper, tied with a white bow. I pulled the ribbon and gently peeled back the paper to find two different types of vegetable peelers.
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