Every Ending A Beginning

Today was the last day of preschool for our twins. Next year all my kids will be in school, and will all be on the bus by 7:00 am. Having been home with little kids for almost 17 years, it feels surreal to have that much time open to me.

The day started taking them to kindergarten screenings, and it ended with me helping to decorate for my daughter’s 8th grade graduation tomorrow. Like so many others at this time of year, I keep thinking about endings and beginnings.

I love being a mom and am deeply in love with my vocation, with the joy and delight I get from each one of my kids. I routinely tell them, if you were my only child, I would be blown away by the gift of you, by the gift of motherhood youhave given me. And I have that feeling times six.

I also love deep thinking, writing, and reading. I have always written in the little pockets of time I had, and when people ask me how I found the time, I always cite Barbara Kingsolver’s line that if you want to be a writer, be a mother. If you have the writing impulse, you will find the time, and you won’t waste it.

So taking stock of the next chapter of motherhood is so exciting. To have more time for these things will be so joyful, and if past seasons are any indication, it will overflow to our family. Before the twins, I sent our other children to a private preschool because the public preschool was only a 2.5 hour day. I’ll have just packed their backpack and dropped them off before I have to pick them up again! I’ll have no time to write! I opted for a preschool with a longer day that gave me writing time.

But with Ronan, my son who loves Scooby Doo and potato chips and Batman, and also has Down syndrome, we knew having an IEP and having the public school know him well was better for him. The school is 20-25 minutes away, so I ended up having the tiniest window to do all the things for our family + write. To have that constraint in my schedule for the past three years has made this final mile like the ones in marathons: hard and long, but worth it. It was hands down the best choice for us, and Ronan has grown so much.

But dear reader, the fact that I only have to do this drive for one more day is making my heart skip a beat. When I think about the twins getting on the bus in the fall at 7 am, well, let’s just say we are planning to pop some champagne that morning.

Mom’s can do hard things because we love hard. But to be able to love hard and have our days have a little more space for other things sounds amazing. While being a mom always came first, the seasons I could write were always the best. I felt like a better wife, mom, friend. I have learned I have to prioritize that mental stimulation. I have found many ways to do that while being a mom – books on Audible, podcasts, smart conversations on Youtube. It was a crazy realization that my food blog was an attempt to feed my creative brain while multi-tasking making dinner, and it worked! I loved it. I had to take a break from it this busy season because I had so little time, and I wanted to simplify everything in my life. I have learned through this time about the sweetness of self-sacrifice.

But in looking at this next season, I felt called to deeper learning, deeper writing, a kind of formation. One week while I was in the middle of outlining C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, my husband called. His best friend Matt was in town, who was the best man at our wedding, and they caught up for dinner and a few drinks. “Guess what?”, he said. “Matty is getting his PhD online. You should do that too!”

I looked over at my computer, and the Lewis book that lay open.  “We’ll see,” I said. I had just finished my second novel, and thought I don’t know. I love philosophy but I love writing and literature too.

I had gotten my MA in Philosophy at Boston College and was two years into a fellowship towards a PhD program in Philosophy when I had my oldest son. When he was six months old, my little family had zero time to be together due to my husband’s travel, and I resigned. A few months after that we found out that we were being transferred back to our home state of New Hampshire and were expecting our second child, so I was so glad I had been nudged to quit at the beginning of the term. I wrote about it here.

I recently shared about the joy of being able to write every day during lockdown while the twins still napped. When the world opened back up, and I had no time to write plus all of the scheduling demands for my kids on me again, I knew that something was wrong but couldn’t put my finger on it. After my sister was diagnosed with ADHD during lockdown when working full time and remote learning was too much for her, she mentioned I may want to get checked out. I thought I was fine because lockdown was good for my brain. But then when things opened up again, I wasn’t. I suddenly saw how ADHD affected me. I got on medication, and it was a major relief.

When I look back at leaving my PhD program after I had my oldest, I wondered if I had been on ADHD medicine, would I have been so inclined to quit? That was a similar season where the demands on my executive functioning were really hard.

But God’s hand is all over this story.

By trusting him and trying to stay close to His plans for our family, we have this amazing life. It is hard work and so much joy. Ducking out of my PhD then to have a family, to be able to be home with my kids, was such a gift. It didn’t matter why I quit then, and I would have made the same decisions all over again.

But there is a season for everything. And my season for having little kids at home is almost done. So when my husband planted that idea in my head, I looked into it. I found a program where I could easily do courses online at night and read and write during the day. I was already pretty much doing that out of sheer interest and a need to write and think about questions I was interested in. Why not get credit for the work?

The best part? It is actually a PhD in Humanities program. Philosophy + Literature. It feels like God just nudged me there and found the perfect way to merge a love of philosophy with a love of literature. When I found the program, I thought it was a Philosophy PhD because of all of the ancient Greeks and modern philosophers listed in the course work. And I am sure my dissertation will be heavily in philosophy. But I also get to look deeply into literature and classic great works. There is a connection for me between these two – when I think deeply on abstract ideas in philosophy, it always generates examples of this inside of stories, in characters and narratives.

I applied and within a week I had everything in. Since I already had my Master’s, I didn’t need GREs, and all of my grad school professors were still there and remembered me and wrote recommendations. I randomly found a writing sample of my work in my PhD was the same length as the writing sample they requested. When I re-wrote it, something woke up in me. I remembered loving writing about these things.

It was kind of…too easy. That hallmark of grace – serendipity – was all over it. Of course, being a busy mom, I forgot all about my application until after Christmas and then I checked.

I had been accepted. I could go back, sixteen years later, and get my PhD.

So we are celebrating a lot of endings and beginnings in our house. We will have two kindergartners, one fifth grader, and three high schoolers. And a mom whose beginnings and endings of babies and learning just end up being a circle of love.

Babies don’t keep you from your dreams. They make your dreams better.

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The Things Art Can Say

I recently read an article called ‘Art is for Seeing Evil’ by Agnes Callard, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.  She writes that in teaching her philosophy classes on subjects like death or identity, she finds she needs to include literature by such writers as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, James Joyce, Elena Ferrante in addition to philosophical texts in order to thoroughly teach on a subject. She writes:

“The situation is this: the topic of the course requires reference to something that doesn’t show up clearly outside the space of artistic fiction. My hand is forced, because without the novels my course omits something that I see as crucial to understanding death, or self-creation, or courage, or self-consciousness. I am talking about evil.”

She goes on to list all suffering as evil.

“I am using the word “evil” to encompass the whole range of negative human experience, from being wronged, to doing wrong, to sheer bad luck. “Evil” in this sense includes: hunger, fear, injury, pain, anxiety, injustice, loss, catastrophe, misunderstanding, failure, betrayal, cruelty, boredom, frustration, loneliness, despair, downfall, annihilation. This list of evils is also a list of the essential ingredients of narrative fiction.”

As a novelist and philosopher, I find on the one hand I want so much to agree with her, and to applaud her making the point that in order to talk completely about human experience, the materialist, relativist world view is incomplete, and we need to use ideas that are transcendent, such as evil. But her account is incomplete, as it emphatically discounts the good. She writes:

There is a certain noble lie that we tell students about art. I was told it, and I hear it retold often by those defending great books and humanistic education. The lie is that art is a vehicle for personal moral edification or social progress, that art aims at empathy and happiness and world peace and justice and democracy and the brotherhood of man. But those are the goods of friendship, or education, or politics, or religion—not of art. The point of art is not improved living; the point of art is precisely not to be boxed in by the sometimes exhausting and always blinkered project of leading a life. When art does transparently aim at moral guidance or social progress we dismiss it as dogmatic, pedantic and servile.

Post-modern, materialist philosophers don’t like references to the transcendent because references to the good create many problems. It points to a deity, it points to morality, it gives us too many ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’. But to say that any reference to the good in art is the equivalent of moral guidance doesn’t ring true. And it also ignores the fact that all evil indirectly makes reference to the good.

Augustine is first credited with the doctrine of privatio boni, that evil is a privation of a good, though Aquinas picked up the idea from him. He writes:

“For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? The flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils—that is, privations of the good which we call health—are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else. 

Callard rightly determines we need transcendental realties to understand our experiences and to treat important questions, and saw she needed something that is still allowed to talk about metaphysics to examine them. Art and literature do just that. While I heartily agree with her claim that art reveals something important to us about evil and suffering, she still keeps one foot in the relativist world view by minimizing the role of the good. Rather than say, ‘art is for seeing the transcendent’ or ‘for seeing good and evil, beauty and horror’, she leaves out so much of the meaning and nuance of literature by minimizing the weight of the good.

Flannery O’Connor is one of the foremost modern writers to deal with the subject of evil. Her work relies on grotesque characters and violence. But for her, fiction wasn’t just for seeing evil, it was for seeing mystery. She writes in Mystery and Manners that the fundamental essence of literature is to express mystery. “The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”

O’Connor cites Joseph Conrad, whose book Heart of Darkness could readily be viewed as a work of art for ‘seeing evil’ as Callard suggests. He writes that fiction should point us to invisible, metaphysical realities.

“Conrad said that his aim as a fiction writer was to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe…It means that he subjected himself at all times to the limitations that reality imposed, but that reality for him was not simply coextensive with the visible. He was interested in rendering justice to the visible universe because it suggested an invisible one, and he explained his own intentions as a novelist in this way: ‘It is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind. The mystery is our position on earth, and the manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery.’”

It seems to me that Callard errors for not recognizing the whole of the mystery of the invisible reality that the visible reality of evil points to. As Pope John Paul II writes in Salvifici Dolores,

“Man suffers on account of evil, which is a certain lack, limitation or distortion of the good. We could say that man suffers because of a good in which he does not share, from which in a certain sense he is cut off, or of which he has deprived himself. He particularly suffers when he “ought” – in the normal order of things – to have a share in this good and does not have it. Thus, in the Christian view, the reality of suffering is explained through evil, which always, in some way, refers to the good.”

Though modern philosophers have a disdain for the way ‘the good’ brings about too many ‘oughts’, I find as a tool for literary analysis, it is extremely illuminating. Take for example Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which Callard uses to show that evil gives far more weight to a story than the good, and offers as evidence the fact that you could take the happily married Kitty and Levin out of the story, but you could never take out Anna and Vronsky. But this analysis leaves out how the good is really operating in the story. It is not just the good of the happily married couple. The main way the book references the good is that Anna suffers precisely because she perceives herself deprived of a good – that of Vronsky’s love. At the end of the book, when they are just about to be together, she feels his love is cooling, and thinks that though he will be faithful to her he will end up just being kind to her out of duty, which is unbearable to her. Her story includes the complex mystery of the whole of reality – the fruit of sin and the way it makes us turn inwards, the freedom of the will, the psychological distress we can become entrenched in when we close ourselves off from virtue.  Her desire for the good of being loved by Vronsky, and her psychological suffering from that good being withheld from her, from not sharing in it in a way that she thinks she ‘ought’ directly motivates Anna’s choice to commit suicide. To not see the way evil comes about due to a lack of her participating in a good she thinks she ought to, or to not see the mystery of how our desires can become vices when they are unconstrained, and unmoored from their relation to the good, leaves out the heart of Tolstoy’s project.

Being able to see the whole of reality is, for O’Connor, something that children do naturally. Children tend to take in the whole ‘gestalt’ of someone, their whole shape, or their integrated reality. It is this type of reality the writer is interested in. O’Connor writes about A Good Man is Hard to Find:

“A good story is literal in the same sense that a child’s drawing is literal. When a child draws, he doesn’t intend to distort but to set down exactly what he sees, and as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion. Now the lines of motion that interest the writer are usually invisible. There are lines of spiritual motion. And in this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother’s soul, and not for dead bodies.”

Here she explicitly tells us that the importance of her story is ultimately about the good, which is the movement of grace in the grandmother’s soul. The evil in the story is just a vehicle to reveal it. O’Connor sees violence and evil and suffering as ways that ultimate reality breaks into our souls. She writes, “In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.” One could see Callard putting O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find on her syllabi as an exaggerated portrait of evil in the violence and savagery of the mistfit, and thus would have, in O’Connor’s view, missed the essential point of her story.

Callard also misses the way C.S. Lewis’s points to this reality that children apprehend, one where suffering and evil point to the good, when she quotes Lewis’s commentary on Hamlet in her essay:

“I am trying to recall attention from the things an intellectual adult notices to the things a child or a peasant notices—night, ghosts, a castle, a lobby where a man can walk four hours together, a willow-fringed brook and a sad lady drowned, a graveyard and a terrible cliff above the sea, and amidst all these a pale man in black clothes (would that our producers would ever let him appear!) with his stockings coming down, a dishevelled man whose words make us at once think of loneliness and doubt and dread, of waste and dust and emptiness, and from whose hands, or from our own, we feel the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of human affection slipping away.”

She uses this passage to support her thesis, and cites the ‘loneliness, doubt and dread’ as Lewis essentially saying that art is for seeing evil. But she doesn’t acknowledge Lewis’s reference to the good. When he writes ‘the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of human affection slipping away’, we see he is much closer to John Paul the Great’s view that suffering is when we feel we ‘ought’ to participate in a good and we don’t.

Essentially, Callard makes the claim that “art—real art, true art, great art—is not designed for seeing good.”  But a casual survey of literature reveals the importance of it revealing both to us. The Lord of the Rings is for seeing the evil of Mordor, yes, but it is also for seeing the good of friendship in Sam Gamgee, and for mercy and compassion in Frodo’s response to Gollum, and for beauty in the Elves. And none of these are in the story as ‘moral edification’ or ‘improved living’, they are more accurately part of the mystery of reality. What moves us about the story of the fellowship is much closer to Lewis’s description of the feeling of ‘the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of human affection slipping away’. What makes the character of Théoden, King of Rohan, being put under a spell by Grima stay with us so acutely is not just that we are seeing evil, but feeling the familiar loss and grief we feel when we know people who are a shadow of their former selves, who suffer from being cut off from the good of being wholly themselves.

In the movie Life is Beautiful, there is no doubt we are seeing the evil of the Nazi’s extermination of the Jewish people. But what moves us, what makes the heart of the story, is the breathtaking beauty of the father’s love for his son and his willingness to sacrifice his life for him. The audience is keenly aware of the good as it ought to be, that the two of them could live in a world of where their clear love and delight in each other could reign. The good in this story isn’t moral guidance or dogmatic preaching, as Cadwell holds the good always ends up being in art. The father’s death, the Nazi’s evil, would mean nothing if this larger reality of how things should be didn’t play on our hearts and minds. Similarly, Romeo and Juliet’s death would mean nothing if we weren’t so achingly aware of what it might look like if they could partake in the good of their love.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is listed as a book on Callard’s syllabus for her class on death, and indeed one could interpret the meaning of the book as ‘seeing the evil’ of a self-interested life, of upward mobility and power. But written just after Tolstoy’s conversion to Christianity, a more robust interpretation of the book’s aim is the reality that when suffering and the threat of death loom, something breaks into his reality and makes him change, and he turns from a meaningless life to an authentic life marked by compassion and sympathy instead of the artificial life of self-interest. In other words, he turns towards the good.

This move by Tolstoy seems to be much closer to O’Connor’s device to allow evil, or suffering, or violence, to break into our world, and bring us to a larger reality. It seems that Callard ignores this cathartic reality of so much of literature which is what makes us feel cleansed after we consume it. Whether the characters succumb to evil or rise towards the good, most of literature involves humans responding to whole mystery, the whole of reality of both, and not just simply evil. It is our own need and hunger to examine the mystery of life, and to consider how we would respond in such circumstances, and to remember ways that the reality of life felt just like that, that drives us to create art and literature and to consume it.

Callard rightly explains that our everyday intentionality often leads us to perceive only the good, towards that which is useful or leading us to our goals, and it tends to censor the bad. She writes “Art suspends our practical projects, releasing the prohibition against attending to the bad. Our ravenous consumption of badness in art reveals just how much we standardly deprive ourselves of it. We commonly praise some piece of art for its “realism”; we could fault life for its lack thereof.”

But I think a more satisfactory account of this can be found in the writings of Bernard Lonergan, S.J. In his major work, Insight: A Study in Human Understanding, Lonergan outlines his project for explaining how we come to understand or know anything. In it, consciousness moves from sense experience, to asking questions, to reflection, to arriving at an insight, which is the acquisition of real knowledge.

We can see clearly the basic outline of this movement of consciousness from sense experience to knowledge in the scientific method. But his explanation of how we arrive at an insight is perhaps most helpful because it reclaims philosophy’s access to metaphysical knowledge as well by giving us a framework for understanding transcendental insights. He writes that our experiences of art put us into contact with metaphysical realities. Because artists describe our sense world (and the better the art, the better job the artist does this), experiencing art actually puts us in the first stage of an insight – sense experience. “Art mirrors that organic functioning of sense and feeling, of intellect not as abstract formulation but as concrete insight, of judgment that is not just judgment, but that is moving into decision, free choice, responsible action.”

So while he shares Callard’s view that art suspends the practical projects of everyday life, for Lonergan it is not just because we tend to censor the bad in favor of the good in a phenomenological way, but because art takes us to that place outside of ourselves, and outside the place of thinking where biases and judgments are a barrier to understanding and knowledge. Art takes us into that pure state of sense experience that is prior to our formulations of opinions, prior to one that Lewis said was the thoughts of adult intellectuals, and in to the place of a child, drawing a picture, or seeing castles.

He echoes O’Connor’s view that the artist is trying to explain mystery through the manner in which we are in the world when he said:  “The artist establishes his insights, not by proof or verification, but by skillfully embodying them in colors and shapes, in sounds and movements, in the unfolding situations and actions of fiction. To the spontaneous joy of conscious living, there is added the spontaneous joy of free intellectual creation.”

Lonergan holds that the act of questioning puts us on the road to insight. Perhaps Callard’s questioning of why she needs literature on her syllabi to teach the whole reality of our experiences offered her the insight that we need transcendent realities to fully explain and understand our experiences. She is just held back by her rejection of the good, and thus of an integrated reality, or what O’Connor calls ‘the mystery that is the great embarrassment to the modern mind’. Even as she praises artists for trying to understand and communicate this mystery, she censors herself from the complete picture of it.

Writers don’t have that luxury. That mystery presses down on us, and drives us to write it, to explore it, and to set down exactly what we see, to draw the lines of spiritual motion that point to the invisible realities. Good art, good literature, it seems to me, is when a writer captures those realities accurately, when the essence of the good and the haunting effects of its absence are played out in their stories in ways that echo the realities of our world.

 

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Something New

It has been 3 months since my ADHD diagnosis, and since then life has been – as the kids say these days – a fever dream.

I have been taking inventory of so many things. What serves me, and what doesn’t. What interests me, and what doesn’t. I am trying to learn the way my brain works. It basically feels like I dumped out the contents of my life, like you would your purse, and am putting them all back in very carefully. I’m trying to throw away the equivalents of the extra napkins, snack wrappers and receipts, and put back the favorite lipstick and an organized wallet.

I have learned that if I don’t prioritize my mental stimulation, my brain will get the dopamine hits somewhere I don’t want it to, like staying up late watching TV, so in addition to my real-life duties, I am sticking with the basics: good sleep, whole foods, less sugar, less consumption of mindless stuff. More exercise, more writing, more reading, more listening to smart people on Audible, podcasts, and YouTube while I do housework.

While these changes are simple, they make a big impact. I’ve lost weight, wake up feeling refreshed, and have a constant desire to write. My mantra has been: ‘Everything I ever wanted is on the other side of a good night of sleep’.

So many good things have come out of this, and I am very intentionally going through my days trying to attend to my duty first, and the 5,346 other things I’m interested in after that.

I have been quiet on social media while I go through this process. The really interesting thing about my diagnosis is it has made clear what parts of social media are difficult for me (and probably for lots of other people too):

  • Things are either so interesting and give such big dopamine hits on social media that I lose track of time, subscribe to a million free webinars that I don’t have time to attend, or come away thinking I really should open a farm-to-table restaurant that employs all of our friends with disabilities and send the proceeds to Reese’s Rainbow stat. While this idea is beautiful, social media generates too many of them, and so I start to lose my bearings if I am not very focused on my goals.
  • Or things are so uninteresting. I have realized how much of social media is so boring. Zero dopamine hits. I get repeated reminders of well-meaning advice that is meant for neurotypical people and is lost on me. Also, ADHD people really like to do things their own way so they don’t like it when people tell them what to do. Since social media is 76% of people giving advice, this makes for a lot of discomfort. Most of the rest of it feels like lots of ads, influencers, mixtures of influencers and ads that are trying to connect, be impactful and serve a community that is not me.

I sincerely love the community I know on Instagram that sneaks in between all this stuff. The other mothers and writers and beautiful souls help me in ways I can’t begin to count. But I know I crave an intimacy that is lost on social media because acquaintances from high school, my old boss, and my mom’s neighbor can see everything I put out and as a writer this makes me not share what I am thinking out of discretion.

All of this is to say that I am trying something new – I am starting a Substack called Chasing Logos to write about faith, growth, love, and truth, basically where God and my curiosity take me through Lent. It is free for subscribers. As most of you probably know, logos is a Greek word that means logic, knowledge, reason, word, communication, and The Word, or Jesus. I was gobsmacked when I first learned about in my college philosophy courses, so much so that I went back for my Masters and started my PhD in philosophy. Though I dropped out of my PhD program when I had my oldest and our family moved back to New Hampshire, the love of the word took on new forms in writing and learning about finding God in all things, His logos enlivening the whole world always. So chasing after it in the hopes of finding Him has been the joy of life for me. I hope it is fun. I hope it is the opposite of boring. I hope I can reveal the crazy passionate love God has for us in a new way. I would love if you can follow along and hopefully make the time spent reading and nourishing that sweet soul of yours well spent.

And I will be starting a newsletter for my wonderful subscribers here called The Joy Letter – you can subscribe over there on the left. This newsletter will be lighter than my Substack, more recipes and book recommendations, things that light up my interest and bring me joy and I can’t wait to share. I am hoping to have a chance to talk more intimately to friends and readers than I can on the world wide web. No one is more scrutinized on the web than the parents of teens (ask me how I know). So I can’t wait to reach people in their inbox, far away from the prying eyes of teenagers. 🙂

I am so excited about these new changes, and hope to get to know the community I have known on social media in a way that is much more meaningful with a lot less distraction.

Cheers friends, I hope this Lent leads you there and back again.

xoxo Katie

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On Epiphany & Knowing God

We celebrated Epiphany at our parish recently, both in the faith formation classes I help teach and at Mass. 

Epiphany is the official start of the world knowing Christ. It was just a handful of people, the wise men and the shepherds, that he let in on the secret. Knowing Christ isn’t meant to be an exclusive club, he’s just humble. 

As I sat in the church overflowing with evergreens and lights, flowers and the Nativity scene, with simple, beautiful Christmas hymns swelling around us, I thought about the deep dive I had just taken over the weekend. I was writing an essay and as I was researching it I listened to atheists like Sam Harris, cosmopolitan philosophers like Martha Naussbaum, and the nihilist philosophy Reddit page (which is as fun as it sounds) and a few chapters of this book on Moral Relativism. 

With my mind filled with the typical arguments against there being a God, I sat in the church after receiving the Eucharist, which is to say after receiving the God they think doesn’t exist. Catholics believe the Eucharist is Jesus, and that the night before he died he gave us a way to be fed spiritually. Through the prayers of the priest, the bread and the wine become his body and blood through transubstantiation. The Eucharist is significantly foreshadowed in the Old Testament: the manna from Heaven that was sent by God each day to feed the Jewish people as they wandered in the wilderness before entering the promised land, the bread that sat in Holy of Holy places in the temple and in the Arc of the Covenant, the unleavened bread at Passover. 

As I sat there, I thought about how all of these people who are writing and arguing about God have never had this experience. They have never felt the peace, the surge of the heart that feels like the warm water swells of a tropical ocean, the glow that feels like light and truth and love, the absolute vastness of the height and depth and breadth of the experience. Truly, words fail to describe the feeling post Eucharist. 

Once, when I asked my teenage son what he experienced after Communion, he looked ahead for a minute before earnestly answering: it’s deeply meaningful. And when I put my nine-year-old to bed after his First Communion, I asked what his experience felt like. He thought about it and then said: “it was like a whomp-whah”.

That is a technical term used by theologians I am sure. But yet, I knew exactly what he meant. 

I have read enough skeptical, post-Modern philosophy to know just how they would tear apart these sentiments (repressed, brainwashed woman who has internalized her oppressor, the Catholic church, reporting instances of her repressed, brainwashed offspring). Or as Flannery O’Connor put it, though faith may seem to some a “peculiar and arrogant blindness,” it can be an “extension of vision” where by you can see the world more clearly. What critics of Christianity seem to think is we are holding on to an outdated, ancient world view and what they miss is that we are responding to a person, Jesus Christ, who is very much interacting with us today, in the present moment. The whole hullabaloo of the Cross and Resurrection isn’t just what happened then, it is what it allowed Christ to do ever since, which is to be present in the world, in the flesh. Yes he was God incarnate when he was born 2,000 years ago. But he is also God incarnate in the Eucharist, today.  

Since it was the Epiphany, the celebration of the first knowing of Christ by the world, of Christ being sought out by wise men, I couldn’t help but think about the type of knowing that all of these modern thinkers didn’t have. Because if they have never been to a Mass, and have never been in the presence of the Eucharist, how do they know? How do they know for certain that a) it isn’t God b) that God doesn’t exist c) that he has never proved it to us?

Because the love that I feel after Communion, or at prayer, feels exactly like he is proving it to us.

That is why we are Catholic. That is why we go to Mass, deep dive into the Scriptures, pray. Someone is there, meeting us. And he is more beautiful and he loves us more than we can ever imagine. If you are on the receiving end of it, that love, that grace, that peace, you know. You know that Jesus is real, that he is alive, and he loves you. It is a knowing unlike any other. 

It is fascinating to see the way writers have described the Eucharist. The writer Mary Karr tells when her 8 year old son asked her to take him to church to ‘see if God was there’, they went to all different types of religious services. When he got to the Catholic Mass, he said, that’s it. He’s there. And they converted. 

And when the writer Heather King decided to find religion, she also went to lots of different services in LA, and finally when she went to a Catholic Mass, at the consecration when they said “Behold, the Lamb of God, he who takes away the sins of the world” and the people responded, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” Right then, she knew, this is what she had been looking for. 

There is a story the philosopher Peter Kreeft tells, when he explained the Eucharist to a Muslim student. The student said, “I don’t understand.” And Kreeft replied, “I think I know what you mean. You can’t empathize with anyone who believes something so shocking. You don’t see how you could ever get down on your knees before that altar.” And he replied, “No, I don’t see how I could ever get up. If I believed that thing that looks like a little round piece of bread was really Allah Himself, I think I would just faint. I would fall at His feet.”

This story holds one of the most important parts about receiving the Eucharist: our attitude matters. Lots of people receive the Eucharist but it is this humility, and adoration, that lets you dive deeper into knowing him.  

As St Thérèse of Lisieux, a doctor of the church, tells us, knowledge of Christian truth inwardly requires and interiorly demands love for him to whom it has given its assent. She tells us that the love on which “depend all the law and the prophets” is a love which strives for the truth, and is is authentic agape for God and man. In essence, we can understand from her that though many people receive the Eucharist, those that are humbly trying to love him will know him more deeply. 

So on this Epiphany, I thank God for the gift of knowing him at Mass, in Eucharist, in prayer. It doesn’t make me any better than anyone that he lets me know him. He wants to offer this gift to everyone. He wants you to go too. But it does require humility. Just like the shepherds and the wise men had when they went and knelt before Emmanuel, all those years ago. 

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Be Not Afraid

Recently I listened to an interview with Dr. Jean Twenge, a psychologist and researcher about iGen and its use of social media. This is a topic I am very tuned into, since we are parents to the first generation of children who have iPhones. We are the guinea pigs. One detail in her research that stood out to me that I can’t stop thinking about it is how much iGen prioritizes safety.

I guess it is because I rarely thought about safety growing up. 

While I would guess that is because I had a secure family, the statistics Dr. Twenge is referencing are also from children who have not only a secure family, but by and large, have parents who opted to have two children to ensure they could invest heavily in them, who are living with their children longer and financing their lives for longer as well. This seems like it would make people feel more secure, not less. So why the increase in concern for safety, or more specifically, why is there so much fear?

According to her, this fear is stunting them. They don’t go on dates, get jobs, get their driver’s license until much later, and have far less face to face interaction with friends. All of these are the hallmarks of independence in previous generations. Her research made me picture caterpillars who don’t want to leave the cocoon, and don’t want to spread their wings. 

When I chatted with my husband about how our kids are affected, he stopped. “Do you know what the ad said that Ernest Shackleton posted to get a crew for the Endurance?” He’s always been fascinated by Shackleton and his Antarctic expedition that lasted from 1914-1917. “Google it,” he said. So I did and found this:

“The line of men answering this ad was around the block,” he added.

This comparison of previous generations reveals the changing cultural tides.

Dr. Twenge highlights in past generations, having larger families meant that parents couldn’t hover or be as protective. She cites her own mother’s upbringing as one of eight kids in a dairy farm in Missouri, and how the load her grandparents carried meant they couldn’t possibly be overprotective, and the children all gained independence very early.

This resonated with me as one of eight children, and as a mother of six. As humans, our psyches are hard-wired that there is safety in numbers. Perhaps the reason why I never felt afraid growing up because I had such a big family, and conversely why iGen feels afraid is that their tribes are much smaller, and less connected? Having a lot of siblings certainly helps to instill a sense of community. It also encourages responsibility and erodes narcissism, which are without a doubt the biggest problems in iGen according to Dr. Twenge. Hence the title of her most recent bookiGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–and What That Means for the Rest of Us.

These large family sizes are counter-cultural, largely because of the fear around having children. This is always surprising to me, given the level of joy, wonder, fulfillment and connection the experience of being in a big family has given us. Yes there are sacrifices but the benefits so completely outweigh the costs that I wonder why people are so afraid. Big families encourage not only independence but teamwork, self-sacrifice and strong interpersonal skills. Does the fact that my oldest son loves to cuddle and play with his little brothers before he heads out the door to high school bode well for him and society? I think it does. My kids might not play on travel teams or be assured of unlimited educational funding, but if all this investment in kids isn’t making them feel secure, what is the point? Conversely, kids that have to be independent early really have no other option than to work hard (and well) to get what they want. While my kids are far from perfect, at most parent teacher conferences they stand out as conscientious and empathetic, and the teachers always make comments that being from a big family makes them very good at group work. Which is what Dr. Twenge’s research shows is lacking in iGen. I often wonder why the fears are highlighted and the many positives are not counted with having more children, especially when these positives are just what our culture is missing.

It is not a surprise that her research shows that faith in God has gone down in iGen. I think it is interesting that as belief in religion goes down, fear and anxiety go up. They are inversely correlated. We often cite Marx’s injunction that religion is the opiate of the masses, and it implies that believers are numbing their independence with being a blind slave to the authority of a church or God. But where is the increase in independence for iGen that don’t believe? The research seems to show it is frozen by fear. This doesn’t sound like Nietzsche’s will to power uberman or the triumph of the will that the post-modern philosophers were convinced would be the result of embracing our own will as the ultimate authority. It seems that while people consciously refuse to acknowledge that they are subject to a higher authority, or any limits at all to personal freedom, they subconsciously know that they are human and have limits and are only as strong as their family, finances, or social supports. Often, they make whichever one of these is their main source of support their god.

Conversely, for most Catholics like myself who derive security from their faith in God’s love for them, there is no question faith helps crowd out fear. The Bible quotes the phrase ‘do not be afraid’ over 300 times. And Saint John Paul the Great is famous for his impassioned plea to young people be not afraid. As a recent article about him wrote, John Paul’s joy and courage never wavered because he was not their source — Christ was.

We live in a pluralistic society, and not everyone is going to hold these beliefs. But even the Talmudic tradition warns against the epic belief in individualism iGen has inherited. In the Ethics of Fathers, the teacher Hillel concisely contradicts the expressive individualism that has replaced religion for many with the following idea: “Do not separate yourself from the community, and do not trust in yourself until the day of your death.” In warning against cutting off one’s community he reminds us as Aristotle did that we are social beings, and often not our own best guides. 

I think my lack of fear is due to my family and my faith, but it is also largely a reflection of the level of fear in society as a whole when I was growing up. Even though the threat of nuclear war loomed and we had enemies and economic instability waiting in the wings, our belief that our fellow man would be with us, and not against us, held firm. That can’t be said of iGen. The fear and mistrust of our fellow humans, of being publicly shamed, canceled, or isolated if they do not fall in line with whatever attitude is trending might have made me afraid too if I grew up at this time. We need each other. But we can’t see that if we have a screen between authentic connection and that screen feeds us with a steady diet of fear and disdain for people who don’t think like us.

As a joyful mother of several members of iGen, I hope young people remember this: don’t let fear win. Let hope and faith in yourself and others guide you. And if you can open yourself up to hope and faith in a God who loves you, then the sky is the limit for living without fear. As JPII said,

“Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. … Do not be afraid to be holy! Have the courage and humility to present yourselves to the world determined to be holy, since full, true freedom is born from holiness. This aspiration will help you discover genuine love, untainted by selfish and alienating permissiveness.”

Then you may find that a life of adventure and purpose is where true joy is found. Just ask the men of the Endurance.  

 

 

 

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  1. Colleen Martin
    Colleen Martin says:

    This is sooooo good and interesting about the rise in fear/concern for safety. I never put it all together like you have, and I sincerely thank you for it. Going to forward to family and friends now 🙂

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Discovering My ADHD, Part II

Knowing thyself is the beginning of wisdom. – Aristotle

Image from Etsy entitled The Tangled Artist

(This post is a continuation of my first post, Discovering My ADHD, Part I if you want to start there.)

When I look back, I can see a constellation of events made my coping skills work less and less.

I had the twins at 41 and was in survival mode for the first few years. I can see now how much the sleep deprivation was very hard, since sleep is super important for ADHD brains. I felt a lot of grace during this time, and had good support thankfully with au pairs and sitters. But life was total survival mode, and it was easy to chalk that up to having twins. 

When the pandemic hit, which was when my sisters coping skills stopped working, I was able to write during their naptime, and began my second novel. With outside events cancelled I didn’t have to use my executive functioning skills as much. My friends and I took walks everyday, and we all reveled that we had more time for connection and time in nature. My husband even commented that I seemed really happy with a slower pace of life. Now I can see why. But balancing everyone’s needs and remote learning with two two-year-olds was still hard, and it will just be known as the time when there were new crayon marks on everything, every day.  

Then life opened back up, and my executive functioning skills were tapped immediately. My big kids started to be more involved in everything – friends, sports, jobs, so I was always filling out paperwork, booking activities and appointments, planning out schedules, driving, doing a lot of sports watching, i. e. things that require executive functioning skills and lack mental stimulation. The only coping skills I could squeeze in were exercise, especially joining a tennis league, and listening to smart people talk while I did boring tasks. Youtube, Podcasts, Audible – these sustained me.

Until they couldn’t. Eventually, they were not enough, and I could feel some pressure building in me. I kept white knuckling it, thinking next week, next month, next season it would get a little easier, and it just didn’t. Additionally, four of my kids and my husband have ADHD and Ronan has special needs. I used to joke to my mom that I was the frontal lobe for my whole family. I thought it was just hard because they were extra. Turns out my frontal lobes also needed some support. 

I have always loved being active and eating healthy and being a healthy weight, but more and more, I was making up for not getting enough mental stimulation by staying up way too late watching TV on the weekend, and inevitably this led to eating and drinking wine – the trifecta of impulse control issues. My weight started to creep up. I tried for the last few years to remedy this by the usual calorie-deprivation methods: Weight Watchers, Noom, Isagenix, My Fitness Pal, Intermittent Fasting, you name it I tried it. Nothing worked, and I beat myself up for self-sabotaging my efforts.

Additionally, many women end up having ADHD show up in their lives during perimenopause, because there is such a tight relationship between your hormones and your brain. This interview highlighted the relationship for me: 

As your Estrogen decreases your brain dopamine decreases. You already have a problem with brain dopamine if you have ADHD. So we see ADHD symptoms worsening as a woman enters menopause.   We also see that monthly with hormonal fluctuations, so that the week before your period your ADD symptoms may be worse, or your meds don’t work as well as they did before.

For my whole I life I struggled with PMDD, and a few weeks ago I got an email in my inbox from ADDitude Magazine (which I have subscribed to for years for my people, never realizing I had it, oh the irony) about PMDD and ADHD. It reports that 46% of women with ADHD have PMDD compared with 5% of the regular population. This link between estrogen and dopamine explains it. I have treated my PMDD with lots of supplements like saffron, Vitex, Dim (an estrogen flusher), magnesium, fish oil, and eleuthero. Turns out most of those are great for the ADHD brain anyway. 

But the cycle of PMDD and the stress from untreated ADHD continued to make my weight creep up. After trying for the last few years to lose weight, nothing worked. Then a few months ago, I joined The Faster Way to Fat Loss, which combines hitting huge macro goals with intermittent fasting with strength training. It has been such a powerful shift, and eating MORE food, not less, has been amazing. Clothes are looser, I feel so strong from the strength training videos, and I have done the fasting with so much ease. It has even been so easy to cut out sugar & flour most of the time. I could eat really healthy and fast during the week. With ease I have lost 10+ lbs. and have felt great.

But when I really wanted to stop staying up late on the weekends, I found I couldn’t. I needed that time. I needed it like oxygen. I knew it was sabotaging my efforts, but I needed it so badly that I couldn’t think of a different way of doing things. My brain literally exhaled when I got to hyper-focus on a tv show for a few hours. I thought it was just what I needed because I was a busy mom.  But it made me ask, why can all these other women go to bed early on the weekends when I can’t?

This summer was my perfect storm. I did not understand how much I needed to prioritize mental stimulation. For the last 2 years I had used my morning preschool or childcare hours for writing, and now that I was finished with my second novel, I used those hours to slog through the thousands of agents to find ones who represent my genre. And guess what? Filling out forms and reading hundreds of query email requirements is extremely boring and gives zero reward.  It gives my brain the opposite of what writing gives it. The rest of my time I was cleaning up extra messes from everyone being home, driving kids, going to the pool, which were all repetitive mundane tasks. Near the end of the summer, when I put on our twins floaties for the 2,034 time I could feel my brain screaming to break out of the monotony. I said to my husband as we entered the school year and all the fall sports with him coaching football: something has to give. I was white knuckling life, and didn’t feel like I could find any oxygen.

Because of the way ADHD shows up in women I couldn’t see that by not prioritizing getting my brain what it needed, it was making me struggle. Until I found a mom on Instagram talk about how it looks in her. Something about the way ActivatedADHDmom presented being a mom with ADHD resonated with me. I signed up for her free presentation and this was the cycle of the ADHD mom: 

It me. 

And all of a sudden: Eureka. That was it. It explained so much of my struggle. While there was so much joy and goodness in our family, there was this something, this itch I couldn’t scratch, some part of the equation I was missing that was keeping me from exhaling. 

I reached out to my insurance, found doctors who could evaluate and prescribe ADHD, and made an appointment for a few weeks later where I got an official diagnosis and was prescribed Adderall. (I highly recommend you read reviews of whoever you are looking to book with on WebMD. There are lots of bad doctors and NPs out there). 

The first day I took it, I came home and cleaned and vacuumed out my van. I had done this maybe once a year previously. I would do anything to avoid cleaning out my car. Then I cleaned the fridge and the kitchen. If I needed any proof that I definitely had it, this was it. It wasn’t like I took speed and could do more, like some people think of Adderall. It was like doing uninteresting things I previously avoided like the plague suddenly felt like cutting soft butter. Without medication, I would just automatically default to putting off the task in favor of something more interesting. But with medication, doing the job and putting order in the space was its own reward. This is actually the biggest issue for ADHD brains – the reward system in the brain doesn’t work properly. But medicine helps set this system right. I didn’t have any side effects, thankfully. I just felt great. 

A feeling of well-being continued to flood me every morning after my meds kicked in. It was so unbelievable to me that other people felt like this all the time. I felt free, I felt light, I felt like I had opened up a part of myself that not only did I not know I had, I didn’t even know it was missing. Best of all, when nighttime came, I was just ready for bed. My brain had gotten what it needed during the day and it was just fine going to bed instead of doom scrolling or watching TV. (As I write this on a Saturday morning, I am reveling in the fact that I went to bed at 9pm last night and felt great when the twins woke me up early.)

I can’t believe the healing, understanding, peace, and awe this revelation has held for me. In the weeks since I learned I had ADHD, so many memories have trickled in, like all these stray puzzle pieces suddenly fit together to form a complete picture. Being 4 years old, with lots of ear infections, and just getting lost in the corner with books because not hearing my friends and siblings made playing with them so boring. (After I got tubes, my mom reports that I went back to my extroverted self but had taught myself how to read in the process, and the love affair stayed my whole life.) I remembered being 11 and having people have to shake me when I was lost in a book when the bell rang to switch classes. Being in high school and leaving my big projects until Sunday night all the time, though during the day I was fascinated by poetry and history and got good grades. Getting lost for hours writing and reading in college and grad school, and then craving that time as a mom. When I got it, life was good, and when I didn’t, it was so hard. 

Being an adult with ADHD has often felt like a super power.  I can throw a party, organize a holiday, or write a novel during a pandemic. As Dr. Ned Halloway says in this great documentary The Distruptors, the 3 problem areas of ADHD – distractibility, impulsivity, hyperactivity – when flipped upside down become curiosity, creativity, and energy. These last three qualities inform my whole adult life. 

But there has been a shadow side, too. Using up all of my executive function skills as I packed to go up north or make dinner with small kids and feeling overwhelmed. Getting to almost the end of my PhD program and feeling overwhelmed by motherhood, running a house and grad school, then quitting. I am so blessed and lucky that I have been able to build my life around my ADHD, and thrive in many ways. But I am looking forward to the next chapter where order in my house and focus doing hard things comes a lot easier. 

Based on the response to my first blog post, I know I am not alone. I am so passionate about how families can be helped by having greater awareness around ADHD, and I am sure I will write about it going forward. It is so wonderful to finally understand myself, and I just want to help others feel the same. When my oldest daughter told me on a recent car ride that I just seem happier on medicine, everything fell into place. That’s the goal, after all. To model successful living for them. To be open and relaxed enough to make space for them. I’m so grateful that I can do that now. It’s the best feeling, and I can’t wait to see how this gift continues to unfold.  

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I was last week years old when I finally realized I had ADHD.

The revelation has been a bombshell. 

How in the world have I lived 46 years without knowing this? Because now that I can see it, there is so much clarity. It is like putting on glasses. And realizing all the ways I was compensating for it is truly amazing.  It feels like I managed a super human feat for most of my life, and I was VERY good at finding ways to cope, finding mechanisms to help my brain get what it needed. Running. Writing. Excercising. Food blogging. Praying. They all worked so well, until they didn’t. 

Like most adults who get diagnosed with ADHD, what brought me to my knees and made me finally see that I have it was my coping mechanisms were no longer working.

After I had the twins, the pandemic hit, my big kids got older and there were more demands on me. For the past few years, I was white-knuckling life, I was gaining weight, and I was not achieving all the things I kept dreaming about. 

Because prior to this time, I could organize my life around getting what my brain needed, and in many ways this hid the fact that I had ADHD. I was lost in books my whole childhood, got to hyper-focus in college, grad school, teaching, and writing. As a wife & mom, I hyper-focused on learning everything I could about cooking, becoming a food blogger, writer, and columnist. I could fit that into the small windows of time in my day as a mom, and when I got a larger block of time I wrote. I got to hyper-focus when I ran and listened to music. Oh, the freedom I felt on a run. But then my chiropractor showed me my X-ray and said I shouldn’t run anymore since I had no cartilage between my L4 and L5 vertebrae, and that was why my back hurt all the time. I had an absolute mourning period when I couldn’t run any more. Now I know that running and listening to music were yet another way to hyper-focus. 

But the very best coping skill, the best way to hyper-focus, was when I was reading and writing novels. When I didn’t have a book going – either reading or writing – I felt adrift. I always used to say that reading and writing were self-care, and now I know that I was definitely getting my brain what it needed.

As a presenter with ADHD said on a recent Tedtalk I watched: 

We have more thoughts then we have time to pursue, so we do so at every available opportunity. Our brains have a special lust for dopamine. We are wired to take risks. ADHD minds become super-powered under pressure. 

This is truly are me in a nut shell. I now understand why SO many of my friends and acquaintances comment on my mode of operating. How do you do all those things with six kids? How do you cook food and write a book? I never really knew how to answer their incredulity. I don’t know, I just know I need to do it. Now, it makes sense why I do those things and why neurotypical people don’t get it.

I remember a night right after my third child was born when a babysitter came over to help while my husband was traveling. I was busy making Ina Garten’s aioli in the food processor to put on top of fingerling potatoes, because I had watched her make the recipe earlier that day while I was nursing. The kitchen was filled with pots and pans and the food processor was whiring, my precious 4 and 2 year olds were playing, the baby was in a bouncy seat, and the dog was barking at her entrance. The (older and wiser) woman walked in to the kitchen and kindly said, “You just had a baby. Do you think you might want to keep things simple right now?” And I remember saying, “I just had a baby. I need to do this to stay sane!”

How in the world did I miss it? How did everyone around me miss it?

There are a few reasons. First, as I mentioned I was very good at setting up coping skills and structuring my life around it. I was always able to change things up so my brain could find something new to learn, to create. I prioritized exercise and healthy eating which is important for the ADHD brain. I kept a very disciplined spiritual life, which I am sure sustained me this whole time. According to this article, How You Are Self-Medicating Your ADHD, I had a lot of good things going for me and did use a lot of healthy ways to self-medicate. 

The author lists the following: 

Exercise – I have long had a habit of excercising 4-6 days a week, because I knew I needed it. For a long time running gave me the hyper-focus and endorphins I craved, but now it is a mix of walking, elliptical, tennis, classes, HIIT workouts, and more recently the Faster Way Strength workouts. I’ve had amazing results eating tons of protein and doing strength workouts and losing weight for the first time in two years, and credit this program with helping me to prioritize my health and start to uncover the fact that I have ADHD and was compensating with bad habits.

Meditation – I could write a whole book about my faith journey and probably will, but I said to my husband that having the Rosary as a daily habit with ADHD has probably helped me more then I will ever know. There is some connection with the spiritual life and ADHD I think, maybe it is because we make so many mistakes we need to lean on God, or are more easily like little children? We have way more tolerance for imperfection, and ideas like forgiveness and mercy and second chances fit our understanding of life because we see how much we need those things. Or maybe it is because there is always so much more to learn about God and ourselves, it is endlessly interesting to our brains. I read St. Therese’s Story of a Soul at 16, St. Therese’s Interior Castle at 18, Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain at 20, and Augustine’s Confessions – my all time favorite book – at 21. (I bet he had ADHD, and I also learned St. Catherine of Siena is the patron saint of ADHD because she struggled with it.) Looking back, I can clearly see that the depth of these works were perfect stimulation for my hungry mind. In the same way, I was completely hooked on my first day of philosophy and have only grown to love it more as I get older. There is a big meditative quality to philosophy makes my brain feel like a duck in water. Maybe truth lights up our brains.

Passion – Being a mom has absolutely been good for my ADHD in giving me a purposefulness to tackle mundane chores. My love for my kids and my passion for my family has made me put systems in place and order in our home and schedule that actually are part of why I didn’t think I had ADHD. I don’t forget to pick up my kids, I rarely missed doctor appointments thanks to always setting 2 reminders in my phone, and there was only 1 school event that I completely spaced (because another of my kids was home with strep, but we still talk about the trauma around when I missed the 1st grade rainforest play.) I’m five minutes late to everything, and our house is messy, but otherwise I take care of my people because of passionately wanting a good life for them.

Connection – I would say the faith piece and the mom piece fall under this coping strategy as well, because feeling connected to God and my family has been the center of my adult life, and the times when I am thriving, it is due to connection. We are also very blessed to have an amazing community, and my husband and I both thrive with a lot of connection and friendships. We have made some major moves in our past in order to raise our kids in a place with a lot of connection, and it has paid off. 

Coaching – I have always been interested in self-help, therapy, self-improvement. I think I was trying hard to understand the parts of me that felt different from other people. Now that I know, I truly hope to help other people who may be struggling unknowingly with ADHD. In particular, it is crazy undiagnosed in women. We have only been part of ADHD studies since the 1990s! And I think not understanding how it presents in women is why it took me so long to get diagnosed. It was the ADHD mama on Instagram that made me see. This Ted talk is also about how women are under-diagnosed (and this presenter has a very similar ADHD to me as well though I don’t share all of her thoughts).

Having all of these coping skills in place helped me self-medicate my ADHD and while they are clearly beneficial, they probably masked it and prevented me from seeing it. 

Another reason why I couldn’t see it is because my husband has the very traditional type of ADHD. Very high energy, needing to move his body, seeking peril & thrill in skiing, hiking, kayaking, bike riding, super social, frequently interrupts. We joke that on our honeymoon in Aruba, in order for my husband to be able to sit by the pool with me for a few hours, he needed to sign up for the 20-mile bike ride around the Island at 7 am. In comparison, I craved finding down time to sit still. But that was because then I could read/listen/think about something mentally stimulating. That was my way of getting a fix. And I had no idea. Now I can see that during ski season, our whole family tends to thrive because skiing medicates ALL of our ADHD.

When my kids started to get diagnosed, they had a similar type as my husband, which added to the idea that I couldn’t have it since I didn’t share their ‘motor running’ symptoms so common in childhood ADHD. When our oldest child went through testing for his NF-1 at Boston Children’s hospital, we were surprised when they diagnosed him with ADHD. I immediately read all the things (i.e. hyper-focused) and bought Ned Halloway’s book Driven to Distraction. He recognized his own ADHD at Harvard Medical School when he was sitting through a class about ADHD, and how they seek out high-adrenaline activities that have peril or risk. I then immediately recognized my risk-loving husband’s ADHD. But not my own. I didn’t seek risk or peril. I was happiest going to a coffee shop to write for 4 hours quietly. Now I know that ADHD’s Ferrari engine (as Dr. Halloway calls it) runs fast in men’s bodies, but it runs fast in women’s minds. Now I see that I like to take risks on anything creative, because doing it is so gratifying to my mind.

As we kept having kids and they kept getting diagnosed, our family went through tremendous learning curves, and found lots of great tools and help from therapists and books and specialists. And I still didn’t see my own ADHD. I would help parents who asked me for advice in person or on social media and suggest that they may want to consider medication for their child because if they don’t, they will likely grow up and self-medicate. And I still did not connect my weekend wine habit and hyper-focus staying up late watching tv on the weekends with ADHD. This absolutely blows my mind. 

Then my sister was diagnosed with ADHD during the pandemic. Trying to work full time while having school-aged kids remote learning created days where her coping skills no longer worked, and she wisely talked to someone who helped her realized what it was. She spoke of going on medication as feeling like her brain went on vacation, and was filled with ah-ha moments after her diagnosis. We talked about the possibility of me also having it, since hello! It’s genetic and now my husband, kids, sister, and very definitely our mom and my oldest brother, had it too. Our conversations went like this:

Me: I don’t think I could have it. I loved school. I loved learning. I have a Master’s in Philosophy and loved it. I write novels. I don’t have a problem sitting down and doing hard things. Isn’t that the main symptom of ADHD?

Her: Remember in your 20s when you would drive your jeep, smoke a cigarette, turn on your favorite song, and converse with whoever was in the car? Maybe just get checked out. 

So I took many online quizzes.  I even took one from a Marriage and ADHD course my husband and I took – and they all came up scoring very low possibility. I didn’t even relate to the test questions like ‘are you always fidgeting?’ ‘do you bounce your leg or feel like you have a motor in you?’ ‘is it hard for you to start a task?’.  No, I thought. I am very task-oriented! I get stuff done. I can accomplish a lot in a day, and tackle my to-do list, and don’t procrastinate or blow stuff off. 

That is, as long as it is interesting. My answers were colored by the fact that my drive to get to the mentally stimulating stuff made me plow through the things that were hard and boring. See, I could slay my to-do list and sit and do hours worth of hard writing work, and heck, I didn’t even have trouble with the day-to-day stuff of being a mom because I love making dinner! Don’t ADHD moms struggle with that? But all of those things are super interesting to me. When I had to fold laundry I piled it all on the bed, watched a movie and had a chore beer (i.e. made it interesting). I love learning about food, and when you are ADHD your brain is always seeking mental stimulation, finding new recipes to try is exciting and interesting. So it makes sense that I started a food blog, and as long as I could keep creating and trying out new recipes, my brain was happy, and I have kept it going for a long time. BUT – and this is a big but – ask me to do something to make the blog successful like posting it to a zillion food sharing sites and Pinterest and try to monetize it by reaching out to collaborators and figuring out how to post adds on the site – and my eyes glaze over. I have kept the blog a labor of love and delightfully ad-free partly because I hate ads when I am reading a recipe and mainly because the business side of the blog is SO boring to me. I have been fine with a small, loyal following of 2,000 ish readers per month for so long, but every once in a while I would wonder why don’t I try to build it? I chalked it up to being too busy with motherhood.  Now I see how much ADHD played a roll in procrastinating on doing the things that were boring to me compared to the fun & stimulation of creating content and new recipes. 

I also found the most stimulation in writing though. I wrote for the food blog, and then used it to write for magazines, and the story assignments were always so much fun to write. In fact, it was part of why I didn’t think I could have ADHD, since so many evaluations ask you about work, and my work was sitting down and writing an article which was easy for me to start and complete. Now I see the truth, that every assignment was a chance to hyper-focus and give myself the stimulation my brain needed. My work was by design not boring. 

Now I can see why I was always the happiest while I was writing novels. The name of the writing genre is literally an ADHD brains favorite thing – novelty. I remember thinking while I was writing my first one, this is the best! I am such a much better wife, mom, friend when I am writing. I feel all filled up, I feel so content. I am meant to do this! 

But when I got bored waiting to hear back from publishers, I immediately had to start another book. I got lucky that my first novel won a novel contest while I was waiting, because without knowing I had ADHD I might have given up. And even more lucky that it was received so well and had so many good reviews. I do have discipline and passion when it comes to trying to find an agent and I will keep going, but that part of the business is hard for everyone to face rejections, but for an ADHD brain to do something hard and to keep having no reward is a special kind of torture. The fact that my brain didn’t get the stimulation from writing it needed this summer and on top of that did the hard work of slogging through agent queries was a BIG part of what led to my unhealthy coping and realization that I had ADHD. 

For the whole of my life, I had my coping skills of reading, writing and learning, and I was lucky to have a great education and a lot of great friends and family around. For a long time, the only cracks that really showed seemed minor, and easily blamed on having a big family. 1) I was always running late and 2) I was very disorganized. 

I remember talking to a mom (hi Pippi!) at my daughter’s softball game last spring, and she mentioned she was just diagnosed with ADHD. I I told her my sister was too. She said she learned that people with ADHD tend to be very authentic, because they are so busy holding it all together that they don’t have time for facades, or pretense. I remember something clicking in me, thinking, ‘I really love authentic people too’. I thought of my husband who creates so many great relationships because he is that way too, as is my sister. I thought of my friend Kristen Reilly from One Hail Mary At A Time who has ADHD and is very open about it and very authentic. So many other ADHD people come to mind – Mel Robbins, Jim Carey, Robin Williams, Simone Biles, Will Smith, Peter Kreeft.

And then Pippi added, they also tend to have really messy cars and rooms. 

Check, and check.

Disorganization has probably been the biggest source of shame in my adult life. Luckily, my husband never gets stressed about it because his ADHD makes him blind to it too. We have compensated by having cleaners every 2 weeks, and my friend who runs an organizing business helped me with lots of problem areas last year which was amazing. But our van is always, always messy, and I rarely open the door with out something falling out. Her comments struck a nerve to be sure.

Why I didn’t just go get diagnosed right then is beyond me. But eventually, my coping tools didn’t work, and the cracks started to get bigger and bigger this summer, until it felt like every day I was duct-taping our life together. I didn’t know how much longer I could hold on, until finally I saw the truth.

It wasn’t our pace of life, it was me.

To Be Continued….

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This is the first hour of the summer I have had that hasn’t been allocated to something else and I am free to write and wow, has it been a while since I shared in this space.

This is largely due to having lots of kids but also because we’ve been traveling and visiting people which has been so lovely. Invariably when we have been catching up with people, they check in with me about my writing. 

My novel is done, I say. But I have had zero time to submit it to agents. Such is the life of a mother writer. 

I know the time will come soon when my kids are all tucked into their classrooms and I can make a cup of tea and throw on my sweater like Mr. Rogers, a habit that immediately makes my brain ready to write and my fingers clicking on the keyboard. I am squeezing out every last bit of fun with my people while the sunshine lasts.

But in the meantime, I have been voraciously reading and listening to books and podcasts – things that are way easier when you are sitting by the lake/pool/field/beach. I’ve been trying to take a step back, do the internal inventory that I think makes us all better writers. Reflecting on experiences and sifting them like a gold miner sifts the river bed, looking for something that sparkles. And I’ve been trying to listen to smart people too, like Augustine, Chesterton, and Lewis and other philosophers, whose insights are surprisingly timely and refreshing.

One idea that I have been thinking about a lot is from the work of Rene Girard about the process of mimetic desire. I learned of it on this YouTube interview with Bishop Barron and Luke Burgis. Girard was a philosopher whose life work was an analysis of human desire, and he posits the idea that all of our desire is mediated by others. We all imitate positive desires that others have and also the very negative desires like accusations, anger, blame. Even Eve when she ate the apple had the desire mediated – the desire for the fruit was given to her by the serpent.

Mimetic desire has reverberations in any field where there is human desire – theology (God seems to address mimetic desire in several of the commandments, and even spells out not coveting his neighbors wife AND his things in two separate commandments), philosophy (Aristotle’s opening line of the Nicomacean Ethics ‘we are social animals’ and his discussion of virtue, vice and telos as our end result reads like a primer of mimetic desire), and of course economics (hello markets & advertising). Human nature seems like it has this mimetic process embedded in the hard drive and you can see it everywhere you look. We can think of the mimetic process as both positive peer pressure and negative peer pressure at work. The saints make us desire what they desire. But the same is true for shallow desires like fame, thinness, vacations.

So how does this memetic process get subverted? It takes someone outside of it to see how it is operating. It is in a way the key to liberation. 

It is clear that social media is like a fun house mirror of desires, and perpetuates this memetic desire in all of us who consume it. Girard holds that memetic desire spreads the fastest the more people are similar. Since the uniqueness of the individual is clearly muted on social media, memetic desire spreads faster in that space. Some of the effects are glaringly horrible, of course. Like users of Twitter and TikTok who desire to get attention at all costs, for example. But some of it can be good too. Groups sharing in prayer, GoFundMe’s and crowd sourcing, even supplying teachers’ classroom items and furnishing homes for refugees. Recently, as I’ve been thinking about this memetic process, I’ve started to follow people with good desires around health and wellness. I’ve found moms who are health coaches who deal with the same challenges I do of staying healthy on vacation and during busy seasons and share how they try to feel good all the time. Things like drinking more water and going to bed earlier, enjoying mocktails and getting up early to work out. And it’s working – I desire to climb into my sheets with a book instead of staying up late watching tv (ok, most nights at least). I desire to feel good with the food I am eating. I can see the memetic desires of healthy living impacting me. 

But memetic desire has a darker side that Girard calls The Satanic Principle. He holds that community and culture are founded on the back of some victim. This scapegoating mechanism actually forms community. There is something in us that makes people believe if we just do a little targeted violence we can save ourselves. (This is just so happens to be one of the main critiques of our current political climate in another book I am reading called the Revolt of the Public, which has been a wonderful read.) History and headlines are full of examples of this, as is literature like the short story The Lottery or The Hunger Games.

Of course, Christ on the cross is the ultimate scapegoat.  But by going into the disfunction of our tendency to scapegoat, he unmasks the part of us that drives scapegoating and mimetic desire, and stands outside the process.  In turn, he liberates us and sets us free.

Like I said, once you see it you can’t unsee it. 

And the implications if we intentionally direct our desires and stay aware of this process are so massive. As a parent, creating good desires for our family. As a writer, trying to communicate good ideas, and being inspired by others who do as well. As a worker, not being part of the endless cycle of vanity and ego. As a citizen, realizing the degree to which our desires can be manipulated and try to rise above the mimetic process towards violence and scapegoating. 

Basically, delete Twitter and love our neighbor harder. The usual remedies.

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Before I became a mother to a child with Down syndrome, I had spent time deeply thinking about it. When I was pregnant with my first child, I was in a PhD program for Philosophy, and was assigned a paper about the morality of genetic testing and screening for genetic conditions. As I thought about the baby in me growing, I researched what several parents, doctors, hospitals and academics had to say about the subject. It was easy to ask myself the question, what would I do if my child’s tests came back abnormal? 

Fast forward to my last pregnancy, and while I was sitting outside of Trader Joe’s one April afternoon, I got a phone call saying just that. 

Free cell DNA Blood tests at 13 weeks can now determine Down syndrome with 99% accuracy. 

Differing countries have different statistics about what they do with those results. In Denmark, the abortion rate after Down syndrome is detected is 98%. In the US, it is around 67%.  

There is no more inflammatory topic in our country then abortion rights.  But what if the prejudice that exists around Down syndrome (for what are we doing in deciding to abort a child with Down syndrome but pre-judging what their life, what our life, will be like if they live ) was swapped for some other feature of a child? What if people in the US were screening for and having abortions based on gender or race? 

If we were suddenly able to detect muscular dystrophy or autism, and then eliminated those pregnancies at those rates, what are we saying about those who live with those things now, and how comfortable would we be with those numbers?

Having gotten that phone call, I know that the fear of the difficulties that come from raising a child with intellectual disabilities and special needs is what leads people to terminate. But here is the thing: his twin brother is so much harder. 

In any given circumstance, his brother – who is very bright, and full of love and enthusiasm – is much harder to parent thanks to a combination of ADHD and sensory issues. As I watch my boys play together I think, if we could test for these things like ADHD and sensory issues, would we be aborting them too? 

Recently The Atlantic explored this question in a story entitled ‘The Last Children of Down Syndrome’.  Author Sarah Zhang’s compelling journalism shows how prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t, and she cautions us that this is just the beginning. She writes: “Down syndrome is frequently called the “canary in the coal mine” for selective reproduction. It was one of the first genetic conditions to be routinely screened for in utero, and it remains the most morally troubling because it is among the least severe. It is very much compatible with life—even a long, happy life.”

A happy life is what is overwhelmingly reported by those living with Down syndrome and their family members. According to the NIH, nearly 99% of people with Down syndrome indicated that they were happy with their lives; 97% liked who they are; and 96% liked how they look. Nearly 99% people with Down syndrome expressed love for their families. Similar happiness numbers are reported by the family members that live and care for people with Down syndrome. 

These numbers are even more staggering considering that only 14% of Americans report being happy in a recent post-Pandemic study. As one of those family members, I can tell you that people with Down syndrome bring out joy. In themselves, in others, in our world. So why is something that is reportedly yielding significantly happier people being targeted as a reason to terminate them? 

In her research for the Atlantic piece, Zhang writes that a dark history of eugenics is part of the reason. Germany’s treatment of those with disabilities was the same as it was for Jews: the gas chamber. Denmark’s policies never became as systematic and violent as Germany, but they shared similar underlying goals: improving the health of a nation by preventing the birth of those deemed to be burdens on society. Zhang writes, “When Denmark began offering prenatal testing for Down syndrome to mothers over the age of 35, it was discussed in the context of saving money—as in, the testing cost was less than that of institutionalizing a child with a disability for life. The stated purpose was ‘to prevent birth of children with severe, lifelong disability.’”

I think Zhang has put her finger on the pulse of the problem. In educated, wealthy nations, money has become god, and like all true worship, things must be sacrificed to serve it. The problem is, we are sacrificing the very best of humanity.  

So where do we look for the burden of proof that the lives of people with Down syndrome are worth living? Not the medical community. When you receive a Down syndrome prenatal test result, the medical community gives weight only to those facts which could require medical intervention. They focus on statistics and problems. This uncertainty leads to fear. 

While the medical community has without question helped improve the quality of lives of those living with Down syndrome, when it comes to prenatal testing, they are extremely risk adverse. The group bias around bringing a child to term that has any medical complications is heartbreaking. Ask any mother who received a prenatal test that indicated Down syndrome, and she will tell you the story of someone in her medical team who encouraged abortion, told them how sorry they were, or outright instilled fear. This is where our society needs to start. At the point of care. Let’s talk to families who have children with Down syndrome. 

There are signs of hope. Massachusetts General Hospital is a role model – they put families in touch with other families if they receive a Down syndrome test result or diagnosis instead of letting them read a pamphlet of health conditions or worse googling it to see poorly illustrated children that look scary (go ahead, google it and you will see). That is when those happiness numbers play out in the stories and faces of those in this wonderful community. (N.B.: A group of parents are trying to change the scary sketch on Wikipedia! Such a wonderful idea.)

And maybe the Down syndrome community feels very ‘over there. Not my problem’. But chances are someone you love who has a condition will start to be targeted through prenatal tests. If we are going to let fear, comfort, and cost determine what lives are worth bringing into the world, what group is next? The mentally ill? Those with genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis or hemophelia? How comfortable would we be with a screen for autism and a rate of abortion that hovers near 70%? 

As a parent of a child with Down syndrome, it looks like a seek and destroy mission. And our world, humanity, has lost something precious with the void that has been created. When my own dentist learned my son had Down syndrome she said, “I used to love seeing my patients with Down syndrome on the schedule because I knew I would get a hug that day. Now, I don’t have any.” 

This void erodes the collective human soul, because we are ultimately saying human lives are only valuable when they can ‘contribute’. And the logical deduction becomes that our own lives are only valuable when we are doing, instead of being, which is the source of unhappiness for so many.

Henri Nouwen, world-renowned professor, writer, and theologian, famously shared his story of feeling empty and purposeless as a Harvard professor, until he went to work at L’arche, a community for disabled adults. There, he met Adam, who he says gave him more fulfillment then being an academic, speaker or writer. He says: “As I developed this relationship with this very handicapped person, he taught me that being is more important than doing. He taught me a whole new way, that the heart is more important than the mind. I realized what makes a human person human is that incredible capacity to give and receive love.  That’s the center of our humanity.” 

My son has given me this gift. There is no greater happiness than loving and being loved. This is why their happiness numbers are so high. Instead of getting rid of these people, we should be learning from them. Instead of deciding what lives are worth bringing into the world, we should be getting clear on what the best of humanity looks like, and then protect that. Spoiler alert: it looks a lot like Down syndrome.     

4 replies
  1. Colleen Martin
    Colleen Martin says:

    Katie,
    This is sooooo good. When you think about things in the context of our faith, where getting to Heaven is the goal, then your little guy is way ahead of the game. When the world proclaims happiness as the ultimate goal, then he’s still in the lead. God doesn’t make mistakes 🙂

    Reply
  2. Katie
    Katie says:

    Thank you so much Colleen! I was both surprised and not surprised by those statistics but wow, the happiness levels have to point to something good! Unfortunately I think it is that goodness and innocence that is being targeted. 🙁

    Reply
  3. Evelyn
    Evelyn says:

    Katie, Your “Best of Us” in this writing was more than perfect. I can see how God uses people, just like he did prophets (not saying you are a prophet! no offense please), to bring humanity to their knees and thank Him for all the good that exists. Your writing is courageous, compassionate, and precious. Thank you for sharing.

    Reply
    • Katie
      Katie says:

      Thank you so much, Evelyn for your kind words. Getting to be Ronan’s mom is the best gift, and thinking that we can be also helpful in bringing about more affection & respect for those with special needs is frosting on the cake.❤️

      Reply

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We are surviving a New England winter with lots of soup and skiing, and I have been in a big reading kick which always makes me happy.

Here are some things that I have been loving this month, hope you enjoy them too!

1. What to Read: The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah. I blogged before about how much I loved The Great Alone, also by Hannah, and I was blown away by how good the Nightingale was. I was lost in German occupied France for the better part of January and I have a renewed appreciation for warm houses and full bellies. They suffered so much, and it has reminded me of the simple, profound grace of peace time life when contrasted with the realities of war. I also just bought Memoirs of a Happy Failure by Alice Von Hildebrand after a friend recommended it. I have wanted to read her books for a while and her passing has led me to so many beautiful interviews with her that I can’t wait to start it.

2. What to Make: These Buffalo Chicken Wraps are so super simple and a hit with the teenagers. I’ve also been making this super flavorful Pork Posole and everyone loves it. I can’t wait to try this Butter Chicken recipe too. And I read about someone raving about this Lemon Mustard Vinaigrette and my mouth is watering now.

3. What to Wear: The Loft has the best sweaters this season – I love this cardigan, I’ve been living in this sweater, and puff sleeve sweaters are the easiest way to look girly and dressed up even though you are super comfy.

4. What to Do: I really enjoyed this online writing course by Joyce Maynard. She is clear, concise and so encouraging for new writers. I want everyone to write a memoir after listening to her.

5. Where to Go: We just booked a trip here (with all 6 kids!) and I can’t wait.

6. What to Emulate: My organizer friend and I are tackling my pantry this week and I came across this post from In Honor of Design. Total pantry goals, though I am not sure I will be able to transfer all our dry goods to those pretty containers, but one can dream.

7. What to Listen To: I REALLY want to link to Encanto but we might all be sick of it by February since we have been listening to it so much. Instead I will offer up this sweet song that I’ve been playing to the twins. I first heard it at 4:30 am on a snowy morning when I had to bring Ronan to do a procedure at Boston Children’s (all is well). Early mornings are magic and this song brings me right back to thinking about what I would do for him because he is such a miracle.

8. What to Watch: The show Maid on Netflix wrecked me. We just started Yellowstone. But for family shows we have loved Resident Alien on Spyfy. The comedian Alice Wetterlund is a total scene stealer and if you remember Dodgeball or 28 Days with Sandra Bullock, the star of Resident Alien Alan Tudyk played such lovable characters in those movies.

9. What to Play: My neighbor has been telling us how much fun the card game Spite and Malice is and I can’t wait to try it. It is played with 2 decks of cards and sounds like it is sort of like a competitive Solitare for 2 people.

10. What to Dream about: Staying on an Italian farm through agritourism sounds pretty great right now. Of course, finding a French farm house on VRBO sounds lovely too.

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