I got Covid a few days before Christmas which has meant that this week has been about resting rather than doing, and the slowness has actually been so sweet. We snuck up to our camp in Maine so the well members of our family could ski after being stuck in quarantine (I was the only one who got it!) while I hung with the twins. There is nothing quite like looking out at a frozen lake to make you reflect.

This year has been hard for so many. I generally operate under the impression that we are all works in progress. But the emphasis lately feels so much more on the ‘work’ part and less on the ‘progress’ part. I know this is a function of being run down literally by the virus, but it is also from the virus taking up so much of our energy in the past few years, you know? We’ve been studying cases and taking kids to be tested and planning things only to re-plan them when the virus made us cancel things. Instead of having energy for creativity and problem solving, so many of us are using our energy just cope.  But perhaps those are the times we have to look even harder to find the lessons and the graces being sent our way. Here are a few of the ones I could find when I looked back on this year.

1. Embracing Imperfection

My year was full of the lessons of embracing imperfection (again, for the hundredth time). I’ve been working on embracing mine and others in countless ways, and have learned anew the importance of leaning hard on a God who is perfect, who can heal us and bring us ever more deeply into a life of Grace. 

2. Rejecting Blame

If you know me in real life, chances are I have probably talked to you about the impact this book has had on our marriage, but also how the author Stephen Stosny has created such a contribution to overcoming resentment, anger and blame. (See this article for a short version of his ideas.)

The biggest a-ha moment I have had this past year was working out while reading that blaming keeps us stuck. It keeps us stuck because when we blame, we are powerless, and it keeps us stuck in the part of our brain where we can’t do anything but look at the past. Instead, Stosny invites us to move to the part of our brain where we can problem solve and make decisions. He has 4 simple things we can do whenever we are stuck in blame.

1) Appreciate 2) Improve 3) Connect 4) Protect 

These four actions will always bring us in touch with our core values, instead of our core hurts, and it will always allow us to move forward in any situation because doing these four things activates us into problem solving mode.  I have noticed that whenever I do one of these things, I always feel empowered and strong and centered, and am able to be the mom/wife/sister/friend I want to be if I focus on these.

If there is anything our world needs, it is is ways to overcome blame, and to connect with our core values instead of our core hurts. I feel like Stosny’s work should be required reading for grown ups.

3. Embracing Responsibility

I am halfway through the book Extreme Ownership and much like the 4 things you can do to move away from powerlessness, every principle in this book teaches you that taking extreme responsibility keeps you powerful to effect change. These ideas are helpful to any leader, but especially as a mother who is trying to lead people at various stages of development. It has made me view problems through a new lens. Instead of getting frustrated and complaining about them, I think about what I need to do to change the situation. It is such a healthy mindset and I can’t wait to keep growing in this area, and helping my kids grow in this mindset too.

4. Finding Patience

In addition to needing patience for the many areas of imperfection I’ve discovered, I also just started sending out my novel to agents. You can ask any writer, the level of uncertainty and angst when you are at this stage is enough to just give up to spare yourself from the rejection and heartache. The hope that the words you wrote might touch someone’s heart is the only thing that keeps you going. I sent out a few queries before thinking that in January when everyone goes back to school I will want to sit with it again and go over it with a fine tooth comb. But then, to add to my general angst about this, my word for the year from Jen Fulwiler’s word of the year generator was ‘Ready’.

What do you mean, ‘ready’? Ready for what? Do you mean my novel is ready? Do you mean I am ready to do something else? Should I be getting ready for something? What is READY?

So obviously things are going well.

I know that in a few areas of my life, God is asking me to be patient and trust him. So I will.

5. Daily Graces

One of the things my spiritual director has been getting me to notice is the daily graces God is sending my way. It is a very centering and powerful practice to try to be present enough in the day to be on the look out for these, and to my surprise and delight, I find them most often surrounding loving people. The joy and delight in my kids – their personalities, their affections, their sense of humor – these are always the things that outweigh any difficulty, and give me the energy to move forward, and give me such a sense of love and peace. If that isn’t evidence of God’s graces I don’t know what is.

6. The Need for Boundaries

There have been so many different relationship struggles in people around me right now that have me revisiting the book Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud. Based on the (small) amount of time I have spent on Facebook groups, it appears to be a rampant problem that we humans are bad at knowing and setting our boundaries. So for anyone reading this who just can’t quite figure out a problem they are having with someone else, my guess is this book – or his relationship-specific other ones – will help you sort it out.

7. The Primacy of Essence over Existence

This one is a philosophical insight, and it came to me through Bishop Barron’s video Ideas Have Consequences: The Philosophers Who Shaped 2020 .

He goes through four philosophers: Marx, Nietzsche, Sarte and Foucault. And the vein through all of them is the atheist worldview that our will should reign supreme, and any force that challenges that should be fought. Especially the idea of a God or a religion that seeks to limit our will. Most interestingly, he talked about Sarte’s view that the problem with religion is that it imposes the idea that essence precedes existence. Religion holds over us the idea of an essence we should conform to in our existence. But Sarte argued our existence should precede our essence. We should live and have experiences and then that should tell us what our essence is. He boiled it down to a maxim: ‘If God exists, then I am not free. But I am free, therefore God does not exist.’

If you have been a longtime reader of the blog you know I dropped out of my Philosophy PhD program when my oldest son was 6 months old. I wanted to stay home, but a not small part of my decision was that the program I was in was heavily weighted in modern existential philosophy and thinkers like Sarte, and these were so soul-sucking it led to a depression that I have heard even priests experienced when they studied these philosophers. (I wrote about it a little here in response to having a baby with Down syndrome.)

But this time, when I revisited these ideas, I was so struck by how easy and joyful it is to do the opposite of what Sarte thinks we should do. Finding ways to discover the essence of things and to try to be a part of that, to be a part of something bigger than myself, to understand the essence of being human, being a mother, being a wife, being a writer, being a Catholic, is so inspiring and uplifting and makes life so worth living. The antidote to the depression I felt as a grad student is living with the awareness that Essence precedes Existence. There is meaning and purpose to be had, and this is the formula. This is the blueprint for a life worth living.

I know I will be thinking about these ideas a lot on the year to come.

8. The Need for Rest

I have discovered this past year that I need to work smarter not harder, and a big piece of that means carving out time to rest. I see the ways that not granting this time to rest throws me out of balance and I’m determined to do better in 2022. Going to be early, and taking Sundays to slow down are my goals. I’ll let you know next year how I fared.

Thank you for being here and visiting this tiny corner of the internet. If you have read this far, you must be a kindred spirit, and I am so thankful for you! For your light and your spark. I hope they brighten the lives of all you love in the coming year.

Happy New Year friends. Let’s make it a good one.

Last night I headed over to a neighbor’s house late, almost 9 o’clock, to join a few ladies in the pool with a glass of wine. As I walked up the driveway I listened to the chorus of tree frogs all around me, and watched the moon float out from behind clouds, and I took a deep breath. 

It has been a long summer. 

School starts next week for us, and while so many parts of the country already started, I kind of like the way my kids’ school eases us in with a short week before Labor Day weekend. 

This year we have a high schooler. I know what you are thinking – you do not look old enough to have a high schooler, Katie. (Bless you.) I am so excited for the next four years for my son. He plays football and they just had a big athletic meeting last night in the giant auditorium (the reason why I joined my friends at 9!). He is so ready for this change, and I am nothing but thrilled for him. 

But as my momma friends and I sat on the edge of the pool, our toes swirling in the water, our conversation became a big exhale about how hard transitions into and out of the school year are on moms. Change is hard, and moms just absorb the energy of our people.

My kids are relatively go-with-the-flow types, and yet all of these conversations were overheard in my kitchen. On the same day.

Is my lunch box here yet? 

I need new shoes. 

Can I get my hair cut? 

Can we go to the chiropractor?

You forgot to order pencils. 

When does the bus come? 

Can I please have one more sleepover?

This time of year is just extra. 

The summer we had was great for the kids – lake swimming, pool swimming, sleep away camps, time with Nana and Grandpa, lots of friend sleepovers, and very fun parties (please don’t take away parties again, Covid). 

But three-year-old twins are extra too. I spent most of my summer outside watching them play, while a mountain of work sat waiting for me inside that I could never get to. I have a lovely tan and a novel that is begging to be edited.  We have terrific sitters, but they had weddings and Covid and their friends and family also had weddings and Covid and surgeries, so that there was a perfect storm of very little coverage. I bargained with my teenagers just to let me work out and take a shower.

I could write about staying in the present moment and finding joy playing with my kids, and how I will look back nostalgically at these days. But sometimes it is helpful to acknowledge the hard rather than put a rosy glow on it. I suspect I will look back at these days and of course, remember the joy of chubby little cheeks and tiny shoes and speech patterns that sound like Elmer Fudd (the best), but I think it’s likely that I will also look back and remember that these were some of my hardest days of motherhood. This summer I learned that having three-year-olds who don’t nap and want to go outside everysecondofeveryday is a season of refining fire. Up there with husbands in residency and moving cross country. This summer I had to learn again about surrender.

There were a few life lines. Having a podcast, or book on Audible, or some YouTube interview playing was like oxygen. But still there was the unmistakable feeling of boredom creeping into my periphery vision. Usually I kept it at bay by meeting up with friends, doing some big outing to tire them out and I would catch up on all the stuff I had to do while they watched Tom & Jerry after. But those days, while not boring, were physically exhausting. From the second they wake up at 6:00 am – bright eyed, adorable, going 110 mph – to when they went to bed at 7:30, I was running. (This nightlight helped us push wake up time to 6am too, in case you have early risers.) Parenting toddlers and preschoolers is always hard, but I’ve had enough babies to know that special needs – Michael’s ADHD and sensory issues kind make Ronan’s Down syndrome an afterthought – is part of why this season is so hard. I will be very happy to pull up to preschool on the first day and wave at them as they go off with other grown-ups, while I go sip a coffee in the glorious sounds of quiet. 

Tonight at the dinner table, my big kids were asking each other if they liked this summer. “It was great,” was the verdict all around. It’s not lost on me how lucky we are, to have had good health and access to swimming and camps and the simple joys of childhood summers. It was deeply satisfying to know that for them, it was a good summer, even if it was a hard one for me. I worry a lot about how much the twins take from me, and how much the older kids have left over. So I’m taking the girls to Boston tomorrow for a much needed get away with just them, where they will have my full attention, and I can’t wait. We’re going to high tea and the museum and shopping, and connect before the busy year starts, and it is just what my heart needs.

I knew summer would fly by like it always does, and the first day of school has loomed ever closer on the calendar, quietly reminding me that this too shall pass. And that soon there will come days filled with lots of time for all of us to work hard and grow, sitting in neat and tidy rows of weeks and months. I will have delightful mornings to work on my novel, to polish it up and make it shine. I have lots and lots of driving to sports penciled in too, so Audible recs are appreciated. 

When I fast forward to next summer, I will have a licensed driver, and the twins will be four and a half! Those two facts will make for such a different season, one with less pressure to be sure. For now, I find peace in surrender. I also find peace knowing that change is inevitable, and as hard as it is sometimes, it is the thing that ushers you into new seasons, ones that hold the promise that things might just get easier.

With three year old twins I barely have time to do anything, but reading is self-care to me. I managed to sneak in a few books that I really liked and would be great for lakeside/poolside/backyard kiddie poolside reading.

These are just the books I really enjoyed. I started so many books that I just couldn’t get into and with such little time to read, I am much better at putting them down and moving on. So this list is only the ones that I would recommend.

Happy summer reading! Let me know your favorites in the comments!

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett is my favorite contemporary novelist, and everyone of her novels is so different, she doesn’t have a type just an imagination that goes into a world and brings you along. Her images stay in my memory like no other writer, and fun fact, I outlined State of Wonder to get a sense for how to plot stories and develop characters.

I was talking to a writer friend recently and she said she often doesn’t like the endings in Patchett’s novels. They don’t always sit comfortably and this one was no exception. I had a lot of DM chats about it. But the path that she leads you down is always worth the ride for me.

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

This book’s ability to bring you into a remote part of Alaska came from the authors time spent there, and it makes this book so worth a read. I didn’t think I would like it as much as I did: the plot is a young girl and her parents try to live off the grid for reasons that mainly center around her dad’s PTSD from being in Vietnam. But the details of their life in Alaska – the wildlife, the landscape, the ways they plan for the winter – are consuming. The wilderness, both interior and exterior, is a great concept to explore, and Hannah was a great guide. Her architecture of characters is very well done, and I found myself taking notes. It is a really satisfying read, perfect for a summer escape.

Dirt by Bill Buford

I am halfway through this book, but oh my word is it interesting. He had me at moving to France to explore cooking (a life long dream of mine) and he brings along his wife and three year old twins (a life I am very familiar with since I currently have three year old twins).

The author travels to Lyon, France, which his friends who are French chefs impress upon him is the place to go if you want to get to the heart of French cuisine. This was in itself interesting as it gets into food history and how food evolved in Europe. The marriages between kings and queens meant influences between Italy, France, and Austro-Hungary shaped a regions culinary influences, so giving credit to where food techniques began becomes a tricky thing.

The discussion of food, history, geography, good old travel adventure like getting a visa, finding lodging, and finding a restaurant that will actually sell you the wine you want (they don’t like to sell the good bottles to foreigners). Plus the element of the authors search to find a restaurant that will let him be a chef so he can immerse himself in French cuisine.

I am only half-way through this book but just knowing I have it to bring up to the lake for the 4th is making me so happy. If I can just occupy those three year old twins while I am there.

The Likeness by Tara French

I’ve included the first book in this series on past reading lists, In the Woods, which I highly recommend and loved.

The first book centers on a detective squad investigating a murder in the woods near Dublin. The main detectives, Cassie and Rob, are best friends and partners, and Cassie hides the fact that she knows that Rob was one of three child who disappeared in the same woods when he was a child. He was the only one who came out and has no memory. While the first book solved the murder, the memories never did return to him, though the author kept you thinking they would just around the next turn.

This book is narrated by Cassie, and has another murder investigation, and this time it is extremely personal to her. It is just strange enough to keep you hooked.

The authors familiar way of navigating intrigue and emotions and mystery makes these passages you want to savor, and pages you want to keep turning. It is a totally original world and plot. I am halfway through it and have heard people debate the ending quite a bit so I know I am in for a treat. Highly recommend.

The Book of Waking Up by Seth Haines

I love Seth Haines writing. It is a mixture of southern drawl, compassionate questioner, and fellow seeker that makes for a unique dreamy style. For example, this book is numbered, with different thought meditations that build on each other and unfold the story of his questioning, his seeking the divine in his life. Like sunshine, it is everywhere.

His super power is honesty, but not in a navel-gazing way. He is very generous with seeing and sharing his own brokenness in a way that lets others reveal theirs.

Side Note: I love that he narrates it on Audible which is how I listened to it. I find that I love Audible for non-fiction, which this is. If its fiction I need to hold the book in my hands and sit with the sentences, which is hard to do while listening. But his reading of it made it even more powerful for me.

Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes

This book was such a great read, fueled mostly by the protagonists wonderful self-deprecating humor while handling her complicated grief over her husband’s passing. In a setting in Maine (which you know I love since my own book was set in mid-coast Maine) this sweet romantic comedy is just what a summer read should be – a wonderful world to escape into, that lets you come back to the real world touched and charmed.

The other day I had my 36,429th conversation with someone that went like this:

“Wow, you have six kids? That’s a lot of kids.” 

“Yep. It is.”

“Wow, it must be so hard.” 

“Well, sure it’s hard. But they’re worth it.” 

Then I point to my license plate that says ‘Think Big’.

I have plenty of friends that have 1, 2 or 3 kids that believe to the depth of their soul that that is all they could handle. Family size is incredibly personal. But as individuals make decisions about this, they tap into the collective culture to form their decisions. Let my 36,429 conversations be a case study – the collective culture holds that having a lot of kids is unfathomable. My question is: why? Why when women can make any choice they want do we not include raising humans as one of our best options? 

And I think the answer is that our culture pits having children and being fulfilled against each other. Children keep you from success, money, pleasure, status, and lifestyle according to the culture.

Even though we live in an age that tells women they can do anything, become whoever they want to be, choosing to be a mother at all – let alone a mother to many – seems implicitly off the table if you want to succeed. If you really have the desire, fine have one, maybe two. But any more and you are directly robbing from your quality of life.

One of the biggest places I see this is among intellectuals, especially writers. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Magic Lesson’s podcast is one guest after another bemoaning the fact that for a woman to create art, she has to pull herself away from the family on an existential level and go to her inner life to produce great work. I call this going to the desk in my room while my kids are at preschool and working. Or like other working mothers, hiring a babysitter. It is how I freelance write, it is how I have written now two novels and one food memoir. Sure, I get taking a writing retreat or weekend occasionally, and while I love taking them it is just that, a retreat from daily life to focus on work. My kids don’t keep me from my work in writing, my kids enrich my life which in turn makes me a better writer. How could finding deep empathy for six humans (seven if we’re counting spouses), championing their strengths and advocating for their weaknesses not make me a better student of the human condition? And isn’t that where good writing starts? 

When I was a new mother, I read a collection of short stories about motherhood by Helen Simpson called Getting A Life that was hailed as an amazing work. I remember I was excited to read about this rich and hard experience I was immersed in. What I read started with a portrait of a mother of two young children through the eyes of an ambitious young girl on her way to an interview, who was walking by their house just as the young daughter had stuck something up her nose, while a baby who was “dark red as a crab apple” cried in the mother’s arms. The girl observed the mother’s ‘ragged cuticles, the graceless way her heels stuck out from the backs of her sandals like hunks of Parmesan, and the eyes which had dwindled to dull pinheads.” The portrait was sad and lonely and ugly, so unlike all of the beautiful mothers I had known throughout my life. When the mother sighed and said ‘this was the hardest year of her life’ the girl didn’t offer compassion, or female empowerment, or empathy, she just “started to sprint, fast and light”. The message was clear: having small children sucks your soul, and if you are full of dreams, you should run.

I stopped reading after the first story.

This didn’t speak to my experience at all. I had two young children and possibly felt on rough days that these were the hardest of my life, but that wasn’t the whole truth of it. It wasn’t the whole story. And the lack of humanity given to the mother, the young child, and the baby was glaring. The vignette left out so much nuance – the dimples on babies’ hands, the way they smell after a bath, the way their eyes light up when they’re happy – that sustains mothers on their hard days. It was such a superficial, distorted portrait. Like writing about teenagers as all pimples and smelly socks and leaving out what it is like to observe bourgeoning athletes, intellectuals, humorists. One write up of the book called it the ultimate contraceptive.

It doesn’t matter that the author had no children herself (she went on to write three more books about motherhood, go figure) or that the portrait was radically inaccurate (probably because she had no kids). There is no question that among the intellectual communities, children hold you back. One article writes that ‘militantly childless women passed it around to their friends that were thinking about having kids’. In such an environment, why wouldn’t young women be scared to have kids? Let alone have more than one or two. 

I know the strangers who see us or the acquaintances that learn that I have six kids have been living with a culture who proclaims this fear, who have been taught from reading their intellectual newspapers and magazines and literature that children equal the death knell to the interior, creative life. That they equal empty bank accounts and ‘eyes which had dwindled to dull pinheads’.

How do I explain to one of these incredulous strangers what it is like when your three-year-old son who has Down syndrome learns to plant kisses, and you watch their older siblings rush to line up for these kisses with the same enthusiasm they have on Christmas morning? That during the age when they should be self-involved and self-centered they will volunteer to play with their three-year old brothers? That during a pandemic, they will have each other, and it will be such a gift. Last time I checked, these things made my eyes sparkle, and filled my heart with stories to tell.

Yes, having a big family requires us to Think Big. But the fact that managing a large everything – kitchen, car, calendar, budget – seems SO HARD to people befuddles me. Women can be running large corporations or sales territories, mutual funds or medical schools, but managing children is seen as the hardest, dreariest task on the planet. 

Having a large family is hard, but meeting the challenges is exactly like meeting the challenges in every other hard endeavor. Time management, reaching out for growth and learning, talking with others to gain insights into problems, managing group dynamics, figuring out the most efficient ways to do routine tasks through streamlining and outsourcing. Most days I feel equipped to run a company because running my family feels kind of like I already do. 

Raising kids – any number of kids – is hard because their existence requires self-sacrifice from the parents. And if there is anything that our collective culture abhors it is self-sacrifice. They forget the other side of the self-sacrifice equation which is self-gift. This is where all the good stuff of life is to be found: joy, meaning, purpose, passion, commitment, loving and being loved, goodness, beauty, truth. Because to give self-gift for others always, always comes with your gift returned to you ten-fold.

And after listening to all this bad, all this fear, I have heard from so many women who are at the age of becoming grandmothers who have confided their disappointment to me that for some reason, their kids don’t want to have kids. I don’t think it is a surprise at all. The world has been shouting at them not too. 

For so many people, the goals of 1) avoiding suffering and 2) having control in their life end up creating even more suffering. And these are the people I want to encourage to think bigger. When you are open to the idea that a child is not the cause of suffering but joy, you are less afraid. You are open to so much love. Because that is what each child brings. The irony for women in our culture is that the things they are told will bring them fulfillment don’t actually fulfill them. And the things that do, like motherhood, they are told to fear.

Here is what I have found, 14.5 years in: having a big family is fun. It is the most interesting and amusing thing I could ever think of doing. Yes there are periods of white knuckling it, like stages with no sleep or a health crisis. But they pass and usher in periods of ‘my cup runneth over’. See the self-gift equation above. You get it back, ten-fold.

It’s winter, it’s Lent, it’s a Pandemic (still) and I am…surprisingly happy. Here are 7 Quick Takes on the things that are making me happy right now:

1. Intermittent Fasting: I love love Intermittent Fasting. I recently listened to this book and it cemented it as a way of life for me. She only eats between 5-10 pm but I eat at 11 and 7, and somedays I might push it to 12 or 1 if I know we are going to be eating later. After our ski vacation where I did eat breakfast before we hit the slopes, and I ate burgers and fries and nachos, I wasn’t worried about if I gained any weight, I just eased right back into it this week and my jeans are loser.

2. A Writing Weekend: This weekend my husband is taking over at home and letting me go up alone to our camp in Maine to working on my second draft of my book. (He is skiing out west next week so it is a fair trade.) I am also going to be tuning into this Writing Workshop with Dani Shapiro. I have learned a lot about writing from Dani and her podcast Family Secrets is also really good. Her book Inheritance is about how an Ancestry DNA test revealed that her half sister was not actually her sister, and her dad was not actually her father. It is amazing that she has found so many guests on her podcast who have similar stories of finding out info

3. Good Food: I have a ritual where I make a big pot of pasta on these types of weekends and I am craving this spicy pasta alla vodka one. I’m looking forward to working and eating and picking my own show on Netflix.

4. Great Reading: I have been loving reading Searching For and Maintaining Interior Peace this Lent along with Adele. This is my second time reading it, and it is such a big part of why I feel so happy. His other books Interior Freedom and In the School of the Holy Spirit are also amazing.

5. Comfy Clothes: I have been living in these JCrew leggings – they are so soft and cozy and I also grabbed this pullover sweatshirt in black and green. They go so well with the leggings or jeans. I’m also eyeing these because we can’t have too many comfy pant options in our life can we?

6. More Good Food: I just made this Creamy Lemon Cod Piccata this week and I am obsessed. It is lemony creamy buttery goodness heaven and it is done in 15 minutes. I feel a strong need to share the love about how yummy and easy this dish is, like restaurant-quality. They say that sometimes constraints yield creativity and that’s how I feel about cooking in Lent which is not the intended purpose I know. I’ll just read some extra pages of Fr. Philippe’s book.

7. Great Writers on Motherhood: I really loved this article by Noelle Mering from The Theology of Home blog. It made me think and raised so many important points about the materialistic world view and how it tries to put a value on motherhood.