Tag: article (page 1 of 1)

“Two Truths & a Lie About Motherhood After the Little Years”

Yesterday morning, our youngest came out of her bedroom looking equal parts thrilled and apprehensive, and announced, “I think I have a loose tooth!”

I felt the tooth. It was so. Now, she’s been sporting a gap-toothed smile for nearly a year already, on account of knocking one of her front teeth loose on a bike handlebar last summer, but this was new. This was a Milestone for all of us.

My youngest child is losing her baby teeth.

And so it seemed apt that Risen Motherhood shared my article “Two Truths & a Lie About Motherhood After the Little Years” this week. What comes next? When her children don’t exactly need her all the time, what’s a mom to do?

I’ve heard moms talk about this moment—this “all the kids finally out of diapers” moment—like it’s a finish line, as though we ran hard and the race is over. High fives all around! I’ve heard rumors about getting my life back, about resuming paused hobbies, about reconnecting with my true self, the one who apparently spent the last decade buried beneath maternity tops and nursing pillows. But I wonder if it isn’t the other way around. I wonder if my true self was not the one showing through in those years of sleep deprivation.

You can read the full article here.

“3 Questions to Ask Before You Take My Advice”

Ah! I meant to go silent, but then this came up: a little something extra to share with you. Deeply Rooted recently republished an article of mine—an old one, from Issue 8. This is a lengthy article, written for the print magazine rather than the blog, but it’s on a topic that’s especially dear to me: how do we filter out the nonsense we hear daily and decide which authors, speakers, or friends are giving legit parenting advice?

When I was small, my dad kept a running joke about something he called The Book of Dad. “I’ll have to look that up in The Book of Dad,” he’d say, or, when I put him in parenting quandary, “I don’t remember anything about this in The Book of Dad.” To me, he seemed to know everything, a fact that I credited to that book (which I never saw but still believed in).

But now, as the mother of three small daughters, I appreciate the joke in a whole new light: there is no Book of Mom, though I desperately wish on certain days that there were. My children look to me for answers, and I feel like I really ought to have them, as though centuries of parents might have had the decency to compile them for me.  .  .  .

This article is, I think, a glimpse at how I strive to approach motherhood, and I’m so grateful to Deeply Rooted for running it again.

You can read the full article here.

“In the Beginning”

When we tell the Christmas story, we often begin like this: “Once, there was a girl named Mary.” Or “Once upon a time in a manger.” Even the gospels open with things that happened here on earth—the birth of John, the words of Isaiah, or the genealogy of Jesus’ family. Only the gospel of John backs all the way up and starts the Christmas story right at the very beginning:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

My newest piece, “In the Beginning,” went up on the Deeply Rooted blog this morning! In it, I got to look at how the Christmas Story fits into God’s larger story of redemption. You can read the full post here.

May you all have a Christmas that is restful in the deepest sense—a celebration centered on Christ, who tucked himself into a finite human body because he loves us. May that be your refrain as you travel, bake, and wipe noses: Because he loves us. Because he loves us. Because he loves us.

Merry Christmas.

Deeply Rooted, Issue 4: Root

I have an aversion to reading birth stories on the internet. It’s not that I don’t care about birth stories—quite the opposite, in fact. I love hearing them told in person, when I can watch a new mother gesture with her hands as she tries to wrestle those first moments into words. I love laughing with her over the things people said, the things she said, during labor, and over how far away it all seems now, as though she has crossed a great chasm and we’re standing there together, looking back at the bridge that brought her to safety.

Birth stories are personal stories, and not just because they have to do with bodily functions: their power lies not in the litany of details—minutes, centimeters, hours—but in the fact that each story is truly unique to the woman who lived it. No one else can share your story with you—not fully, anyway. And while the rest of us can enjoy your story and be moved by it, we eventually have to back away and leave the experience with you, where it is meant to stay. Telling these stories on the internet, then, feels to me like shouting from a platform what ought to be treasured among close friends.

Yes, I have an aversion to reading birth stories on the internet. And so it is fitting (and just this side of hypocritical) that my first full essay for Deeply Rooted opens on a scene from the night of Phoebe’s birth. It seemed right, as I was writing, to include that moment, and so I did. That took me down a peg.

Deeply Rooted, Issue 4: Root | Little Book, Big Story

From there the essay moves into a consideration of the birth of Christ—what we know happened that night in the stable, what might have happened, and what it might have meant to Mary. But the essay isn’t a birth story: it’s mostly about Mary. And it’s in the newest issue of Deeply Rooted. (You can purchase a copy here.)

Deeply Rooted, Issue 4: Root | Little Book, Big Story

Deeply Rooted Magazine
Issue 04, Winter: Root