September 2009

budge-rider

Some days, there are just no words for the depth and breadth of her awesome.

There are, however, words for what it feels like to be spiritually confused, and I have plenty of those: over at Their Bad Mother, I’ve been rehashing a question that has been plaguing me since I became a mother – one that has become all the more confused and complicated since the death of my father – can I be a good parent without God? How do I meaningfully introduce my children to God when I’m ambivalent (deeply ambivalent) about organized religion? And why do I worry about this stuff, anyway? You know, just a little light existential interrogation for a Wednesday afternoon. For fun.

PS: For all of your warm and supportive comments on my last post, thank you. Thank you. Your kindness and patience make all the difference.

PPS: MamaPop is up for an award. You know that it deserves one; nay, MANY. Please to help?

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It’s My Story And I’ll Cry If I Want To

September 28, 2009

You need to get over this. I hope you’ll get over this and start writing about other stuff again soon. It’s terrible what happened, but you need to remember that there’s worse. You didn’t lose a child. Some people get hate mail. I get hate mail, but I also get mail of a slightly different [...]

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Swamp Monster

September 24, 2009

I keep insisting that I’m stuck, that my creative feet are wedged in the mud of sadness and anxiety, and yet I keep going. I wiggle my toes against the muck and pull my heels up and will myself forward. Some days, I advance by an inch, maybe two. Other days the mud wraps itself [...]

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Thirteen

September 22, 2009

… is the luckiest number, when you’re counting years of love. In such a difficult year, your presence by my side has been the most cherished of gifts, the greatest of blessings. Love you so much.

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Sugar And Spice And Everything Awesome

September 21, 2009

Emilia does not want to be pretty. Nor does she want to be beautiful or adorable or precious or sweet. Emilia does not want to have anything to do with anything that smacks of putting ‘lovely’ and ‘little girl’ together in a sentence. To wit: Emilia: (in response to a suggestion that she wear a [...]

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This Is Why We Didn’t Send Her To Catholic School

September 18, 2009

I’m not sure what that black hole is towards the bottom of Emilia’s self-portrait. I mean, I’m pretty sure that I didn’t dress her in a fig leaf for her first day of Junior Kindergarten. I think. It’s possible that I just didn’t have enough coffee that morning and mistook some lettuce for a pair [...]

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The Unbearable Lightness Of Letters

September 15, 2009

A friend called me, last week, after I’d written about struggling through the process of sorting through some of my father’s papers. “After my aunt died,” she said, “after we went through all of her things, I immediately went home and dug up all the old love letters from old boyfriends and notes and letters [...]

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Stuck

September 10, 2009

I don’t know how to write here, right now. I don’t know how to write here, because I am caught between the imperative to move forward in my life, in this life, in my life as Catherine, and the imperative – the desire – to dwell a little longer in this space where I am [...]

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Ephemera

September 1, 2009

In the last year of my parents’ marriage, my dad had an affair. I’ve always known this, my mom has always known this, it was something that we all talked about, in later years: his regret, his remorse, over this thing he had done, its effect on my mother, its effect on our family, the [...]

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