mental health – Page 2 – Mama Needs Coffee

Culture of Death, mental health, Pornography, Sex, sin, spiritual warfare, technology, Theology of the Body

Sex, violence, and the internet: every parent’s battle

August 9, 2017

My boss brought to my attention a startling and, frankly, disturbing piece of research that surfaced last week correlating the age of a boy’s first exposure to pornography and his resultant attitude towards women. In results that ought to startle nobody who is familiar with the concept of the “latency period” in human development, according to this small study of 300 college-aged men, the younger a child is introduced to pornography, the higher the likelihood of violence in his interactions with the opposite sex.

The study authors were surprised, as they’d been expecting to see a correlation between promiscuity and earlier age of exposure. What they weren’t expecting to find was that the younger the child was when he was exposed, the more likely that he would hold a violent attitude towards women:

“That was a shock because scientists had expected that men would be more promiscuous the earlier they came to pornographic material.”

For male children who are exposed to pornography later in life, their attitude towards the opposite sex tended toward a “playboy” mentality leading to higher rates of promiscuity and an increased number of sexual partners.

I feel like any parent in possession of a grain of common sense could have predicted the outcome of the study, provided they were familiar with what the Church has traditionally identified as “the latency period” of childhood development. The notion being that pre-pubescent children are, by design, not in possession of the necessary mental faculties to process sexual images or events when they are prematurely exposed, and thus sex can actually become conflated with violence.

This is part of why sexual abuse of children is particularly horrifying, and why the normalization of pornography in our culture has such profoundly troubling consequences.

You see, introducing children “gently” to pornographic content and premature sexual information, ala Planned Parenthood’s method of classroom instruction of school children, is not the way to craft sexually healthy humans.

Putting porn into tiny, still developing brains that are neither emotionally nor biologically equipped to receive or process such information leads not to sexually-savvy adolescents down the line, but to children whose neural pathways have conflated sex and violence in a devastating intersection of dopamine and digital content.

In a society plagued concerns about rape culture and violence against women, this is something that should grip our attention. The more we learn about pornography and it’s effects on the brain, the greater our efforts to prevent – and honestly, at this point, mitigate – a massive public health crisis.

Porn is not harmless.

It’s not harmless at age 5, (the youngest age at which the men in the above study were exposed. Sob.) and it’s not harmless at 26 (the upper age range of the study). It’s not harmless at 13, which, according to this study, is the average age of first exposure. The wider-studied average appears to be age 11.

And this is really important:

Most said that they had first encountered it by accident, rather than searching it out or being forced to watch it. And how exactly that happened didn’t appear to determine how men would relate to women.

Whether they’d been exposed by accident or by design, it was the age at which they were exposed, not the method (or intention) of exposure, that determined whether they’d tend more towards violence or more towards promiscuity.

Parents, teachers, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, caretakers: this is on us. We cannot turn our children loose with internet devices, however carefully we’ve filtered and password-protected them. We cannot hand over the remote and expect kids to safely navigate Direct TV or Netflix. We cannot check out of the essential and critically important task of raising healthy adults who have a shot at a healthy interior life and decent sex some day.

Porn is not harmless. And it is not inevitable, either.

At least it doesn’t have to be, for our children.

I spend hours each day on the internet, and it has been years since I’ve come across hardcore pornography. Softer porn is harder to avoid, but as an adult with a fully formed brain and conscience, plus the necessary technological and common sense, I can easily click away plus take steps to avoid questionable content in the first place, based on the sites I click and the search terms I craft.

But I am 34 years old and female. And if I can still not help the accidental exposure to soft core porn in my daily use of the internet, imagine with the digital landscape holds for your 10 year old son or your 15 year old daughter.

Do not give your kids smartphones. Do not allow them to peruse the internet without the screen in your plain site and safeguards in place to enable safest searching. This isn’t prudishness; it’s sanity. It’s not a matter of cultural or religious preference, it’s the difference between living in a civilized society and a barbaric wasteland. Does it sound weird and inconvenient? Yep. But the devastating public health crisis we find ourselves in the midst of demands some weirdness and inconvenience of us, the grown ups.

Why do you think co-eds get raped while lying unconscious behind dumpsters on college campuses? That kind of behavior doesn’t develop in a vacuum. A normally-developing and sexually healthy 19 year old male doesn’t violently assault an unconscious female simply because he’s had a drink or 10. That is not normal human behavior. It is the result of a broader cultural dysfunction that has whispered temptingly that we can have our cake and eat it, too. That porn is healthy and acceptable and normal under the right circumstances, and that the consequences of what is done alone behind the privacy of a screen doesn’t reach out tentacles into the wider community.

Wrong.

We were wrong, and it is beyond time to correct course.

Fight for the future generations of men and women who will become the mothers and fathers and leaders of tomorrow. Don’t resign yourself to the inevitability of a sexually depraved future of men unable to care for or bond to women, of women unable to imagine or demand anything more of the partners they’ll settle for.

We can do better. We can do better than an unsupervised 5 year old whose 14 year old neighbor shows him porn on an iPhone. We can do better than a 14 year old girl sexting topless pictures to her first boyfriend, but actually to the entire lacrosse team, whose goalie will upload the images to an amateur porn site specializing in underaged content.

Talk to your kids about porn. Talk to your kids about technology. About social media. About boundaries. About saying no to immediate perceived goods for a greater good down the line.

We do not have to settle for the status quo when it comes to kids and healthy sexual development.

And neither do we have to wring our hands and lament the passing away of the civilized world. Stand up and fight! Your kid will not die without an iPhone. Your kid will not die if you pull them out of public school for their own safety and sanctity, if that’s the reality of your particular situation. Your kid will not die if you forbid the viewing of “Game of Thrones” or “Girls” in your home. Your kid will maybe even thank you some day, on the precipice of 40, surveying a wasteland of divorce and domestic destruction all around him and observing the apparent miracle of his own reasonably happy family.

We cannot settle for this. We must not settle for this.

Some excellent resources for educating about porn, combating the effects of habitual usage, and best practices for parents:

Digital resourcs:

The Digital Kids Initiative

Fight the New Drug

Porn Kills Love

Print resources:

Good pictures, bad pictures

The porn myth

Freedom: Battle strategies for overcoming temptation

Your brain on porn

Good pictures, bad pictures jr.

Theology of the body for tots

About Me, ditching my smartphone, mental health, mindfulness, reality check, social media, technology

Smartphone detox: the first fortnight

April 17, 2017

Today marks 2 weeks since my dramatic public breakup with my littlest mother’s helper and I wanted to do a little post op, as much for my future self as for any curious readers as to how it’s going.

So how’s it going?

In a word, swell. But it is incomplete yet. I haven’t bitten the bullet and grabbed the flip phone yet, because its actually costs money, as some of you intrepid souls pointed out, to reinvest in a new device and find a plan that isn’t crazy expensive. The problem I’m running up against is that the providers who do carry dumb phones (and I’m leaning towards Charity Mobile at this point) seem to assume that if you want one, you don’t also want a lot of minutes or texting data. However, in my case, I vv much do want those things. Especially now that Voxer is relegated to an awkward to use desktop app, I’m finding myself using more minutes than before, not fewer.

So, in the meantime, I’ve made do by stripping down my already basic Samsung Galaxy J7 (a cut-rate Galaxy iteration compatible with my current carrier, Boost Mobile, which runs on the Sprint network. Coverage is so-so, phone itself does get a bit hot (but not anymore as there are no apps running! The battery life isn’t great. Or, rather, wasn’t. Now that I’m not using it for anything but talking and texting, I’m only plugging it in every 3 days or so. What?! I used to struggle to make it to 8 pm without draining the battery to zero. Crazy, I tell you.) which was $80 at Best Buy during a Black Friday sale, and is $30/month with unlimited talk and text. Which is hard to beat.

So how do you make a smartphone dumb? Well, I’m not the most tech literate person, but I was able to delete or uninstall almost all of the factory-installed apps, plus those I’d added myself. Then I untethered my email and delated the gmail app, turned off location and wifi, and, voila, a fairly dumb phone.

Of course, the big caveat being that at any moment, I can undo all these things and endow myself once again with phenomenal cosmic powers, which, in a moment of poor planning and weakness last week en route to a doctor’s appointment in an unfamiliar town, I did, for the sake of using google maps to guide me in for a smooth landing.

I think that if I were a better moderator and not a dyed in the wool abstainer, this intentionally stripped down still secretly smart phone would actually be a decent long term solution for me, but I know me, and I know that 4 months or 4 weeks from now, whether checking in late for a flight and in search of a boarding pass or simply passing the time in car line, I may very well cave and go back to using the internet on it.

But, for you more more temperate folk out there, I think that stripping down your existing phone could be a valuable exercise in detachment and time-reclamation and a good half measure towards getting away from the addiction to the device. Plus, super cost effective.

So, what have I learned in 2 weeks without tapping, scrolling, browsing? A couple things, the first of which has been most surprising.

And that is? I have a lot more time than I realized. I have enough time to make meals at home. I have enough time to keep mostly on top of my housework. I have enough time to write those articles, make those deadlines, pay those bills, and, yes, read you one more story.

I don’t work a 9-5 job outside the home, but I do work about 20 hours we week writing, reading, researching and planning for the blog and related content for CNA. Outside of that, I do a bit of freelance work, including regular gigs for Endow and Blessed is She. I also have 4 kids, only one of whom is in school full time, so they’re, you know, around a bit. And in need of cuddles, cut up avocados, bike-riding supervision and bathing. Add in a husband, a school commute that currently hovers around 2 hours roundtrip, and a house that we’ve spent the last 8 months fixing up and now selling, and there is a lot going on. But the past 2 weeks have felt like vacation.

Granted, a pretty unexciting and not terribly exotic vacation, but a vacation nonetheless. A break form the ordinary. A respite from the rat race. A change of pace that has me looking around the house and wondering, should I be doing something right now?

Because there are suddenly these pockets of…I guess I’ll call them opportunity…in my days lately.

A half hour here or there where it’s too early to leave for school pickup but somebody is still napping, so I guess I can curl up on the couch and pray a rosary or read a little bit from whatever spiritual reading I’d been slogging through towards the end of Lent. So not exactly party party vacation-y, more like restful retreat vacation-y. Which is…not my favorite.

I like to be busy. I thrive on adrenaline and scooting in just under deadline and cramming it all in as efficiently as possible.

But I also struggle with anxiety and insomnia and a general sense of the world is on my shoulders…and I wonder now, could it all possibly be connected?

I don’t want to oversimplify this for the sake of painting a pretty clickbaity picture that “DITCHING YOUR SMARTPHONE WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE,” because there’s more to it than that, as there is in every case. I’ve been changing the way I’m eating, what and whether I’m drinking, habits of prayer and intentional cultivation of virtues that I am sorely lacking. And also, there have not been 14 perfect days of good behavior and effortless mothering on my part. I have yelled and lost my mind and then rediscovered it around 9:33 pm, a solid hour after everyone is in bed.

But overall, there has been a marked difference.

I am still grabbing for my phone like a phantom limb now and then, but even that behavior has yielded to a 90% reduction. I carry just my keys and wallet into the store. I don’t bring my phone when I leave the house half the time, because it’s just not that interesting without the dozens of little notifications going off throughout the day. When I do walk by the counter where it’s plugged in and look at it, it’s boring.

Stripped of all it’s attention-grabbing apps, it will show a handful of text messages and maybe a missed call, but nothing nearly as exciting an Instagram notification. (I do miss being able to post there though. But, it’s an acceptable price to pay, for me.)

I can attend to the messages every 4 or 6 or even 12 hours, and nothing bad happens. (Given, I am no emergency medicine doc. Nobody will die if I don’t check my phone. But I think a lot of us – looks meaningfully into mirror – live that level of availability out of a sense of obligation or FOMO or just plain force of habit, because this is what everyone does in 2017, and if I miss a call/email, all hell will break loose”

But most every piece of career advice I’ve read lately says otherwise, emphasizes the critical (and rapidly disappearing) skill of “deep work,” the necessity of attending to one’s own present and pressing tasks, ordained as such by self (and God, if you include Him in your calculations) because otherwise – otherwise – we risk living most of our lives responding to other people’s requests for and demands on our time. And we don’t get our own work done.

And that’s all well and good to read these things and skim those books and then roll your eyes and think, yeah, must be nice, to be able to go off and be a hermit or be single again with no relational responsibilities or to be independently wealthy and mobile and, and, and…but what I’m realizing is that I, a simple stay at home/work from home mom of 4 little kids, actually have a hell of a lot more free time than I know what to do with. And am going to have to render an account one day for how I’ve spent it.

(I think I can make a good case for 2-3 hours a week of Netflix. Anything more than that, I get a little nervous.)

So without the apps, without the notifications, without the constant influx of data and Very Important Beepings, it turns out I am neither that essential nor am I all that important to most anyone outside of the 5 people I do life with.

I do not mean to devalue my friendships or disrespect my coworkers or downplay the connections I’ve forged with internet peeps over the years. These are truly valuable relationships. But it is perhaps not ideal for me to be continuously attending to all of them at any given time, on any given day.

I realize this is not a perfectly-transferrable parable I’m spinning for you. Some people are more connected to their phones for work than I am, and I concede that this is a luxury which I possess. But. A big, big but: I think more of us have more flexibility than we realize, and we’re trading away a good deal of peace out of a need to look busy and seem available and feel important.

I am not actually that important. The people who need my attention are right here with me, occasionally barfing onto floor beside me and tugging on the hem of my shorts, asking for another popsicle. And it turns out that even when I’m running on all cylinders getting all their needs met, I still have a little margin left over at the edges and even in the very middle of my day for meditation, exercise, writing, reading, sitting vacantly on the front steps blinking in the sunlight…and also for being bored. I have been bored at least once a day since this little experiment began, and it has proven to be glorious and painful fodder for ideas. Books have been outlined and titled (at least, in my mind). Relationship difficulties have been identified and considered. Plot lines for bedtime stories have been refined. Elaborate backstories to the person driving beside me in traffic have been concocted. And, most essentially of all, conversations with God have ensued.

I have plenty of time for prayer, it turns out. And with fewer attractive options to distract, I’m finding myself resignedly surrendering to it more and more frequently.

So, those are my initial takeaways from this foray into what I believe will become a lifestyle for me. I miss my Instagram peeps. I miss being able to shoot a Vox to my best friend in another time zone. I miss being able to easily send or receive a link to something on my phone. But that all pales in comparison to the new spaces that have been opened up in my head and in my soul.

What do you think? Would you ever consider ditching your smartphone? Or, if you’re an adult who can actually moderate your behavior in a responsible fashion, would you consider putting firm boundaries around how and when and whether you use it?

It seems the conversation is becoming increasingly common. (<— language warning: all the f bombs.)

Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Homosexuality, JPII, mental health, Parenting, relativism, Theology of the Body

The beauty of gender: our differences aren’t scary, they’re beautiful (and essential)

April 7, 2017

Male and female created he them; and blessed them… – Genesis 5:2

This morning I was strolling a leisurely stroll on the treadmill and enjoying 45 minutes of toddler downtime (thanks, Brandy in kids club) when my eyes drifted to the newsfeed on the bottom of my tv screen where a “breaking news” alert was scrolling.

What constitutes breaking news in 2017? That’s a loaded question. But for this local ABC affiliate station, the answer was “Australia considering banning fairy tales from schools.” I rolled my eyes into my frontal lobe because probably it was offensive to real witches and living fairy godmothers, all that questionable detail Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, etc. go into about their lives and various motivations and ways of being.

But, no.

Apparently, it’s because fairy tales “encourage outdated gender norms” and that children “as young as four” are reportedly manifesting “gender biasing behaviors” in their play and make believe.

(Note: there are real, medical, biological examples of transgendered individuals born with chromosomal abnormalities and ambiguous genitalia. These are real medical conditions from which real people suffer and about which hard decisions and choices have to be made by doctors, parents, and the individuals themselves. What we’re talking about here today, however, is the growing cultural infatuation with what I’ll call “transgenderism by choice,” or the belief that gender is utterly divorced from biological sexual characteristics by desire, not by any design flaw, and that you could possibly have been born with ovaries and a uterus but a brain that “feels” male, and so you choose to discard – whether surgically or behaviorally – the “non-conforming” female part of your identity.

This is a point of real confusion and pain for a lot of people, and the present cultural climate of strangling political correctness makes civil discussion about any kind of gender dysphoria all but impossible. But we must persist for the sake of real human souls. We cannot shrink away from discussing what is fast becoming the defining issue of our age. End disclaimer).

First of all, kids as young as four display “gender biasing behaviors” because children as young as age four do, in fact, have genders.

Fetuses, it turns out, also have genders. Pull up a Youtube video of balloons popping out of giant cardboard boxes and you’ll see this is not a recent discovery. And gender – in parlance common up until just a few short years ago – was basically interchangeable with “sex” – and nobody was going to bat an eye or shred an admission form over it.

Children, like the rest of us, are male or female, and as such, they typically exhibit a few characteristic (but not exclusive) behaviors common to their gender. Boys, for example, as anyone who has ever birthed, raised, or even tangentially known one, are loud and they are intensely physical. Not all boys and not all the time, but overall, there is a certain exuberance that belongs to the male sex that is right and beautiful.

These boys will become men who lend their strong voices to the pursuit of truth and goodness. They will speak up for what is right, and they will take action to defy evil when they see it. Because that is what men are designed to do. Men are action-takers and pursuers of truth by nature. They image God in their strength, both physical and moral. And that is beautiful. (And does not, incidentally, exclude women from being action takers and pursuers of truth.)

So, about those differences. Let’s get into some generalizations here, because there are common features and universal truths that do, in fact, hold water. Not everything that we have collectively amassed over the course of human history needs to be jettisoned just because Mark Zuckerberg has a new global initiative of the month.

Ladies first. Girls are tender. Not all girls and certainly not all the time, but as a general rule, the female sex is superior at feeling and expressing feelings. Emotionally connected and deeply expressive, women possess a relational capacity that is unmatched in men. My daughter can yell down the entire minivan full of warring brothers and silence us all with a shriek of power, but she wears her heart on the outside, feeling the world deeply, and encountering things with her entire being.

This does not make her weak. (And this is not to say that my husband is not tender. That my boys do not feel sorrow for having hurt or disappointed someone, or shed tears of pain.)

Far from it, her depth of feeling and her capacity for emotion render her a force to be reckoned with beyond anything I have yet experienced in my 3 sons. We live in an era which has been captivated by the lie that the heart is somehow disconnected from and inferior to the mind. And that is a lie. The heart is essential. It is where we encounter God in His Holy Spirit, where we give and receive love. The heart is the source of human life, and it is from our hearts that our relationships with one another and with God take their roots. In a culture awash in isolation and alienation, between spouses and families and even within our very selves, it is evident that the price of disregarding and dismissing the heart is deadly high.

And then there are boys. Boys who will grow up to be strong men, and who desperately need to be affirmed in their abilities. They long for the affirmation – especially and essentially from their fathers – that they have what it takes.

A boy who is not mentored into manhood in this way will struggle in his adult life with feelings of unworthiness and shame. A man has to know that he can do it, that he has what it takes, and that there are people – his mom and dad first and foremost – who are cheering him on because they believe he can.

A boy who is denied these opportunities to prove himself is at risk of becoming a man who struggles with his identity and with his understanding of self worth.

For some boys this might look like hunting and fishing trips. Camping and using pocket knives and jumping off of boulders and killing it on the soccer field and generally having the experience of doing the hard thing and coming through the other side with the knowledge that he has what it takes, that he is enough, that he is capable of leading, of providing, of greatness.

This has less to do with being out in the great outdoors, being naturally athletic, or being any particular good shot with a bow and arrow, but it has everything to do with testing himself against some opponent, whether it be the elements, an animal, or even his peers, and discovering for himself that yes, he measures up. He does not fall short.

This does not mean that girls aren’t outdoorsy! I can’t emphasize enough, the stupid stuff we fret over with “gender norming” our kids is so much less about colors and kinds of toys and neutral language and so much more about what is intrinsic to the nature of men and women.

Girls aren’t going to pick up dolls just because they’re silly and pink and soft and isn’t that just adorable how she’s trying to breastfeed her teddy bear? No. I have watched my 3 year old decapitate her brother’s snowman with a lightsaber and then pretend to nurse her stuffed kitty cat, within the span of fifteen minutes. She weeps and rocks her stuffed animals to sleep at night if they’ve had a bad dream. And then she stands on the edge of her bed literally roaring in defiance if anyone should dare trespass and remove one of her beloved “babies” from their positions.

She is not weak because she is drawn to mothering behaviors with her toys, for if she is called to motherhood, it will be the source of her greatest strength and ability. (It’s not for nothing we use the expression of “mama bear” to communicate deep, protective and don’t-you-dare-mess-with-it anger.)

This hysteria over neutral-colored Legos and removing all swords and tutus from toy boxes is missing the forest for the trees. A little boy is standing 12 inches from my elbow right now playing in a pink toy kitchen, stirring soup and preparing steaks to feed the cat. This doesn’t mean his gender is “confused.” It does mean he likes being involved in food prep and his chief enjoyment in the 4’oclock hour is chopping vegetables.

We are foolish when we typecast certain “behaviors” into rigid gender norms and then insist that our children refrain at all cost from manifesting them, should they match up in a way we are currently collectively frowning upon.

What good is there to be gained by discouraging a boy from expressing strength and courage on the playground, whether he is shouting down a bully or rallying his friends to the winning kickball run? And what good is served in correcting a girl who longs to be told that she is beautiful – who in fact has a profound and fundamentally good desire to be affirmed in her beauty on a soul-deep level – that she ought not be concerned with something so trivial or vain?

Conversely, if a boy enjoys cooking and art and a girl is an absolute terror on the lacrosse field, these, too, are good and beautiful manifestations of their particular individual giftedness. This does not indicate a confused or wrongly-assigned gender, but normal and healthy diversity in this thing that we call being human.

Being a mother is intractably a female role; being a hairdresser is not.

While the world frets on about the sexism of fairy tales, about girls dreaming of true love and affirmed beauty, and boys about vanquishing dragons and journeying into uncharted territories, I’ll be sitting here reading Cinderella and the Chronicles of Narnia to all of them, male and female alike. And they will perhaps get different things from the same story. They will perhaps encounter it with their male or female minds and focus on particular aspects which attract or repel them, and that will be fine. That will be good.

Our differences are our strengths, and denying the intricate design of the complementarity between the sexes is to deface the image of the Creator Himself.

(For further reading on the complimentary of the sexes and the essential goodness of gender, I highly recommend reading Dr. Mary Healy’s short, accessible book on JPII’s Theology of the Body, “Men and Women are from Eden.” I also like Dr. Edward Sri’s “Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love” and John and Stasi Eldredge’s books, “Captivating” and “Wild at Heart.” (I’m on a bit of John Eldredge kick myself at the moment, having just finished “Walking with God” and “Waking the Dead” and now about halfway into “Fathered by God.” The last title in particular is great for facilitating a deeper understanding of masculinity.)

Culture of Death, Evangelization, mental health

Walking each other home

March 14, 2017

This past week, my dad lost his best friend. Jim was 20 years his senior and could technically have been his father – my grandfather – but instead of assuming a parent/child interaction, a 23 year streak of baseball games, happy hours, cigars, Christmas toasts, rounds of golf and countless, countless political conversations around the firepit in the backyard ensued between two unlikely men’s men, guys who could each have run a small country on their own, and yet, still made time and recognized the value – in the most natural and unscripted manner – in cultivating a relationship spanning decades.

They didn’t do programs together. They didn’t meet for any kind of men’s group, nor would they ever have attended had they been invited. Some people, particularly in generations preceding my own, are not “program people,” and that’s just fine.

In fact? It might even be more fine, more natural.

Coming of age in the digital revolution, I observed the bizarre migration of the bulk of my relationships from the real world to the virtual world, and then, more recently, back again. By “back again” I don’t mean that I’ve jettisoned online finds, just that as the shine has worn off for all of us, I’ve started (and it’s really fits and starts in this season) to push myself to be more intentional about actual face time. Not the app. And I’ve observed a lot of other people doing it, too.

It’s a lonely world we’re living in. For all the blessings of technology and cheap energy, the cost ends up being perilously high in terms of overall social connectedness and health. We drive everywhere, spending literal hours “alone together” stuck on the freeway. It has become so easy to be absorbed in a screen at all times. So much less effort to pick up my phone and snap a video of what I’m currently doing and shoot it out to an audience of a thousand “friends” than use it to call one specific friend and connect with, directly. The connection costs something. Maybe I’m too tired. Maybe I’m not really looking for connection, but to scratch the itch of boredom. Maybe it’s too hard to sit with silence, too intimidating to cross the street and knock on the neighbor’s door.

We are a culture dying for a little love. Literally, figuratively, emotionally and spiritually.

Instead of meaningful, sacramental sex, we have porn. Instead of family meals, we have fast food and a screen for every nose to press against. Instead of a vibrant, dynamic parish where one can belong, be known, and be in relationship with others, we have a cold, disconnected group of strangers standing in line to receive their Sacraments, assembly line style, and filing out like a frantic fire drill before the closing hymn is announced, let alone sung.

We are so lonely. We have lost the ability to connect with one another. We say we’re more connected than ever, yet an article about people making eye contact or performing some basic act of human decency in public brings actual tears to our eyes when someone shares it on social media. My God, we think, can you imagine if everyone reacted with such kindness/bravery/compassion/honesty?

Well, what if we did?

What if instead of spending literally hours with our tiny screens opened in our laps, collecting comments and likes and mindlessly scrolling through other people’s daily lives (this is not an anti social media manifesto, said the blogger. Just, we do really have a problem here), we spend an hour or two every day drinking a beer with our next door neighbors. Playing soccer in the backyard with our kids. Invited our coworker to grab dinner as we each exit our soulless work stations for the night, each headed home to dark studio apartments. What if we took the moments at the stoplights to pray a silent Hail Mary for the person in the car next to us, asking the Lord to work in their hearts and meet whatever profound need they are currently struggling with?

Because we all are. We are all in this together, and we are all of us broken, struggling, and in need of saving.

When I think of my dad and the friendship he’ll lay to rest later this week, I think of it as being sacramental in a way that means incarnate. That it was real, that it was the product of years of interaction and communication and recreation and real fellowship.

They didn’t share all their beliefs, but they shared their lives together.

That is what we are called to do. To be in communion with one another. To love our neighbor. Not only the neighbor who looks, acts, thinks, and believes exactly as we do. But the neighbor who is vibrantly, unmistakably different. And who we love – and who loves us – anyway.

Real love doesn’t gloss over differences either, no more than it rejects them. Real love stays in the fight and wrestles, chews them over, discusses and debates and banters and walks away at the end of the night with a handshake, and means it.

When did we stop shaking hands? The self-selecting isolation we’ve chosen for ourselves is killing us, destroying our culture, and birthing a generation of profoundly lonely, alienated people who think that to be accepted demands a uniformity that isn’t possible, isn’t necessary, and isn’t in keeping with the profound dignity of the human person.

Never stop working for the conversion of your own heart, and for the heart of every single person you encounter. You never, never know how much work God can achieve within the sacred boundaries of true friendship which wills the good (the authentic good) of the other.

And never for a moment think that real conversion can happen apart from real, complicated, dynamic, sometimes messy relationships.

God can work with that. But He can’t work if we won’t go.

After all, we’re all just walking each other home.

Catholic Spirituality, deliverance, guest post, mental health, PPD, Suffering

Two Hearts for Healing counseling (and a special giveaway)

March 3, 2017

Today I’m honored to have my beautiful friend Karen share a little bit about the incredible work she is doing in the world of counseling and mental health. Karen and I have been dear friends since our FUS days, where we lived in a literal (former) crackhouse and, fun fact, her older brother, Fr. Bryan, witnessed our marriage. (Technically theologically incorrect to say he “married” us, so. #theologynerd.)

I pray that Karen’s words will be a gift to you all, and that you are able to take advantage of the generous giveaway she has offered to 20 of my awesome readers.

Hello to Jenny’s amazing readers! My name is Karen, and I am so honored to have the opportunity to share with you all some of what God has been putting on my heart. I am a licensed professional counselor by trade, but to put it more simply, I am someone who just has a burning desire to see people healed and living the abundant life Jesus promised to give us (John 10:10). But before I jump into that, I wanted to just give you a little background about how I know Jenny. 🙂

Jenny and I have known each other now for about 10 years. We first met when I was lucky enough to be her housemate while I was getting my MA in counseling at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Immediately, we connected and understood each other because we both had similar less-than-pious undergrad experiences and were longing for that deeper encounter with God that Franciscan seemed to provide. Together we began a journey of faith and healing where our hearts and lives were completely transformed by the grace of God, and a life-long friendship was formed. We continue that journey together today, and that is honestly what brings me to write to you here.

God has given me a burning desire to bring healing in the lives of His children. For about as long as I can remember, I knew I wanted to be a counselor, but to completely honest, once I finished my Masters degree and began the actual work of counseling, I became very discouraged.

Despite all my desire, efforts and training, I was not seeing much real or lasting transformation or healing happening in the lives of my clients. And what I came to realize after working for a few years in a community-based practice, was that not many of my colleagues were seeing much dramatic transformation – or even really even expecting it to happen – either.

The predominant expectation was just that symptoms could be “managed” well with counseling and medication. The problem was, I didn’t sign up to be a counselor in order to lead my clients to a life of “symptom management”. Of course, I see the great value in learning coping skills and how to manage the emotional crises that are intrinsically part of the human experience, but deep in my heart, I knew that God had more to offer his children. Since modern psychology has pretty much divorced itself from God, it’s not surprising that healing wasn’t happening when the Author of all healing had been removed from the equation.

I decided to take a break from full-time counseling after having my first child in 2009. While I did take on a few part-time counseling jobs, none of the work really resonated in my soul because it still seemed to be more-or-less “symptom management,” but then in 2013, everything changed…

It was during this time that God allowed me to experience first-hand, for the first time, what so many of my clients had struggled with. Shortly after giving birth to my third child, I had my first major battle with depression. It was a very strange experience for me of being “on the other side,” but it is exactly what led me to the work I am doing today.

Through my own experience, God led me to uncover the root causes of what I was feeling, and by the grace of God I received profound healing and transformation. As I was facing my own struggle with self-worth, failure, rejection and abandonment, I was filled with this certain knowledge that God had the answer to these struggles, and that He truly wanted to heal me. Through prayer and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I was introduced to a “new world” of counseling, led by the Holy Spirit, where the head meets the heart and deep healing truly happens. I found a lasting freedom, rooted in Christ, and now I am on a mission now to share it with others.

I want to take a moment to elaborate here on one of the main things that sets this kind of Christ-centered, Holy Spirit-led counseling apart from the secular counseling experience. One of my biggest obstacles as a counselor in the past was that my clients typically had a huge disconnect between their heads and their hearts. Modern psychology talks on and on about the connections between one’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors. You hear endless talk about how you need to change your thoughts in order to change your, feelings and then change your behaviors, and that is absolutely true. The reason many people are depressed and anxious is because they have anxious and depressed thoughts and beliefs, and IF you are able to help them change those anxious and depressed thoughts, they will feel better and make better decisions about their behavior.

But (and this is a big but), how does one “talk themselves into” believing the truth?

My clients would always confess that they knew intellectually that all the negative things they were believing about themselves were probably not true, but they didn’t know how to change those beliefs in their hearts.

No amount of positive self-talk about how wonderful and beautiful and special and worthy they were seemed able to penetrate their hearts and “take root” so that they could walk in true, lasting freedom.

This, my friends, is what I believe is the absolute work of the Holy Spirit. I (and any other counselor for that matter) can talk until I am blue-in-the face about the truth of someone’s identity, but only the Divine Counselor can actually make that truth take root in the heart, and it usually happens when God leads that person to the root wound where that lie about their identity first took hold.

This is the difference between what man can do and what God can do… Only God can read the heart and speak to its depths in a way that brings real and lasting change. And this is what God is allowing me to lead others to through my practice. He has SO MUCH MORE for us than we can even imagine (Eph 3:20).

I want to say quickly here too that I am not at all disregarding the reality that there is a physiological component at work when it comes to mental health struggles. Science has proven that the neurotransmitters in our brains – like serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine – all play a major roll in mood and emotions. I have witnessed the profound ways that medication has helped my clients, so I the last thing I want is for this to come off as a dismissal of the crucial advances of science in this area in the past 50 years. I definitely advocate for the use of medication when it is needed and helpful.

My main point, however, is to make the case for the Author of all healing, the Divine Counselor, who truly knows the causes for our heartache, and who I believe truly wants to bring healing and freedom to EVERY mental health struggle we face. I have a very hard time believing that our loving Father determined that any person would struggle with something like depression or anxiety for a lifetime. I believe these struggles are permitted in our lives to help point the way to the wound that needs be healed, in the same way that the pain in our leg points to the broken bone that needs be reset.

Without the pain focused in a certain place, we wouldn’t know where or how something needed to be healed.

I believe with all my heart that God wants ALL of His children to walk in freedom. Every one of us.

So many people are walking around in prisons of fear, sadness, and shame; and when they look around at someone else who doesn’t seem to have those struggles (hello, curse of social media!), they believe a LIE that God just doesn’t have a plan for their happiness.

It’s as if people believe that God has a good and joy-filled life for some people, and a difficult and miserable existence for others. But this is not the truth. He wants to grant the gift of his joy and peace to all of his children (John 14:27; 15:11), but the effects of sin in our world have stolen this gift from so many people today.

But the GOOD NEWS is that Jesus died on the cross to grant us the restoration and freedom that we so deeply long for! In the next life, yes, but also in this life.

He longs to grant us this healing so that we can become WHOLE – the person He had in mind for us to be when He first created us – before sin took hold and wreaked havoc in our lives.

It is the pursuit of this WHOLENESS that is the key to the truly HOLY life that we are each called to lead.

So, my prayer for you is that if you find yourself struggling in a certain area of your life, whether or not that carries a clinical diagnosis (maybe you struggle with anger or self-worth or any number of other issues), I pray that instead of beating yourself up about your struggles, you instead turn to God and ask him to shed light on those areas in need of healing in your heart so that you can continue to persevere in JOY and PEACE on the path of sanctity.

Peace I leave with you, My own peace I give to you; a peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you. Let not your hearts be troubled or afraid. John 14:27

Karen has generously offered a free 30 minute introductory virtual counseling session (via Skype, FaceTime, or by phone) to the first 20 readers who contact her at [email protected] and mention this post.

Connect with Karen on Facebook and visit her online at www.twoheartscounselingandhealing.com.

About Me, Catholic Spirituality, Family Life, mental health, motherhood

Winter Survival List

February 2, 2017

I wanted to participate in Modern Mrs Darcy’s “What’s Saving My Life Right Now” reflection exercise, but I just couldn’t bring myself to actually title a post … that.

Buuuut, I do have a little curated collection of practices, products, and habits that are indeed keeping me mostly afloat during a challenging season, which I will identify as having begun the day after Halloween with the first round of vomiting and has basically stretched into an almost interminable succession of viral assaults. I know, having kids in school changes everything and I know, having little kids with limited – nay, zero – hygiene is mostly to blame, but we have been hammered by Thor himself this winter, and woe mightily unto the next classmate who shows up at school with RSV/rotovirus/pink eye/croup. Woe, I say.

But the list.

The reason I’m not bald and completely insane yet, I think, is that I’ve been making some respectable efforts in the self care/spiritual care department, and it’s helping keep things limping along.

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Reading for pleasure. I had been remiss in falling out of a good reading habit and letting the social media dragon creep stealthily back into the driver’s seat during my daily time pockets, but about 3 weeks ago when felled by the first round of croup, I forced myself to make a digital hold list and slowly but surely, my Kindle started to fill up with new titles from the library.

So far since January I’ve read The Shoemaker’s Wife (loved), Everyone Brave is Forgiven (loved), Before We Visit the Goddess (meh), The Magnolia Story (LOVED), Falling Free (moderately enjoyed), Simply Tuesday (meh), and Resisting Happiness (decent). I got well into the Neapolitan Trilogy and while the writing was simply top notch and the character development was deep and fantastic, the subject matter and the gruesome, detailed accounts of sexual violence had me clicking “return.” I told the well-read friend who’d recommended them with that very caveat that she was not wrong, but that I’m particularly sensitive to what I read, because I pretty much never forget something once I’ve read it. Downfall of a visual learner, I guess.

The punchline to all this is, look how much reading I was able to accomplish when I left my phone on my desk (sorry, friends who I forgot to text back) and forced myself to sit without “real time” entertainment. It’s kind of scary that sometimes I’ll click on my Kindle and start instinctively trying to “scroll” through it and then experience a pang of disappointment that no, I won’t be getting a dopamine hit from this particular electronic device. I need so much self control when it comes to the internet. Work in progress.

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Which brings me to my next practice: not engaging in inflammatory political discourse on the internet. The Women’s March and the March for Life aside, I’ve been assiduously avoiding engaging in any overtly political discourse with strangers or friends via social media. It is not helpful. It does not bring me joy. It does not cultivate depth or growth between myself and those digital friends with whom I am in true relationship. I am watching the news with one eye, checking headlines every day or so, but not consuming piece after piece dictating to me what I should think about what is going on in the world and in our country right now.

My particular role is to continue working in my own wheelhouse, which has always been women’s issues and life issues and the profound beauty of human sexuality. Any noise I could add to the national “conversation” (if you can call this … that) would be exactly that: noise.

I can pray for justice and I can make acts of sacrifice and self denial and offer those up for the Lord to use as He sees fit. I can donate money to charities that serve and protect refugees. I can continue praying and working and writing for a greater awareness of the sanctity of human life and the beauty of marriage. And I can pray for our President, our leaders, and those whose beliefs I don’t share, and teach my children to do the same. Screaming profanities or click-baiting friends from middle school on Facebook has never and will never advance a single cause. (Nor will, say, lighting cars on fire or pepper spraying people you disagree with.)

The world is a crude, coarse, and common place right now. Don’t contribute to the noise. If the noise is directed at you, forgive and turn away, and don’t engage in escalating violence even when it’s merely violent rhetoric. Flip the magazine covers over. Unfollow the unhinged social media ranter. Say a prayer, offer a smile, buy a stranger in line a cup of coffee, and do your little part to bring beauty into a world that is starved for it. Small acts of kindness are not incidental, they are essential to the survival of culture and desperately necessary to civilize and invigorate a culture that is losing hope and coming ever more off it’s moorings.

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This probiotic is probably what saved us from round 11 of the stomach flu last month. Two separate friends recommended it and most of my kids drink it happily (one gags and surrenders only under extreme duress). I quite like it, it reminds me of a pina colada 🙂

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A cleaning service. I found a fantastic deal on a bi-weekly housecleaning service and even though we’re in a belt-tightening season as we work on this house and prepare to sell, it has been a literal investment in my sanity and general sense of wellbeing. The kids are benefiting from it too, as I no longer faint dead away when somebody pees on the floor I just mopped, but instead wipe it down with clorox spray and look forward to next Thursday. We achieved this life-long dream of mine (at least since motherhood began) by shifting around some budget items, planning a couple simpler dinners that are vegetarian, and letting go of buying certain things organic. I realize it’s a privilege to even have the option to do this, but if there is even a possibility of getting some kind of domestic help when you work at home, whether it’s sending out laundry, having a cleaner come even once a month, or paying a neighborhood kid to do yard or snow work, I am a hearty endorser. We wear a lot of hats, whether it’s homeschooling, working part time or full time, or being all-hands on deck the only adult in charge of multiple small humans all day long. When I found we could make it work with our budget, I cut myself some slack and made it happen.

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Non-negotiable nap times. When my 2 little ones are the only one’s home Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, I have become militant about nap time. 3 year old Evie thinks she’s ready to drop hers, but come 5 pm she is borderline feral without one, so I’ve finally become the iron-willed mommy who escorts her to her room with a stack of books, a sippy cup of water, and strictest instructions to stay for a minimum of 2 hours. And then I go downstairs and turn on the stove exhaust fan, and …. ahhh, blissful white noise-masking silence. I can get everything done in those 2 hours. Everything. Like sitting around writing, or staring vacantly out the window at a flock of geese, or praying a rosary or looking at the wall that really needs to be repainted.

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Fresh flowers and lighting all the candles. Appropriate, since today is Candlemas (confession: I don’t actually know what that means), but I’ve been burning candles with wild abandon all of January and now into February and it is so comforting to have them shining during the day. I’ve also made it a point to grab a bunch of flowers from Trader Joe’s when I’m there ever week or 2, and they last so long that sometimes I’ve enjoyed uninterrupted fresh flowers for a month straight, for less than $5 a bunch.

I also started picking up a bundle of eucalyptus branches when I’m shopping once a month or so, which I break up and distribute in mason jars or vases throughout the house and especially in all the bathrooms. They look and smell so good, and they last for months. If I’m going to be working from home, working in my home, and just generally doing life within these 4 walls day in and day out, it helps my mood tremendously to have little touches of “luxury” and beauty around me. I think it makes the kids more chill, too.

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Compounded progesterone. About 2 months ago I had some labs done for some weird hormone stuff that has been going on, and while it’s not fully resolved, my doctor did suggest switching to this specific preparation of bioidentical progesterone called a troche which dissolves in the side of your cheek and is supposed to be more readily absorbed into your bloodstream. I only take it for the last 10 days of each cycle, essentially, and I have noticed a big improvement in mood and a modest improvement in the ability to stay asleep (which had been killing me). Now if only I could fall asleep before midnight.

I heard someone say that most people figure out their health “stuff,” be it mental or physical, in their mid 30s. I don’t know if that’s because you start falling apart at that point, or because you start to have some of the necessary headspace and resources to look more deeply into things, but that has certainly proven to be the case for me. (shovels another handful of supplements and vitamins into mouth.)

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Daily Mass and Adoration. I’ve been making it to one or the other (or sometimes both) at least once a week, vomiting kids notwithstanding, and it really is the game-changer. Maybe I should have listed it first? But really, when the opportunity arises, I’ve been trying to train myself into a place of “don’t think too long about it, just do it,” and as a result, I’ve been able to spend more time with Jesus. Yesterday, for example, I had to drive drop off to school while Dave met with a contractor, so I trotted next door to 8 am Mass after dropping the boys and even though Luke was in his footie pajamas and Evie was really, really naughty for the first 3 minutes, it was so worth it. Later in the day I had the thought “I could stop into the Adoration chapel” while driving near our parish and instead of caving to the 1000 things that seemed more important and interesting in that moment, I made myself pull over and go inside “just for 5 minutes” and ended up staying for 20. And it was amazing. I can’t hold down a regular holy hour during this season of life, nor can I commit to daily Mass in a literal application, but I can go – and I should – when the inspiration strikes and the circumstances allow.

So, what’s on your list right now? What are you doing that is saving your life during what can be a hard season, or even a really great season? I’d love to hear about it.

(And if you want to join the larger linkup, you can hop over to MMD and share there.)

breastfeeding, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Marriage, mental health, NFP, Parenting, pregnancy, Sex, Theology of the Body

NFP: The methods and the madness

January 12, 2017

Never one to resist a pun.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, but I wanted to have a few months (a year maybe, now?) under my belt before going and saying something crazy like “we found an NFP method that works great for us and it’s been a game changer.” Before we go any further, however, the necessary disclaimer that I am not a medical expert, that my opinions are not those of a trained healthcare practitioner, and that what works great for one couple may not be so hot for the next. Which is why we have a proliferation of methods at our disposal. Some friends who learned the Sympto-Thermal method alongside us while we were going through marriage prep are still happily using it. Other friends have gone through one method after another, landing in their doctor’s office doing bloodwork and figuring out all kinds of hormone imbalances and health issues.

So the big fat disclaimer to this all is: NFP is women’s healthcare. And we women and the men who love us should take it seriously, and treat it as such. Which means seeking out doctors and nurses and instructors who are trained in the various methods, when we’re struggling with finding something that works and with figuring out our unique fertility. Facebook groups are super helpful, books are great, and online resources can be a godsend, but sometimes you need a trained professional to help figure out the language your body is speaking.

This is where I tell you that we found such a professional to teach us a wonderful new method of NFP well suited to my body, and we lived happily ever after. But no, I self-taught using the sage counsel of a combination of Facebook groups and my patient little sister. So do as I say, not as I do! End disclaimer.

Where were we? Oh yes, 3 methods in 3 years. Or just about. We learned Sympto Thermal through the Couple to Couple League when we were engaged, but perhaps because we were excited to start our family right away, I wasn’t paying the greatest of attention to that daily temperature taking protocol. Once baby #1 came along and I was supposed to start waking up at a reasonably early hour and testing again, along with making mucus and cervical observations, I was done. Between the night wakings, the nurse-a-thons and the unusual mucus patterns, we never found our rhythm (ba dum ching) with CCL again, and so we moved on to Creighton.

Creighton was great in terms of helping me to understand where I was chronologically in my cycle. Numbers are really difficult for me, and Creighton was more hands on (I’m sorry I literally cannot help myself) and helped make our fertility a more concrete concept. However. While I am nursing, it was basically an endless yellow sticker party for months and months and months. (For the uninitiated, yellow stickers are when your instructor gives you the green light to go ahead and consider some days infertile, based on observations over a period of months, and agrees that the hormones related to breastfeeding are also totally obscuring the cyclical mucus patterns your body is supposed to show once you cycle returns postpartum, and that you probably haven’t actually been in Phase 2 for the past 13 weeks. In my case, that return to regular fertility typically begins about 10 months after baby, as long as I’m breastfeeding.

The psychological toll of the yellow stickers was tough on me though, because it always felt very “fertility roulette” and very much all on my subjective shoulders to make the right observations and then to give the correct classification. Call it a lack of self confidence or just a body really intent on getting pregnant again, but I pretty much felt like every month we practiced Creighton we were going to conceive, so long as I was nursing. Enter the weekly Dollar Tree pregnancy test taking ritual.

After Luke was born in 2015, our 4th sweet bundle of joy in 5 years, I was very anxious for a break, both mentally and physically. Creighton did not seem to be a good fit for our particular situation, at least during the nursing months (and they were all nursing months, back then) so we sought out yet another method, one that several of my girlfriends had tried and found success with.

One thing I want to note is that because the postpartum season is so exhausting and so overwhelming, it is the one time I have really found myself tempted by contraception. I totally get it. I get that it seems like a godsend, like an obvious solution, and like the only non-insane thing to do when you’re bleeding and sleep deprived and financially bereft and just barely hanging on.

And I think a lot more of us have been there than are willing to let on in polite company.

But in my heart of hearts, and in the heart of our marriage, I know that God would not hold something good just out of arm’s reach from us. And that if contraption were a true answer to our hardships, the Church who is a good and faithful Mother would extend it as the healing balm to our fertility woes.

But she hasn’t. Because it isn’t. It isn’t the answer when you’re 7 weeks postpartum and haven’t slept in 44 nights, or when you’re struggling to make the mortgage payment, or when you’re teetering on the precipice of menopause and really, really afraid of having a baby in your mid forties.

Contraception is either good for human love, or it isn’t. It either builds up and supports marriages, or it tears them down. And it’s either something God has asked us to yield to His will over our own on, or else it’s something that everybody can freely partake of, no matter the circumstances.

Human circumstances are rarely black and white, but God is. And His guidelines for our happiness and holiness are unwavering, however wobbly and wrecked I might be in any particular month.

So, back to the new method. We ordered up a Clear Blue monitor (this one from amazon, use my pal Bonnie’s affiliate link to shop there), which comes in a really fun box with “helps you get pregnant faster!” scrawled on all four sides of it, as do the monitor sticks, which inspired a ton of confidence in me when I opened the package, and which I really love seeing under my bathroom sink every morning.

Basically, the Marquette Method did an end-run around this ovulation predicting and pinpointing urine-testing monitor and figured out a way use the monitor and to co-opt it’s data to reveal to a woman the specific parameters of her fertile window (Phase 2). The monitor uses urine test sticks which measure detectable levels of lutenizing hormone (LH) and estrogen levels and can give a pretty accurate picture of when ovulation is occurring, and then gives you a count down back to “low” fertility after peak day. I like the objectivity of the method tremendously, because I can put all my faith into a tiny machine instead of my exhausted midnight brain, and that seems eminently more reasonable to me. I’m only joking the very littlest bit about that. Which maybe I need to talk to someone about. But seriously, having an objective standard by which I am measuring my fertility signs has been a huge weight off my shoulders.

The postpartum period was a little tricky with Marquette (and a little more expensive with the test sticks) but it was hugely freeing for me to feel like I had a good understanding of what my body was doing, and that even with the continuous mucus patterns during breastfeeding, the hormone levels my body was producing were low enough to reassure me that my cycle was not yet returning. I think it probably bought us literally months of useable days during the postpartum period with Luke. And now that I am in regular cycles again, it has been extremely helpful in corroborating other psychological and physiological changes that each cycle brings.

Learning Marquette with a Creighton background helped me to not trust the monitor overly much, too, I would say. Because I know have what I think is the most possible data at my disposal, short of blood testing, I can make truly educated decisions about my fertility using what I learned with each method, checking the hard data against the more subjective. (Not saying Creighton is not scientifically rigorous, just that it’s easier to be objective with a little computer than with a square of toilet paper.)

Also, it should be noted that for couples who are struggling to conceive, Creighton is something of a gold standard for many people.

I hope this was helpful? Informative? Not mind-numbing or totally repulsive? And I may write a more detailed Marquette “how to” post one of these days, if I can work up the enthusiasm.

Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, Family Life, mental health, Parenting, politics, sin, Suffering

As a parent, you have one job

December 16, 2016

(I mean, aside from the obvious keep them alive/fed/clothed and try your hardest to get them to Heaven part. Does that go without saying?)

I had someone make the following bold statement to me earlier this year, and it rocked me to my core:

your primary job as parents is to provide and secure the peace in your home.

You know who I thought about when I reflected on that statement? I thought about the dad from “Life is Beautiful.” I thought about his heroic, self-sacrificing and odds-defying performance to erect a brave and shining barrier of innocence over his little boy in the midst of unimaginable horror. As the world literally crumbled around him, his father shielded him as best he could not only from physical harm (and over this realm he had very little control, truly) but perhaps even more critically in their circumstances, from emotional harm.

I feel like we modern parents tend to kind of do the opposite. Whether it’s because many of us were ourselves exposed to pain or danger or brokenness in our family of origin, or because we watched so many of our friends go through hell as kids, many of our generation of parents seem to be questing after some vague sense of authenticity or relatability with their own offspring that is going over, frankly, like a lead balloon.

On the one hand I can understand the earnest desire to be open and honest and reliable with our children, but on the other hand, my kids are going to learn soon enough about the heartache, the danger, and the sin in this world, and it actually isn’t my job to sit them down and tutor them in it.

Because the world is a cruel place. Kids get sick and die. They get abused. Their families fall apart and bombs fall on their cities and their friend’s dads leave their friend’s moms, and vice versa.

But they needn’t know every excruciating detail.

In fact, if and to whatever extent we can possibly spare them the details, I believe it is our sacred duty as parents.

Right now bombs are falling on children the same ages as mine in Aleppo. As Christians, we need to fall on our knees and pray for those affected, and give material aid to reputable organizations (highly recommend the Catholic Near East Welfare Society) who can deliver food and medicine and shelter on the ground. But my kids, at ages 1,3,4, and 6, do not need any details about the tragic circumstances in Syria. They should not be watching the bodycounts scroll by on the news, or listen to me listening to NPR within earshot.

It is essential, in fact, that I shield them from the horror of war and human cruelty as much as possible during their formative years.

Our children will absolutely learn that the world is not a perfect place. That people sin. That people hurt each other. That sometimes kids get hurt, too. But it is critical to their development into healthy, functional human beings that we don’t saddle them with that knowledge prematurely.

When my 6 year old asks why we pray for babies in mommies’ tummies to be safe, that does not open the door for a frank conversation about abortion. If he explicitly asks what abortion is (as has happened before), I deflect and say that sometimes babies get hurt, and that not everybody believes that every human being has the same rights. And then I change the topic.

(I take a similar tack with the sexual curiosity stuff, not because sex is bad in any way! But because it’s not developmentally appropriate for him nor is it necessary that he know the nitty gritty.) Allowing our children to ask questions and answering them in a way that is both honest and honoring of their developmental stage and age is a tricky line, and it’s one I’m learning to walk with some trial and error as the months and years roll by.

I had a little friend of my kids’ come to me earlier this month with a tearful story about another family’s deep pain, their disintegrating home life, and the fear this child felt about the whole situation. As I tried my best to toe the line of appropriateness with a child who is not my own, I reassured this little one that this wasn’t their burden to bear, and encouraged them to give the situation over to Jesus as much as possible and to let the grown ups handle grown up stuff. Because kids have their own work to do that is perfectly suited to being a kid.

I have no idea how effective that was, but my heart ached for the burden this child had been asked to carry, inadvertently or not. There were gruesome and salacious details in the story that could have come from a prime time drama, and this little person’s eyes were filled with tears over it.

This is not okay. And whether our kids are getting it from overhearing us having inappropriate adult conversations within earshot, or by watching programing that is explicitly not suitable for children, or even just hearing an earful from one side of a phone conversation when we think they aren’t paying attention, (they are. Ask me how I know.) we have to be so, so mindful of our duty to them.

Their innocences is our business. And maintaining that innocence requires sacrifices on our parts.

I can’t listen to whatever music I like in the car anymore. Do I still love Dave Matthews Band and Adele? Yep. But I don’t need the 4 year old asking me what does it mean to send your love to your new lover, mommy? just because I couldn’t be bothered to switch on KLove or change the CD during carpool pickup.

I can’t watch shows depicting adult themes and filled with violence and horror when they’re awake. (Should I be watching those shows, period? That’s another post for another day.)

I shouldn’t have sensitive, nuanced conversations about world affairs and politics and war and unrest in earshot of my kindergartener, who has the right to experience the world from a disposition of curiosity and wonder. Soon enough he will know of hatred, bigotry, war, and gruesome suffering. My job is to mold his little heart and soul to be receptive to a good God Who alone can heal those division and redeem that pain. And to ensure, to the best of my ability, that he grows to become an honorable man who will do his part to create beauty and goodness in this world. A child who is robbed of a childhood, who does not have the opportunity to encounter beauty and goodness, is unlikely to grow up to be this kind of adult.

We need to be so careful and so conscientious of their environments. To the best of our abilities. What they’re watching, what they’re reading, whom they’re spending time with and what they’re listening to. And, ahem – looking into the mirror – what kinds of things their parents do or say when they’re stressed, angry, overwhelmed or in pain.

I can just as easily make a chink in their armor with a careless word or an exhausted scream of frustration and anger. And then, when it is I myself who have disturbed the peace in our home, I must kneel down at eye level and humbly ask forgiveness from the little one who depends upon me to keep this space sacred, to keep it safe.

Please hear this: This is in no way an attack on parents whose children have been exposed to violence or inadvertent abuse of any kind. We live in a broken world filled with pain, and the smallest victims are the most tragic. Our little family has not been spared from heartache.

But it is our job as mothers and as fathers to help our children to feel as safe and as secure as possible while they are small. The world outside can wait, and time will ensure that it does not, not for long.

We must take up the mantel of adulthood and respect the profound dignity of the child and the sacred charge that we grown ups have to protect them from evil.

Even if the evil is becoming the norm, all around us.

In our homes, at least, let them feel safe, insulated against the harsh elements in our own little Nazareth, growing and learning and developing all they will need to navigate adulthood. Which will come soon enough.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, mental health, mindfulness, self care

Mindful Mondays: vol. 2

November 21, 2016

I’ve been falling further and further behind in my online viewing of the mindfulness courses I’m enrolled in, but I’ve been exercising more and more compassion towards myself about the fact that in this season of life, I can’t keep up with everything I’ve set my hand to. And sometimes that includes not being able to honor commitments I’ve made, even if only to myself.

I’m counting that a huge win.

Maybe you know this about me from reading for even a little while, but I’m a leeeetle bit of a perfectionist. Which is not a particularly healthy way to live. And, with 4 young children stacked fairly deep, nor is it a particularly realistic way to live these days. (<-I question the grammatical accuracy of that sentence structure, but not intensely enough to google it.)

So yes, self compassion. A an essential piece of the practical application of mindfulness. Does it ever happen to you that you’re sitting down listening to a homily, trying to pray a rosary, maybe even having a conversation with someone and you catch yourself zoning out and then the negative self talk starts…great, you totally missed the first 15 minutes to that. Why do I even bother. What’s the point of trying to pray. Ugh, if she knew I was thinking about the grocery list when he’s pouring out her heart to me…and so on.

I’m stopping myself now when the spiral starts and gently, with compassion (kind of crucial and not necessarily natural to me!), redirecting my attention back to whatever it is I’m doing in the present moment. I can’t explain how much this has helped with the practice of prayer, and even in going through the mindfulness course itself. I catch myself wandering, see the wandering thoughts as “mental events happening in my brain,” and then bring that attention right back to the present moment. No judgment, no angsting over what I missed or what it says about me as a person. And it’s great.

The other observation I have now that I’m halfway through the 8-part course offered by CatholicPsych Institute is how much more present I am to my children, and how much more possible (note: not easy) it is to stay there. I’m finding myself more attuned to their needs and emotions throughout the day, and I’m a little ashamed (but not a lot, because compassion!) of how often I was tuning them out before, especially when being “tuned in” to them required me to suffer in any way, not least of all, by being bored.

So, in the past, it has not been unusual for me to do a lot of parenting, especially in that delightful 4-6 pm time slot, on autopilot. Kind of numbing myself out to the stress/effort of the task by not really focusing on them, but by robotically doling out after school snacks, assembling dinner, barking orders for peaceful sibling play, and usually succumbing to at least a show or three as they wheedled and whined and honestly, were just trying to get my attention. My authentic attention.

Now that I’m being more mindful of what they’re saying and doing, especially during the witching hour (if ever a name were apt, that’s the one), we’re experiencing a more harmonious home life. I wouldn’t say their behavior has improved in any significant way, but that my behavior (which is the only thing I can actually control, control freak) has improved noticeably. I’m not as productive as I was a month ago, but my kids are getting more of me. And I know I’ve heard some wiser parent say it before, but the more I intentionally lean into those hard moments of motherhood, the stronger those muscles grow. When I zone them out for an hour while I’m pulling a Gayle Waters-Waters on the kitchen and dining room floors and leave them to their own devices, scrapping verbally over the Magic School Bus verses Lego Friends, we both re-engage at the dinner table in decidedly less than pleasant demeanors.

Finally, I’m observing my own limits and capacity for what Dr. Bottoro refers to as “the shallow waters of pain” both mentally (as demonstrated above) and physically, and not running from every experience of discomfort. An oncoming headache doesn’t need to be immediately medicated as something to avoid at all costs, but might be a sign that I’m dehydrated or overly caffeinated. A stubbed toe doesn’t mean that I need to scream obscenities and drop my basket of laundry in a dramatic scene, but that I can lean into the small moment of suffering and observe in myself the feelings of pain, discomfort, surprise, and anger that actually won’t end up killing me.

I haven’t totally unpacked what it means to be mindful in moments of pain and suffering, but from the light dabbing I’ve done, I can see why mindfulness was initially created as a tool for pain management by patients with chronic, unnamable conditions. We’re talking people who morphine couldn’t help. But their own minds, thoughtful and observant and curious about the sensations and circumstances they were experiencing, very often, could.

It’s pretty mysterious and awe-inspiring stuff, what our brains and bodies can accomplish together.

I’m not sure this week of holiday busyness and travel and festivities will bring a lot of time for me to catch up on my missed lessons or travel much further into the course, but I am 100% certain that the skill of “leaning in” will come in handy when Thursday roles around. 🙂

I’ll leave you with the opening lines of what Dr. Bottaro calls “the sacramental pause,” at least as I am understanding it. It begins with a prayer:

“Ever present God, here with me now. Help me to be here now, with You.”

Isn’t that beautiful? May you feel His presence in the present moment today, too.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, mental health, mindfulness, self care

Mindful Mondays {week 1}

October 31, 2016

I’ve been dabbling in my expansive spare time in the very highly recommended “Catholic Mindfulness” program offered online by Dr. Greg Bottaro of Catholic Psych. And it’s awesome. I’m 2.5 weeks into 8 (and I should be 5 but c’est la vida con bambini <– multiculturalism right thur) and I’m already starting to look forward to revisiting the sessions for a second time. And I’m the least likely person who should be touting this to you, because I live much of my life in a haze of borderline panic which is antithetical to everything I’m learning here. Which is maaaaybe what makes me such an ironically excellent candidate.

Some pertinent information up front:

Mindfulness is not some kind of eastern mysticism or a hippie dippie corporate wellness concept. The term was coined in the late 70’s by a researcher working with chronic pain patients at the UMass medical center. And it didn’t exist before then. You can’t go back into the annuls of time and dig up ancient Zen mindfulness meditations. Jon Kabot-Zinn recognized some undergirding concepts from his own personal practice of Buddhism – namely an attentive, peaceful state of mind – could be separated from the religious worship and applied in a secular setting to assist his patients in their suffering. And so mindfulness was born.

But wait, isn’t that like doing yoga while saying the rosary and pretending there’s nothing inherently spiritual about the various poses? Nope. Kabot-Zinn didn’t co-opt any particularly Buddhist concepts or elements of worship and replicate them for his patients. He simply saw something that was essentially true and good – maintaining an interior peace and mental focus – and realized it could be useful when practiced in a completely secular application to help his suffering clients. And quite contrary to the practice of emptying one’s mind with the hope of achieving nothingness, mind-FULL-nes seeks an awakening to reality, a discipline of becoming fully present to the moment.

I hope that’s clear enough. If anyone has lingering doubts about the concept, recall that the Church has a long and robust history of finding what is true, good and beautiful in any culture and correctly identifying it as such. We Christians don’t have a corner on the market of reality, we’re just fortunate to be able to correctly identify it as “His” when we do encounter it.

Dr. Bottaro has, in this course, successfully wedded the practice of mindfulness to a profound Christian truth which ought to undergird our experience of reality: that we are safe in the Father’s arms. That He created us, that He saved us, and that He is carrying us at every moment of our existence.

And that is what makes this mental discipline so effective and so transformative. Because to be truly aware – moment to moment – of God’s total and sustaining love for us is to be profoundly engaged in reality. And to the extent that we can remain in reality and not fall prey to the one million distractions of work, laundry, kids, stress, pain, frustration, fear of the future, etc…is to find real peace.

That’s what I’ve taken from this course thus far: to remain in the reality of the present moment with God is the secret to real peace.

Because suffering will come. Bad things will happen. Stressors will arise. Life will unfold in an unpredictable way. And yet if we truly believe and choose to live in the experience of the Father’s unwavering care for us, we needn’t lose our interior peace.

So these first 2 weeks have been very mind/body centered, building on an increasing awareness and acknowledgement of the connection between the two. In lesson 2 Dr. Bottaro even jokes that in practicing mindfulness, we are consciously battling the heresy of Dualism. And it’s not a joke! We live in a wildly incongruent era of alienation between body and soul. We too frequently experience the cultural truth of a “separateness” between our minds and our bodies. St. JPII made this reintegration of the person – an adequate anthropology – the work of his lifetime. And so much of what ails us as a society has it’s rotted roots in the false dichotomy between body and soul.

I’m finding it fascinating as I go through my days and parent the kids, pay the bills, visit the gym, scrub the toilets, pray the Mass, how frequently I’m mentally “checking out” to escape the boredom/tedium/pain/discomfort of any sort. And when I do check out, I’m learning to gently return my attention to the present moment. To engage consciously in the practice of living my actual life, not the life I’m looking forward to at 8:45 pm when everyone is finally in bed and Netflix is firing up.

I once heard or read that God dwells only in the present moment, and that therefore the enemy works tirelessly to keep us either ruminating on the past or fixated on the future. Actually, I think CS Lewis says something very like this in his Screwtape Letters:

“…a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.”

That’s essentially how I live my life. Every real gift offered to me now – this season of littleness, these cherubic messy cheeks, this house in constant need of upkeep and repairs, this youngish, healthy body capable of almost perpetual motion – I heap these gifts continuously on the altar of the future, burning them up in anticipation of some nebulously comfortable or satisfying “someday.”

But there is no such place. There is no such time.

St. Mother Teresa said it best:

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”

That second part in particular seems to me to be the essential truth that underpins the whole practice of mindfulness: we have only today. Let us begin.

Next week I’ll start in on more of the practical applications of what I’m learning. But for today, try to stop in a moment of repetitive, ordinary work and allow yourself to be fully present in that moment. Maybe while brushing your teeth or loading the dishwasher or driving to work. Feel the water running over your hands or the tingling minty burn of the toothpaste against your gums. Allow yourself to connect with the solid shape and feel of the steering wheel beneath your fingers. Be present – wholly present – in the present moment.

It’s surprisingly wonderful. And surprisingly difficult. And my kids are acting verifiably psychotic this morning, so it’s deeply ironic that I’ve chosen this moment to write about it.

Or is it? Biiiiig wink.

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