Anyone else throw those Christmas lights up a little early this year? Like maybe a month or two early? I have to admit that despite all my posturing and practice of liturgical rigor in the early days of motherhood, I happily blitzed through Walmart for 1,000 extra sparkle lights the week before last.

Dave came home in the newly dark 5 o’clock hour last Friday and found me perched on a ladder in the front yard cursing and stringing up lights by myself, realizing in the cold twilight how much math is involved in the process. Is math the right word? All I know is that it is not as easy as it looks to get those strands lined up and I wished I had a dozen outdoor outlets, but alas, Clark Griswold I am not.

I’m excited for thanksgiving, in whatever form it takes and whatever number of guests it features. All are welcome, as is the case every year, and all are equally free to recuse themselves over health concerns or other anxieties. As for me and my house, we will serve the turkey. (And the Lord.)

It has been difficult to find time and, honestly, the energy to put much of anything creative into the world lately. I made a huge push (pun unintentional but perfect) to finish the Postpartum NFP Survival Guide last month, and the process of multiple hours-long days of editing and find tuning was exhausting to my overstretched 2020 brain.

I’ve popped in on social media twice since the election and both times been sick to my stomach afterwards by the hatred, the vitriol, and the viciousness there. I truly don’t miss anything about Instagram. (Well, I thought I missed the pretty decorating pictures, but then I had a flashback to 2014 and remembered Pinterest, lol)

Speaking of the Postpartum NFP Survival Guide, it’s on sale this week at nearly 40% because Black Friday is really more of a season this year, is it not???

If you’ve been on the fence or know a newly postpartum mama who you think could benefit from it, snag yours here. (Giving it as a gift? Awesome! Just use enter the recipient’s email in place of your own at checkout, or drop me a note with their email at [email protected])

I’ve had a couple people ask for more details on what it is, exactly. I tell them it’s a bit like a more interactive e-book, minus the need for an e-reader or an app. It covers everything from common postpartum struggles with hormones, emotions, and relationship stressors to tips and tricks to help nudge your cycle gently back into place even while breastfeeding.

And best of all? Every Postpartum Survival Guide now includes access to an exclusive online community, Th Postpartum Posse, just for postpartum NPF using mamas.

(Already purchased yours? Check your inbox, you’ve been invited into the community too. and no, it’s NOT on Facebook.)

A few mamas have graciously allowed me to share their feedback:

“This is exactly what I needed. I just had my 3rd and thought I knew everything I needed to know, but this is opening my eyes!” – K.L., postpartum mother of 3

“My husband gifted me this after our last baby was born in October and I tore through in a couple days. It is SO good not to be alone.” A.N., postpartum mother of 4

“I was impressed how detailed and attentive you were to hormone issues and common experiences with postpartum charting.” H.C., NFP instructor

You can order yours here – the discount is good through midnight on Black Friday, November 27th.

I’m seriously, seriously contemplating putting up another 500 Christmas lights this afternoon. It’s just such a weird, dark season of life for so many people, and it has helped me tremendously to narrow my focus a bit to the four walls of our home and the illegal amount of people contained therein. (Add a couple neighbor kids watching Dude Perfect in my basement and we’re officially over the respectable number of occupants. #bigfamilyproblems)

It has also been so stabilizing to have the liturgical year to fall back on and to lean into. You guys know me and I’ve never been the craftiest or homemakey-est gal in the blogosphere, but gosh darn it we are going to ADVENT OUR HEARTS OUT THIS YEAR.

Because saying, Come, Oh Come Emmanuel has never felt more appropriate or more urgent.

I’ve got a whole post on Advent plans and tweaks to those plans which the present darkness will make necessary, so stay tuned.

A blessed and gratitude filled thanksgiving to you and yours, whatever form your own celebration takes this year. Though there is much darkness in the world, the light is greater; and the darkness has not – and will not – overcome it.

Last week I launched a brand new baby into the world and have barely had a chance to talk about it, much less write about it. Life has been weirdly, um, chaotic this week. Anyone else? No?

Ahem. Moving on.

I’ve been working for a couple of months now on a secret little project that is especially near and dear to my heart as a veteran survivor of postpartum NFP six times over. In any other industry I think I’d be in senior management, but since my bosses are small and unpredictable and emotionally unstable, I’m still pulling all night shifts in housekeeping.

Eh, what are you going to do?

Around a year into my experience creating content for my NFP membership site, Off the Charts, I started to feel a pull to create more content specifically for postpartum mamas, since that is, in my humble opinion and extensive personal experience, the black hole of NFP.

It’s the time when things are simultaneously the least clear – you might even call them cloudy, ba dum ching – and yet the stakes seem the most high. And, depending upon the kind of delivery you had and whether any complications ensued, the stakes really might be the most high they’ll ever be.

First I’ll say what I always say to mamas who are looking for help with NFP: you need to work with an instructor. Don’t do your own dental work, don’t sew up your own stitches, and don’t try to self teach NFP. I mean, emergencies happen and circumstances can certainly merit the occasional hacking off of one’s limb while trapped for days in a very large boulder crevasse, but…you get the idea.

So, now that we’ve established what this ebook/digital resource is not (NFP lessons) let’s talk about what it is.

When I tell people what I do, I invite them to imagine I’m their best friend who will absolutely look at your test stick if you send a text over, will absolutely meet you for a glass of wine and a good cry when you’re on day 57 of consecutive highs in postpartum Cycle 0, and can point you in the direction of a truly excellent NFP instructor who teaches online.

I can also help you understand why to use NFP, what differentiates it from contraception, why it can be such a powerful force for good in your marriage and in your overall health, and some best practices and common stumbling blocks to look for.

The PNFP SG (that’s a mouthful; think I’ll stick to writing it out from now on) will also help you identify:

• Common hormonal situations that can crop up on the first 12 months after baby
• Opportunities to improve and even deepen your marital relationship even in this kind of crazy and sometimes chaotic season
• Best practices to introduce into the most important relationship in your life: your marriage
• Spiritual resources to help you navigate it all
• And other insider info you probably aren’t going to find in your typical NFP program or by just randomly clicking around in facebook groups

I wanted this to be super accessible, affordable, and easy to distribute and so I used a digital content platform when I created it rather than going a more typical ebook publishing route. It also means you don’t need a kindle or any other kind of e-reader to access it!

You can buy yours here – if you’re purchasing it for a new mama as a gift, simply use her email when you order it, or send an email with that information after purchase to [email protected] and we’ll make sure it gets to her.

Thank you SO much for your support – I can’t wait for you to read it too.

Early praise for The Postpartum NFP Survival Guide:

“This is such a missing link kind of resource – there’s nothing else like it for NFP using couples.” – Kelly F, NFP instructor

“I’m seriously impressed with the stuff you included about hormones and different postpartum scenarios – couples NEED this info after baby” – Marie C, NFP instructor

“I wish I’d had this after our youngest was born. I experienced so many of the symptoms of progesterone deficiency and had no idea what to look for. I’ll know better next time.” Rebecca, NFP user

Grab yours today, or get one for a new mama you love!

Hi, hello, my name is Jenny, and I spent 6 and a half hours on the internet yesterday. Unsurprisingly, I followed that “questionable” (being charitable to myself here) life choice with nearly a whole bottle of inexpensive prosecco and a bedtime more suitable to one’s twenties than thirties, and I may have fallen asleep with fingers scrolling through a Twitter feed rather than sliding across a set of rosary beads last night.

In that brief, humiliating but illuminating intro paragraph, I believe I managed to encapsulate 90% of the highlights from the “don’t do this” list which I am about to reveal to you.

2020 has been a year filled with anxiety, and for the already anxious it has felt, at times, a bit like being trapped on that moving conveyor belt that escorts your car through the carwash, except there *is* no car and you’re just standing there utterly at the mercy of drenching water and pummeling brushes and the terrifying spinning flapping things that make my babies scream.

Listen, as Dave and I are won’t to quote back and forth to one another regularly, “Nobody in my family is dramatic!” But, then, you don’t come here expecting gravitas and composure, do you?

I have found through much trial and error (see again: last night) that the most difficult days are those which combine the 1-2-3-4-5 punch of: pathological fixation on terrible destabilizing world event + too much time online (especially on social media) + overindulging in mind altering substances + no sleep + no prayer.

Weird.

Anyway, here’s what I know I need to stay mindful of during these bizarre and buffeting storms that just keep on rollin’ in. Maybe you’ll find something helpful for yourself:

• The news. Do you watch lots of it? Stop. It’s trash, it’s entertainment packaged as knowledge that leaves you stupider, sicker, and more scared for having consumed it, and I’m beginning to doubt that there are more than a couple real live journalists left anywhere in the world, apart from those doing old school reporting and analysis in niche markets. The news is why we have an epidemic of stupidity and hate and stark raving panic sweeping across the globe. Turn off the news. Whatever happens that you absolutely, essentially must know about? It will find you without your having to sit captive to the doom scroll ticking across the bottom of your screen for hours on end hearing what’s the latest. You will survive without knowing. You will thrive without knowing. Free yourself.

• Of course, you know that the only thing worse than the news is social media. I know, I know…my forever soapbox. But look, that “dictatorship of relativism” that Benedict warned us about way back when? I think this is it: a self-inflicted nightmare alternate reality you both create and are held captive by, emanating from the tiny computer in your hands where the only objective truth you acknowledge is the one that suits your personal preferences. Social media is literally self brainwashing; within its dopamine-bathed echo chamber, an intellectual circle jerk where it’s nearly impossible to entertain an opposing viewpoint or offer a corrective counterpoint, one reflects and, indeed, becomes that which one consumes. Our viewpoints are reinforced, our positions entrenched, and our objectivity blurred by the blue light emanating from our tiny pretend remote controls for reality. Delete Facebook and Twitter, deactivate Instagram, and if you really, really need to check in with one of the disembodied personalities you interact with on the internet, well, it’s not 2005 anymore and you can actually access information on most of these platforms without having an account or a presence there yourself.

• About that bottle of prosecco… Back during the darkest days of lockdown we had to mandate (you know, for ourselves, as card carrying adults capable of self parenting) no alcohol Sunday through Wednesday nights. Does that sound pathetic? Well, it was. And it was also sleep spoiling and waistline expanding. But we live, we learn, and we moderate our consumption back down to a reasonable place where wine accompanies feast days and not just random Tuesdays.

• I have never been so tired in my entire life. Confusingly, it isn’t the baby. A piece of it, surely, can be attributed to parenting half a dozen kids, but even adjusting for offspring inflation, I feel like the crypt keeper. Guess what? Staying up until 11 pm reading hot takes on twitter makes you feel like shit on so many levels. SO many. (refers self back to bullet point 2.) Seriously, I’ve been lying down to nap or attempt something thereof on the days when the big kids are all at school and the babies nap together, and not only does this feel deeply pathetic, but I’ve yet to rediscover my pep, my joie de vivre, my internal drive to succeed at life. Apart from the 208 lawn and leaf bags of toys and clothes and what else I cannot say that I’ve dragged to the thrift store since March, I really don’t have much else, concretely, to show for myself apart from keeping these children alive and my hair occasionally (very occasionally) washed. It’s truly pathetic. I attribute it partially to poor sleep hygiene. Maybe I’ll sleep on November 4th…

• We’re doing better in the spiritual realm, lately, but it’s still always the first thing to go when things derail. If I spent as much time with my Lord as I spend with my phone…Dave and I have been spending the first 10 minutes each morning reading the daily Mass readings out loud together and then doing like the world’s briefest take on Lectio Divino as we share whatever insights or inspirations we receive. It has been incredibly fruitful for our marriage and unlike the pulling of teeth that is grinding out the daily rosary, it’s something we actually both enjoy and look forward to. I 100% believe the rosary is critically important right now, too, however it is a less emotionally satisfying discipline for sure.

I think plenty of us are in a place where a little extra self care could go a long way – and I think of the categories outlined above as real, basic selfceare, the kinda stuff that really does keep the wheels from coming off.

As a very wise and holy priest said earlier this year, “make of this time what you can, let it be the year you look back upon and say ‘oh, yes, 2020, that’s the year we started praying the rosary together as a family, began going to daily Mass, returned to the Sacraments after years away.

2020 was when it all began again.”‘

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I’ve heard – and read – plenty in the past week thanks to that Trump post that went viral (should I refrain from pointing out that Trump, also, went viral? Alas, I cannot. The puns live loudly within me.) about how Christians of good will can “agree to disagree” on the fundamental issues at stake in this election. That it’s possible, according to some voting guide coughed up by some totally disinterested and nonpartisan organization, I’m certain, to tally up the pro life stats of Biden and compare them with the cumulative pro life stats of Trump and bring oneself to the fantastical conclusion that Biden, is, in fact the more pro life of the two candidates.

I suppose it is also possible, along those lines, to compare the number of hit singles and dollars earned between Mozart and Tswift and reach the conclusion that Taylor Swift is, in fact, the more masterful musician of the two.

But is it true?

And in the case of the example above, are the metrics equitably weighted?

When I skimmed a “pro life” voting guide last month that suggested Biden outweighed Trump by double digit numbers because his stance on the environment and racism and immigration gave him a higher cumulative score than the incumbent who has busied himself about appointing solid judges, defunding Planned Parenthood, stripping funding for abortion from international aid, and finally, has put forth THE MOST CRITICALLY IMPORTANT SUPREME COURT NOMINEE TO EVER BE RAISED TO THE HIGH COURT WHO COULD ACTUALLY HELP TO OVERTURN ROE V WADE, I wanted to simultaneously laugh and cry.

Are we this foolish, my fellow Americans?

And are we this poorly formed in our consciences and our capacity to reason, my fellow Christians?

The media is very pleased indeed when the talking points go out across the digital echo chambers proclaiming environmentalism as a core “life issue,” just as much as abortion, and inviting believers to fall all over one another to signal their wokeness on social media by solemnly nodding in virtual agreement that of course, of course immigration and green energy laws are on equal footing with the willful destruction of a human being – OF COURSE THOSE ARE EQUIVALENT ISSUES. It’s not the dark ages, after all. Everyone knows to be truly pro life you have to also be very concerned with gender equality, the wage gap, and carbon footprints.

My friends, this is bullshit. And I invite you to search your hearts and discover if, in fact, deep down you already know that it is.

Out of an abundance of false piety, held aloft to distract from truly crucial moral issues, tepid Christians and milquetoast Catholics trumpet about being “consistent” and not getting pegged as a Single Issue Voter. Because what could be more dreadful than that?

How about death? Could death be more dreadful than that?

Could Planned Parenthood, the single greatest perpetrator of racism in the 21st century, be more dreadful than that?

Could 125,000 deaths every single day of the year be more dreadful than that?*

How about racism? But then, you have to be alive to be a victim or a perpetrator of racial discrimination, bias, or violence.

Perhaps immigration? Then again, dead people cannot escape violence and famine by fleeing their homelands.

It is particularly trendy to claim climate change as The Issue of the day, but again, you need living people to both care for our common home and craft just and prudent legislation for her care.

Are you seeing a theme here? Because I am. And it’s this: maybe the culture – and I’m including everything from Teen Vogue to your social studies class in high school to social media to the trash we watch on tv – maybe it’s beating you over the head with the concept that one mustn’t be a Single Issue Voter, that there is truly no greater sin. That one must diversify one’s focus when it comes to being “truly” pro life, and to not get myopic over abortion as if it were some greater sin against life than All The Other Issues.

But what if they’re wrong?

And what if the culture does not find its true north in the Word of God, in the teaching authority of the Church?

What if the culture values things that are very much in tension with what we profess as believers of Jesus Christ to be the highest good?

If so, would it not appear that your conscience, properly formed in submission to the mind of Christ, would it not appear that your conscience was in fact permanently at odds with the prevailing sentiment of the age?

Christians, we are responsible for forming our consciences and for following them – but forming our consciences means we are pressing them against a form, holding them up to a template and pushing, stretching, continually pursuing the perfection we are called to emulate.

And if your conscience tells you abortion and the right to live, to breathe, and to exist on planet earth is on equal footing with carbon emissions or racism or prison reform, then your conscience is wrong.

Consciences can be improperly formed, after all. And the formation is the work of a lifetime. And – here’s the really, really humbling and tough to swallow part – when our consciences and the Church come to an impasse over an issue, when there is a rebellion in the soul, well, let me break it to you gently: it’s not the Church who is in error; it’s me.

When our consciences lead us astray from the moral order, from the natural law which is written on and discoverable by every human heart, than our consciences are wrong.

And however you might want to parse things out otherwise, this election, because of this Supreme Court vacancy and because of the laundry list of other pro life accomplishments I listed in last week’s post, this election truly does come down to a single issue.

Life.

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him.

Deuteronomy 30:19-20

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*According to WHO, every year in the world there are an estimated 40-50 million abortions. This corresponds to approximately 125,000 abortions per day.

In the USA, where nearly half of pregnancies are unintended and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion [1] , there are over 3,000 abortions per day. Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies in the USA (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion. [2]https://www.worldometers.info/abortions/

4 years ago seems like a lifetime, honestly. I had 4 kids instead of 6. We were still renters. I was still juggling part time work on someone else’s schedule, trying to make everything fit. The run up to the 2016 election season felt insane, but now that we’re all snuggling in to the waning hours of 2020, the year from actual hell, I think I can safely say 2016 was a bit like a contentious student council run off, yes?

I knew I couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, not for all the money in the world, all the penguins in the zoo, all the coffee in the southern hemisphere, etc etc etc. So I held my nose, averted my eyes, and stealthily, guiltily, shamefacedly cast my vote for Trump.

Was I embarrassed? You betcha. Too embarrassed to put so much as a thumbs up on social media, so chastened was I by the mere fact that I was selling out my very soul, according to the court of public opinion, by voting for this clown of a man, this caricature of an actual human being.

Nevermind the fact that Hillary Clinton was – is – demonstrably one of the more (most?) corrupt politicians in recent American history. Never mind that her stance on every issue under the sun was about as far left as the Golden Gate bridge, never mind that her husband was an actual sexual predator who carried on his philanderings in the actual White House, I was expected to – nay, commanded to – throw my support behind Clinton based largely upon her proud possession of a uterus. Because feminism!

Besides, Trump was, according to the media, the political peanut gallery, and multitudes of people of faith, both on and offline, a bonafide monster. A p*ssy grabber. A misogynist cad with a bad hairpiece a third marriage (probably just for show) and a brash and “uncharitable” way of speaking his mind.

If I were a good Christian, a good person, the rhetoric insisted, I’d have refrained from sullying my conscience and simply abstained from the vote entirely.

But, here’s the thing. As I looked around at the political frenzy that surrounded 2016 and the increasingly hysterical rhetoric surrounding the candidacy of Donald Trump, as I watched the media hyperventilate as he dominated the Republican debates, rising about a tepid and wilting crowd of career politicians, I couldn’t help but notice that the same media who fundamentally opposed almost everything I stood for, from the sanctity of human life to the dignity and sacramental nature of marriage to the blunt reality that men have penises and women have vaginas, well, these people really, really did not want Donald Trump to get elected.

So much so that, it turns out, either every single one of them spectacularly misread the polls, or else they willfully ignored, suppressed, or manipulated the data that would have made election night 2016 less of a bombshell.

I was stunned. I think the entire world was stunned. How could the media have gotten it so wrong? How could it be that there were enough deplorable, hate-filled, ignorant, bible-clutching, gun-toting morons in these great United States of America capable of handing Trump one of the biggest upsets in modern politics?

As the reality of what had transpired sank in, and heads exploded across airwaves and social media platforms the world over, I reflected on the disparity between what I’d been shown in the news coverage and what had actually transpired.

And I realized something.

I realized, perhaps shamefully late in life, but I got there, nonetheless…I realized that the media itself, every inch of it, had – has – an agenda. And that agenda? It trumps (no pun intended) absolutely everything else.

And we had just witnessed perhaps the greatest rebuke to that agenda of all time.

The American people were supposed to reject Trump resoundingly. Because the moral elite, fatally impaired in most of the actual virtues but prodigies in the art of virtue signaling, insisted that we do so, because Trump was yucky.

As this realization sunk in over the first year of Trump’s presidency, while I was still holding my nose and watching with skepticism as he began to govern, I found myself increasingly clicking over to Cspan or the Whitehouse.gov YouTube channel, sort of checking in to contrast the mainstream media coverage with what had actually transpired. I wanted to see if he really was the dictatorial monster Anderson Cooper and AOC make him out to be.

So I watched, and I listened.

I watched him address the March for Life, streaming the coverage from EWTN because it wasn’t on a single other channel. I listened to his live streamed speech before three quarters of a million marchers gathered on the national mall, not fully understanding how a sitting president of the United States of America could get away with the following statement:

As you all know, Roe vs. Wade has resulted in some of the most permissive abortion laws anywhere in the world.  For example, in the United States, it’s one of only seven countries to allow elective late-term abortions, along with China, North Korea, and others.

Right now, in a number of states, the laws allow a baby to be born [torn] from his or her mother’s womb in the ninth month. It is wrong; it has to change.

Americans are more and more pro-life.  You see that all the time.  In fact, only 12 percent of Americans support abortion on demand at any time.

Under my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life.

What?

What had I just heard? I shook my head in disbelief, logging in to Twitter expecting to find Catholics and other Christians cheering in solidarity. Instead I found snarky, sarcastic criticism about how if he were “truly pro life” he would change his stance on immigration, parental leave policies, access to contraception, etc etc etc.

About a year later as the immigration crisis began to rise to a critical level, as the media coverage indicated, pictures started circulating of immigrant children detained at the US border in cages. Trump, the monster, according to most news reports, was personally responsible. Oddly enough, some of the earliest circulating photos accompanying the media coverage of this objectively disturbing situation dated back to … 2014, during the Obama Administration, attributed to a Congressman’s website where he details a visit to the border and his satisfaction at finding the immediate needs of migrant men, women and children so diligently met by US agencies and various coordinating charitable organizations.

What?

Then and there I adopted a new habit: to dig into the dull, densely worded and not-at-all headline-shaping transcripts from CSpan, NPR, whitehouse.gov and other duller than dirt government sources on Twitter and the like so that I could read through Trump’s judicial appointments, policy decisions, and executive orders myself, needing to know for sure that I was getting the truth.

This is what I found.

• Thus far, Trump has installed two (soon to be three, most likely) Supreme Court justices and 205  judges overall to the federal bench — all for lifetime appointments. (Even if Trump is not reelected in 2020, his presidency will continue to have an impact on the direction of the US due to the sheer number of conservative federal judges he’s installed.

• Three years into his presidency, Trump’s signature legislative achievement remains a Republican tax bill that made sweeping changes to the tax code — the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The law was the biggest overhaul to the nation’s tax code in three decades, permanently slashing the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35% while also providing temporary benefits for individuals and their families.

• Trump signed the First Step Act into law in December 2018, marking the first legislative victory in years for advocates seeking to reform the criminal justice system. The bill also aims to lower recidivism by offering more rehabilitation and job-training opportunities, and it includes provisions intended to treat prisoners humanely — banning the shackling of pregnant inmates, halting the use of solitary confinement for most juvenile inmates, and mandating that prisoners be placed in facilities within 500 miles from their families.

• After a five-year effort led by the US, ISIS’s caliphate was finally defeated in March 2019 when a US raid led to the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the world’s most wanted terrorist up to that point.

• Trump finalized the Protect Life Rule, cutting Planned Parenthood’s federal funding by $60 million.

• He reinstated the Mexico City Policy that ends federal funding of overseas abortions. The Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance program safeguards more than $8.8 BILLION in overseas aid from being used for abortions.

• Signed a bill that allowed states to defund Planned Parenthood of Title X (family planning) funding, reversing an Obama attempt to force states to fund abortion providers.

• Defunded the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) which supported China’s population control program (which includes forced abortions).

• Issued new guidance ensuring hospitals provide medical care to infants who survive abortions.

•  Cut HHS funding for fetal tissue research…

So, um, should I go on?

While we’re being browbeaten by an amoral, scratch that, immoral media, powered largely by Hollywood and celebrity outrage culture for voting for a man who is just a hairsbreadth above satan himself when it comes to moral character, according to Lady Gaga and Nancy Pelosi and even my very kind neighbor lady, he’s over there in DC like, signing bills that lower taxes, facilitate prison reform, and protect unborn human life.

I don’t know about you, but I am sick to death of being moralized and preached to by a corrupt, spineless, and utterly compromised media who literally say the opposite of what is true.

I’ve seen Catholics in recent weeks make the case that Joe Biden – Joe Biden! Who has been in his basement for the past 4 months and can’t form a cogent sentence! – is the only morally sound choice this year.

Joe Biden, a lapsed Catholic who shows no sign of having repented from serving in the most corrupt and anti life political administration in history. Joe Biden whose credible (look this word up, it will become increasingly important especially as the impending SCOTUS nominee starts having their lives nuked in the coming days) accusations of sexual assault were ignored, downplayed, or outright accepted by the media and his political allies because even though he may have actually raped that one woman, he is still a better overall choice for all women (?????) than is the sitting President.

Joe Biden, who has aligned himself with a vice presidential candidate who is literally a socialist and a virulent anti Catholic, to boot.

But at least he’s not Trump, right?

I know lots of people are disgusted by Trump’s past, by the sleaze, the divorces, the degrading comments towards women. But is he still there? And most importantly, does it inform the way he governs?

I don’t want to make excuses for immorality, for corruption, for sin. And I won’t. But if someone has changed? If someone lives a corrupt life and turns away from it? Even if not in a public act of repentance, if in word and deed (read: what someone says and what someone does) someone amends their life, does this make a difference?

This is important. It is fundamental-to-Christianity level important. Is he still pro “choice”? Is he passing laws that undermine the family and the sanctity of human life? Is he raping women in the White House? Is he molesting children? Is he embezzling from government coffers, spending taxpayer dollars on entertainment? Abusing the power of the US military?

What is he doing now, today, that merits his title as Monster in Chief, bestowed on him by the illustrious court of public opinion and presided over by the Honorable Judge Hollywood?

Because it matters. Tremendously. Do the research. Figure the answer to this one out for yourself. You owe it to your country, to your family, and to the rest of the free world. Don’t let the media – and that includes social media, maybe even more so depending on your demographic – do your thinking for you.

Don’t settle for anything less than reality.

Just because something isn’t popular doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

In fact, in the year 2020, it may well be that if something is popular, you should take a long, hard second look at it, and figure it out for yourself.

“Is it true?”

Truth matters. Reality matters. Results matter.

Trump 2020. I’m not ashamed anymore.

(P.s. Comments are closed, because I’m also not stupid anymore. Happy election season!)

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In this phase of life – of parenthood? Of 2020? – time seems exceedingly distorted. Mornings stretch out into almost infinity as I process load after load of laundry only to look up and see that it’s 9:23 am and, so, apparently time has stood still.

If it’s later in the week, on a day when I have only 2 sleeping babies at home, if the stars align and they synch up their naps, time speeds to triple and I blink and it’s time to leave for carpool. I’m so grateful our kids are in full day school this year, so grateful there have been no issues so far, so happy they’re so happy. Lockdown was hard on all of us, hardest on me, I thought for sure, but now that they’re with their friends again, playing sports, swapping stories of what I did on my weirdest summer vacation ever, I realize how hard it must have been on them.

Yesterday I ordered takeout from a favorite burger place for a living room picnic with the 4 little kids while Dave had a work dinner and the big boys were camping with Grandpa. Later in the evening I overheard Luke describing the interior of the restaurant to Evie in exacting detail, commenting on the lights, the tables, the piped in music. I had to laugh because we were in the lobby for maybe 25 seconds, standing just inside the entrance while a hostess grabbed our to-go order from a makeshift station and handed it over. But the poor guy, he has hardly seen the inside of a building other than home or our parish in 6 months. He was entranced! I made a mental note to let him join me on my next shopping trip. If he thinks the lobby of Bad Daddy’s was rad, wait until he sees Walmart.

I’ve noticed, also, that my drive to work outside of our four walls has waned to an unrecognizable level. I’m still enjoying running Off the Charts, supporting and encouraging couples in their practice of NFP, but my appetite for growing the ministry, for speaking or writing outside of this little space and the videos I record for the community there, has dwindled to nothing. At first I chalked it up to PPD; once that was handled, I figured it was a 4 month sleep deficit and lockdown ptsd. But, I think it’s something else. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately sort of sitting at the feet, so to speak, of more experienced moms, reading their essays, watching their youtube tutorials. I spent hours last week during our freakishly early snowstorm and 48 hour cold snap poring through the Like Mother, Like Daughter archives, reading post after post from Leila Lawler’s years and years of compiled wisdom. I’ve come to realize, after spending days and weeks and months tethered more closely than ever to home, that far from being a drudgery and prison, it has become a place of increasing freedom.

Let me back up a bit.

For much of my motherly life, as those of you who’ve been reading from the beginning already probably know (gulp, Mama Needs Coffee turns 10 next year!) I’ve found myself walking that familiar tightrope of identifying as a stay at home mom but also, “something more.”

Initially I worked out of necessity, I told myself, paying down my student loan debt and chipping away with a BIG shovel at the ‘ol Dave Ramsey snowball. And then the babies started coming. I doubled down my efforts and kept apace, but something strange started to happen. My shovel shrank.

Or, rather, the pile of snow started to accumulate rather than melt away, with diapers and hospital co-pays and the cost of living with 3 and then 4 and then 8 family members, yes, but also with the cost of convenience foods, dinners out, trips, gym memberships, babysitting, trips through the Starbucks drive through, the Target dollar spot, sparkling water by the caseload…all things that I could, technically, do without, but things I wasn’t willing to surrender so long as I was working like a dog to “do it all.”

I took on massive freelance projects, pushed myself after babies’ bedtimes to hit deadlines that I’d plowed ahead and committed to, working my regular job in the shrinking hours between kid needs and meal requests.

As the babies grew into toddlers and then preschoolers and kindergarteners, their immediate physical needs waned, even as their emotional and social needs skyrocketed. I could no longer count on 2 or 3 hours of quiet work time in the afternoons. I could no longer count on any quiet work time. My mornings got earlier and my nights got later. I was tired and resentful and definitely not enjoying motherhood.

Enter baby number 6. Benny’s pregnancy was really the last straw. It only took half a dozen kids, but I finally hit the limit, mentally, physically, and emotionally. It made zero sense on paper, but I finally got the courage to quit my job at CNA and started out on my own with increasingly regular speaking gigs, bigger writing projects, and of course, Off the Charts. All throughout the first 2 trimesters of that pregnancy I was pretty much high on the intoxicating rush of freedom and sheer terror that is self employment. I switched gyms and joined the YMCA specifically for their 2 hour daily childcare limit. I worked feverishly at a peeling laminate table squeezed between the racquetball courts and the men’s locker room, familiarizing myself with the back end of a website and learning about list building and sales funnels and how to batch record content. I registered for an LLC, bought a handful of domains, hired a bookkeeper, added 2 contract employees to help manage admin tasks, and it was off to the races.

The first 6 months were exhilarating. The second 6 months were excruciating. Now, more than a year out, I’m finally feeling like I know enough to know that I don’t know much, at all. The fire to grow my audience and self promote has dwindled to absolute ashes, thanks in large part, no doubt, to abandoning social media in all its forms.

And the strangest things begin to happen.

I spend time scrolling though soothing images of clean, empty rooms on Pinterest and somehow find bags and bags of clothes and toys and books to donate. Every week at least another bag or two. I start googling things like “how to deep clean a bathroom” and I watch video tutorials on big family batch cooking and how to expertly roll paint on a wall. As the online world fades and the actual world seems like an ever hotter burning dumpster fire, home starts to look less like a prison and more like a refuge. I let my sister direct a redecoration of almost the entire first floor of our house, tossing out hand me down end tables and the mishmash of “eclectic” pieces of furniture we had somehow amassed over the 7 years since we moved home from Rome.

The thrift store angels yield up one treasure after another, items and prices too good to be true: a 12 by 14 ft jute rug still rolled up in its packaging, unmarked and haggled by me down to $19 dollars. I googled it later and widened my eyes at the original price: $500. I toss all our old, mismatched plastic kid gear and fill the cupboard with one shelf of thrifted, all white Corelle dishes. Shatterproof, yes, but not technically, entirely unbreakable. Even so, the peace and beauty of the kitchen without Paw Patrol water bottles and neon green plastic cups and bowls is worth the price of a broken dish every couple of weeks or so. (Luke.)

As home becomes more beautiful and kids become increasingly awake, active, and self aware, my focus continues to shift ever more inward, my vision narrowing at times for days and days on the four walls of our house.

When I was a younger mom I had to leave the house at least once a day for the library, the gym, Chicfila, just anywhere but here. I felt frantic to escape the narrowing walls of what felt, sometimes, a bit like a prison. I chafed at the weight of the daily tasks required of me, the tasks I felt at once overqualified to perform at at the same time deeply unprepared to carry out well. I had yet to experience the sweaty satisfaction of a bathroom well scrubbed and sanitized, a massive pile of laundry reduced to nothing.

I knew little about home making, and so making a home seemed little, too. Insignificant and secondary. Cooking 3 meals a day felt – still feels sometimes, truth be told – like some kind of work release program: “yes, you get to have these cute kids and wonderful husband, but there’s a catch – they’re going to want to eat. Every day.”

Where am I going with this rambling, meandering reflection? I’m not sure. But there is some thread running through this all I can’t quite pull together, something about narrowing one’s field of vision and suddenly having the entire horizon filled with the beauty of your immediate surroundings.

With increasing regularity, I am learning not to mind standing at the sink, washing the millionth pile of dishes for the week (our dishwasher broke in June, because of course it did. And the part is backordered forever because 2020.) I am content not to weigh in on The Latest Thing, much of the time now. I’m not sure, financially, what will be the ramifications of my pulling back from my earning potential, saying no to more outside work as the pace of the inside work accelerates. But I know it’s what they need.

And it’s what I need, too. And I can say that now, honestly. I need to be home. My home needs me. And it is not beneath my station to learn how to properly scrub a toilet or roast a cheap cut of meat. Quite the opposite, I’m finding it thrilling to grow in mastery at things I just assumed I wasn’t good at.

Kind of like that season I spent learning HTML and online marketing.

I think we’ve all been given a rather unique opportunity to see the value of the work done in and around the home these past 6 months. How many of us darkened the door of a hardware store in that span, perhaps for the first time in a long time, the first time ever? How many internet searches for “how to repair a blank” were sent out into the ether? How many of us experienced the beauty and the exquisite, exquisite pain of explaining multiplication or a finer point of grammar to someone who shares your last name and your dinner table but whose academic formation was formerly a complete mystery?

I have no conclusion, but I wonder in continued curiosity at the way things are unfolding, the way life is developing in a totally different direction than I’d have ever predicted – or asked for.

(p.s. I still don’t really like to cook.)

I am finding myself oddly relieved that summer is on its way out whilst simultaneously dreading the advent of Fall for, perhaps, the first time in my adult life. I have always loved PSL season, the thrill of premature seasonal decor in the harder-core neighbors yards, (anyone who used to follow me on Instagram knows exactly which neighbors I speak of: At the time of publication, a skeleton biker gang, zombie red riding hood and a big bad werewolf AND 5 dozen fake pumpkins had already been spotted. Also, a single, empty wheelchair waits hauntingly atop their driveway. One can only imagine what mid-September will yield.) and (sob) the return of football season, cut brutally short at its very heart and soul this year with our local governance’s ordinance against outdoor high school sports. Because, you know, if we ban football, those big, goofy, naughty 17 year olds definitely aren’t going to be finding other ways to gather in groups and touch each other.

But I digress.

I did a somewhat maniacal stress-cleaning of the basement this morning, sweeping legos and cat food and spiders and old Doritos (??) alike into trash bags, beads of sweat rolling off my face and hitting the concrete. Joey and I made a run to the thrift store to drop off, somehow, 5 entire bags of donations plus a couple pieces of under-utilized furniture. Don’t ask me how many donation runs I’ve made during the rona season, because I’ll never tell. My endless aspirations to minimalism have only been stoked higher and hotter by days and weeks and months spent in close, close quarters with my beloveds.

After trundling though a line of 14 cars (is anyone else experiencing this? I bet it’s easier to get an indoor table at a nice restaurant these days than a spot in the drop off line at Goodwill) we turned our big white beast of a van back around (hi, hello, we bought a 12 passenger van and now the stereotype is complete) and circled the lot for a parking spot in order to complete what Dave affectionately refers to as the thrift store rental cycle (Donate, browse, buy, repeat). In my defense, it is 97 degrees today here in Denver and by Tuesday it will plummet to 25 (!!!) and I don’t know where any of our sweatshirts or light jackets are lurking, plus I suspect all the lbs we accumulated during lockdown are going to necessitate at least a minor shuffling of the outerwear deck.

Thrilling, thrilling weekend be mine. Last night I spent time in both urgent care with my sister who suffered a nasty charcuterie board injury AND, merely an hour later, was summoned to the ER with one very, very lucky six year old whose brother did not cut her thumb completely off with garden shears while harvesting pumpkins. So much for girls’ night out. This morning we audibly and specifically thanked every single family member’s guardian angel before praying our Saturday morning rosary, because they’re putting in some serious overtime in our house lately.

I’ve been trying to spend more time reading books and less time reading the news – quitting social media has been a great boost, but there are still a few news aggregators I find myself compulsively checking in a residual occupational tic I’ve found hard to break even as my illustrious journalism career lies further and further in the rearview. I’ve been working to disrupt the cycle by carrying my kindle in one dress pocket and my phone in the other so that I actually have a choice rather than defaulting always, always to the phone (also, hi, hello, I’ve been living in a rotating 4 pack of hideous, shapeless bag dresses from walmart made out of – honest to gosh – stretchy headband material, and they are both wonderfully comfortably and deeply, deeply unflattering but there is so very little will left to present oneself to the world these days, you know?

Also, alas, the baby weight.

Every time I find myself with all 4 options in the dirty clothes I vow to return them to the garbage pile of fashion from whence they evolved, but then one comes back to me, hot and stretchy and sagging fresh from the dryer and gosh darn it I just can’t help myself.

I need a What Not to Wear level intervention, but first I need about 7 straight days of uninterrupted sleep and for my kids to go back to school.

We are wonderfully, blessedly, eagerly returning to in person learning at our fine little school, but alas a back to school cold that would have cost us 2 days of absence any other year stretched interminably into a week plus a long weekend “just to make sure” nobody is secretly harboring The Virus, masquerading as a common cold and sans fever, shortness of breath, or chills.

2020 you’ve given us so little to work with.

And yet, we have made improvements, too. Our kids spend more time together than ever before, which includes cage fighting but also much more frequent (read: ever) family rosaries. A wonderfully holy priest counseled a friend early in this whole shitshow: “Forget reading about the news. Let 2020 be the year you look back on one day and say, ‘oh, yes, 2020, I remember what happened that year…that’s the year we began praying the rosary (together/alone/as a family) every day. It’s the year I started going to daily Mass. It’s the year I began starting every day with God’s Word.’”

I think about his words often. I wonder what God’s intention for 2020 is, for me.

Onward to the reading list:

“The Age of Miracles” – guys I read this in a single day, during which time my children ate nothing but granola bars and yogurt. this is the quarantine comfort read WE’VE ALL BEEN LOOKING FOR. (and by comforting I mean, of course, their situation is decidedly worse than ours. Spoiler alert, but at least the earth’s magnetic field is still intact!)

“Discernment of Spirits” – I’ve been meaning to read this for years, and despite the fact that my spiritual director of 10+ years regularly directs Ignatian retreats, it turns out I had a few pretty significant misconceptions about what Ignatian Discernment actually entails. It’s SO good.

“The Day is Now Far Spent” – I know he’s too old, but man I wish Cardinal Sarah would be the next pope. A slow, beautiful, thick read. I’m only halfway through after a month.”

“For Women Only” – Embarrassing title, world rocking content. Cannot recommend highly enough for every married or engaged woman.

“The Family and the New Totalitarianism” – weirdly prophetic from the 90s (but not really, considering it was written by Michael O’Brien). A good gut check that all this craziness didn’t appear overnight, that the foundation has been eroding for some time now. Not all doom and gloom, but definitely a serious sort of read.

“My Lord John” – my last Georgette Heyer (sob); I’ve now plowed through her entire catalogue and she’s dead, so, also, is a part of me.

“Parenting From the Inside Out” – I don’t remember enough about this except to say it was mildly distressing to read about a lot of the traumas I’m re-inflicting on my own children from not having fully processed my own crap.

So instead I’d recommend…”Mindsight” – by the same author, which delves into a lot of the stuff explaining why we are the way we are, including unconscious beliefs/actions, patterns of behavior, inherited baggage, generational trauma, and just really so much interesting stuff. It was not a lighthearted read, but neither is it depressing. Validating is the word I’m looking for.

“The Heart of Perfection” – liked, but didn’t love. Well, I should say I liked the chapters introducing me to new saints very much – Campbell has a way of really humanizing characters who have a way of seeming too aspirational and one-dimensional, which is amazing. I didn’t really connect with her personal sections though, maybe because I’m wandering around in a dirty topknot draped in sleeveless, size XL walmart mumus these days so perfection is not something one might say I am actively striving to attain.

“A Higher Call” – so good. Do you love WWII books? Read this.

“Boys Adrift” – a must read for all parents of boys. Be warned, you will probably spend $100 dollars on stainless steel water bottles and glass tupperware before you finish the book. My apologies in advance to your budget.

wish I could take credit for this gem, but all props go to some bro called ThioJo.

Let me start this off with a big ol 2020 caveat: if you’re concerned about transmitting or contracting covid, whether because of an underlying condition or an immunocompromised person in your life, you should be free to stay home and exercise every precaution. This is not a post telling people with depressed immune systems or chronic diseases to suck it up and start taking public transit again. If you feel safest at home, you should be free to remain there. And thanks to an increasingly digital economy, it is actually conceivable that someone could shelter at home more or less indefinitely.

End disclaimer.

I’ve noticed a troubling trend in coverage, whether secular or religious, identifying people who are eager to get back to in person worship as either foolhardy (at best) or selfishly reckless (at worst). At first I was perplexed because the same voices were generally in favor of (safely) patronizing newly re-opened restaurants and hair salons and other small businesses who had struggled mightily during lockdown. I was further perplexed because my church, at least, mandates the most slavishly observant covid protocol-adherence of nearly anywhere else I’ve been during this madness, including doctor’s offices, airports, grocery stores, and restaurants.

As the lockdown has continued to ease and summer has marched on, I’ve continued to observe a disturbing apathy among believers coupled with outright sneering disdain from the culture at large when it comes to a return to public worship. The latter surprises me not at all, but the former is a bit alarming.

At a glance, I can see two obvious reasons for the reluctance to resume in person services. First, if you aren’t Catholic and you don’t believe there’s anything beyond fellowship, great music, and compelling preaching happening up there on the altar, the stage, or whatever you might call your focal point of worship, then, I suppose that makes sense. While you can’t totally replicate it streaming at home or in a small house church kind of setting, you can probably come fairly close with enough creativity and a good wifi connection.

But we Catholics, you see, cannot.

Don’t get me wrong, we can (and we must, I’d argue with increasing urgency) form small, intimate communities of faith and get in the habit of worshiping together in informal and ordinary spaces like our homes and places of learning. If we don’t share our faith organically with our family and friends in our homes and in our ordinary lives, our faith is not going to survive what is coming. But let us not presume for a moment that the Mysterium fidei can be supplanted by Zoom Bible studies and conveniently live-streamed Masses said by our favorite celebrity priests.

It is wonderful that we have unleashed the gospel anew across what Pope Benedict called “the digital continent” during these deeply troubling and uncertain times over the past 5 months. But we must never forget that our primary obligation as believers places us firmly and messily in the midst of real people in a real building with the Real Presence of Jesus Christ Sunday after Sunday, and yes, in most places the Sunday obligation is still dispensed and so we are not bound by canon law to attend Mass, particularly so where it is difficult or impossible to do so, as is sadly the case in so many dioceses around the world. But if we can go, shouldn’t we?

If we are well enough, if we are resuming our normal lives in so many other ways, doesn’t it feel essential that we return to the pews to worship our Jesus as He asks to be worshiped, in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass?

And doesn’t it seem important to take up space in this way so that other people don’t forget that public worship is, for Catholic Christians, very much an essential service?

And doesn’t it seem important so that we, ourselves, do not forget this?

Again, if you are frail or elderly or have any other reason to be exceedingly cautious in striving to avoid this virus, this is not a adjournment to go out and put your life on the line, so to speak. But if one has resumed in person shopping in stores, visiting doctor’s offices for in person appointments, getting hair cuts and buying bookshelves and potted plants and catching up over drinks or coffee…and if all these things can be done safely and prudently, then shouldn’t we be beating down the doors of our local parishes and begging our priests for the Blessed Sacrament?

Because that is one thing we can’t replicate, remotely.

Or one Person, rather. Jesus comes to us through His word and He is present to us in our vocations, and of course He is omnipotent because, hello, God. But there is only one place we can receive Him physically. Touch Him. Consume Him. Be transformed and renewed by Him.

And it can’t happen over Skype.

Our culture desperately needs to know this. The world needs to know it. Jesus doesn’t make telehealth visits. He spits in the mud and touches ears and pulls hands into bloodied wounds and He rests on our tongues and in our bellies. And worship of Him is not predominately a private, personal affair best kept behind closed doors and safely tucked away in private residences.

The ultimate form of public worship – participation in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass – is really one of the most fundamentally corporate thing we can do as human beings. It’s the most massively public experience imaginable. Because not only are we united in fellowship with our surrounding congregation, during Holy Mass, we are united with the entire communion of saints, with heaven itself.

And it is essential. Don’t ever let anyone convince you otherwise.

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I know I should be gently nudging our days back towards something resembling structure, particularly structure of the academic variety, but with the prospect of a very, very different sort of back to school season looming over our collective heads, I haven’t had the heart to start implementing much in the way of housebreaking these fine and feral children of mine.

Actually, I take that back. I’ve started keeping a random pair of shoes that fit most of my 2 to 6 crowd, so when someone inevitably “forgets” to finish getting dressed and we have to go into, I don’t know, a gas station or someplace exotic like that, I can point to that sad, scuffed pair of hot pink Cat and Jack velcro specials and say “I don’t care if you’re a boy and very offended right now, you’re also barefoot and vaguely sticky. Shoes. on.”

It’s called standards. Look it up.

Speaking of standards, and getting back into the academic swing of things (<— flawless transition line if ever I’ve seen one), my friend Cassie created a life preserver to toss to other parents, forged in the grueling fires of corona lockdown and born of the necessity to have something – literally anything – that doesn’t involve a glowing screen to help us weather “the new normal” (gentle barfing sounds) amidst the new boutique elementary schools we’re all running in our homes.

I don’t know about you, but I’m crossing my fingers it’s business as usual come late August, but also planning for Apocalypse Then, if, you know, it comes.

Enter “SchoolBoxCo: it’s a hands on, turnkey subscription box filled with standards based, interactive lessons in four core content areas each month: English/Language Arts, Science, Engineering, and Math.

We got to preview the 2nd/3rd grade box for September, and it was descended upon by my preK, kindergartener, 3rd grader and the tag along 2-year-old as soon as it hit our porch. The soon to be fourth grader didn’t get in on the fun only because the box looked like a carcass from the elephant graveyard scene in the Lion King by the time Luke was finished “sampling” the materials, but otherwise I found it spot on age appropriate and engaging for kids between ages 5-9.

What’s funny (to me, at least) is that Cassie taught elementary school for nearly a decade and still found Lockdown: Not the Movie to be almost as traumatic as I did, who has spent nary a second even playing a teacher on tv.

We both agree that the “distance learning” thing we experienced – nay, endured – was closer to penance than progress, experientially. The battle of the screens was real, and it was intense. Especially for younger kids whose learning is so vitally hands on (or at least, it should be) the switch to laptops and zoom calls and pre recorded video content was a rough ride, and we saw attention spans and tempers fray all around.

I’ll be tucking SchoolBoxCo into my back pocket for the Fall, come what may, because having a fun and custom designed “treat” (but secretly, learning!) to dangle as a big fat carrot if they’ll just please, please finish their spelling words sounds like a good game plan. And even if we don’t end up back in domestic quarantine (please, baby Jesus), it’ll be great to have a non-netflix prize to hand out after school when the boredom bugs bite.

You can order your own SchoolBoxCo box here, and learn a little more about it here.

P.s. Between now and July 31st, new subscribers can save 15% off their first order. (Not sponsored! Just think it’s great.)