This past year has been the busiest of my life with a new marriage, pregnancy, full-time graduate school, multiple moves, homeschooling a new stepson, and approaching the date of finally getting Cece’s service dog. It has been hard to find time to write this calendar year, hard to process all of the changes that seem…
As human persons, we are born with an innate incapacity for self-regulation. Our initial understanding of self exists only in reference to our mothers; we are inescapably relational creatures from the first stirrings of conception. An infant can no more control his or her emotions than cause the sun to rise and set at will….
For the newly postpartum mother, the exact tone, pitch, and key of her newborn infant’s cry can trigger panic, milk, and tears simultaneously. This is not coincidence. This is not emotionalism. There is nothing in the world like the cry of a newborn mammal, and there is no one in the world more equipped to…
On April 16, 1879, St. Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes died at age 35. She was always a sickly child, barely surviving the cholera epidemic of 1855 and suffering from asthma all throughout her short life. Towards the end, she developed tuberculosis, culminating in a tubercular tumor on her right knee. According to the nuns who…
I spent my undergraduate years insatiably devouring mystical and sacred texts from world religions, desperately hoping to find answers to the inexhaustible questions of life. Among the most important of these questions to me was the nature and meaning of suffering. Buddhist teaching frustrated and repelled me because it advocated eliminating attachment as a way…
Every day, as I walk Cecilia down for her naps in her stroller, I walk past endless baked and desiccated carcasses of earthworms. They die while trying to cross the hot, dry concrete of the sidewalks and then their flesh is washed away in the next rainfall or carried off by the industry of ants….
Fetal microchimerism (FMc) describes the persistence of low numbers of fetal cells in the mother after a pregnancy. A number of recent studies suggests FMc may play a role in the etiology of some autoimmune diseases. Remarkably, FMc has been demonstrated to persist for up to 38 years after pregnancy… – http://www.bloodjournal.org/content/102/10/3465?sso-checked=true Pregnancy, in itself, is…
Since I was a teenager, I have re-read Madeline L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light every summer out of sheer love of the story. I am not sure how, but I don’t think I ever realized until now how much this book is about death. It has been helpful to re-read this book with the…