Getting my life back

[This is a Part II to the post Putting Our Lives on Hold.]

This weekend will mark my fourth Mother's Day as a mom. It's stunning to think of how much things have changed since that first Mother's Day not that long ago. Three years and two more babies later, I see now that it was the crucible of motherhood that shattered the fragile life philosophy that I learned from the secular world, made me fearlessly seek truth and, ultimately, taught me the true meaning of life. Here are my reflections.


Back when my first child was born, I had a certain amount of angst about being the mother of a baby. It was odd. I loved my son dearly and saw the great importance of shaping another person's life...and yet, there was always this voice in the back of my mind that murmured, "What about my life?" Despite my tremendous love for my child, there was a part of me that felt like I'd hit the pause button on my life the day he was born. The full-time care that babies and toddlers require was so wearying, and I frequently commented to my husband that I couldn't wait until our youngest child went off to elementary school so that I could finally "get my life back!" I felt like there was always a carrot stick hanging in front of my nose, distracting me, promising the glory days to come when I would no longer have little ones around and I could finally get back to really living.

In my mind, the phase of life with babies and toddlers underfoot was drastically different than other phases of life. As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, I assumed that the only way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused. This was the default, the only way to live life to the fullest. Being the mother of little ones was a rare situation in which you were thrust into being temporarily other-focused, and was therefore something to just grit your teeth and endure until it was over and you could get back to the default.

After my second child was born in the midst of painful medical complications, life with little ones got even harder. You'd think that I would have found myself more desperate than ever to move on from this grueling time in my life, and yet, that didn't happen. This was around the time I had started to take a serious look at Christianity, and in the process of reading up on God and what he's revealed to us through his Word and his Church, I started to notice something interesting:

My life as a mother started to make a lot more sense when seen through the teachings of Christianity.

I've said many times before that reading the Christian explanation of why we are here, what we are to do and how we are to live was like reading an articulation of words that had been written on my heart all long -- and this was especially true when it came to motherhood. I increasingly found that my secular, godless worldview offered me no lexicon for describing what was so beautiful about motherhood, and why it was worth it; yet Christianity described it perfectly. I started to find some very interesting answers to that nagging question, "What about my life?"

Christianity was telling me that all those things I yearned for that fueled my self-focused pursuits -- happiness, excitement, security, youthfulness, joy, importance -- were actually yearnings for God, and that I'd never find peace until I sought him. At first that claim sounded crazy, even after I thought it was possible that God might exist. But when I took a hard look at my worldly pre-motherhood life and recalled the travel, the parties, the socializing, the trendy size 8 clothes -- all those things that were supposedly my "real life" that I was so anxious to get back to -- I started to realize something: none of those pursuits ever brought me lasting happiness. In my self-focused life without God there was certainly happiness and joy, yet it was fragile. There was always a feeling of restlessness, a never-ending search for the next big thing. I felt like I couldn't stay still too long, or the happiness might go away.

"OK, I'll bite," I thought after contemplating this for a while. "If I've somehow been groping around for God this whole time and won't be able to truly rest until I find him, how do I go about doing that?"

It was when I got the answer to that question that my entire life -- in particular my life as a mother -- finally made sense.

I discovered that the path to God is the path of agape, of self-giving love. When John wrote in Chapter 4 of his first Epistle, "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love," he wasn't talking about just any kind of love. I "loved" traveling and sleeping in on weekends and pretty much anything that involved me doing things for me without having to make sacrifices. But that's not the kind of love John was talking about. The kind of love that leads to God, that God is, is agape: self-emptying, other-focused, inconvenient, sometimes-painful love.

When I started to seek God by seeking agape, everything changed. For one thing, the carrot stick disappeared; that siren song of the self-focused glory days to come when I no longer had children in diapers was silenced, the tension gone. My life as a mom of little ones was no longer in such sharp contrast to my future life without young children: either way, I'd be serving others. I found that this was the meaning of life, the secret to lasting happiness, the hidden key that unlocked the mysteries of the spiritual realm that I'd spent my whole life trying to find.

And, ironically, after I came to embrace the idea of a life dedicated to agape, I actually ended up with more time for myself. Because in my secular mindset the other-focusedness of the childbearing years was a temporary situation that you would extricate yourself from as soon as possible, my mentality was to just hold my nose and plow through it. I would have thought that to further embrace selflessness would lead to mental and physical collapse! But what I realized, through Christianity, was that a life of agape is not a life of running yourself ragged. To truly serve God and others to the best of your ability is to humbly accept that you are only human, and that there are limits to what you can do. Using the Rules of Life of religious orders as examples (I once posted the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity here), I began to see that it was simply not optional that I regularly find time for rest and prayer. I saw that the other-focused life doesn't mean that you can never take a time for recreation and relaxation -- quite the opposite, in fact. It means that you must regularly take time for recreation and relaxation, but that you put these activities in their proper place, realizing that they're not the meaning of life.

After doing it backwards for so many years, it fit like a glove to live a life that was other-focused for the long term and self-focused in the short term.


As this fourth Mother's Day rolls around and I look at my life with three children in diapers, I find that it's a perfect encapsulation of the mystery of human existence, a testament to that most counterintuitive, most important of all truths: that it is only by going through the discomfort of becoming other-focused that we will find what we're really looking for. To paraphrase the Evangelist John, it is only by knowing agape that we will know God.

I've mentioned before that I'm particularly ill-suited for this job: I'm easily irritated, disorganized, sensitive to noise, introverted, and come from a background of being a spoiled only child where I never had to lift a finger around the house. My daily life is not usually what you would call "pleasurable," at least not in the same way as my pre-kid days. I would almost certainly have reported more days as being overall "fun" or "easy" back when I had a cool career than now. From a secular, self-focused worldview, my life should be worse now than it was before. But it's not. I wouldn't say that "my life is better now," as much as I would say that "my life has started now."

Through Christianity, I understand that that the tension I used to feel about my life as a mother was the tension of resisting God, of fearing that if I emptied myself of ego and selfishness that there'd be nothing there to fill me back up. I finally understand that the life of a mom of little ones is in such sharp contrast to the typical life in our godless, secular culture because it is inherently a life of self-giving love, of being close to God.

The lessons I've learned are objective truths about the human experience, applicable to everyone in every state of life, whether or not they have children. Yet, for me, it took motherhood to teach me these lessons. I am so hard-headed and was so entrenched in my old ways that it took the tidal wave of agape that could only come with a house full of babies to break down layer upon layer of selfishness encrusted with fear, and free me to seek the truth.

Through the beauty of motherhood, I think I now understand what it's all about. And I finally got my life back.

Daily bread, for the next 20 years

The the March Write-Away Contest over at Scribbit really got me thinking. The topic is simply: The next 20 years.

My senior year in college a professor actually asked us to write an essay about that very thing: where are you going to accomplish in the next 20 years? Boy, was I all over that one! I opened up my "Goals" Excel spreadsheet, categorized by short-term, medium-term and long-term goals, and started writing. I started with where I wanted to be in 20 years -- the founder and CEO of a thriving web development company with at least 30 employees -- and worked backwards from there. I also threw in the various hobbies that I was going to pursue, such as becoming a published author by the time I was 30 and learning to program in Java by the time I was 28. It felt great to know exactly where I was headed!

The problem was, my life veered off the Excel spreadsheet. At the end of each year I'd review all the great plans I'd laid, only to find that I'd accomplished barely half of them. "Goals for this Year - 2001," "Goals for this Year - 2002," "Goals for this Year - 2003," all had distressingly few items crossed off the list. I started to wonder if I needed to find better ways to motivate myself, if perhaps my tendency to procrastinate was to blame, if I was destined for failure.

And then, somewhere along the way, I started to believe in God.

After a life of atheism, I came to believe that there really is a Creator, that we can know him, and that he has a plan for our lives -- a plan better than anything we could come up with on our own. When I looked back on my discarded Excel spreadsheets with this newfound knowledge, I started to see something: in each of those years there were certain things I'd accomplished that were not on the spreadsheet, yet that brought greater peace and joy to my life than anything I'd planned to do. Most of these things didn't come with much acclaim and didn't have the worldly glamor that my goals had had, yet I could see now that they were far better. I started to wonder just how much more I could have done, how much more my life could have been enriched, if I'd stopped banging my head against doors that were closed, and started peeking into the doors that were open. I started to wonder if maybe Someone else had a better plan for my life than I did.

So, a couple years ago, I decided to set aside the spreadsheets and the goals lists. I decided to stop praying this:

Give us this day a detailed plan of how You're going to provide bread for us every day for the next 20 years with specifics as to what quantities You will provide and at what intervals we can expect to receive them so that I might work that into my goals milestones.

And to start praying this:

Give us this day our daily bread.

I would plan my life around much shorter intervals, discerning what I should do today or this week or maybe this month, and not try to speculate where God would lead me after that. I would seek not to follow my desire for worldly status or other people's approval, but to let go and let the finger of God be my guide. And as I reflect on this seemingly reckless abandonment of my life to an unseen God whom I had barely gotten to know, I keep coming back to the same thought:

This shouldn't work...but it does.

Perhaps it's my nonreligious background, but I continue to be amazed that my life has not fallen into scattered chaos without my planning it out to the last detail. What I secretly worried would happen is that this whole "following God's will" thing would lead to me jumping from one idea to the next, leaving a bunch of unfinished projects in my wake after I drifted off to do the next thing that I decided was "God's will." But that hasn't happened. Looking back at the past couple of years, there's more clarity in my life than ever before. It's like watching a play unfold: I see storylines cropping up, I'm starting to see a clear direction and purpose in where I have been led so far...I just don't know where it's going from here, or how it's going to end. As I've said before, it's more exciting than anything I could have ever planned.

So, what will happen in the next 20 years? It gives me a little thrill to say: I have no idea! There are a couple things I feel pretty sure about: e.g. that we're meant to stay in the city we're in for the rest of our lives, that I'll always do something involving writing, however informally; and we have taken basic measures for planning for the future such as retirement and college savings accounts. But other than that, I have no idea. I don't know where my husband's career will be. I don't know if I'll ever get any writing published. I don't know if I'll ever go back to work. I don't know whether we'll be rich or poor. I don't even know how many children we'll have.

When I think of the rest of my life here in earth, however long that may be, I don't expect that it will always be comfortable or easy. But, if the past couple of years are any indicator, I expect to find that God will indeed give me my daily bread, every day, and that with it will come a freedom and a deep sense of peace that I could have never found on my own.

Comments closed for Lent

How I became pro-life

I've been wanting to put this together ever since I read Abigail's touching post with the same title. I've been dabbling at this post for a few months, and finally feel ready to share it. I apologize that it is so long, I just couldn't figure out how to condense it without leaving out important details. I hope that you will find that it's worth your time to read the whole thing.


Who is human?

Back in college I remember reading about how in certain societies throughout history, I believe in this case it was the Greeks, it was common for parents to abandon unwanted newborns, leaving them somewhere to die. It was so deeply troubling to me, and I could never figure out what was going on there: how on earth could this have happened?! I mean, I knew lots of people, and nobody I knew would do that! In fact, in our society you only hear about it in rare cases of people who are obviously mentally disturbed. How could something so obviously evil, so unthinkably horrific be common among entire societies?

Because of my deep distress at hearing of things like this, I found it really irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as "killing babies." Obviously, nobody around here is in favor of killing babies -- and to imply that those of us who were pro-choice would advocate for that was an insult to the babies throughout history who actually were killed by their insane societies. We weren't in favor of killing anything. We simply felt like women had the right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced an unwanted pregnancy. It was unfortunate, yes, because fetuses had potential to be babies one day. But that was a sacrifice that had to be made in the name of not making women slaves to the trauma of unwanted pregnancies.

I continued to be vehemently pro-choice after college, and though my views became more moderate once I had a child of my own, I was still pro-choice. But as my husband and I were in the process of exploring Christianity, we couldn't help but be exposed to pro-life thought more often than we used to be, and we were put on the defensive about our views. I remember one day when my husband was in the middle of reconsidering his own pro-choice ideas, he made a passing remark that stuck with me ever since:

"It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other people's-life," he quipped. "Everyone is pro-their own-life."

It made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints were putting me in the position of deciding who was and was not human, and whose lives were worth living. I (along with doctors, the government, or other abortion advocates) decided where to draw this very important line. When I would come across Catholic blogs or books where they said something like "life begins at conception," I would scoff at the silliness of that notion as was my habit...yet I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with my defense:

"A few cells is obviously not a baby or even a human life!" I would say to myself. "Fetuses eventually become full-fledged humans, but not until, umm, like six months gestation or something. Or maybe five months? When is it that they can kick their legs and stuff?...Eight weeks? No, they're not human then, those must be involuntary spasms..."

I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human. And I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard that 3D ultrasounds showed "fetuses" touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion OK. I didn't have any interest in reading the headlines at Lifesite. Babies -- I mean, fetuses -- seen yawning at 12 weeks gestation? Involuntary spasm. As modern technology helped fetuses offer me more and more evidence that they were humans too, I would simply move the bar of what I considered human.

I realized that my definition of how and when a fetus became a "baby" or a "person," when he or she began to have rights, also depended on his or her level of health: the length of time in which I considered it OK to terminate a pregnancy lengthened as the severity of disability increased. Under the premise of wanting to spare the potential child from suffering, I was basically saying that disabled fetuses were less human, had fewer rights, than able-bodied ones. It didn't sit well.

The whole thing started to really get under my skin. At some point I started to feel like I was more determined to be pro-choice than I was to honestly analyze who was and was not human. I started to see it in others in the pro-choice community as well. On more than one occasion I was stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon reading of what otherwise nice, reasonable people in the pro-abortion camp would advocate for.

In reading through the Supreme Court case of Stenberg v. Carhart, I read that Dr. Leroy Carhart, an abortion advocate who actually performs the procedures, described some second-trimester abortions by saying, "[W]hen you pull out a piece of the fetus, let's say, an arm or a leg and remove that, at the time just prior to removal of the portion of the fetus...the fetus [is] alive." He said that he has observed fetal heartbeat via ultrasound with "extensive parts of the fetus removed." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which presumably consists of well-educated, reasonable, intelligent men and women, opposed this procedure. Not for the reasons I thought -- because it was plainly obvious that this was infanticide in its most grisly form -- but because dismembered babies inconvenienced their mothers, and it was better to kill them outside the womb in a procedure they refer to as "D&X". In the College's words in its amici brief:

D&X presents a variety of potential safety advantages over other abortion procedures used during the same gestational period. Compared to D&E's involving dismemberment, D&X involves less risk of uterine perforation or cervical laceration because it requires the physician to make fewer passes into the uterus with sharp instruments and reduces the presence of sharp fetal bone fragments that can injure the uterus and cervix.

There is also considerable evidence that D&X reduces the risk of retained fetal tissue, a serious abortion complication that can cause maternal death, and that D&X reduces the incidence of a 'free floating' fetal head that can be difficult for a physician to grasp and remove and can thus cause maternal injury.

I read the Court documents from Stenberg v. Carhart in a state of shock. A few years ago a friend of mine had her baby very prematurely, and I had visited him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He was so beautiful, just like the full-term newborns I'd seen, only a little smaller. Seeing him and the other babies lying there so peacefully in their incubators (some of them with cute little notes written on their incubator tags like "Aiden -- mommy's big boy!"), I was overwhelmed with feelings of wanting to protect these precious, innocent little babies. I was thrilled to hear the my friend's son and all the other preemies who were in the NICU at that time did survive and go home with their parents. So I found myself in a state of cold shock and disbelief that I was reading of people -- not just fringe crazies, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and some Supreme Court Justices -- casually speak about the inconvenience of the skulls and bone fragments of dismembered babies ("fetuses") the same age as those babies in the NICU. The horrors continued when I read Gonzales v. Carhart [some excerpts here...warning: no photos, but the descriptions are extremely disturbing].

It took my breath away to witness the level of evil that normal people can fall into supporting. They were talking about infanticide, but completely refused to label it as such. It was when I considered that these were educated, reasonable professionals who were probably not bad people that I realized that evil always works through lies. I also took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice movement. If this is what it meant to be "pro-choice," I was not pro-choice.

Yet I still couldn't quite bring myself to label myself pro-life.

I started to recognize that I was no better than Dr. Carhart or the concurring Justices or the author of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' brief, that I too had probably told myself lies in order to maintain my support for abortion. Yet there was something deep down inside, some tremendous pressure that kept me from truly, objectively looking at what was going on here. There was something within me that screamed that to not allow women to have abortions at least in the first trimester would be unfair in the most dire sense of the word. Even as I became more religious, I mentally pushed aside thoughts that all humans might have God-given eternal souls worthy of dignity and respect, because it got too tricky to figure out when we receive those souls, the most obvious answer being "at conception" as opposed to at some arbitrary point during gestation.

It wasn't until I re-evaluated the societal views of sex that had permeated the consciousness of my peer group, took a new look at the modern assumptions about the act that creates those fetuses in the first place, that I was able to let go of that internal pressure I felt, and to take an unflinching look at my views on abortion.


The contraceptive mentality

Here are four key memories that give a glimpse into how my understanding of sex was formed:

• When I was a kid, I didn't have any friends who had baby brothers or sisters in their households. One friend's mom was pregnant when we were twelve, but I moved before the baby was born. To the extent that I ever heard any of our parents talk about pregnancy and babies, it was to say that they were happy that they were "done," the impression being that they could finally start living now that that pregnancy/baby unpleasantness was over.
  
  
• In sex ed class we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. After we were done putting condoms on bananas, our teacher counseled us that we should carefully decide when we might be ready to have sex based on important concerns like whether or not we were in committed relationships, whether or not we had access to contraception, how our girlfriends or boyfriends treated us, whether we wanted to wait until marriage, etc. I do not recall hearing readiness to have a baby being part of a single discussion about deciding when to have sex, whether it was from teachers or parents or society in general. Not once.
  
  
• On multiple occasions when I was a young teen I recall hearing girls make the comment that they would readily risk dangerous back-alley abortions or even consider suicide if they were to face unplanned pregnancies and abortion wasn't legal. Though I was not sexually active, it sounded perfectly reasonable to me -- that is how much we desired not to have babies before we were ready. Yet the concept of just not having sex if we weren't ready to have babies was never discussed. It's not that we had considered the idea and rejected it; it simply never occurred to us.
  
  
• Even recently, before our marriage was validated in the Catholic Church my husband and I had to take a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and in the segment called "Good Sex" they did not mention children or babies once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest they came to connecting sex to the creation of life was to briefly say that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.
  

Sex could not have been more disconnected from the concept of creating life.

The message I'd heard loud and clear was that the purpose of sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten about altogether. This mindset laid the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being closed to the possibility to life by default, I thought of pregnancies that weren't planned as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street -- something totally unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal lives.

Being pro-choice for me (and I'd imagine with many others) was actually motivated out of love and caring: I just didn't want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Because it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with "hang-ups" eventually has sex and sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I got lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: to dehumanize the enemy. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendencies to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize the fellow human beings who are on the other side of the lines in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized the enemy of sex.

It was when I was reading up on the Catholic Church's view of sex, marriage and contraception that everything changed.

I'd always thought that those archaic teachings about not using contraception were because the Church wanted to oppress people by telling them to have as many kids as possible, or something like that. What I found, however, was that their views expressed a fundamentally different understanding of what sex is, and once I heard it I never saw the world the same way again. The way I'd always seen it, the standard position was that babies were a horrible burden, except for a couple times in life when everything is perfect enough that a couple might temporarily see new life as a good thing; the Catholic view is that the standard position is that babies are a blessing and a good thing, and while it's fine to attempt to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons, if we go so far as to adopt a "contraceptive mentality," feeling entitled to the pleasure of sex while loathing (and perhaps trying to forget all about) its life-giving properties, we not only disrespect this most sacred of acts, but we begin to see new life as the enemy.

To use a rough analogy, the Catholic Church was saying that loaded guns are not toys, that while they can perhaps be used for certain recreational activities, they are always to be handled with grave respect; my viewpoint, coming from contraceptive culture, was that it's fine to use loaded guns as toys as long as you put blanks in the chamber. Thinking of that analogy, expecting to be able to use something with incredible power nonchalantly, as a toy, I could see how that worldview had set us up for disaster.

I came to see that our culture's widespread use and acceptance of contraception had led to the "contraceptive mentality" toward sex being the default position. As a society, we'd come to take it for granted that we're entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we're in a state of being vehemently opposed to the new life it might produce. The option of abstaining from the act that creates babies if we're in a state of seeing babies as a huge burden had been removed from our cultural lexicon: even if it would be a huge crisis to get pregnant, we have a right to go ahead and have sex anyway. If this were true, if it was indeed a fact that it was morally OK for people to have sex even when they believed that a new baby could ruin their lives, in my mind, then, abortion had to be OK.

I realize that ideally I would have taken an objective look at when human life begins and based my views on that alone...but the lie was just too tempting. I didn't want to hear too much about heartbeats or souls or brain activity...terminating pregnancies just had to be OK, because carrying a baby to term and becoming a parent is a huge deal...and society had made it very clear that sex is not a huge deal. As long as I accepted that for people to engage in sex in a contraceptive mentality was morally OK, I could not bring myself to even consider that abortion might not be OK. It just seemed too inhumane to make women deal with life-altering consequences for an act that was not supposed to have life-altering consequences.

So this idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if we're vehemently opposed to its life-giving potential, was a totally new and different message. For me, being able to honestly consider when life begins, opening my heart and my mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my fellow human beings, was not fully possible until I understood the nature of the act that creates these little lives in the first place.


The great temptation

All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I was reading something, and a thought occurred to me, and from that moment on I was officially, unapologetically PRO-LIFE. I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering to myself how normal people could possibly do something like that. I felt a chill rush through my body as I thought:

I know how they did it.

I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people -- people like me -- can support very evil things through the power of lies. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans, and people in every other society could put themselves into a mental state that they could leave a newborn child to die: the very real pressures of life -- "we can't afford another baby," "we can't have any more girls," "he wouldn't have had a good life" -- left them susceptible to that oldest of temptations: to dehumanize other human beings. Though the circumstances were different, it was the same process that had happened with me, that happened with the concurring Supreme Court Justices in Stenberg v. Carhart, with the abortion doctors, the entire pro-choice movement, and anyone else who's ever been tempted to dehumanize inconvenient people.

I bet that as those Greek parents handed over their infants for someone to take away, they remarked on how very unlike their other children these little creatures were: they can't talk, the can't sit up, and surely those little yawns and smiles are just involuntary reactions. I bet you anything they referred to these babies with different words than they used to refer to the children they kept. Maybe they called them "fetuses."

From atheism to Christianity: a conversion story through books

Back in this post I was talking about how I strongly encourage Christians to ask the tough questions about their faith. To summarize what I said there, occasionally I meet Christians who seem hesitant to delve too deeply into their faith for fear of what they might find. It's a shame because, in the opinion of this former atheist, by asking challenging questions and seeking answers Christians have absolutely nothing to fear, and everything to gain.

"So where do I start?" is a frequent response I get to that statement. I've finally had a chance to put together a list of books that I found helpful when I was first asking the tough questions of Christianity. I think it would be a good jumping-off point for lifelong Christians (especially Catholics) who don't feel like they have a lot of knowledge of the how's and why's behind why we believe what we believe. This would also be a good list for people who are not Christian but are curious about the religion.

These are by no means the only sources of information I used -- the conversion process was a long road that involved lots of thinking and reading (and eventually praying) and gathering data from tons of different sources. These books alone were not enough to convince me to convert; all the information in the world would not have been enough had my heart not been open to it (as I talked about here). But they are, I believe, good places to start.

One of the reasons it's taken so long to put this together is because I don't want to present this as any sort of definitive list or hold myself out as an authority on the subject: I offer this as a humble account of my personal story, detailing some books that I found compelling in my search for truth about God, the world and the human experience.

-----

The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

My conversion to Christianity had a very clear beginning: the day I walked into a bookstore and saw this book. In my vague search for religion up to that point, I had been planning to explore Buddhism and other Eastern belief systems first (then Judaism, then Islam, then Baha'i, then that Wicca/"earth goddess" stuff that my friend from college was into...anything but Christianity!) It had never once occurred to me that there was even the most remote possibility that the Christian claims about Jesus could be true, so I was planning to skip over all that. But one day back in July of 2005 I walked into a bookstore, saw this book from way across the room, and knew I wanted to read it. I had no idea what it was, just that I was oddly drawn to it and had to go see it.

As it turns out, the book was exactly what I needed to read. Former atheist Lee Strobel lays out the data that convinced him that the Christian claims about Jesus' life, death and resurrection are true. It's not that the book was perfect, or even that I instantly believed after reading it (I didn't). But it did open my eyes to the fact that Christians had a much better defense for their beliefs than I'd expected. I wrote about it at the time here.


Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

I read Mere Christianity shortly after I finished The Case for Christ, and it added fuel to the growing fire of my interest in Christianity. It was the first book I read where a Christian looked at Christianity from a rational, questioning point of view. One of the reasons this book was probably so helpful to me is that Lewis was himself a former atheist, so he knew how to explain his faith in a way that made sense to nonbelievers.


By What Authority? by Mark Shea

At some point along the way I bought a Bible and started reading it, which left me with more questions than answers (as I talked about here). Around that time someone suggested I read By What Authority, saying that Shea (a convert to Catholicism) provided a good, readable explanation of the concept of Sacred Tradition. I would love to spice up the story with tales of how I wrestled with accepting the notion that God gives us doctrine through the Catholic Church...but, honestly, it was a slam-dunk. This was the missing piece of the puzzle. I had been leaning towards Catholicism for a lot of other reasons, but understanding the concept of Sacred Tradition was what finally made all of Christianity make sense to me.

I still had questions, though. What about the bad popes? What about the Crusades? And, most pressingly, what about those teachings that were just obviously antiquated and oppressive (e.g. their stance on contraception)? I figured that a lot of those crazy teachings must be optional, that perhaps they were categorized under "suggestions" rather than official teachings. I decided to keep reading to see what I'd find...


Catholicism for Dummies by John Trigilio and Kenneth Brighenti

I admit I was a bit embarrassed to buy a "Dummies" book on such a serious topic, but after multiple people recommended it I sucked it up and got Catholicism for Dummies, thinking that maybe I could slip on a fake Summa Theologica cover if I were to read it in public. :) Indeed it was very helpful -- not, of course, for gaining deep knowledge of any one area of Catholicism, but for answering some of my basic questions and pointing me in the right direction for further explanation. For the first time, I started to think that a lot of that Catholic stuff that I had written off as oppressive or old-fashioned might actually have a whole lot of wisdom to it.


The Catechism of the Catholic Church (version by Fr. John Hardon)

At this point I decided to hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, and get a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the official exposition of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Though you can read the full text online for free on the Vatican's site here, I decided to get this version since a) I didn't want to read that much text online, and b) I heard that this arrangement by Fr. John Hardon was more readable. Reading it was amazing. It was so...not what I expected. Here's one excerpt (chosen quickly from the copy sitting here on my desk) that is the type of thing I found interesting:

[W]ith his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God's existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the "seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material", can have its origin only in God.

The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality "that everyone calls God".

The more I read, the more I became enthralled. As I've said before, when I read the Catholic Church's official teachings on God and what they claim is God's one true church, I felt overwhelmed with the peace of certainty that I had found truth.


Making Senses Out of Scripture: Reading the Bible As the First Christians Did by Mark Shea

Now I felt ready to deepen my knowledge of the Bible -- I'd previously read through most of the New Testament, but didn't know where to go from there. We didn't own a Bible in my house growing up, so I had almost zero familiarity with it. I'd flip through some of the Old Testament books and think, "What on earth is going on here?"

I read a few books on the topic of getting a basic understanding of the Bible, and this one was my favorite. Mark Shea walks the reader through an understanding of the Scripture as seen through the eyes of the Apostles themselves. The Bible, especially the Old Testament, was a lot more understandable once I understood that different books were intended to convey their truths in different "senses": literal, moral, allegorical or anagogical. This book really illuminated the Bible for me.


The Good News About Sex and Marriage by Christopher West

Back on the topic of Catholicism, the one thing I couldn't quite understand was the issue of contraception. I'd been living in this cycle of "Jen thinks she knows better than the 2,000-year-old Catholic Church" --> research and reading --> "Jen does not know better than 2,000-year-old Catholic Church" for a few months, so I was at least open to hearing the Church's point of view on this one. And, on a gut level, something was starting to ring vaguely true about the notion that contraception might not be the best thing for individuals or society. But I still had a lot of serious reservations.

That's where Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body came in. Unfortunately, I was too sleep deprived at that time to get through the massive tome, amazing as it was. So that's where Christopher West came in: he's made his career making the wisdom of the Theology of the Body accessible to everyone. The Good News About Sex and Marriage explained a lot of the questions and concerns I had about Catholic teaching on the relations between the sexes. Reading this book helped my husband and me familiarize ourselves with the basics so that we could move on to other sources which explained them in more detail. To our shock, we found ourselves agreeing -- even though we had some serious issues going on at the time that would make following these teachings very difficult -- after finding what we had found in our research and conversations (and prayers), we knew that we would have been lying to say that we didn't think this was true.

When we actually started to apply these teachings to our lives, everything changed -- our relationship to each other, to God, to our vocations, to our children -- everything. We found ourselves standing in wonder at how our life had done a 180-degree spin and been turned on its head by what we once assumed to be oppressive rules, and it was then that something that we'd come to believe intellectually about Church teaching became something we knew in our hearts: this stuff doesn't come from people.


The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton

I read The Everlasting Man shortly after I came to truly believe in God, and found myself wanting to shout, "Yes! Exactly!" all throughout this book. In this classic work, Chesterton makes the case that Christianity is something that rings true both to the mind and the heart. It takes what we know of the world through science and what we know of our souls through human experience and brings it all together. Though he doesn't use this exact analogy, I found that this book helped me articulate why I came to believe that Christianity is the box top to the puzzle of life.

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So there it is: a very abbreviated version my my conversion story as told through the books I read along the way. As I said above, none of these books will convert anyone since that is not something a books alone can do. I think they will, however, provide great starting points for believers who are eager to ask the tough questions of their faith, or for nonbelievers who are starting to think that there might be something more to this whole God thing than meets the eye.

The bottom line is this: if you are seeking God with humility and an open heart, you will find him. And asking tough questions will only speed up the process.


Feel free to use the comments to share your favorite books on these topics as well.

On discussing parenting philosophies

I was talking with a good friend the other day, a fellow convert to Catholicism from atheism, who is expecting her fourth baby in five years. We were talking about how wonderfully crazy it is that our lives are where they are, how neither of us would have ever guessed that we'd be where we are today given our totally nonreligious backgrounds. One thing that came out is that we both agreed that one of the most difficult parts of having children spaced so closely together is simply dealing with the reactions of friends and family members who are baffled by our newfound religion and lifestyles. With each of our pregnancies, we have both gotten reactions that ranged from unsupportive to downright vitriolic. Frankly, we often feel attacked.

Then I came home to read of the blowup about parenting philosophies that was going around the Catholic blog world last week (Hope has a good summary here). I doubt that anybody involved in the debate meant to make other parents feel attacked by simply expressing their beliefs that certain parenting methods are what's best for children...yet that was the effect. There is no more sensitive area than the subject of what makes a good mother. The mere whiff of implication that something a woman is doing may not be in her children's best interest will cut straight to her heart like a knife, even if she disagrees with it.

That's why I think we should be really, really careful in discussions about parenting philosophies, because the more strongly we advocate for one particular method, the more parents who don't adhere to that method are going to feel attacked. Certainly in some cases this is warranted: it is a good thing to decry clear cases of neglect and abuse. Yet the lines between what is clearly abusive or neglectful, what is just less than ideal, and what is simply a matter of opinion, are not clear. They are for each person to discern on his or her own. And I think that we should be very careful where we draw those lines, and ask ourselves when advocating for certain practices as "best" or criticizing other practices: is it worth it?

I can speak with authority on this one because I used to be the worst of them all. When my first child was born I pretty much had it all figured out. I had read all the books and knew the proper way to parent. Unfortunately, however, there seemed to be a lot of people out there who had not read the books and did not know the harm they were doing to their children with their improper parenting. At the time I had a neighbor who violated pretty much every one of the parenting principles in which I believed. I was horrified as I heard her nonchalantly discuss the things she did and didn't do. "I just cannot believe she'd do that to her baby," I lamented to my husband one day after hearing about a choice my neighbor made that I strongly disagreed with. "I feel so bad for her children."

Yet as I got to know her family better, at some point it occurred to me that for all my opinions about how detrimental her choices were for her children's mental health, I had not a single observational data point to indicate that they were anything other than happy, well adjusted kids who had great relationships with their parents. From seeing their family day in and day out, hearing the giggling children yell "Hi, Miss Jennifer!" as I'd walk to my car, I started to wonder if maybe her kids were doing fine, if maybe kids can thrive under a variety of circumstances, even if some scientists say they're wrong. Maybe all my opinions and raised eyebrows about her parenting choices were doing nothing more than adding one more voice to the attack on families.

The traditional family is under attack in our society; I might feel that more because of my nonreligious background, but it is undoubtedly so. Especially families who are involved in their religion, who homeschool, who have or are open to having larger-than-average families -- even the parents who just want to raise their kids with some traditional Judeo-Christian values -- we are under attack. And because of the sensitive nature of the subject of parenting, when we espouse one way as best, when we take a lecturing tone in discussions with other parents, when we imply that perhaps parents who make choices different from our own have not properly discerned God's will for their lives...we're adding to the attack. Again, there are cases when this is warranted, when the cons of wearing down other parents with direct (or indirect) criticism are outweighed by the pros of pointing out something truly dangerous or detrimental. But I think that we should put some serious thought and prayer into where to draw that line. (And I really do mean "we" here -- I am as guilty as anyone.)

Now that some years have passed and the trials and tribulations of motherhood have left me realizing that my best effort is not enough to meet my own high bar, I sometimes think of that old neighbor. I run into her every now and then, and each year I see her children's smiling faces beaming at me from their Christmas cards. She didn't know about all the studies that proved that my way of parenting was superior to hers. But neither did her children. All they knew was that they had a mom, imperfect like the rest of us, who loved them dearly and was doing her best. And while her best may not have been good enough to meet my lofty standards, it was good enough for them.

How important is it to pay for college?

I've enjoyed following yet another great thread over at Danielle Bean's blog, where she asks readers to talk about how they afford to have more than one or two children on one income.

One thing that surprised me was how much of the discussion is focused on paying for children's college education. If I'm understanding correctly, it seems that some of the commentors thought that not being able to afford to pay for all or most of college for additional children would constitute a serious reason to avoid pregnancy. (It's quite possible that I did misunderstand what the writers on this particular thread were saying...but certainly that is a common notion in our society.)

Personally, I disagree with that -- I'm biased, however, because I have the most amazing husband in the world, whose mother knew full well when she decided to get pregnant that there's no way she'd ever be able to pay for him to go to college. :) She ended up becoming a single mother and was so poor that they often couldn't run the heat in the winter, so paying for even a single textbook was out of the question. He ended up getting an undergrad degree and two graduate degrees, all from Ivy League schools, so the student loan debt we're paying off boggles the mind. He was able to get some scholarships and financial aid, but it didn't even come close to covering the total cost. When we got married the debt we had on student loans was more than some people have on their house! To this day, it continues to be an albatross around our necks, especially since we've restructured our lives around stability and family instead of making more money. Our debt payment on the loan each month makes it really hard to get by, and it's going to take us forever to pay it off. All that said, would it be better if my husband had never been born?

I understand wanting to do everything possible to help your children not begin their post-college lives under a mountain of debt. I also understand that certain dire financial concerns are surely "grave and serious reasons" to limit your family size. But is student loan debt so terrible that it outweighs the value of bringing a new life into the world?

I've made it clear what I think, but that's just my $0.02. There's no right or wrong answer to this one. What is your personal opinion on the issue?

Motherhood: God doesn't call the equipped, he equips the called

I've come across a series of posts and comments lately related to the topic of determining God's will for how many children you should have. I'll pick on Sarah (of the very cleverly-named blog Sarahndipity) only because she offered a clear articulation of the point of view I've been puzzling over. In response to my interview with Hope, she wrote, "I would like maybe four kids total...I cannot imagine having 7, 8 or more. My husband and I are just not cut out for that."

My initial reaction to statements like that is always, "Whoa! Does that mean there are people who actually think they are cut out for that?" In my life I've known one or two couples who, early in marriage, thought that they had what it takes to have five or six kids...and then had a drastic change of mind, usually around the time when the second baby started teething.

It seems to me that if God called only natural "supermoms" to have large families, there would be like five women in America with more than three kids. Maybe I'm doing some projecting here since I lack pretty much every skill one would want to be a mother to anything other than a Chia Pet, but I've come to believe that when it comes to having kids, nothing is more true than the old saying that "God doesn't call the equipped, he equips the called."

And this is good news for people like me. Because I am "equipped" to do very little, least of all be a mother. When I try to come up with a list of things at which I naturally excel, that are easy for me because of some innate skillset, the train of thought goes something like, "I like to drink wine...and eat stuff. Umm...I'm good at reading blogs..."

As a person who is still getting used to difficult concepts like cleaning up after myself and doing my own laundry, motherhood is, not surprisingly, a big challenge. My loving parents wanted to give me the "perfect childhood", which meant having to do almost nothing for myself. I was expected to get good grades, but didn't have to lift a finger around the house. My home environment was quiet and orderly, kept in tip-top shape by my mother alone while most of my time was spent relaxing. I had no experience with young children until I had one -- I'd never even known people who had little kids except for one aunt who lived out of state. I never babysat because that sounded too much like "work". I'm naturally introverted, impatient, disorganized, self-centered, irritable, and have an extremely low tolerance for noise and chaos. The closest I get to being a supermom is when I make sure that whatever the baby is eating off the kitchen floor is actually food (and the closest I get to being neat is when I think, "Cool, I don't have to sweep now.")

It is from this background that I can proclaim with great joy that God does indeed equip the called. If three years ago I had had all the facts about what motherhood really entails and sat down to carefully analyze whether or not this is an endeavor I should undertake, the overwhelming verdict would have been to get a goldfish and call it a day.

What I couldn't have known in my pre-kid days, though, is how much God was planning to use motherhood to transform me. I would never have guessed that the experience of holding my first newborn baby would be one of the final blows to my life of atheism; I could not have known that the difficulty of managing a strong-willed toddler and a very loud redheaded baby with a redheaded temperament would push me to a level of depending on God that I would have never sought on my own; never in my dreams would I have thought that an unexpected, untimely, potentially financially ruinous pregnancy would bring with it a series of experiences and answered prayers so profound that I'd never be the same again. And, of course, I cannot imagine what God is planning for these three little souls I've helped bring into the world. I can be certain, however, that the world is a better place for them being here.

When I think of my life as a mother and the future of our family, I'm reminded of that great poem They Weren't Ready. I now see the decision-making process for how many children I should have solely as an issue of accurately discerning God's will, rather than approaching it from the perspective of what I think I can do. I assume that God knows my limits and he'll take into account my weaknesses in his plan for the number of children I should attempt to parent.

And who knows, perhaps after this next baby gets here God will clearly reveal his will to be something like, "Quit having kids! Now! Just try to keep the ones you have alive!" I think, however, that I am called to have a fairly large number of children. And it's hard not to second-guess that call. I often think that I just don't have what it takes. But then again, who does? What sane woman who currently has few or no children could confidently say, "I could definitely handle six, seven, eight kids -- no sweat!" I think that almost nobody could do it on her own, without God's grace.

Of course not every family is called to have lots of children -- I don't mean to imply that every couple who decides that a small family is best for them isn't following God's will. I only offer my experience as a testament to the fact that when making decisions about bringing new lives into the world, we should focus a lot more on accurately discerning God's will and a lot less on our own assessment of what we think we can and can't do. As I have found, God sometimes calls people to do very unlikely, seemingly impossible things -- especially when it comes to parenthood. But he does, indeed, equip the called.

MegaMom Interviews: "I could never do that!"

Hope, a mother of eight, has once again been kind enough to answer questions about life with lots of children. Be sure to check out her blog Mothers of Many Saints for more insights, and you can see the rest of the MegaMom Interviews here.

I asked:

Q: What would you say to women who look at how many children you have and think, "I could never do that, it would be too (physically / mentally / financially) hard"?

She responded:

I hear this all the time. I hear this from people who say that they couldn't do the mothering that a large family demands, and generally I just give an encouraging, "Sure you could!" Some just say it, because it's something to say, with no real consideration or care about inviting a new life into their family. Sometimes, though, I hear it from ladies at Church, who perhaps are truly struggling with the question of adding another soul to their family.

Recently, a woman who is an acquaintance, approached me at a church function, and the first thing she said was, "Are there going to be any more?" I looked at her quizzically, wondering at first if she was referring to the on-stage music or the festival itself, as if she was asking if there would be more music or another festival, but I quickly realized she was asking if there would be anymore children. I said, "Sure, maybe, only God knows." This about knocked the socks off this mother of three. I guess because I don't have it all planned out. As we talked I could tell that mothering and the question of following Church teaching regarding marriage was a struggle for her.

The state of being open to life in your marriage does not mean that you start off with having it all together. I mean, we had two children before we even had an income. When we started our family we were young, poor, and still had a lot of learning to do. At the beginning we hardly would have thought we would be where we are today -- with eight kids, and we certainly were not "ready" by the world's standards. But God has blessed us with each baby. The babies come just one at time, and with each we have grown and learned in many ways. If we had stopped at two or three, I would still think I couldn't do eight. Just like I hear about families with twelve plus children and I think, "Wow, there is no way I could do that!"

A question I would ask myself and anyone else who thinks they couldn't do it is, "Why not?" Is it impatience? Pray for patience and find practical ways to learn patience. Is it finances? Maybe a better job can be found or better budgeting can be practiced. Is it health? Learn how to be healthy and develop good habits. Is it disorganization? Learn how to instill order in your life. Is it a struggling marriage or unruly children? Learn how to fortify these relationships. If you do these things, you will see blessings in your life, blessings that prepare you to open your heart and home to just one more.

The point would be to learn to be content in every circumstance, trust in God, and keep striving for holiness.

A big thanks to Hope for taking the time to put together such a beautiful response!

MegaMom Interviews: Laundry and rooms

For the latest installment of my series of interviews with moms of large families, I had some questions about the details of day-to-day life. Ouiz, mom of (almost) seven and blogger at Chez Ouiz, was once again kind enough to answer my questions.

I asked:

Q: How on earth do you handle all the laundry?! I can barely keep up with our load, and I only have two children so far. Any tips for how to handle it as our family grows?

She replied:

Anyone who says they've got it all together and never get behind on the laundry are either supermoms or lying. Laundry is a never-ending, mind numbing task that makes me want to scream some days! When I am able to stay on schedule, here's how I've had to break it down:

Monday: our (my husband and I) laundry, the baby's laundry
Tuesday: our and the baby's bedding
Wednesday: girls' laundry
Thursday: girls' sheets/bedspreads
Friday: boys' laundry
Saturday: boys' sheets/bedspreads
Sunday: DAY OF REST... NO LAUNDRY!!

That way, I'm not sorting through 8 people's socks and underwear and trying to figure out what belongs to each child.

Each clothing hamper takes about two loads. I fold as soon as the dryer goes off, whenever possible. I hang up dressy clothing, and fold and hand the rest of the clothes to the appropriate child to put away.

Now the "dirty little secrets":

I don't believe in ironing... ever! That's what the fluff cycle is for. If it's still kinda wrinkly, I hang it up in the bathroom so the shower steam will smooth it out.

I don't bother to separate into the appropriate "whites/colors/darks" categories (unless it's extremely delicate or new). I wash everything in hot water and, surprisingly, have had very few "disasters" with colors that have bled.

Bathtimes are rough, because by the end of it all I've got 3 wet towels and washcloths, plus all the dirty clothing from 6 little kids who managed to get them awfully wet on the bathroom floor. I use said wet clothes to wipe down the bathroom floor, and then dump the whole mess into the washing machine for an evening load.

*IF* I keep to this schedule, I'm able to keep everything going efficiently.

I asked:

Q: What about rooms -- I assume each child doesn't have his/her own room? Do the kids who share rooms get along pretty well? Sometimes I worry that our growing family will bee too cramped until we can somehow afford some sprawling McMansion!

She replied:

Three boys in one room (10x12'), three girls in another (same size). My husband built bunk beds with a trundle bed underneath, so the littlest one in each room gets that one.

While *I* tend to worry that they don't have enough space, to them it is a non-issue. More often than not, they want to sleep in the same twin beds together! For them it is much safer, and less scary, to have someone else with them in their rooms at night.

Thanks again to Ouiz for taking the time to answer all my questions about life in a big family!

MegaMom Interviews: How do you make sure each child gets enough attention?

I'm delighted to share another installment of my email interviews with moms of big families. Today I have answers from two "MegaMoms". Ouiz of Chez Ouiz is currently pregnant with baby number seven, and Hope of Mothers of Many Saints is a mom of eight.

Today's question is one of the ones that most perplexes me. I am an only child and even an only grandchild on one side of the family, so one thing I was particularly curious about is:

Q: A frequent concern for those of us who grew up in and around small families is getting to spend enough quality time with each child. What is your philosophy on that, and do you feel like you're able to spend enough one-on-one time with each child?

Ouiz answered:

I will always worry that I'm somehow short-changing someone in the attention department. With 6 little ones, it's very hard to give everyone the same amount of attention as everyone else. That's just life.

I try to look at it this way: the Lord knew that child X would be the middle child in a large family...or whatever...and will give him the grace he needs to be in that role. On days when I'm beating myself up agonizing over whether I've spent enough time with each child, I remind myself that He loves them even more than I do, and will take care of them and supply what they need when I've fallen short.

Over the course of a week, I try to make sure I've done SOMETHING with each of them -- asking them to help me cook, or taking a few minutes to have a cup of tea with them while they tell me a story, or reading a special story to "just the boys", etc. One of the best things I can do is make sure I give them my attention when they are talking to me...a small thing that sometimes is one of the biggest sacrifices I can make, but let's them know that they are important enough for me to stop and listen to.

Where I am unable to give each child substantial chunks of time, their siblings jump right in. My children usually "pair up" and play with each other quite contentedly, so no child is ever "alone" unless he or she has specifically sought it out. There is ALWAYS someone to applaud their efforts, see the big tower they just built, or read them a story. There is a WHOLE LOT of laughter in this little house, so I must assume that they are growing up contentedly and happy.

Hope answered:

I think this is a concern for every mom in some regard, and is the root of the "mommy guilt" that is popularly referred to so often in the media. All loving mothers wonder if they are doing enough. The question is, though, what is enough, and then, enough of what? It comes down to determining what kids really need and then making sure that that is what they get. It's all about priorities. On the flipside, smothering children is not good for them either.

What my kids don't get because I don't have time: sun screen slathered on them every time they step out the door, their shoes and socks and coats all put on by mom (they figure it out), and hypervigilance over every bite at every meal (they learn, if you're hungry eat, if you don't eat, you'll be hungry), or fussing over every sniffle.

Sometimes I feel guilty, but I have learned how competent even little children can be at caring for themselves, and how this acquired competence can lead to confident independence. I am also so glad I don't worry over every little thing I hear some other mothers worrying over, I'd drive myself (and my children) crazy!

What my children do get because I make time: clean clothes (that they fold and put away), nutritious and homemade meals, a neat and organized home, a good education, lots of spirituality, and breastfed as babies.

One book I read that really helped me out was How to Really Love Your Child by Ross Campbell. He writes that it is important to give your children three things -- focused attention, eye contact, and physical affection. I really try to make sure that each kid get some of this every day, and it's easy to do, simply by giving some attention to the story of a bad dream they had or an interaction with a friend, looking them in the eye when they walk in a room and giving a smile, or offering little back rubs or running my fingers through their hair as I walk by.

I may not be at every soccer game, but I am at every bedside every night. I spend a few minutes with each child talking and praying and giving back scratches, eye contact and blessings. Even when I'd rather be done with it, I am committed to this time with my kids.

Another consideration is homeschooling. Homeschooling affords me hours and hours a day to be with my kids. If I were working and they were in daycare or school, I don't know how I'd give even a couple of children they attention they need. Sometimes I wonder at what people are thinking, as it is often the same people who question about quality time in big families who have their kids in a classroom all day with 20 kids and 1 teacher. My adult/child ratio is much better than that!

Additionally, I have learned that it's not all about me. It is not all about the attention I give my kids because they give a lot of attention to each other. Mothers are irreplaceable, but so is a house full of siblings who love you.

Two fabulous responses, and another book to add to my Wish List. Huge thanks to Ouiz and Hope! For more great insights be sure to check out their blogs Chez Ouiz (Ouiz) and Mothers of Many Saints (Hope)