Faith

Babies and Dreams

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When talking about Babies and Dreams, there’s a side that I think is often missed: you can’t have it all, all of the time.

I wasn’t the girl who dreamed about staying home with my babies, though I did always want to be a mom. I didn’t dream of messy days baking in the kitchen with little ones at my feet. I have never been good at cleaning or homemaking. And my decorating skills involve finding something on Pinterest, saying “I like that,” and then having no idea how to make it actually materialize. My husband does that part, as he is talented in having a creative vision and executing it.

Instead, I dreamt of teaching. I dreamt about having both worlds: home in the summers, working in the school year. But for many reasons, that dream is not right for our family right now. So for now, I am home with my girls and teach one homeschool class a week. That hour and a half of teaching is deeply fulfilling; I love sharing my gifts with students and helping them to grow in wisdom and knowledge.

Staying home with my girls brings me more joy than I ever imagined to be possible. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want more.

I want to get my master’s degree and eventually my doctorate. I want to teach at the college level. I want to help form young adults and encourage them as they prepare to enter professional life. I want to write a book. I want to be a part of the intellectual life of our Church. And when I look at charisms that I have—teaching, wisdom, encouragement, knowledge—this dream is a direct expression of those charisms. I know that I can serve God, my family, and the Church through this dream. But now is not the time for it. To this dream, Christ is not saying “no”, but rather, “not yet.”

It is hard sometimes to see college classmates starting their PhDs, graduating from Master’s programs, going on to big things. It is so easy to compare. To think, “look at all they are doing. And what have I done?”

I am raising two daughters of God. I am raising them to look to Christ for their answers. I am supporting my husband in his career, so that eventually, we can make my dream happen when the timing is right. I am supporting him so that we can raise our daughters not for this life, but for eternity.

God does not tell us that we will not have to make sacrifices. He does not say that we will be able to have it all, all of the time. The idea of “having it all, all the time” is a lie. A deceptive, attractive lie that encourages selfishness and greed. It’s the lie of the feminist movement, that encourages women to pursue “having it all” at any cost.

What cost is worth having it all, all the time? Not my peace. Not my faith. Not my mental or physical health. Not peace in my marriage. All were on the table when I was teaching full time. Perhaps some would not struggle as I did, but for me, the cost of having all of my dreams right now was too high.

And so my dream changed. I still want to get my doctorate. I still want to teach at the college level. But I also want to be present to my girls, in a way that I couldn’t when I was working full time. I want to stay home with them in their early years. I want to support my husband by striving to create a peaceful home. I want to focus on raising our girls to love Christ, remembering that the purpose of this life is to love and serve God, and not to store up accolades and awards.

And, when it is time, when it won’t cost me my peace, I will go on to get my doctorate. I’ll pursue this other dream, because I see that it uses my talents. I have so much I want to share with others, and I believe Christ wants me to share my talents with others. I do not believe these dreams are fully my own. But I can see that “for everything, there is a season” and that now is not the season for that dream.

It is ok to have dreams that are bigger than your babies. To have dreams that you know you can’t pursue for a time. The key lies in accepting God’s answer of “not yet, my beloved” and then being able to be present to where one is in life now. It is not always easy, and comparison often sneaks in.

I see the mothers who are working full-time, and I struggle not to envy them. I wonder at how they are “doing it all,” until I remember—most of them aren’t. Some may have hired help. Others will let dishes go undone, laundry unfolded, may be dealing with high levels of stress or anxiety—whatever it may be, there are crosses that come with working full-time when one has little children at home. Of course, there are many crosses that come from being home full-time with little children, and the laundry often goes undone anyway, but for me, the crosses of being home full-time right now are less than what I’d have to ask my family to give up if I were working full-time. It has been a long road to come to peace with that and to own that.

So when we speak of babies and dreams, we should be careful to avoid the attitude of “women can have it all.” Motherhood will demand sacrifice. Those sacrifices are often difficult and will often demand that some of our dreams have to wait. But the joy in motherhood comes in finding a new dream, in finding the joy in simply being present to our children, in the joy of the sacrifice. For love is sacrifice, and so the more we love, the more we freely sacrifice. And in doing so, we become free. Free of false attachments, free of pride, free of vanity, free of selfishness.

Perhaps that is the beauty of motherhood, of being asked to delay our own dreams. For when the time is right to pursue the dream to which God has said, “not yet” we can pursue it more freely. We can pursue it having been made more selfless by the hard work of motherhood. We can pursue it not for our own gratification, but for the glory of God.

And that alone will make the wait for my other dreams worth it.

Lies I Believed

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I have always had grand plans, high ambition, passion, and a desire to do it all myself. When I set a goal, I pursue it ruthlessly, and if you stand in the way of my plan—look out (I remember a college friend describing me as “bulldozing,” which upset me at the time, though I now see she was right). And so, in 2019, I got my teaching license. That same year, I began my first full time teaching position. When my husband told me at the beginning of 2020 that I needed to change something or resign, I accused him of being “stifling” and “controlling.” I could do it all, why didn’t he see that? I could be an excellent teacher, a great mother, and a wonderful wife. He just had to give me more time to figure it out—why couldn’t he be more patient with me?

And then in 2020, a series of unexpected, uncontrollable events happened. The pandemic, school shut downs, teaching from home, being pregnant with our beautiful baby girl. Suddenly, I couldn’t just fight my way out of my problems. I couldn’t ignore what was in front of me, although I sincerely tried to do so. All of it wore on me and finally culminated in PPA and PPD after the birth of our beautiful daughter in October.

I found myself having to stare in the face of the lie that I told myself over and over: I can do it all, I do not need help, and I will just power through everything and make it all work.

Slowly, I began accepting this as a lie. I resigned my teaching position and didn’t return from my maternity leave. I had planned and hoped to return to full time work in the fall. I began treatment for my PPD and PPA, but often stubbornly insisted that I was “just fine” and sometimes failed to schedule appointments. I threw myself into blogging as a creative outlet.

I found myself crashing again. I was still trying to do it all and do it without help. Suddenly, everything fell away. All the threads of my identity, all the things that I considered to be myself…they fell away. I wasn’t teaching anymore, I didn’t want to teach anymore, I was now home, I was struggling, I didn’t recognize my physical body in the mirror, and I suddenly found myself looking in the mirror and wondering: “Who am I?”

I threw myself into reading. I read The Anti-Mary Exposed by Carrie Gresser, The Sunshine Principle by Melody Lyons, Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend, The Temperament God Gave You by Art and Larraine Bennet, Eat Smarter by Shawn Stevenson, In Over Our Heads by Robert Kegan, and a few others. Slowly, I began to see that I had been seeking to define myself by my roles and by what others think of me.

I had been asking all the wrong questions.

I had been asking, “Who do others say that I am?” and “Who do I say that I am?” instead of “Who does Christ say that I am and wish me to be?”

I worked through childhood wounds. I worked through negative patterns of behavior. I am still doing this work; it is difficult and painful. But most of all, I worked through the lie: that I can do it all myself, that I do not need others, that I can power through all my problems instead of facing them in humility.

The Anti-Mary Exposed showed me the lie of the “I can do it myself” attitude. It showed me the bitterness that I had carried into my marriage and life as a mother, the poison that I was willingly drinking. Her work showed me that my resentment toward the work of my home came from a den of snakes that wished to devour myself and my children. I began to see that my rebellious spirit that wished to rebel against the leadership of my husband was a result of a dangerous message fed to us by our culture: that a woman does not need a man, that she do can do everything, that woman should not be “imprisoned” by her spouse.

The Sunshine Principle and Eat Smarter challenged my thoughts about food, medicine, and healing. I began to see the opportunity to practice St. Therese’s little way even in my choices around food and exercise, seeing that choosing health is choosing the ability to better serve my family, and that I can choose health through the small, daily little things.

I am still working through In Over Our Heads, but I know it will challenge my patterns of thinking and encourage me to stop defining myself through the lens of my relationships with others and instead seek to engage in Christ motivated self-authorship (an area of scholarship my husband explored in his Master’s thesis).

We carry lies with us constantly, accepting them as truth. When dealing with anxiety or depression, these lies become our reality: You are not enough. You cannot be enough. Nothing will change. You cannot change. You have to do this all by yourself.

There is a reason that Satan is called both the Great Deceiver and the Father of Lies. He seeks to whisper these deceits into our ear as if they were sweet nothings, repeating them again and again to our hearts until our hearts begin to repeat them as a beating drum, sounding in our ears, deafening truth, drowning us in despair.

Untangling these lies within our hearts requires staring them in the face, recognizing them as false, and humbly handing them over to Our Blessed Mother. She whose heel crushed the snake will gently hold our hearts, rooting out all the painful deceits we have come to believe. It is not always easy work, but it is work with doing. If we are to truly live out our faith, we must live it out in truth. We must truly know ourselves, and that means understanding our deepest faults and wounds. For if we cannot know our faults and wounds, we cannot bring them to Christ, and if we cannot offer our wounds to Christ, he cannot pour His Mercy over them, and if our wounds are unable to receive Christ’s mercy, they will fester, spreading to our whole selves, poisoning not only our own body, but the Body of Christ itself.

In our baptism, we have died and been raised in Christ. Our struggle is in continuing to choose that self-death, so that Christ may live in our hearts rather than trying to fill our hearts with empty and vain things. For Christ can only fill what we have emptied out, and his Divine Mercy reaches into our hearts only insofar as we allow Him to reach. We must return again and again to the Cross, embracing our sufferings, embracing our vocations, and asking Christ to reign over us. For our identity can only be found in Him, and we must always be first a son or daughter of God. Our hearts yearn for truth, who is Christ, and Christ, who is Love. In finding our identity in Christ, we answer the deepest longings of our hearts and crush the lies that Satan wishes to feed our souls, and in doing so, we can allow others to do the same.

Allowing Christ to form me is not an easy task, and often my pride gets in the way. Frequent confession (minimum once a month) has helped in increasing my willingness to serve my family. For in that sacrament, I am humbled. My soul is laid bare before Christ, and he loves me, even in all my sin and littleness. Confession helps to keep me humble, to help me to say “Fiat” rather than “Non serviam.” Little by little, Christ chips away at all my attachments, and I am made new. I am made whole. And in that wholeness, I find I am better able to serve, to be present, to love.

Building the Village

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We have heard so many times the phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child.” There is truth to this phrase, as parenting, while joyful work, is also demanding and exhausting both physically and emotionally. We need support from our families, our parishes, our communities, and our friends to successfully fulfill this portion of our vocation, and indeed, any vocation, without depleting ourselves. Yet, how many of us could truly say that we have this village, this network of support? How many of us enter parenthood, marriage, or life as a single person feeling alone and isolated, especially in the world of Covid?

Many of us live away from our families of origin. Some of us find ourselves moving away from communities of which we have long been apart due to jobs or other financial reasons. Others of us have tired to thrive where we have planted, and when we have seen our efforts at community fail, have perhaps cynically, given up.

For most, the days of the intergenerational family are gone. With the move to dual-income families, many times out of necessity, the effect of the lack of this built-in village is keenly felt. With no family nearby for help with care, daycare costs become a burden and one can feel especially drained by the effect of both spouses working, multiple kids in daycare, commuting to work and daycare, getting home, seeing the kids for a few hours, and then doing it all over again.

I have felt this lack of village very painfully at times. There have been times I have reached out to others and never heard back. Before Mariana’s birth, I reached out to someone that runs a parish mom’s group nearby and asked her how I could set up a meal train for after Mariana’s birth. That same mom group, under different leadership, had taken care of everything in regards to setting up a meal train after Madeleine’s birth. The person I contacted never replied. We set up our own meal train, and while the post said, “many have been asking us where they can sign up for a meal train to support us after Mariana’s birth,” the truth is this: no one had asked us at all.

There are however, two sides to this issue of the village. The one side is when we reach out to others and they fail to respond in love and support. The other side? When we fail to reach out, when we fail to be vulnerable, when we shut ourselves off from those most willing to help us.

With my first child, Madeleine, I was naively under the impression that my baby would come with a built-in village. Those from our Church and community would come to our support now that we had a child. This was true, to an extent, and we certainly received much more support after Madeleine’s birth than we did Mariana’s. But as time went on, I stumbled onto a painful truth: if one wants a village, one has to build it.

My anxiety causes me to fear rejection. In my anxiety, I will often choose not to reach out to others at all, choosing isolation over the possibility of rejection. I fear saying the wrong thing as I am building new friendships and then losing that friendship forever. If I forget to respond to a text message within a day or so, my anxiety creeps in saying, “If you respond now, they’ll judge you for not having responded sooner.” So the message sits and sits without a response until I decide, “better not to respond at all at this point; it’s been a week, what will they think of me?”

I am an awkward person. I despise small talk. I’m shy. I hate parties. In social situations, I frequently rely on my husband to do the introductions. I’m very sensitive to the possibility that someone won’t like me, and so sometimes, when my anxiety has been at its worst, I’ve simply decided that it’s better not to try.

During one of the lowest points of my PPA/PPD, around Christmas, I was complaining to Nicholas about the lack of support I felt. He looked at me and said, “And how many people have you reached out to about this? How many people are you trying to talk to on a regular basis besides me? How many times have you tried to reach out to an actual person instead of just making a post in one of your Facebook groups?” The answer at the time: none.

Nicholas gave me a homework assignment: text one person, one friend, every day. It terrified me at first. But, then the more I did it, the less I was afraid. I became more confident and less afraid of rejection. And I began to feel more supported as well.

Yesterday, I met up with one of my friends from college. As we were talking, she asked me why I hadn’t reached out to her. I explained that my anxiety causes me to feel paralyzed and makes it difficult for me to reach out. She was understanding, and later in a message to me said, “I have always wanted to be your friend, Elizabeth.”

How often do we allow our fear of vulnerability to prevent us from doing the hard work of building our village? Of reaching out for support? Of being open to the possibility of rejection? How often do we fail to reach out to those that love us because we are overwhelmed? Because we fear burdening them? How often do we decide that because others have failed to support us, that those who have known us and loved us will not support us as well? In our fear and anxiety, we end up burning our own villages.

The devil is often called the accuser. And as I examined my worries—they won’t like you, you’ll be a burden to them, people don’t want to support you, they don’t want to be your friend, you’re not [_____] enough for them, you’re doomed to be alone, you’ll just say the wrong things and hurt these people—I realized that these were all accusations. All lies. Because the devil would like nothing more than for us to have to live isolated from one another, separated from the Body of Christ that is His Church.

And so if we want the village, we have to build it. Villages are not built in a day. They take time, communication, and effort, from both sides. If we want others to support us, we must support them. We must be willing to be Christ’s hands and feet to others. We must be willing to give of our hearts, of our time, and of our kitchens. We must be willing to be vulnerable, to be open to the possibility of rejection and being wounded. We have to reach out to those we want in our village regularly. Most importantly, we must say “no” to the accuser that tells us that others will not care for us.

We are all worthy of love. We all—no matter our state in life: married without kids, married with kids, or single—deserve to have a village. We deserve to be a part of a community that will draw us closer to Christ. We must conquer the fear. We must stop letting our anxiety and fear of vulnerability burn down our villages, because that is precisely what the devil wants. We have to put in the work, to commit to building the village and showing up for others when they need the village.

It will not be easy. Often, after meeting up with a new friend or an old one I haven’t spoken to in a while, I find myself replaying and analyzing every bit of conversation: “Should I have said this instead? Did they judge me when I said this? Oh no, I shouldn’t have said that, I should have been quiet instead.” And again, this is the work of the devil, the accuser, that would rather us live in isolation than build communities that draw us closer to the heart of Christ.

So what does building the village have to look like then, practically? Reach out to one friend a day. Ask simply, “how are you?’ When you’ve successfully reached out to one friend a day for a month, make it two. Then, maybe three—this depends on how much of an introvert you are. Try to plan out time with different friends. Start with a goal of meeting up with someone once a month. Then perhaps every two weeks. Then perhaps once a week. Be there when others need you. Is someone you know having a baby? Bring a meal to them and a gift for the mom, not the baby (everyone brings gifts for the babies—make the mom feel special instead). Is someone you know struggling with infertility? Sit and listen. Is someone you know struggling with anxiety and depression? Bring them a meal and offer to just be with them.

These are the types of things we need from our village. We need others to be willing to sit with us in our suffering, to be present to us in our time of need. Building our village means doing the same for others, and initiating that even when it may be the most difficult for us, especially when we are struggling with anxiety or depression, because that is precisely when the devil would like us to feel most isolated.

Friendship requires patient listening, love, and vulnerability. The nature of friendship is such that being hurt is a very real possibility. We cannot let that stop us from having friends altogether, from reaching out in faith, from striving to love others, from building up our villages so that we can better love Christ and our families.

How are you going to work towards building your village?

The Daughters of Job(e)

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I will never forget the moment when Nicholas first shared ideas for future baby names with me: it was November of 2014 and I was in his pickup truck as he was driving me to the airport…for a discernment retreat with the Sisters of Life.

At one point, he looked at me and said, “do you know what they say about the daughters of Jobe?” I did not, and so he promptly directed me to open the book of Job, 42:15, “In all the land no women were found as beautiful as Job’s daughters.”

I remember laughing and thinking to myself, “whoever marries this guy will be one lucky girl. I hope she knows it.”

That weekend, I spoke to Sr. Virginia Joy, the vocations director at the time, and she told me, “keep your heart open to marriage. Perhaps God has someone in mind for you that you will meet while you’re in Rome.” I laughed. I was certain of Christ’s plan for me, and marriage wasn’t part of it.

Just two months earlier, I went to Mass with a group of friends and met Nick when he was invited out to lunch with us. He was just starting his graduate program at UD, while I was in my second year there. If you ask Nick what his initial impression of me was at that time, he will simply say, “intense.” If you ask him if his impression was accurate, he will emphatically state, “Yes!”

At the time, Nick had a girlfriend of two plus years and I was determined to be a sister. There was no thought of romance between us.

I knew Nick had been having a difficult time adjusting to UD (I know now that UD was not his first choice for grad school, and the assistantship he was given has now been divided into two positions), so when many of our friends went on retreat one weekend, I invited him to ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s. He was quiet. It was unacceptable. I remedied this by abruptly breaking the silence and unceremoniously saying, “So, tell me your life story.” Amazingly, he didn’t think I was entirely crazy…and he told me about his life, in detail, as we walked together after finishing ice cream.

One thing we both shared was a love for Traditional Latin Mass. And so, Nicholas drove me to mass each Friday and each Friday we would have breakfast together. Looking back, it is easy to see how Mass brought us together. We became closer through our love of tradition as well as our love of coffee and bagels. When my roommates drove me nuts, I knew I could go to Nick’s apartment and write a paper in peace without disruption. I didn’t have to say anything and we didn’t have to even be in the same room, but he became a quiet source of comfort for me without my even realizing it.

But of course, we were only friends. So much so, that Nicholas actually told me his entire plan for how he would propose to his future wife (he didn’t change it, by the way, and his proposal to me is what started his rosary business). I remember meeting his then girlfriend at the time, and Nick later asked me what I thought of her. My response was simple, “I don’t know who you are around her.”

So after that discernment retreat in November, I began preparing for my study abroad in Rome. Nicholas helped me move out of my apartment. We continued texting each other throughout that Christmas break, and at one point, we realized, “wait..we could actually work really well together as a couple!” We made a pact that if neither of us was married or in religious life by 30, that we would marry each other.

And so in January 2015, I went to Rome. I began a 54 day rosary novena asking God to make the path forward clear to me. I will never forget when I was in Chapel at Santa Maria in Trastevere, and I heard Christ asking, “Will you give it all to me?” I knew this was asking me to lay it all down, to let go of my dreams, to let Christ lead. And I thought that it meant that marriage was not my vocation.

I spent the next three days miserable, until I was in Santa Maria Majore. Note the length of time: three days.

I was in prayer, still mourning the dreams I had of marriage and children, but determined to follow Christ. I then felt a strong prompting to meditate on the sacrifice of Isaac. As I reflected on this, I began to realize: God asked Abraham for his only son so as to give Abraham an opportunity to demonstrate his trust in God. God, in return, rewarded Abraham. I recall being promoted to reflect on Christ placing my hand in Nicholas’ hand, as he led us to the altar together, as Christ led us to the Cross. I heard simply, “You have shown me your faithfulness, now see the one I have prepared for you.”

For three days, I had felt utter misery, but I had trusted. Then, on the third day, there was the resurrection: God’s full plan revealed to us.

It is for that reason among many others that one of the central parts of our marriage and family mission statement says, “We will keep station at the Cross in anticipation of the resurrection.” It is why our daughters, Madeleine and Mariana, are named for Mary Magdalene and Our Lady of Sorrows respectively: these are the two women who remained at the Cross with Christ.

We have certainly had our share of crosses: family members passing, infertility, my anxiety, my RA. But there have been so many joys as well, so many resurrections amidst the Cross.

I met Nicholas in September 2014, we began courting in March 2015, were engaged in July 2015, and married January 2016. Our romance is one I never expected and could never have written, and God’s hand in our relationship is so clear to me. I am deeply grateful for him: he is my rock, my quiet place of comfort, my constant, my cross. Christ has chosen Nicholas to help sanctify me, and I am astounded by the gift of our marriage.

And what they say is true, by the way: the daughters of Jobe are the fairest in the land.

Trust: The Heart of NFP

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I will forever remember the first time I tried to educate somebody else about NFP. I was explaining that NFP along with natural reproductive technology, or NaPro, could actually provide health solutions for most problems treated by the pill. My audience: my junior level morality class.

I am one of the first in a generation that has used NFP from a young age. Rather than immediately being put on the pill for the issues I was having with my cycle, my parents took me to see a NaPro doctor and a Creighton practitioner. And so at the young age of 16, I was familiar with signs of my fertility, the way in which a woman’s fertility worked, and the fact that my current hormone levels likely meant that I would struggle to have children if they continued at that level into adulthood.

I quickly saw the many uses of NFP. I saw how it benefited me greatly in preventing immense pain throughout my cycle. I wanted others to have this knowledge, too. Hence, the position in which I found myself: explaining NFP, a woman’s cycle, and the downsides of birth control to my junior morality class.

It was at that moment that I learned that many of my classmates were in fact on the pill. Mind you, this was a Catholic school. However, many of them had been put on the pill for various health issues. Most of these health issues could have been addressed by hormonal support provided through NaPro Technology. I’ll never forget the reaction though from the boys in the class who looked at me and booed me and Said to all the girls in the class “We don’t want to hear about your flow.”

Although comical now, it points to the issue of educating not only young men but also women about their health and fertility. Fortunately, my school decided to address this issue by bringing in a Creighton practitioner to talk to all the girls in the high school. Perhaps the young men could have benefitted as well.

As I became older, I found myself having discussions about NFP with my fiance. When we attended marriage preparation the way in which NFP was presented to us was a sort of prosperity gospel: use NFP and avoid kids when you want. But when you want kids, since you have been following God’s will, they will come easily!

However that wasn’t at all our experience. We faced infertility and all the struggles that went along with it. I wrote about that extensively in my infertility series that you can find here. If that is currently your struggle, know that I am praying for you.

Once we were finally blessed with our first child in 2018, we then switched to using NFP to avoid. That was not nearly as easy as it as it had been made to seem either. For both of us when I was postpartum it seemed that there were infinitely less available days for use than the happy, smiling, overly cheery couple at our marriage preparation had made it seem. There were likely many days that had been available to us but that I did not feel confident enough in using. I was using Creighton the first time postpartum, and since Creighton is a mucus only method, it became confusing postpartum. Postpartum cycles and fertility markers are very different than in normal cycles, which is why I’m using Marquette this time around.

In both cases, using NFP required trust. Trust that we would be carried through our suffering. Trust in the purifying fire of Christ’s love and suffering. Trust that any child would be a blessing, no matter that timing. Trust in one’s spouse to communicate. The center of NFP is trust, which is why this method can be difficult to embrace.

If you don’t trust your body, your spouse, or Christ, other forms of birth control can become tempting. And while there have certainly been times that birth control has seemed appealing, I know it would leave me feeling empty. It would remove the radical trust required in each intimate act. It would become a divide between us rather than something that requires continued communication and trust, as NFP has been for us.

I find that NFP mirrors the requirements of love: it requires self knowledge, communication, vulnerability, and trust to work effectively. How fitting that these elements are also required for a healthy and successful marriage. And so in using NFP to plan our family, we practice the very things needed for a strong marriage and indeed, a strong faith as well. For at the center of our fertility is Christ calling us to relationship with Him, calling us to walk on the waters, to put out into the deep, to trust in Him. Christ is calling us to know ourselves that we may know Him, to trust that we may be vulnerable with him, to be vulnerable with Him that we may be loved by Him. Will you answer His call?