I’ve spent time in the church my whole life, first as a clergy kid and now as a clergy spouse. Where I grew up, in a very Anglo-Catholic diocese of the Episcopal Church, matters of doctrine took second chair to matters of Which Brasso Product To Use To Polish Fancy Things.
Several years ago, Jen Hatmaker’s Worst End of School Year Mom Ever made the rounds, describing the desperate limp toward the finish line that many parents experience. More recently, the Holderness family produced a video about “Maycember,” illustrating the feeling that parents have at this time of year – just as busy as Christmas, without the lights and the peppy music.
If you’re anything like me, you might have still found scraps of Christmas lying around when you were getting ready to help your children with a school Valentine’s Day celebration. It’s still cold in most parts of the country, and we might still feel a bit of a holiday hangover when we’re not quite sure what to do with ourselves in the days following the Feast of the Epiphany.
I’ve been tempted in the past to say that I’ve been tricked into thinking that I’m a good parent because I have easy children. I say “tempted” because the last time I sat down to write something about that, I was in the ER that night with a kid who needed stitches in his head after an unfortunate encounter with the sideboard in our dining room.
During the summer between my second and third years of law school, I worked as an intern in the General Counsel’s Division of Children, Family, and Aging. Every morning, I made my way to the Hubert Humphrey building in the shadow of the nation’s capitol, not realizing until then how many federal government employees filled Washington, D.C. every day.
I once knew an Episcopal priest who was also a dad of young children. One of his daughters disliked their
My husband and I don’t watch TV news, partially because we have two elementary school aged children, but also because
A few years ago, I wrote this before sending my oldest child off to summer camp. After sending him for
My attempts to modify others’ behavior during the six weeks before Easter haven’t really been any more effective than my mother’s were.
We have transitioned away from “cute” to… toeing the line of scary.
