For those who haven’t heard the news yet, I’m closing up shop here at Shoved to Them and at Patheos. I have enjoyed my time here as a member of the Patheos team, it is just time for me to take my writing in a new direction. I’d like to take a moment and thank Elizabeth Scalia who hired me, and then Sam Rocha who took over as the new boss when she left for supporting my writing, praying for my... Read more

Ella and Erika met at their little brothers’ preschool playgroup. Ella was a shy 6-year-old in bright colors and glitter, and Erika a friendly 5-year-old who only liked to wear black. One born on the summer solstice and the other the winter solstice, they were instantly two sides of the same coin and immediately inseparable. When Ella developed Juvenile Rheumatoid arthritis the next year, Erika slowed her pace to the speed of a girl on crutches and carried the things Ella couldn’t. When... Read more

Dear Ella, I forgot you in the car yesterday. I carried in the groceries, and left you sitting there. When I came back out a few minutes later, you were laughing at me. “Mom, did you forget that I couldn’t walk?” You were teasing, but the truth is that I had. We were talking, and I expected you to just get out of the car and come into the house with me. This week marks two years since this whole journey began.... Read more

As our 16-year-old son slipped away after dinner to sit in his dark bedroom with only the light of his laptop for company, my husband shook his head and asked, “Porn?” When his grades dropped and he started missing homework assignments and blowing off his friends, I looked at my husband and said, “Maybe drugs?” We ransacked his room and dug through his computer history, and found nothing other than a half-eaten sandwich under his bed that we think used... Read more

This morning at Mass, my four-year-old sat on my lap staring up at the Crucifix. With a small sigh, she asked, “Mommy, why did those bad men make Jesus dead on the cross?” I leaned down and whispered in her tiny ear, “He died on the cross so that we could go to Heaven.” “Where’s Heaven?” She whispered back. “It’s with God,” I told her. She sat quietly for a while, watching the Liturgy of the Eucharist. As Father raised... Read more

As I watched the new Catholics enter the Church on Saturday night, I wept during the Baptisms and choked up during the Confirmations. Nothing makes me happier than the sight of so many (64 total at our parish) accepting Jesus Christ and entering into full communion with His Church. As I looked at the standing-room-only crowd of over 1,300 people, I wondered how many of them were back at Church for the first time, and remembered the Lent and Easter of... Read more

I took my older children to Confession this afternoon. The lines were long with well over 100 people in attendance, and our wait for the Confessional was way beyond an hour and a half. The kids (ages 16, 14, 11, and 8) started off well, but by the end of the first half hour they were fidgeting and fussing with each other. An hour into the wait, I was hissing at them to be quiet, and their repressed laughter was echoing... Read more

I’m a day late in sharing here, but that’s pretty par for the course. Holy Week started on Sunday, and with it the holiest time of the year. As I scan through the Easter pages on Pinterest and look at all of the clever crafts and ideas on the “Mommy blogs,” I notice that all of those ideas seem to run out once the children are too big for coloring pages and gluing popsicle sticks. How, then, do we make the... Read more