A couple weeks before Christmas, we were getting ready to host a long-anticipated cocktail party at our house. My husband and I were a great team trying to get Christmas lights up, clean the house, and prep food for the occasion. Unfortunately, our toddler’s molars decided to make a ferocious push for the surface and we had to juggle a miserable little girl on top of all of the chores. We felt helpless. We kept giving her homeopathy and snuggles whenever we could, but sometimes she was completely inconsolable. Our usually cheerful munchkin was as fragile as could be and even though I was anticipating a festive event that evening, I could feel myself fraying at the edges. She skipped her nap entirely—something she hadn’t done for months, so she was completely exhausted on top of the pain and there was nothing we could do about it except desperately try to make it to bedtime.

A little before dinner, she really fell apart. We had already tried all sorts of distractions and remedies throughout the day and were running out of ideas. I decided that she had been cooped up in the house for a while, so I was going to bundle her up and take her for a walk outside to look at Christmas lights. The battle that ensued was utterly unprecedented. It took both my husband and I to wrestle her into warm clothes as she kicked and screamed. My patience and heart were breaking. Continue reading Teething →

You know that feeling when you are working on a project, and it’s full of joy and excitement…it sails along, the ideas come freely, and when finished, you are so excited about the result that you feel like doing a little joyful jig?

Or the feeling when you are happy with your performance, and your place in the world around you…excited to share ideas or your presence with people? The feeling of having actually contributed to an event or gathering… of having connected with people in a real way?

I think many of us know those feelings. They are lovely feelings, I find they help me be creative, and keep me interacting with others in social/work settings.

Unfortunately, too often I instead know anxiety, worry, and a paralyzing or suffocating sense of inadequacy or despair about myself or my work. It lurks around many creative and social corners. I know others feel this too –sometimes every so often, sometimes frequently. Continue reading Confidence, Herod, and Stealing from the Lord →

The well-travelled passage in Divine Love and Wisdom comes to mind at this time of year: “Love consists in this, that its own should be another’s; to feel the joy of another as joy in oneself, that is loving” (47). Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. It’s especially fun now that I have three young kids to share it with. To watch the face of my baby as she stares and gasps at the lovely Christmas lights—that’s love. I’ve been looking forward to baking cookies, decorating the tree, preparing presents, and talking about the Christmas story with them.

Today I read the rest of DLW 47: the part that doesn’t get quoted nearly as often; the part that is more chilling than inspiring.

“But to feel one’s own joy in another and not the other’s joy in oneself is not loving; for this is loving self, while the former is loving the neighbor. These two kinds of love are diametrically opposed to each other. Either, it is true, conjoins; and to love one’s own, that is, oneself, in another does not seem to divide; but it does so effectually divide that so far as any one has loved another in this manner, so far he afterwards hates him. For such conjunction is by its own action gradually loosened, and then, in like measure, love is turned to hate.”

Continue reading Don’t Mess with My Christmas →

On December 21, 1844 Hans Christian Andersen published the “Little Fir Tree,” a rather depressing story of an evergreen tree that is never satisfied. As a young sapling he looks up at his full grown comrades and dreams of one day being as large as they. The sun and air and forest are beautiful but he takes no joy from them. When he grows older he hears a bird tell about the trees that are cut down in the fall and decorated by the people in the nearby village. The tree is very excited to think that he will one day be a Christmas tree too and once again ignores the blessings of his current state. When he has reached a good size, he is chopped down and taken to a nearby home where he is decorated and celebrated. Though he loves this moment of glory, he is still convinced that there will be more and that his situation will only get better. He has a rather rude awakening when Christmas is over and he is stored in the attic eventually to be chopped up for firewood. He recognizes too late that his happiest moments in life were those that he did not appreciate in the moment. It may not be the most chipper of Christmas stories but the story of this Christmas tree got me thinking about how I look at the Christmas season.

Christmas is all about anticipation. From the moment Thanksgiving dinner is over, it is nothing but Christmas. Stores and radio stations may start right after Halloween but that is because they have no concept of the proper order of things. But now is not the time for that tirade. Continue reading Make It Last All Year →