bits and bants vol. 47

whirlwinds, greenery, parenting complaints - did I just use an AI description of everything I've ever written??

The whirlwind of May is still whirling and I don’t even know where to begin. I feel as if I’ve lost whole weeks due to event upon event, practice upon practice, game upon game, ad infinitum. (Audiobook pronunciation poll question: is it infinitum as in Infinity Wars or infi-NEIGH-tum as in a person who has one too many degrees? Comment your answer below!)

the restful vibes I aspire to

Add to the mix of everyone needing to be everywhere at seven different times a day— the fact that it is planting season! I may not be a farmer, but I am spending every spare minute planting some form of plant material be it seed, seedling, perennial shrub, or raspberry bush. I am truly planting a lot of plants, but there was a risk of frost this morning so I can’t even plant out cold sensitive things yet!

I haven’t simply not written, I haven’t even texted my friends back in weeks, or so it feels. We’ve also had big family celebrations for sacraments, mother’s day, and hosted 40 people for dinner last weekend. This weekend is just my oldest child’s eighteenth birthday and I may just shrivel up completely in an emotional ball of turmoil. Oh, and then maybe my own landmark 40th birthday the next day. I am in a glass cage of emotion but as per usual don’t know what to do with it. Actually I know what I would like to do with it, I would like time to just stop, I just need a good straight week of no commitments or giant, important events to just try and get my head around life. Is that asking too much?!?!

But May is the most beautiful of spring months around here—things are actually growing and things are actually green! I continue to express that you really don’t understand how taxing it is mentally to not see things alive for six months of the year. If you’ve got flowers coming up in March you have no idea. No. Idea. It is such a tangible mental relief. Touching grass is now possible, people!

On the thornier side; does anyone else sometimes feel as if your kids are these bottomless pits of entertainment? I swear I have worked my entire motherhood career to try to raise independent children who are not immune to boredom, but I also attest that they can be driven from event to exciting event in the course of 24 hours and within less than 6 hours be morose that they haven’t seen their friends and “have done nothing fun” in days. Honestly, it is just a good reminder that if you’re parenting for the ego boost you’re doing it wrong. Thank goodness I don’t parent to keep my kids happy at all moments! It’s hard when they’re toddlers, but let me tell you it is harder for a camel to go through an eye of a needle by the time they’re 13. Sometimes I just look back at toddler days and smirk at the ease, and then I remind myself that I am so grateful to not be going through the struggle of toddlers again. AND THEN I realize that there are tons of moms who are doing both at the same time and they’re the real superstars who are much better mothers than I!

This post is all over the place, truly welcome to my brain right now.

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bits:

• I won’t burden you with another papal take, but if you’re new to Rerum Novarum I really recommend this article which sums it up well. The encyclical itself is well worth the read, I wrote multiple papers on it in college because I liked it so much and am such a papal nerd, but I do want to remind everyone who seems to think it the encyclical that knocked down capitalism that it equally knocked down socialism. So remember kids, the family is the basis of political structure and Catholic social teaching isn’t left or right! (Side note: I paid up for a real subscription for First Things over the past several weeks because they were cranking out so much good content that I maxed out my free views on multiple browsers.)

• Also on the Rerum Novarum train, this excellent discussion from New Polity that I thought was really interesting and adds so much context. I think that because we live in such a ridiculously heated time in Church history that we forget that the previous hundred years of Church history were also ridiculously heater. Probably not as heated as now…but you know what I mean.

• Here’s an interesting look at the reality of surrogacy and the disembodied production of babies from

  Nadya Williams
  at Mere Orthodoxy. I have such a gut response to surrogacy and how wrong it is that it is hard for me to think about it objectively, but Nadya makes such a eloquent argument.

• Obviously you should be reading everything

  Amy Welborn
  has been writing over the course of the conclave and papal election, but I especially like her reemphasis of this important point about tradition-it’s not about doing things that have always been done like preserving artefacts in museums or owning the libs, it’s because tradition is a way of communicating important truths that smarter humans that us have figured out over the course of two thousand years.

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reading, watching, what have you:

• watching - nothing but hockey because I’m always planting something and there’s always hockey on.

• I’ve been reading The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton which is a historical fiction look at what I presume is a famous Puritan woman from New England. I haven’t wikipedia-ed her because I don’t want to spoil the ending to this book even though I’m 99.9 percent sure she’s going to be killed for being a witch, because what else happened in the beginning years of Puritan New England that would make a good historical novel??? I don’t often have a hankering for historical fiction, but when I do it is written by Anya Seton who has a wonderful ability to write with such precise historical accuracy without becoming weirdly preachy, or sentimental, or didactic, or sensationalist. I actually just found her book on Camelot at the used book store last week so I’m interested to read that. I would also love to know if

  Dominika
  has read her books because she is a forgotten mid-century woman writer who was pretty great at what she did.

• I am in the season of audiobooks because again, planting all.the.time, so I’ve been listening to The Betrothed and The God of the Woods which has been universally praised. The God of the Woods isn’t bad, it’s fairly suspenseful, I am just getting a littler tired of the “rich people are so weird and emotionally abusive and above the law” trope that feels so trope-y and yet it is in book after book after book.

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Ok, I need an iced coffee to sustain me through book club tonight—not because my book clubs are quiet but because I feel like I’ve already done a million things today and I’m starting to lag. Also, do I need to make dinner?

send tequila,

Christy