shadowwonder

Some sins merely sting. Slight-seeming shortcomings, they inflict but brief burn-- easily soothed with a salve of self-sufficiency. Some sins scald. Singeing beyond skin’s surface, they scorch the self’s very center, stir again the sobering sense of the soul’s insolvency. Both sting and scald leave scars. These marks tell the truest truth: skin and soul flesh and spirit beg for Balm.

If you read about how Mama Guilt loves to offer unending “helpful”observations —even about the inconsequential moments—you may have noticed a few things: First (and as my family jokes when one of us is in an especially talkative mood), she has a LOT of words.    A whole lot.     There’s always more where that came from. Second, her suggestions usually back me into a corner that impossible to escape.  I’m a bad mom if I go in one direction, and I’m also a bad mom if I go in the other direction.  She loves to put me in the damned-if-I-do-damned-if-I-don’t position (and sometimes that feels literal-but more on that later). She also has a knack for pointing out that any difficulty I’m encountering could have been very easily avoided (evidence that I’m not particularly bright), and that the person who should have done the avoiding is me (evidence that I’m not very intentional about my choices). That, of course, necessitates that she move on to reminisce on all those other times

If you've read my  previous post about deciding to ditch Mama Guilt , you may be wondering how she and I got so close in the first place. For the longest time, I didn’t even realize this frenemy was part of my thinking.    What I did know was that when I looked at my life, I knew it was (and still is) absolutely full of blessings to savor and celebrate.     To feel sad seemed somewhere between silly and ridiculous.    Yet so often, I just couldn’t shake a sense of low-grade, self-directed frustration. I knew my emotions were often incompatible with my circumstances, but nothing seemed to help:    whether I talked about it, squelched it, prayed about it, tried to push through it, berated myself for it, or worked at cultivating gratitude, the sense of dis-ease lingered on.     My inability to cajole myself out of these feelings only made things worse:    I was even more frustrated, and pretty embarrassed, too.    It seemed best—safest, really—to keep my feelings under wraps and

Yesterday, I went public about my "friend," Mama Guilt .  Maybe that seems a little weird.  So maybe I should explain. Here are some reasons I decided to write about Mama Guilt, and why I chose yesterday to talk about how I'm telling her goodbye. Mama Guilt has been in my life for about as far back as I can remember.  In fact, I'm pretty sure her critical voice was part of my internal dialogue long before I even realized she was even talking to me. It was this lack of awareness on my part that gave her a lot of years, and a lot of room, to do a lot  of damage. In retrospect, I really  wish I could have recognized that she had taken up residence in my mind, and that what she had to say was completely un-helpful.  But I never ran across anything or anyone who talked about a similar experience   If I had, maybe I would have recognized her for who she is.  Maybe I could have quieted her down before now.   Obviously, that can't happen.  I can't g

When my son and daughter were young, their growing-up years stretched out before my husband and me like some vast, unexplored beach—one whose end seemed practically unreachable, or at least beyond a barely-visible horizon.   Now that both children are teenagers, my husband and I are recognizing their time at home does indeed have an end point.   We have begun counting down the years—and especially the slower-paced summers—remaining before they graduate high school and begin whatever comes next in their lives.   This awareness has led us to be a bit more intentional about planning time together—with an emphasis on making fun memories as well as teaching important life-skills. While our now-sixteen-year-old daughter has shown a good bit of interest in cooking (especially improvisational baking with unexpected ingredients, thanks to Chopped ), our seventeen-year-old son has focused primarily on the role of consumer.    His food preparation has involved little more than throwing a