If Dostoyevski Had Instagram

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Image taken from Mari Andrews on Instagram (@bymariandrews)

Recently, as I shuttled my new babies down to Boston for a checkup, I listened to a podcast of writers discuss how social media is changing us, changing the way we live. One of the writers on the podcast was Dani Shapiro, whose memoir Slow Motion, about her parents’ car crash and her father’s death I happened to be reading at that time. She was talking about another writer friend whose parent was in their final days, and who shared on Facebook about her parent’s flame slowing being extinguished. Shapiro was struck by how, as her own father was dying twenty years earlier, there was no social media. She wondered if she had Facebook on her phone when she hopped on the plane to go home after she learned of their car crash, would she have posted about it? The tension of all of her feelings around these events having no release is what prompted her to write Slow Motion. If she had posted about these events, would she still have written the book?

It was fascinating to hear writers analyze how social media is changing us, especially because most of the writers I admire are not on Instagram, or are on Instagram and have 350 followers because they are busy writing and not building an online presence. They give me perspective for what is truly meaningful in the sea of voices we are presented with, because I want to be more like them and less like the people who are Insta-famous. What would it be like if C. S. Lewis or Dostoyevski had an Instagram feed? Would they be so busy posting that we would not have Surprised by Joy or A Grief Observed? Or The Brothers Karamazov?

Writers today are caught in the conundrum of using their writing time to both actually write and to build up a following on social media. Yet good writing comes from retreating, withdrawing, reflecting. And writers are cautioned about what they are consuming while trying to be productive. Stephen King famously called television the ‘glass teat’ and warned his audience to wean themselves off if they wanted to write well. Reading good books is the conduit to good writing, which only happens if we put down our phone and pick up a tome.

While writing and food blogging brought me into social media, motherhood is what has forged community there. I am part of a unique generation that will have mothered both before and after social media took hold. Ten years ago, when my oldest was almost two, we had a flip phone to make phone calls and a flip camera to record videos of our kids. By the time I had my third child, I got a smart phone and had just joined Facebook. And my fourth son’s birth ushered in both Instagram and Snapchat, which was then ushered out by Instagram Stories. When my children were small, being a mother was filled with tremendous experiences, but it didn’t occur to me to post these on Facebook because I didn’t think my old co-workers and high school friends wanted to hear about my mastitis or sleep deprivation. Motherhood was still intensely personal, and private, and isolating. But then people started to share these moments, these experiences on Instagram, and these shared experiences forged something powerful.

There is no question that social media has made the most isolating years of motherhood now a time of community and tribe building. With my last pregnancy, people were praying and congratulating us through the power of hashtags and online communities. My pre-social media births that went undocumented, that garnered no likes or any attention at all were the highlights of my life, seen or unseen. But there is power in ameliorating the feeling that you are all alone in the hopes and fears that motherhood brings. As I sit for hours now feeding babies, I can still find some connection with people and ideas. I can be entertained by witty humor. And in rocky times of parenting, you can find the power of shared experience. When our son with Down syndrome was rushed to the hospital and we discovered he had Hirschsprung’s Disease, through the hashtag #hirschsprungs I had found within hours another mother in Canada who had twins, one with Down syndrome and Hirschsprung’s. “You are literally the only other person in my situation,” she wrote. We would never have found each other, in the narrowest of all Venn Diagram possibilities, without Instagram. Through social media I found a community that prepared me for horrible diaper rashes and multiple doctors appointments and life with a g-tube. If we were to quantify the power of social media as a type of ‘knowing’ about experiences it’s enormous. I was able to know what to expect exponentially faster than if I had been in that situation ten years earlier.

But there is another type of knowing that is challenged by how social media impacts us. One writer lamented the tendency to always want to find the ‘narrative arc’ of their experiences, the framework to wrap things in that would make for good storytelling, instead of truly living their life in all of its immediacy and authenticity. This I think is the same danger that Instagram does to us. If we spend too much of our conscious attention on thinking of how that moment could be consumed instead of lived, how framing the photo, finding the right light, the right composition, instead of being with the subjects of the photo themselves, we lose out on what the immediate experience is offering up to us – the scent of morning rain, the laughter of our children, the song of the birds in the tree outside your window. And that of course is where we find true joy. Often it is that real joy we are trying to share, but it is healthy to keep checking that the sharing doesn’t eclipse the joy.

And there is something appealing to our creative souls for looking for the photo in the first place, for wanting to tell the story of a moment. Especially the heartwarming moments of motherhood. The human urge to keep an account is timeless. And for many people, the value of social media is keeping a record of our lives that might otherwise pass in a blur. The size of our babies, the height of our teens, the homes we live in. Some people argue that we spend too much time on social media, and while that may be true, long before we had it, people spent time connecting and recording. A hundred years ago, the habit of writing letters, diaries, and journals was commonplace. And large parts of people’s days were spent being social, perhaps even more than ours as we post on Instagram.

But that may be the problem. We are Insta-social. If we are not careful, we can spend time on being social but only a few seconds at a time, instead of, say, an afternoon on a Sunday family meal, or a half hour writing a letter. It is more convenient, but it is at a proximity that is much further away, in tiny squares, at lightning speed. And the result is that we are often just hearing noise, or getting quickly nudged by others, instead of being truly touched. For me, what ends up feeling like ‘noise’ is those who present a very superficial and manufactured self. What ends up truly touching me is when people share a real, authentic human experience. Support, connection, and collaboration do grow out of social media. We can and should be a source of positivity and caring wherever we are, social media especially. But we can discern those who are letting a real self, and not shades of their ego, come through.

I came at Instagram as a writer first, and for me, success in this craft is how well you capture truth. The opposite is often the case on IG – it is how well you capture what is desirable. Many people view success on IG as popularity, even if you are getting the attention by totally fabricated and untrue images. There are some Instagram accounts that have huge followings and the majority of the pictures are of them lying in bed with their children, eyes closed, seemingly asleep. Who is the person that climbed up and hovered over them to take the picture? I wondered. I asked in the comments. Their husband. I can’t imagine my real-life husband having the time to hover over our bed to take a picture, to arrange the covers just so, while I pretend to sleep. And then doing it again fifty other times.

The tricky part, the part that confuses the real knowing, is that they appear to be reflecting in the post. Under the picture of the husband staging the moment of sleep for his wife and children includes something like ‘I’m never letting go’ and then the hashtags #soblessed, #heartsfull. It’s not really reflecting at all if it is premeditated or staged. It’s definitely not if there are any brands being tagged. And that’s ok, if we are not confusing what is being shared. Obviously, some accounts become what magazines were – glossy representations of perfect homes, families and houses, with plenty of ads. My guess is if you never liked those kind of magazines, you won’t like those types of accounts either. But when we see the number of people that follow such fabricated images, we are left scratching our heads, wondering what our society values.

What is vastly different from a hundred years ago, or even from reading magazines, is the rate at which we consume other people’s experiences. This is I think the variable that is changing us the most. Having already ‘known’ about an experience by consuming it from someone else’s social media content, we can be in danger of not giving ourselves the time and space to have our own experiences, to reflect in a slow and meaningful way. The surprise and joy of a new pregnancy might dissipate as it gives way to thoughts about how to announce it on social media. It’s wonderful to share a pregnancy announcement. But it is also a special thing for you and your family to be the only ones that know, and to process the news, and then share it in an authentic way. The change in seasons now can be perceived more from a shift in color scheme on someone’s feed then actually going out and taking a walk, and must be shared as soon as we drink our first PSL, which we bought because someone else just posted one yesterday. A homogeny of experience arises, and the complexity and richness and wonder of life is lost as we all repeat and regurgitate what we are taking in.

I think about the question that Dani Shapiro posed – does sharing these moments dissipate an innate tension in our lives that might propel us to greater things? Would we make more and better art if we weren’t curating a feed? This is hard to say, since many people build their art though Instagram. But for sure, there are less tangible evidences of the human urge to create – less buildings, less art to put in buildings, less art to hold in our hands – as we pour more and more of our artistic impulses into the digital sphere.

These questions press on me most as a mother. How will I plan to teach my kids about social media? Right now, their consumption of it consists of YouTube videos (Heaven help us). But there are plenty of teaching moments in just this arena. How is it that a girl’s first time making slime has 3.5 million views? Who is buying all these toys these kids are opening? Like most parents, I am faced with answering this: What degree of participation should I let my kids have in social media? When she gets older, should I let my daughter have her own YouTube Channel if she desires to participate and share in this arena? The answer for now is no but I have to admit I don’t fully know what the right answer is down the road. There is plenty of leadership, initiative, knowledge, public speaking skills, and entertainment in the few videos she has recorded on my phone in the event that I might change my mind and let her share them. But besides safety, I got back to Dani Shapiro’s pressing question: what is not being created because we are sharing so much instantly? What will grow in my daughter and take root if she is forced to stay isolated while she develops her skills and interests? My instincts tell me good things.

The one thing that is clear in all of this change is that we are getting used to not being alone. Now we are all in each other’s doctor appointments, living rooms, date nights and kitchens. This isn’t all bad. We are less isolated, and some might argue, more engaged, more alive. But it does mean we have to try harder to find ways to be alone, to intentionally carve out space in our day for silence, for quiet. To see what takes root when no one is looking.

So the antidote may be this, to just sit quietly with ourselves and with our God. He will give us everything we need, so that when we turn to social media, we are already filled up. We don’t come at it hungry. In already getting all the approval, attention and love He has waiting for us, we don’t look for these from others. Maybe a way to determine helpful versus harmful consumption is think about the end goal. If your end goal is attention, then perhaps you need to be cautious about your social media use. But if your end goal is to authentically create art, love your family, be healthy, mourn your loved one, or grow spiritually, and you share your journey towards getting there, it seems there is value, and true knowing, and community to be found.

We are all fumbling around what social media means to us, and I was comforted to hear writers I admire admit they are thinking it through for themselves. Perhaps Dostoyevski would have fumbled too. But I like to believe he would have sought out the quiet to think, to journal, to write, to have a meal with real conversation, to pray. These are the source of true reflecting, and the meaningful knowledge that it brings. Because no matter how many likes the shot of your PSL or the photo of you sleeping with your cherubic children gets, only this really satisfies.

 

 

 

Easy Peasy

You probably already figured this out, since I haven’t posted here in a month, but having twins does not make for good food blogging.

I thought I would pop on here though and list the meals that I’ve discovered in this crazy season that are a) easy b) delicious and c) easy.  Most of the time I am cooking with a baby in the Bijorn or on my hip so I am low on pics. Let’s think of this post as word-of-mouth recommendations, shall we? There are different seasons in life and in the kitchen, and I subscribe to the idea that part of loving food is embracing the season you are in and not trying to fight it, or else you will be miserable. I know there will be seasons down the road where I will be creating recipes again. Maybe you have found yourself also in a season of needing quick dinners and easy ideas. I’m sharing the shortcuts I’m finding just in case.

One thing I am LOVING is that my local grocery delivery service (Peapod, run by Stop & Shop) has put up on their website meals that you can click on, and then they pull up all the ingredients and you add them to your cart lickety split. This is a much better (and cheaper) option for our family then Blue Apron or Hello Fresh. Plus I often have some of the ingredients in the pantry and don’t need to buy all of the ingredients. I think its genius and I’m so happy they started doing this (I may have emailed them the idea last year, so I’m biased, and no I don’t think that they listened to me or anything).

I am trying to be healthy, and chose real foods that are not processes and are good for a nursing mom. But I’m not killing myself either. I can do that when they are sleeping through the night and I join Insanity or stretch my running times to longer then 30 minutes. My motto right now is to enjoy this period, go easy on myself, and these dinners have allowed me to do just that.

1. Lemon Chicken – this one was a winner. There was something so comforting about this huge pot of juicy lemony chicken and potatoes that picked up all the drippings as it roasted. Bonus points that you get to cut up a whole chicken, which you have never done it is oddly gratifying. Here is a tutorial if you need one. Also lots of people asked me what this veg is and it is just sautéed Brussel Sprouts with pancetta – it is the only way I can get my kids to eat Brussels sprouts since they love it!

2Thai Chicken Wraps –  There are a number of recipes on the web and I actually feel like I pull up a different one each time I make this. This one has a dressing I really like because you can throw all the ingredients in a blender and it tastes great. I am intrigued by the idea of collard greens to hold more then butter lettuce or Romaine leaves, but we just used Romaine leaves. Also, I used rotisserie chicken and skipped the first half of this recipe. You will notice there is NO cooking in this recipe if you do that. Yup. Dinner came together in 5 minutes, and I was like  what will I do with all this extra time? Answer:

3. Mini Turkey Meatball Soup –  You might have seen me make this on InstaStories. It is so so good. I double this and have lunch made for the week. While you are on her site check out her Instapot Mashed Potatoes. They cook in 10 minutes! It has me thinking generations from now everyone will cook using the Instapot and will talk about the times before we had it as ‘the olden days’.

4. Ina Garten’s Beef Tenderloin with Mustard Horseradish Sauce: The twins had their Christening this weekend and I made this for one of the dinners we had with family in town.

I also made this for Christmas Eve and we turned it into sandwiches for Christmas dinner. (The link above shows how to make it into sandwiches, we eat it either sliced with sauce on top or as a sandwich). It is fancy and delicious and takes 5 minutes to prep and cooks in 22-25 minutes. If you are looking to impress someone with a dinner but are scared to bite of more than you can chew, this dinner is for you. The scariest part will be paying – for the beef but it feeds 10-15 people and is worth it. It is so, so good and melts like butter in your mouth. Take the time to trim and tie it (again here is a tutorial). And this sauce? You need it in your life. I have come to mixing together a mini-version for my sandwiches instead of mayo and mustard.

5. Ski House Bolognese I got this cookbook around the time we got a ski condo, but it is chock full of comfort food that is easy. I love their version of bolognese AND their suggestion to freeze half of it so you have a delicious dinner waiting for you that just requires a box of pasta.

6. Oven Roasted Sausage, Peppers and Onions – I have discovered a new love of this easy dish by roasting it in the oven. The sausage skins crisp up into a lovely, crispy but juicy texture. They are great for a crowd, too, since you can really bulk it up with rolls, good spaghetti sauce and provolone. Meatballs are good too but there is nothing to do for prep work with sausages except slice open the plastic wrap and put it on a tray. Bonus if you find pre-sliced peppers and onions.

7. Pioneer Woman’s Pulled Pork – Leave it to a rancher to tell you how to cook your pork. Not that they have pigs on her ranch. Do they? I don’t even know. Anyway, she makes a yummy pulled pork. I have made pulled pork many different ways lately because our au pair loves it, and because big roasts are cheap and last for days.

In a pinch I have just placed a hunk of whatever pork is on sale in a slow cooker, seasoned it with salt, pepper and garlic, and added a few cups of bbq sauce, and it was…pretty good. I have also made it by seasoning the pork, adding a can of root beer, and once it is shredded, adding sauce. This was also lovely. But I really love the seasonings in Ree’s recipe, and so did the other 50 people we fed with this over the weekend. Just know you can’t really go wrong if you are cooking it low and slow and it meets salt and bbq sauce at some point.

Here it is coated with the rub which I like to put ontop of a thin layer of mustard to hold the rub to it. Then let it hang out for 30 minutes to marinate. Then pop it into the slow cooker for 6-8 hours. (Note: I did try to make this in the InstaPot, but I have to say the meat came out more tender in the slow cooker.)

8. Mushroom and Goat Cheese Mini Frittatas – These mini frittatas are HEAVEN. I made a huge batch when my very healthy neighbors came over and plowed my driveway when my husband was traveling to thank them. I also doubled the egg/milk/sauteed onion mixture and made a second tray of them by putting diced canadian bacon and cheddar cheese on the bottom of the mini muffin tins, then pouring the mixture over. Both were amazing! And you can see that they are super easy and you can use any ingredients. But the mushroom and goat cheese one felt so decadent and luxurious, and I lived on them all week. I have been in a huge frittata kick lately, because it feels like all the work of making scrambled eggs or omelet but I have seconds and thirds in the fridge for later, saving me time and pots and pans.

Well, here is hoping you find something new to add to your repertoire on this list! I hope to share the next bunch of recipes I find with you here because, let’s face it, I am not eating out much in the near future.

Happy Eating! xoxo Katie

Pancakes & Poetry

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This morning I woke up to pancakes, already made.

This is new for us, this season where I don’t have to make the pancakes on Saturday morning, and my husband doesn’t either.

When I was a new mom and had three kids three and under, Saturday morning looked like every other morning – get a few sippy cups and a bottle of milk and some breakfast, and then everything else they needed between the hours of 6am and 7pm. I would crash after they went to bed like a waitress who just worked a double shift because, well, I did.

Sometimes, when I hear from a mother who has two or three kids, aged five and under, who is swamped and going through Hard Days and not thriving and barely surviving, I want to grab her hand and tell her that she is in the Hard Days and that it will get better. Then I want to give her a glass of wine.

And when other parents hear how many kids we have and they are like, ‘I couldn’t do it. No way. I could never have more kids.’ I nod because I know they are thinking about the Hard Days. And I know they are wondering why would I want more of that?

But what I want to say to them is that after the Hard Days, there is another season of motherhood that awaits. That there are so many Good Days, when you have older kids that love on the little kids, when you are seasoned and you don’t sweat every stage, because you know that it will pass, so instead you can enjoy parts of the stage you are in and leave the bad parts because ‘meh, its just a stage.’ When you figure out how to ask for help and are lucky enough to find it, or are sleep deprived and begin to appreciate sleep like you never have before, and suddenly, every night that you get more then four or five hours is magical. When you can all agree that you are arguing because you are hungry.

And there will come a day when you wake up and someone else made the pancakes on a Saturday morning.

The poet Beth Alvarado captures the early days of motherhood so well:

And all this: the doubt, the loneliness, the fear no one can assuage, not even your mother for you are the mother now and even though you might want to hide in the closet, 24/7, crying, you cannot. Someone needs you, a someone you don’t even know. Look into his eyes, he is a mystery. Face it. That’s why his name doesn’t fit him, and why no name would. Who is he? And he gazes at you with unfocused eyes. He does not know you, except by the smell of your skin, the sound of your voice. He cannot see you and, because you are his mother, he may never be able to see you, not clearly. Your beginnings are too close, skin against skin, this is a love affair, admit it. You will never recover.

Early motherhood is lovely and lonely and you can’t quite wrap your head around how your life has irrevocably changed. It is an intense love, like a blow torch flame. But later motherhood is like a cozy fire, the kind you can warm your hands on. It is almost like getting a college roommate. You start to stay up and watch shows together, and you teach them how to use the treadmill and play golf or tennis. You order sushi and ski together and start to wear the same shoe size. You fight over who gets to play the next song. You enjoy life together and start to recognize shimmering signs that they are becoming equipped to enjoy life even without you.

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To be clear, there are many Hard Days before you get to the Good Days. You will burn a lot of pancakes and muffins and cookies while you teach them how to cook, and clean up flour and egg shells and spilled vanilla. You will soak your sports bra right through trying to teach them how to ski. You will have them glare and argue with you that they don’t want to take piano lessons, and then enter into hostage-level negotiations before they agree to try it twice, where they will fall in love with their teacher and fill the house with the sound of “Jingle Bells” in the weeks leading up to Christmas. You will lose your mind trying to fit them all for sports shoes before school starts, getting all those little people lined up to put their foot in the foot measuring tray, and then stand on one leg – no the other leg, the one in the tray – and then a few months later they they will hop out of the car at Lacrosse practice and wave ‘bye.

And soon you realize that they are on their way to becoming caring, functioning people. And they will ask you ‘what is the Cold War?’ and beat you at chess and they will sing love songs to their little brothers. They will pick out a pink mug that says ‘XOXO’ for your Christmas present, and buy it in the checkout line using their own money at Target.  And they will know how to make pancakes, all by themselves, and you will realized that that is kind of poetry too.

And so when they ask me why I would want more kids, why I would go through sleep deprivation and the terrible twos and potty training again, and possibly skip out on a Hawaii vacation, or maybe any vacation, my answer is this: because of the way they make pancakes. The are so so good. You should try them.

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A Deep Breath for the New Year

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When I found out I was pregnant with twins, one of my friends who has her own pair said to me, ‘oh your life just falls into a hole for about a year, that’s all.’

Duly noted.

I have to admit, the seasons I have had of motherhood where my kids go to preschool and I write in the mornings have been my favorite. A big warm sweater, a mug of tea, and a morning of words and ideas. My need to write exhausted, and if I am lucky, my need to run exhausted too, I am free to focus on my people, on making dinner, on molding hearts in between soccer practice, the dentist and dinner.

Now I am in the throes of life with newborn twins, and it is vastly different. I love love love babies. All pink, kissable flesh and potent possibility. They are like springtime, totally fresh and filled with blinding light. But to paraphrase the comedian Jim Gaffigan, if you want to know what life with twins is like, imagine you are drowning while holding a baby, and then someone hands you another baby.

When I first started freelance writing for magazines, another writer said to me ‘Do NOT become a mommy blogger.’ For this reason, I have dodged writing about motherhood directly. I think I also had a hangover from my academic days, and from a low level cultural bias against being a staying home mom, even one who might, say, publish articles and novels. Not going to gain any awards or critical praise from writing about that topic. But recently, I have started to notice the writings that I am most drawn to are essays about motherhood, prose whose insights on the whole rearing of babes leaves me mulling over ideas and words like a butterscotch in my mouth, warm and sweet. In her book, Homing Instincts, the wonderful writer Sarah Menkedick asked why Motherhood hasn’t been made more of a subject of serious writing, and then proceeded to make it one in her beautiful collection of essays. My ears, and my itching writing fingers, perked up.

Good writing is, I think, paying attention, recording what you see, and then editing that well and artfully. These are also helpful skills for motherhood. I remember an interview with Ralph and Ricky Lauren’s children, and they said that their mother always helped them see themselves clearly. She held up a pair of eyes – her own – through which they could see themselves. So it makes sense to me during this year of rough waters and black holes to bring the two together and write more about motherhood. Maybe they will turn into essays, or even a book of essays. Maybe they will stay just the posts of  a tired mom during her year of having baby twins. Either way, writing makes me a better mom and being a mom makes me a better writer. In both areas, the work changes you, and I think for the better.

There is a constant tension for any writer today about where to write. Online content to gain an audience? Solid essays for submission? Longer, thoughtful works for publication? And all of these are constrained by time. With twins, my writing time will be limited but my notes on my phone about what I want to write about will be long and varied, so perhaps the combination of the two will yield something that resembles consistency here. I also think there are generations of smart, loving, strong women who are becoming mothers and are curious about motherhood, about how this endeavor will change them. Writers have always done a service by shining a light into the dark, and motherhood, for all of its wonder and beauty, has plenty of dark days.

I created this website to be more intentional about writing, talking about books, and helping others who are interested in the craft of writing, so I know many of my posts will be about these things. I am Catholic, and this informs my motherhood and my writing. But I hope to give support and solidarity to any mother or writer or both who reads this blog.

So I’ll start with this post – a deep breath for the New Year.

Something about last year – maybe it was the news that one of our babies might have Down syndrome? Maybe it was just a deepening of listening to the voice in my deepest part of myself. Perhaps it was turning 40 – something made me aware of how to live while you pray without ceasing. How it can be just like breathing. The more I prayed, the more I loved. The more I loved, the more I had energy to act, to support, to give, to pour myself out. I am interested in this mystery, this paradox, that as He increases, and I breath Him in, I decrease, and exhale worry, anxiety and frustration. What’s left is peace, joy, and hope. I learned last year how a surrendered life is so much easier to live, even if surrendering is hard. I want to learn this year how to harness this better, how to become better at breathing Him in.

I am still stuck on my many short comings and mistakes, days where I am short and I yell and I ask the people I love to forgive me. It is hard to pray when you are worried about your loved ones, when you are sleep deprived. There are many days where resistance wins, and I eat too much sugar and drink too much wine. But then there are the other days where discipline wins. Where I do the things that help all of the people in my house to live the good life. Discipline helps overcomes resistance, since setting a goal means you only have to make the decision once, instead of negotiating and doing battle with resistance every day. So I try to stay disciplined in the things that help me breath.

Things that help me to inhale: good food, good books, good friends, laughter, time to pray.

Things that help me to exhale: exercise, decluttering, letting go, simplifying. Finding the empty spaces – in my home, on the page, in the empty pot on the stove – to fill with clarity, order and creativity.

Taking a deep breath will mean praying. It will mean finding empty spaces. It will mean writing here.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey for this year, as I am hunkered down in my hole of having twins. As I try to finish my second book, and write meaningful essays and blog posts in between. As I try to do these things that help me to breath, help me pray without ceasing. To love well. And to make many mistakes in between.