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Feeling Triggered?
Feeling triggered lately? Yeah, I thought so. Me too. I don’t blame you. It would be hard not to be triggered with all the fear hanging in the air like a thick layer of pheromones. What’s your poison—your particular trigger?
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Why Everyone Should See “Turning Red”
I recently came across a Facebook post from Diary of a Mom about Pixar’s new animated film Turning Red. I was intrigued to note that the reviews ran the gamut, from David Sims’ rave in The Atlantic—he called it “the best thing Pixar’s produced in recent memory”—to the dismissive-at-best review from the managing director of Cinema Blend, Sean O’Connell, who said, Some Pixar films are made for a universal audience. Turning Red is not. The target audience for this one feels very specific, and very narrow. If you are in it, this might work well for you. I am not in it. This was exhausting. Hmmmmm . . . The…
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When Your Ex Dies–Disenfranchised Grief
August 31 is difficult for me, and today is no exception. You see my today is my husband Bill’s 60th birthday. It would be my ex-husband’s birthday—we were separated for nine years—if it were not for the fact that Bill, or William as he was known then, died before we managed to divorce—also on August 31. Yep, three years ago he went out on the same day he’d come in.
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Time after Time
I’ve been thinking about time this week. Physics majors, as I was long ago, are surprised to learn that physical laws do not depend on time going in only one direction. There’s only one law that requires time to move in a single direction, the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy is always increasing. Energy gets more dispersed, not less.
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Take Back the Night—and the Garden
I found myself in therapy in the late 1980s because I didn’t understand how to receive the nurturing I deserved, especially in sexual relationships. My therapist, Fred, had been trained in Primal Therapy. The process of unraveling soul-crushing trauma by following the trail of excess emotion turned out to be a very effective tool for me. In fact, I uncovered so much that one day I actually found myself reliving my birth. It was terrifying, so much so that I vowed I would do what I could to make my children’s births less traumatic.
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Mama Mary: Nature and Nurture
As I mentioned in my post about the Agony in the Garden, I love gardens. Flowers, particularly, mean a lot to me. A beautiful flower can almost always strike a joyful chord in my heart, even if I am in the depths of despair. So when Perdita announced that this would be the “Flower Power” novena, intended to nourish the garden that is the Way of the Rose community, I was all in.
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True Love Stories Never End
Many of you know I’ve written a memoir about my relationship with my ex-husband, which went from deep love to intense loss and betrayal before winding its way back to a different, but no less powerful, kind of love. Mama Mary’s been pushing me to get this book “out there” for a while now, especially now because there are so many people who are dealing with loss. The last couple of months I have been working toward that goal, but slowly and with great resistance—okay, perhaps terror is a better word.
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Agony in a Garden?
Have you ever heard a phrase you’re very familiar with and suddenly it meant something different to you, as if you were hearing it for the first time? That happened to me very recently when I was praying the Sorrowful Mysteries with the Agony in the Garden.
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Going Public: “This Is Who I Am!”
I’ve noticed a theme on Way of the Rose novena posts lately, people baring their hearts and souls and changing themselves and others in the process. This is a theme I would like to see continuing. I think it is very important that as many of us as possible stand up and say, “This is who I am.”
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Tiger Mommying
There was a really popular book by Amy Chua called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that came out in 2011. It was about a strict, disciplinarian form of parenting that was supposed to result in kids who graduate from Harvard and Yale. This is not that. It may even be the opposite of that.
writer and editor
