Well-Read Mom
I am so very grateful that the Well-Read Mom Year of the Father begins with poetry. I do realize that poetry is not everyone’s jam. And I’m not grateful in the sense that I gain some weird didactic pleasure from others’ discomfort (as my students sometimes posit). I’m grateful because I need all of the help I can get. I need help in paying attention to my life.
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To Seek and To Know the Place for the First Time Written by Lucile Foley When we began this Year of the Seeker, I was in the midst of an intense period that felt like the climax to years of searching. What did I seek? Healing. A return of our fertility. In these years of…
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Ants in the Honey Cabinet Written by Emily Burns Russell My mom keeps bees. The delight and wonder this sparks in her life has been a joy for our family to share, along with gallons of honey we’ve helped her extract every June since she started this hobby. In our corner kitchen cabinet, we keep…
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A tale of a well-placed nine-top, unexpected fruit, and the true womanhood of Well-Read Mom that is good, beautiful, and true.
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Seeking. I am always seeking. Seeking a bargain, a better way to do a chore, or getting two errands done simultaneously. But this year has been different. Life events have pushed me deeper toward inner strength, perseverance, and, ultimately, toward God more fully present in me.
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In my time as a mother, I have sought long and hard for holiness. I want to feel holy. I want life to look holy. I have this false impression that my life before marriage was all those things, simply because I had the time and freedom to pray in peace, to attend mass daily, and to have a job that involved active ministry. Maybe it was holy, but holier than life as a wife and mother? More holy than a life of routine self-sacrifice, self-denial, and discomfort?
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I first learned about Well-Read Mom after our family moved from Florida to Georgia, and I was looking to meet new people. A dear friend invited me to join her evening group. The structure and rigor of the book selections fed my love for literature. Unfortunately, evening book club meetings were not sustainable for our growing family. I tried reading on my own, but it wasn’t the same. If I wanted a book club that fit my family’s needs, I would need to start my own chapter.
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I began my journey in the Year of the Seeker by responding to a forwarded email from a friend inviting me to join a local Well-Read Mom group. It was July, and my husband and I were coordinating the fall schedules of our seven children. We had also just found out we were expecting. Though I have been an avid reader since childhood, I have never participated in a book club. I thought reading some new books and chatting with like-minded women might be a good opportunity.
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Unlike Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a solo trip to the beach is neither possible nor desirable for me. However, I have thought about this book several times throughout the past year, especially when I needed retreat and refreshment.
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I first read A Severe Mercy in college and fell in love with it immediately. I was a lifelong C.S. Lewis fan and I was more than willing to read a book with C.S. Lewis’s letters!
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