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It was not my intention to start writing and speaking on pregnancy loss, but I suppose in many ways it is not surprising that I did. Writing gave me an outlet for my own healing and emotions.
But a book, a website, speaking gigs?
Those I would happily leave to someone else while I focused on my education experiences. I was content to let someone else handle the ministries side of pregnancy and infant loss.
Until I wasn’t.
And for the past couple years, I must be honest, I have struggled bouncing back and forth between the two. One would come to the forefront for a month or two and then the other would slip forward to take center stage. Occassionally the two ministries would collide in a sea of stress and overwhelm.
Me feeling like, “God, you can’t seriously want me to do both? Don’t you know the interwebs don’t tolerate that kind of cross over?”
If you follow me on any of my social media platforms or follow my original blog, Work and Play, Day by Day, then you may have seen I published a new book for the new year. MISSION: FAMILY is an edited complicaion of a piece of my Master’s Degree capstone project.
Through my research, I discovered that most parents are aware of church teachings that elevate parents as the primary educators of their children. They are aware of it and they want to step into this role. Most of them, however, feel that they lack the resources to know where to start.
Insert the creation of MISSION: FAMILY (which began as a parent education unit and it now a stand alone journal for families) and several other components of my project (that can’t exactly be duplicated large scale).
It was a satisfying project.
One, that prior to this book’s publication, had been lost. Lost in the sea of pregnancy and infant loss.
Because you see, I was in the process of finishing my project when Siena was diagnosed with PPROM. I was teaching that parent education unit and mentoring a group of parents in leading their own cooperative faith formation classes.
Only now I was doing it on bedrest.
The narrative component of the project was written in the hospital.
I orally defended (remotely) the week before her birthday.
And I promtly put the whole thing out of my mind.
Until the original publisher of my first two books, Blessed Is The Fruit of Thy Womb & 67 Ways to Do The Works of Mercy, came to me with a new project. He wanted to create a series of journals that would allow families to strengthen relationships and explore what it means to live authentically Catholics. As he described his goals for this project, I tentatively told him that I might already have something that would meet the needs he was describing. At least a first step.
I sent him a copy of the original manuscript and it started down the long road of development into the book that is available today.
When it came time for cover designs, Jerry proposed a handprint motiff. As a I looked at it, I remembered the origins of the project. Those long hospital writing sessions. The half-forgotten degree. And so Siena’s footprints were added to the cover. Where most people simply glance by and will not understand just what they mean.
But I know.
Yes, sometimes one vies for attention and sometimes one slips into the background, like ministries crossing in the night. Yet they are not separate things, they are what makes me, me. In this project they collide, reminding me how all is intricately interwoven into one divine purpose. My job is simply just to honor that in the best way I can with what is in front of my on any given day.
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