Category: Marriage and Family Life
-
What Blossoms in a Children’s Graveyard
We visited the cemetery today, as is our custom, since November is the month of the Holy Souls, and this week is the Octave, and you get an indulgence for going there to pray for the dead. I don’t think I would much want to go—I’m pretty lethargic these days; can’t seem to clean the…
-
Art and Salvation?
When I was in graduate school at the Pennsylvania Academy, a cheeky philosophy student from Temple University said to me: “Art is great and everything, but it won’t save your soul.” Well, I believed him at the time, but I beg to differ now. In his papal Letter to Artists, the late St. John Paul…
-
The Stations of Acceptance
It’s easy to look back with sighs of regret, as a mother “in the weeds,” as a person in midlife, having made life’s commitment at last, at the unfinished work; work that has been eclipsed by the demands of your dependents, and cannot be attended to again for some months or years, if ever. What…
-
Nurturing the Artist’s Creative Cycle
These children are not worried about output. There is no pressure for them to make anything, or to have anything to show for what they’ve been doing with their time. But they will. There is something within themselves which they are carefully, instinctively building.
-
An Artist and a Mother
I am slowly beginning to realize that there is still some kind of false choice being proffered here. There is some sort of repulsive-charge between the ‘self-as-artist’ and the ‘self-as-mother’ images I hold simultaneously in my heart. A mother is supposed to be someone who can’t do art. An artist is supposed to be someone…
-
Words Underground
It was another “medicine walk,” as I call them. These have become indispensable. I’m not able to describe what goes on during my medicine walks in pictures, though as a painter, I sorely wish I could. That’s why I’m stuck with words. Words in English. Words, words, words. Words like worms beneath my feet in…
-
A Little Grief
The bond with one’s own pre-born baby is a bond more basic than fondness. It sits deeper than personality. It is a bond made irrevocably but not yet fully realized. The satisfaction of loving is in knowing the other, but I can’t really know Doloran as I know my living children. And that is perhaps…
-
Meeting Another Mother on the Way of Sorrow
Her name is not really “Laurel” but I’ll call her that. She’s a Catholic friend of my midwife who has been an invisible helper to me in various ways since my hospitalization last year. For one thing, it was she who brought Thanksgiving Dinner to my dad and girls while Krzys and I were languishing…
-
Looking at Pictures Again
There was a time in which I was a little girl, frozen still, on the floor, gazing into a book at a painting by Balthus. I was gazing at another pensive little girl, who was gazing back at me, perhaps lost in dreams of adulthood herself. I wished someday that I could paint her, too.…
Michael Shelby Suberlak 