Looking Back & Looking Forward

Words and babies abound

La nuit étoilée, Vincent Van Gogh (1888)

As my most faithful readers regularly remind me (hi Mom and Dad!), I’ve been pretty quiet on Substack lately. There are several reasons for this (two moves! triple Lyme disease!), but one of them overshadows all the rest: we’re getting ready to welcome a new baby any week now! In fact, I write this while strapped up to a hospital monitor for a non-stress test; any mom who has ever been pregnant while caring for a toddler will no doubt acknowledge that this is indeed a prime writing opportunity.

With the New Year freshly here, I’m gearing up for my annual tradition of spending weeks writing the wrong year on paperwork and having to cross it out. I have always loved liminal times: the beginning of an academic year, the beginning of the liturgical year, the beginning of the calendar year. I relish the opportunity to step back from the sweep of daily life, to think about where I’ve been and where I’m going.

Of course, this looked a little different as a single woman than it does now. I had the leisure, then, to spend long mornings with a journal and a steaming mug of tea. (I love going through lists of questions like those shared by Tsh Oxenreider). With my office or school closed, I would often read a novel in an afternoon, giving a last-minute boost to my Goodreads/Storygraph reading challenge for the year. Now, I try to fit some time for reflection into the nooks and crannies of my life: hence, the Substack post from the comfort of the labor and delivery unit.

I may not have spent much time on this platform last year, but I have been writing. I’m proud of the projects that I’ve completed during slivers of time during a very busy year. And I’m so grateful for the wonderful publications and people I’ve had the privilege to work with in doing so. Here are some of my essays from 2023:

• “Dust Thou Art: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History at Thirty” (February, The European Conservative): If you haven’t read The Secret History, do yourself a favor in 2024 and get your hands on a copy. It provided one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of my adult life and has loomed large in my imagination ever since. Any conversation about contemporary Catholic literature is, I am convinced, incomplete without a consideration of Donna Tartt.

• “The (Female) Intellectual Life” (February, Public Discourse): Every woman is familiar with judgement about her life choices . . . whether it comes from other people, from social media, or just from the voice in her own head. It is a breath of fresh air, therefore, to read Word on Fire’s collection of essays by women from all walks of life who see their vocations and their intellectual lives as complimentary—not as warring.

• “A Pro-Life OB/GYN Looks Back on the End of Roe v. Wade” (June, America): I was honored to interview the doctor whose practice delivered three of my siblings (and in whose office I spent many hours as a young girl!). If you are looking for an example of how to treat both women and children with love and mercy, look no further than Dr. Bruchalski. (For those who prefer audiovisual media, this video by Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center is a tearjerker).

• “Review: A Brave New Feminism” (June, Current): It was a delight to publish my first piece over at Current and to join the conversation about Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, which made quite a splash this year. Though Harrington and I have different approaches to interacting with some of the lows of contemporary sexual culture, I am deeply interested in her approach to romantic and parent-child relationships in a technological age.

• “Review: The Heart of Parenthood” (November, Current): I read Twin A (Amit Majmudar’s memoir about fathering a child with a heart complication) while in the depths of pregnancy nausea. It was a welcome opportunity to reflect on the myriad ways our children shape us into better men and women.

• “What Home is Where the Eggs Are Taught Me About Cooking as a Mom” (November, Verily): sometimes I write about bioethics, sometimes I write about cookbooks. Getting married and starting a family has been a launching pad for thinking more deeply about the daily work that ordinary families do in their ordinary homes. A 2022 cookbook by Molly Yeh, reviewed here, helped me approach this work with both wonder and practicality.

Bonus: I had the pleasure of giving a paper at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture Fall Conference in the fall. I spoke about chronic illness and the sacrament of anointing of the sick. I have always loved attending the fall conference, but with a second small child on the way, I anticipate staying home for the next few. Therefore, it was an extra special opportunity to get to present at this one.

Bonus 2.0: I also have a book review of Jennifer Banks’ Natality forthcoming in the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly. It isn’t available online, but I really enjoyed the book (and if you want to learn a little bit more about it, I recommend reading this roundtable over at Current or this review by my friend Dixie Dillon Lane).

I’d hoped to share some of my favorites from other writers (both print and online, both essays and books), but this post is getting long, and this window of time is getting shorter. Maybe I’ll make a separate post for that some time early this month.

So, what’s ahead in 2024? Well, to begin with, a baby—who will shape the rest of the year as I adjust to his unique needs and temperament and to life with two small children. I hope to get out in nature more, though I have long been a creature of mostly indoor hobbies. My toddler loves the great outdoors (especially SNOW), and it seems silly not to take advantage of the natural beauty of the Adirondacks.

I have a few different essays in the pipeline, which I am excited to share when they are published. And I plan to continue writing about my (somewhat disparate) favorite topics: bioethics and literature and the various things that factor into our ideas of home. As I continue to evaluate the role of this Substack in my writing life, it is the last theme that I anticipate taking center stage here.

For now, however, I’d like to close by expressing my gratitude to anyone who read or interacted with what I wrote in 2023. It is a joy to have shared my thoughts and words with you. May the year ahead be filled with blessings!