The Pope has come and gone, with countless people either seeing him for real –including two of my very best friends –or wondering what’s he’s about; we’ve watched the moon get enveloped in a red shadow and then learned that there’s likely water on Mars. Meanwhile, I just keep trying to make sense out of, on the one hand, organized religion and the way different people depict God; and on the other hand, the vast universe and what we actually … Read More
Driving back from early evening tennis a few towns over, I saw the sun hanging low over the rolling New Hampshire fields—still glorious, as if darkness weren’t right on its heels. Going to the pond would mean taking a significant detour from my route and then, after parking, hoofing it under the highway and over to the water. I briefly considered doing the sensible thing: heading home for a shower before joining my family for dinner. But that was really … Read More
It’s funny sometimes, isn’t it, how a task that might at first seem like just another chore to complete on a long list of others becomes more than that, takes on a certain depth and fullness, even gives new life? Take wood-stacking, for instance. Our neighbors down the road had what looked to be a wood-stacking party yesterday. A bunch of cars pulled in, and lots of people wearing gloves were moving about purposefully as I drove by in the … Read More
Just when you think, after about 25 years in the marriage pond, you might be getting the hang of it, you realize there might be a whole other way of swimming than the one you learned—the one you’re still learning, actually. That’s kind of how it feels when you have a burgeoning anthropologist in the family who is studying how polygamy has worked, over generations, in peaceful communities on a distant continent. In this country, we’ve been widening our definitions … Read More
Not long after I started this blog three and a half years ago, some people questioned the title. They said, “Why identify yourself as a ‘pastor’s wife’ when you’re obviously more than that? It’s so limiting.” This is true to an extent. In a way, I guess, I was poking some fun—right from the beginning—at the label. Show me a stereotype, almost any kind, and I’ll try hard to show the exception. In this case, I didn’t have to try … Read More
Even if we put politics aside, I have a whole other reason to oppose Scott Brown. It has to do with marriage–that venerable institution many of us know well. Recently, I heard Mr. Brown—running for U.S. Senate here in New Hampshire—on the radio, answering questions. It was a re-broadcast, actually, of an event that had taken place as part of a series called “Rudman Center Conversations with the Candidates.” At one point, I think when the NHPR host Laura Knoy … Read More
Do you think life is essentially made up of particular moments, like grains of sand that you can feel, grainy to the touch; or is it more about patches of days or even great swaths of years that bring about sweeping changes? One evening last week, I came home eager to tell my husband about some experiences I’d just had. Unfortunately— and this was nobody’s fault—other pressing matters got in the way. Believing that whatever I had to report was … Read More
Since becoming a bishop’s wife, I’ve been paying more attention to how other wives of other public figures – perhaps religious, perhaps not – conduct themselves, establish their identities, make their mark. Is there any perfect formula, I wonder, for mixing the need to be oneself, to find one’s own particular way to happiness, with the need to be a supportive spouse for a husband in the public eye? I don’t have the thing down yet, completely, but I … Read More
“You really aren’t comfortable with moral ambiguity, are you?” This was the question my husband asked me shortly after we emerged, one evening last week, from seeing American Hustle. For some reason he thought I hadn’t liked the whole movie, when what I think I said was that I didn’t particularly warm up to any of the main characters, except for maybe Carmine Polito, who is open to taking money from an unknown Arab sheikh for the casinos because all … Read More
Been to an aerial forest park recently? Our family got to go to one last weekend, and the whole experience made me want to give thanks all over again. Swinging around on those harnesses was both refreshingly different from putting myself through the paces of daily life on the ground and also surprisingly similar to managing regular co-existence with a bunch of other individuals who happen to be my spouse and my children. Take the quality of balance, for instance. … Read More