Nice to Meet You!

Hi Everyone! I’m Cam and I usually blog over at A Woman’s Place… Since January of this year I’ve also been doing a second blog that I dubbed A Year of Dresses. It’s mostly just pictures that I manage to snap, hopefully before baby food or paint or mud go flying across my clothes, which always seems to happen at some point in the day.

I’ve been meaning to do an introduction post for a few days, since I got the invitation to join the group (I was very excited to learn about this site and to be invited to join!), but things have been a bit crazy here. My husband graduated on Friday with his Master’s in Theology. Perhaps just as great an accomplishment was that he survived 3 years at a “Catholic” university that proudly claims to be “the most liberal in the country” despite his very orthodox outlook on life. Because of the graduation we spent the weekend in “The City” with the entire family to celebrate his accomplishment (and to attend graduation since he commuted around 250 miles each way almost every weekend for the past three years!).

Now we have two and a half months of relative relaxation before we move from our home in Northern California to his new school in South West Florida, where he’ll be studying law.

Now for the hard part… what to include in an introduction?

I consider myself a stay-at-home mom, although lately I guess I’m closer to a work-at-home mom since I have three etsy shops where I sell the things that I make after my family goes to sleep each night (I have a rosary/jewelry shop, a headcovering/snood shop and a saint doll shop at the moment).

So far we have two daughters, an almost three year old named Sadie and an almost one year old named Margaret (although she goes my Maggie and Mae more often than not). I met my husband six years ago this September and we married a year to the day after our first date.

Before I got married I worked as a lifeguard, a swim instructor, a rock-climbing instructor, a student trainer in my college’s training room and had been hired by the CIA shortly before meeting my husband. I earned my black belt in karate while I was in college and taught that for a short time too. I was raised Southern Baptist, but by the time I met Paul I had gone through a Mahayana Buddhist phase and I basically considered myself to be agnostic when I met him. I had a ridiculous number of tattoos (a number which most people I know would not believe because they are thankfully, for the most part, well hidden) and at one point had industrial piercings to match (thankfully I’d already taken those out for the CIA interviews). I would have told you I was happy. I would have even believed my words. But there was a yawning void that nothing I could do would fill.

Through some small miracle considering the state I was in, about seven months before I met Paul, I found myself praying. I felt nothing but a great dryness in my soul. I believed little. And yet I found myself asking God to help me believe.

I didn’t expect the prayer to be answered at the time.

I’m very thankful that it was.

Paul told me when I met him that he was “Irish Roman Catholic from Boston” and it was pretty clear that he wouldn’t be going to any other Church. By then I had begun to feel the pull to attend a church, any church, and figured that his was as good as any.

In this way I stumbled Home.

I found the answers that I had never expected. You see, I’d always had questions as a Baptist that the Bible alone didn't seem to answer (at least not in the context that I’d been raised to read it). Suddenly though, I found the answers I’d been looking for staring at me from the page. Apostolic succession. The Eucharist. Christ’s promise that the Gates of Hell would not prevail against the Church.

So I went from being a girl who wore mini-skirts and believed in nothing, to being a young wife finding my way and learning the truths of a religion I was very new too. Life is very different now. I wear skirts and cover my head and heart at Mass. We’re happily open to life (when I found out that Catholics didn’t believe in birth control, which, by the way, I didn’t learn about until after I was married and confirmed thanks to a rather cheerful, light Catholic education in both RCIA and our Engaged Encounter, I was shocked!) and are doing our best to instill in our growing family a great love for a wonderful God. We've found our nightly family rosary to be a huge help and are enjoying watching Sadie learn to say her prayers.

It’s nice to meet all of you and I look forward to getting to know you all better! I hope my getting to know you post wasn’t too long!