Association Of Catholic Bloggers

Reality has a way of intervening into my own little bubble of bliss. In our small family of four, our Father's Day was fine. And yet, over the past few days I have encountered no fewer than 10 children of our acquaintance who are essentially fatherless. Read more here...

"You can sleep in another lifetime," my girlfriend told me Thursday afternoon, when I complained to her during my seventh period cafeteria duty that I was bone tired  and asked her if I should show up for my 12 year old's middle school baseball game. After all, I had been to a game yesterday and he had told me he didn't care if I showed up for this away one. "Really?" she said. "You know what that means. Go to the game." Read more here...

On a rare day off this week, I took our dog for a walk down our block, a block of century-old houses on tiny lots with scraggly lawns. The sun was bright, the sky was clear and my neighbor Anita, nearing 60, was seeding her lawn. As we chatted, I noticed moss had taken over parts of her pocket-sized front lawn. I told her how pretty it all looks. Anita, who is some kind of scientist for a pharmaceutical company, said our neighbor Ruth farther down the block, a landscape architect with grown children, told her to let the moss grow. Moss, she said, is good for the soil. I am now thinking it is good for the soul, too. Read more here....

Deep in the night, while most of us are asleep in our beds, the mother of a teenager I know begins her 10-hour shift stocking shelves at a discount store. She starts at 2 a.m. At noon, while many of us are taking a lunch break, she is leaving work and driving to other people's homes to make extra money cleaning them. She's usually asleep when daughter returns home from high school. The daughter has about three hours between returning home from school and heading to a store, where she works four hours every weeknight. Her father's workday begins at 7:30 a.m. and he is home by 6 - after she has left for her job. Her older sister, with whom she shares a bedroom in the family's apartment, works 40 hours a week at the same discount store as the mom and takes one class a semester at a community college. The family rarely is awake at the same time, and seldom eats meals together. Read more here....

By Allison Salerno   Given that my husband is a major movie buff and has shown me so many wonderful classic films, it surprised me he's never seen Vittorio De Sica's neorealist masterpiece, The Bicycle Thief.   I'd never seen it either. So Saturday night, we sat down with a good friend in our family room to watch this masterpiece on cable TV. Even if you have seen this film before, rent it. Given the perilous state of the American economy, the film speaks to our hearts now as never before. The movie's setting is post World War II Rome, when Italy was poor and politically unstable. The plot concerns a young father, Antonio, who is struggling against every odd to support his small family. Bruno, his 7-year-old son, accompanies him throughout most of the story and so we see the father's pain through the child's eyes. The theme: the price we pay for what matters most. The story begins as Antonio lands a day job putting up movie poste

This afternoon I headed to a Target discount store with L., our 11-year-old, to pick up some khakis, dress shirts and ties for the boys to wear at a bar mitvah we are attending tomorrow. Imagine our surprise when, halfway through the visit, most of the lights in the store went out. It turns out that Milltown, NJ has been without power since Hurricane Irene. The store never closed, but has been operating with generators ever since. It is slowly trying to ease its way onto the small town's tenuous power grid. Today, managers shut off all but one generator while we were shopping there. Last week, Hurricane Irene brought tragedies to hundreds of thousands of families: death, the destruction of homes and communities and livelihoods. My inconvenient shopping trip has led me to thinking that the rest of us, those who suffered slightly flooded basements, the temporary loss of electricity or phone service, need to quit complaining. We are, after all more than the sum of our m

I grew up in a family with three girls and one boy and the atmosphere was weighted toward the feminine: my sisters and I played with Madame Alexander dolls, hosted singing "concerts" in our basement, wore Lanz of Salzburg nightgowns and, when we girls were teenagers, experimented with dozens of brands of shampoo. Now, I'm raising two sons. The experience is filling out my understanding of childhood. Consider this.   Read more here...