My Daily Domestic Clips 03/22/2012 (p.m.)

nd today, she wants to curl up in a ball and die.

The eldest of her eight children, a beautiful girl who has been carefully raised and loved wholeheartedly, is wearing all black, tattooing her back, piercing her navel and her nose, coloring her hair pink, and engaged to be married to a man who is a professed and angry atheist. She is rejecting her family, their values, and their faith.

Her mother feels like her entire life is a shredded heap of failure. This–the raising of children for God–has been her whole life’s calling. When she was young and newly married, she sat in church basements and parish halls and listened to energetic, inspiring mothers a few years older than she tell her all about how to be a virtuous wife and mother. They detailed home-management systems and homeschooling curricula. They talked about raising children of virtue. They promised that if she only listened to God’s call and lived her life intentionally, faithful to the precepts of her religion, she would raise holy children. Some even went so far as to promise that Catholic homeschooling would guarantee she’d never be confronted with trials of secular teenaged and young adult culture.

She believed those women. They were well-intentioned, good-hearted and living their own lives in the manner they described.Together, they’d all raise a holy generation for the glory of God.

Now. Now she looks at this child-grown-woman, this first beautiful soul with which she was entrusted, and she is sure of only one thing: she has failed.