I was not a good candidate for motherhood. Had I gone for a “job” interview, I would not have been given the job. If there had been a try out, like for a cheerleader squad, they would not have selected me for the team. I did not have the qualifications, the necessary skills or the “heart” required. I don’t think I even had a desire to apply for the job. However somewhere on my journey God grew within me a “mother’s heart.”

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Liturgically, we’re taking a brief breath in ordinary time. We’ve lived the long wait of Advent, and Christmas has been celebrated and it’s trappings stored away – nativity sets snuggled in attic alcoves and ornaments stacked in garage bins.

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I ran into a friend recently, another mom with lots of littles, at an indoor trampoline park. It was a sizzling summer day in Phoenix and we’d both reluctantly shelled out too much money for a few hours of much-needed activity for the kids.

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My husband are I are raising six lively children; two-thirds of which are boys. (Come March, one will be a man...but let's not think about that just yet. Oy vey.) And the boys are bookends of the bunch.

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When we welcomed Pope Francis into our country, I'm sure many of you moms, like me, dreamt of traveling to be with the crowds who were there to celebrate, listen, and pray with the pontiff. Of course, for most of us, it never got further than a fleeting, wishful thought.

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“Nooooooo!” I couldn’t help but cry out as the three year old began to pour the container of salt – the giant Costco container of salt, moreover – all over the kitchen floor. He smiled gleefully despite my dismay, then scurried off as his older brother and sister chased each other through the kitchen, knocking the four-dollar cup of coffee off the counter to spread its sticky sweetness into the dunes of salt on the tile.

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A recent Friday morning found me at the funeral Mass for a friend’s mother, and I had to take the two youngest with me. We lasted only a few minutes in the main church. My three year old, his toddler voice echoing during the quiet and solemn service, sent us into the vestible. I could hear the readings from the speakers back there, and listened while the kids sprawled at my feet. It was Matthew’s Gospel of the final judgement, where Christ tells of separating the sheep from the goats. I felt my stomach knotting up as I listened.

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In January this year I sat in my kitchen early one morning, bleary-eyed after a fractured night’s sleep. (And I’m using the term “sleep” quite loosely.)  The former night’s guilty parties, ages 2 and 5, lounged – in varied stages of consciousness themselves – on the couch, while I clutched a mug of coffee and scrolled through the day’s news stories.  Suddenly I was wide awake, as I came upon the headlines of several Catholic sites: “Pope says Motherhood is Martyrdom.”  Whoa.

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In 1995, I was nearing graduation as a student at the Franciscan University with a degree in theology when I learned about the tragic impact of the radical feminist movement in Beijing, China. My father was a lobbyist at the UN conference on Women in Beijing and I remember sitting on the floor of my dorm room as he told me with great concern about their move to redefine gender. I knew this was wrong, very wrong, and I wanted to find out more about what the Church, in her wisdom, had taught about authentic femininity.

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From the very beginning of pregnancy, each and every human life is the result of a special act of creation by God.

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