personal development

Guest Post: Not Perfect, Still Amazing

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

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The last two years were very challenging and last winter, the difficulties started seriously wearing on my mental health. Thankfully, participating in Stratejoy’s Holiday Council workshop (along with an appointment with a therapist) helped a lot. I wanted to give back, so I wrote a blog post for their website.

The post, called Not Perfect, Still Amazing, is finally up! Part of their Two Truths and a Lie series, it talks through a lot of the issues I deal with but I hope it helps you too.

With their forays into mutant beings, aliens, and time travel, I don’t usually look to superhero television shows for practical advice. But in Supergirl, I’ve found a couple of heroines that have taught me a lot about what means – and doesn’t – to be enough.

Read the rest on Stratejoy’s website! (And isn’t that photo hilarious? That’s a fantastic summary of my life right now.)

Saying Goodbye to my Childhood Home

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 9 Comments

Saying Goodbye to my Childhood Home

The Victorian-influenced sun and moon wallpaper, that I felt so grown-up picking out. The musical theater posters on the wall, including one from West Side Story signed by the touring cast. The photograph of two manatees kissing at Homosassa Springs that my dad took when I was in third grade. The glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, interspersed with painted clouds. All fundamental elements of my childhood bedroom, now all gone. Instead, it’s some other child’s bedroom, empty and awaiting his dream of what he wants it to be.

Last month, my parents closed on my childhood home in upstate New York so they could move closer to us. They sold it to a young family with two small boys. Like my parents 30 years ago, the mother and father were excited about the good school district and suburban neighborhood. While I’m glad everything worked out, it’s still a bit bittersweet for me.

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How I’ve Confronted My Own Racism

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 12 Comments

How I've Confronted My Own Racism. The first step in dismantling racism is for white people to look inward - here's how I've tried to do it myself. (Words below: Black Lives Matter)

Trigger Warning: Racism, police violence

“I’m here mommy, don’t worry.”

One of a parent’s greatest fears is that their child could experience something so traumatizing it would scar them for life. Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds, the fiancé of Philando Castile, experienced that last week. She watched her fiancé bleed out in front of her while her four-year-old daughter sat next to her in the car. A police officer shot him at close range during a traffic stop during which he was following directions. She watched him die because of our country’s screwed-up policing system and screwed-up systemic racism.

In the two years of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, many white people have been crying out, “This is horrible. What can I do?” One answer I’ve seen over and over from black people is for white people to get their own houses in order. The white supremacy systemic in our society can only exist and continue if white people let it. While I’ve talked about what I’ve done to try to raise my sons as anti-racist peacemakers, I haven’t discussed what I’ve done myself.

So for the sake of that little girl and all of the little black boys and girls like her, along with their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers, here is how I have confronted my own racism:

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A Failing Garden and Thriving Family

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Text: "A Failing Garden and Thriving Family; We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So." Photo of a garden with a few very small plants growing in it, surrounded by a fence and mulched with straw and leaves.

My garden is sad. Or at least I’m sad about it. But a combination of bad luck and slight neglect is reminding me where my attention needs to be right now.

Photo of groundhog and groundhog baby in a yard with green grass and a turtle-shaped toddler pool behind them.

My garden is feeding a fellow mommy!

I’ve planted corn, broccoli, melon, beans, peas, basil and tomatoes so far. The May rains of Biblical proportions washed away our broccoli seedlings and corn seeds. The first round of bean sprouts failed, along with the melon sprouts. A hungry animal stripped the leaves from the second round of bean sprouts, along with the vast majority of my pea sprouts. (Possibly our resident groundhog – she did that to the sweet potatoes last year.) Hungry birds looking for worms dislodged the sweet potato and few sprouts that remained.

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The Pain of Not Being the Favorite Parent

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 9 Comments

The Pain of Not Being the Favorite Parent (Photo: Silhouette of a parent lifting up a child)

“I want daddy.”

My breath catches in my throat. “Really? You don’t want me to give you a bath?” My voice cracks.

“No, I want Daddy for bath. Daddy, give mommy [Little Bird],” my older son insists.

Sigh. “I’ll give him his bath,” my husband acquiesces and hands me the baby.

I watch as my almost three-year-old (nicknamed Sprout) ambles over to the bathroom, where I usually need to drag him. I’ve always been the one to put him to bed, only relinquishing it to my husband on the rare occasion I’m out of the house. My husband follows him, pulling my son’s monster towel out of the closet on the way.

I didn’t expect it to be like this.

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On Valuing My Work as a Mom

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

On Giving Myself Credit as a Mom

Feeding and taking care of my child is an important, essential job. I need to keep reminding myself of this.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked how I could keep up the blog with a newborn. That answer was relatively easy; I write on the phone while nursing. But the question he didn’t ask – why I’m keeping up the blog – struck me. There are pat answers involving maintaining my audience and SEO, but if it came down to it, I would ignore them. No, the reason I’ve kept writing is because it feels like important work.

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Reflections on my Lenten Fast from Social Media

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The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Third Trimester

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Note: I started this essay before Little Bird was born, but thought I’d finish it off even though the third trimester is now thoroughly over! Content note: pregnancy loss / miscarriage, pregnancy complications

The Agony and Ecstasy of the Third Trimester

The most dreaded era of pregnancy: the third trimester. But even though it could be a slog at times, my third trimester was also the best part of my whole pregnancy.

Of course, I dealt with a variety of physical discomfort. From retaining enough fluid that my wedding ring hadn’t fit for months to the baby being in possibly the least comfortable positions possible, it was damn painful. I think he enjoyed sitting on my kidneys and doing upside down push-ups on my hip bones. The Braxton hicks contractions – oh, the Braxton Hicks! The “irritable uterus,” where it gets ineffably hard for long periods at a time, made its return. The lack of sleep was a killer, especially the fact that I woke up every time I tried to turn over.

But despite all that, my mental and emotional health was much more solid than it was any other time in my pregnancy.

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Super-Exclusive We’ll Eat You Up, We Love You So Swag

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

Yes, the blog has swag! Except that it’s so exclusive that I’m the only one that has it. While I would love to say that t-shirts are here, in reality, it’s a single, amazing t-shirt. For my birthday, my friend Teresa designed and hand screen-printed the most thoughtful gift I’ve received in a long time. She captured so many wonderful things: Max riding on a Wild Thing’s back, the bicycle with a kid’s trailer, and even a baby in the trailer! And the shirt is my favorite color. (Weirdly, it’s much brighter in person.) I was flabbergasted when I opened it.

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Astonishingly, it wasn’t the first time I was flabbergasted on this specific birthday. On the actual day of my birthday, I had to be into work a bit early for a conference call. Opening my door afterwards, I almost walked into crepe paper hanging down from it. Then I saw the same someone had brought in brownies and scones. While I was on my call, my friend Natalie had snuck around so quietly that I didn’t hear her at all! It reminded me of the other girls getting their lockers decorated for their birthdays in high school, except no one ever did that for me. So to have someone do it as an adult was terribly sweet and unexpected.

Feeling that support and love from my friends was actually one of the reasons I was so hopeful and confident in the post about my birthday. Especially in a time of big transitions, we’re so blessed to be surrounded by people who love us so much.