personal development

Finding Space for Beauty Over and Over Again

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Photo of a sunrise with silhouetted trees. On top of it, a screenshotted message from a cell phone saying "Storage Almost Full"

Finding space for beautiful things in our lives can feel impossible. After all, they’re so full. How can we fit in any more?

My phone has persistently reminded me of this fact over the last few months. It’s given me the “almost out of space warning” at least 30 times. I’ve deleted old videos, apps I’ve used twice, and music I haven’t listened to in years.

When a radiant sunrise caught my attention the other day, I picked up my phone to take a photo. Of course, I got that “out of space” warning. In response, I cleared out even more “stuff” so I could capture that moment. That shining, beautiful moment.

Because that’s what we do as moms – we find space, however we can.

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Finding Home at Our House for the Holidays

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

Christmas tree with colored lights shining on wall.When I close my eyes during Christmastime, I see my parents’ house, with its fresh tree with white twinkling lights, ornaments from my childhood dangling off it. My dad has classic rock on in the background, either from an ancient speaker system or the TV, depending on what memory I’m drawing from. In the kitchen, my mom is making a gingerbread house with my older son, placing marshmallows just-so.

Closing them again, I see my in-laws’ house, all singing animatronics, baskets of candy, and holiday music. I’m lounging with my husband’s family on their brown plaid couch, gazing at the multi-colored lights. It’s not quite as familiar as my own parents’ house, but is still embedded in my heart and mind.

But when I open my eyes, none of that is present. It’s not even accessible – neither my parents or my in-laws live in those houses anymore.

Yet, despite that loss, it feels like we’re finally home for Christmas. That’s because this is the first year my husband and I have celebrated Christmas with our kids in our own house.

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Struggling with My Past to Empower My Son’s Future

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Struggling with My Past to Empower My Son's Future (Photo: White boy throwing his head back in front of a plate of food.)

“I talked to the teacher today,” my husband said while he was making dinner. While his statement was neutral, his strangled tone of voice revealed something was wrong. “The teacher” is our four-year-old’s preschool teacher.

After we put the kids to bed, he said, “She said he’s having trouble makingfriends.”

Ah. That’s what it was.

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How Moms Can Reduce the Mental Load that Leaves Us Sick and Tired

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

How Moms Can Reduce the Mental Load and Emotional Labor that Leaves Us Sick and Tired. (Photo: White woman holding her head with one hand and a crying baby with the other.)

When I faced going back to work after my maternity leave, my husband and I faced a very real and common challenge – how to balance household management and the mental load between the two of us.

I’m a “doer” at heart while my husband, Chris, is much more laid-back. So taking everything over was a legitimate risk for me. The mental burden of being a mom is very real, whether you embrace the role of being a “keeper” of everything or find it smothering.

Our situation had an additional twist on it. That’s because Chris was going to be taking on a role that 29% of moms hold, but only 7% of dads do – stay-at-home parent. Because I would be working outside the home and he wouldn’t, I could not be the de facto household manager. It wouldn’t be fair or practical.

So we had to find a balance of duties, both in terms of physical chores and management. Since then, we’ve learned to reduce my emotional labor and mental load as a mom. (Unfortunately, most of these don’t apply if you’re a single parent.)

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What I Learned About Self Love From The Flu

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

What I Learned About Self-Love from the Flu. (Photo: White woman lying in bed on a pillow, sleeping.)

Lying in bed with my eyes closed, I wondered if I was the victim of a cosmic joke. A few days earlier, I had celebrated a few moments of silence, but four days of looking at nothing but the inside of my eyelids was starting to feel like a bit too much.

The Sunday before, our entire church was silent just before the sermon. Everyone was reading the white text on the black screen in front of us. Among other thoughts of discomfort, the text said, “It’s too quiet” and “For the love of God, this is anguish.”

After a few minutes, our pastor asked, “How did that feel to everyone? Did that feel like forever? Because it was just three minutes.”

While various murmurs reverberated through the congregation, my hand shot up. “It was nice not being asked for anything!” I volunteered. Chuckles ensued. Our fellow churchgoers are well-aware of my husband’s and my weekly Keystone Cops routine, chasing our young kids around to ensure they stay in the sanctuary.

But a few days later, I was starting to regret my enthusiasm for silence. I had a case of the flu so brutal that even visual sensory input overwhelmed me. But as awful as it was, I realized that my experience as a mom helped prepare me for it. While that sounds like a joke – the flu as a vacation! – what I’ve learned as a parent has actually made silence far more tolerable than I ever expected it to be.

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The 10 Things Parents Must Teach Gifted Children

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What do we need to teach gifted kids about life before they go out into the world? There’s a lot more they need to know than calculus and Shakespeare. 

The 10 Things Parents Must Teach Gifted Children (Photo: Kid with a backpack walking away)

Sitting in the private school’s admissions office, my mom faced a choice about my education. The admissions officer told her how much smaller the classes were than public school, how girls felt less pressure when they didn’t compete for boys’ attention, and how much more they could meet her gifted daugher’s needs.

But the tuition was as expensive as you would expect for a private school. We were a solidly upper-middle-class family, but a salesman’s and teacher’s salaries together meant we weren’t exactly rolling in the dough. Private school meant no new house. No vacations for years. Hardly any luxuries at all.

But wasn’t her daughter’s education worth it? Wasn’t public school going to hold her back? Would she be able to fulfill her potential?

As the daughter in question, I now know my mom made the right decision. With more hoopla these days than ever about the beauty and struggles of raising “gifted” kids, it feels odd to me. Wasn’t this stuff we should have figured out 20 years ago?

As a “gifted” kid who had lots of gifted friends growing up and is now an adult, I’ve thought a lot about what society does and doesn’t do well in terms of how we treat “smart” kids. From my experience and reading, here’s what parents must teach gifted children:

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How Parents Can Go Out and Not Hire a Babysitter

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How Parents Can Go Out and Avoid Hiring a Babysitter. (Photo of a doll babysitter who looks vaguely grumpy and has a small child clinging to her leg.)

Reading a party invitation, I look up at my husband and ask, “Whose turn is it this time?” We both struggle to remember who went out last. In the end, we just pick one of us, figuring that even if it’s wrong, it’ll work out in the end. And it always does. Paying a babysitter would be easier, but we’ve never gotten around to hiring one.

While we’re too busy to have extensively vetted a babysitter and too cheap to pay one anyway, we’ve remained committed to seeing our friends on a regular basis. Here’s some of the ways we’ve managed to maintain those relationships, our wallets and our sanity:

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Parenting through the Looking Glass

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Parenting through the Looking Glass. What an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland taught me about adulthood, childhood, and parenting. (Picture: Illustration from Alice in Wonderland of Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter at the tea party.)

The fairy-like White Queen gazed at me intently. Lying on a table, her look invited me into Wonderland, a place of childhood on the edge of adulthood. Then she shoved herself backwards, flew across the table, and jumped to her feet, towering over us.

This was all quite literal.

Last weekend, Chris and I took our first trip by ourselves since Sprout was born. The trip was nominally celebrating our eleventh wedding anniversary. So we were in New York City, watching a play put on in a former mental institution. The play – based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and the real-life relationship between Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell – sparked insight for me about childhood, parenting, and how both are more complex than they seem.

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My Post-Baby Bathing Suit

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

My Post-Baby Bathing Suit. When I was looking for a bathing suit after my second son was born, I was actually looking for so much more. (Photo: Black and white striped bathing suit on a checked comforter.)

I stood in Target, looking for something on the shelves that they never carried and never will. In theory, I was there for a bathing suit. My first post-baby bathing suit since my second son arrived in the world. As I hadn’t lost the baby weight yet, I needed one so that I’d be ready for a family trip to Cape Cod. But like so many bathing suit searches, it was about much more than a piece of fabric.

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