Culture

Pregnancy is Strange

04.04.2019 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 2 Comments

This is my fourth time feeling a tiny person kick around in my belly. And it’s not any less strange than the first time. In pop culture, when pregnancy isn’t being stigmatized or avoided at all costs, it’s being glamorized. I think of pregnant celebrities, baring their bellies on the covers of magazines like fertility […]

Life Without Social Media

02.27.2019 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 4 Comments

After mulling over it for months (years) I finally permanently deleted my Facebook, thereby removing all social media from my life. Here’s what I’ve learned: I am shocked by how nosy and gossipy I really was. I had already hidden at least 80% of my newsfeed because the content was either distracting or irrelevant. I […]

Christmas Does Not Belong to Me

12.18.2018 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 1 Comment

I just want to make sure we have OUR Christmas. I’ve said it to my friends and my friends have said it to me. Somewhere between college graduation and thirtieth birthdays Christmas becomes super, super busy. And we feel like it’s all about other people. All about extended relatives. All about work parties or neighborhood parties […]

How We Advent (And Advent Music)

12.01.2018 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 1 Comment

When I was about ten my dad first introduced us to the old custom of Adventing before Christmas and Christmasing until Epiphany. At first, it was quite difficult for me to accept. My dad and I had many debates about how early was too early to turn on the real Christmas songs and all the […]

A Baby, The Catholic Church, and Hope

10.15.2018 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 10 Comments

It was the Eve of the Feast of the Assumption when I got an unexpected positive pregnancy test. I’ve been pregnant every year since 2012 and my youngest child is only ten months old. While I felt joy and excitement that I would get to know and love another tiny human, I had all sorts […]

Why We Don’t (Always) Do Family Dinners

08.01.2018 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // Leave a Comment

We don’t usually eat dinner together as a family. This is not a decision we formally came to, but more of a gradual shift that we first resisted and then finally accepted. The dining room is still the center of our house, surrounded by our prettiest artwork and covered with candles. We have one of […]

“There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and fragments. Then, its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that it must be true.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I found this quote well described my own experience– consistently reworking my idealism, being surprised by it, sometimes even losing it only to discover it all the more fully. I know we will never find all the answers, but how thrilling it is to find ourselves getting a little closer to the source and summit of things, a little closer, as we work our way through the “degrees.”