Culture – Page 2

You May Be A Parent, But You’re Also Still A Person

05.31.2017 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // Leave a Comment

Almost four years ago my first baby was born, and while I was overwhelmed by the love, beauty, and tenderness of it all, intro to parenthood totally turned my world upside down. I knew to expect sleepless nights, anxiety, exhaustion, etc. What I didn’t expect was the loneliness. At the time, I was the only […]

Watch the New Beauty and the Beast– If Only For the Ending

04.24.2017 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // Leave a Comment

I went into Beauty and the Beast with somewhat low expectations. The cartoon version was always one of my favorite movies, and I hadn’t heard the best reviews of the remake. One of the reviews I found most striking argued that there was something forced, strange, and off-putting about the story being live-action in the first […]

Why all the moms you see look stressed

01.11.2017 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 2 Comments

The other day I saw a picture on social media of a little girl dressed as a “mom” for Halloween. It wasn’t a flattering depiction. The little girl had painted bags under her eyes and messy hair and she was dressed in a t-shirt covered in fake spit-up. She was dragging a baby doll behind […]

How to participate in gift-giving without participating in materialism

12.06.2016 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 1 Comment

Materialism is an obvious problem in America and it is made more obvious during the holiday season. Many people blame Christmas, or at least Christmas gift-giving, for this materialism. But materialism can happen with or without gifts. Whether it be iPads or beach trips or going out to bars, we become materialistic when we are […]

What is an animal that is not nocturnal?

11.30.2016 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // Leave a Comment

My three year old turned to me, and asked, urgently, What’s it called when an animal is NOT nocturnal? Hmm. I don’t know. That’s a good question. He paused for a few moments and, maybe one day when me and Nicholas are big we can go and find a dragonfly. And then we can ask […]

How to protect our children from social media

10.24.2016 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // Leave a Comment

It’s difficult to figure out where the line is in sharing our children with the social media world. Of course, some sharing is natural and good. Parents are proud of their children and those children can inspire and bring joy to other people. But when the sharing is not organic— when it happens on these exponential […]

“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.”