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I can count the mystical experiences I’ve had in my life on one hand. Mysticism isn’t a brand of spirituality that comes naturally to me. In fact, it’s so unfamiliar that I often have difficulty believing people when they say things like, “and then I heard God tell me blah blah blah.” What does that mean? A voice? A thought? A sense? A feeling? Is it just nonsense?

And yet, on very rare occasions I have experienced things that defy my understanding, experiences that pierce me to the heart and seem to speak to me from outside of myself. I’ve never thought of myself as very woo woo but maybe I’m becoming that way. Mystical experiences are strange. They’re not my usual. But it does happen. And it happened recently when I was in a therapy session, a visualization so clear that I would almost call it a vision. My therapist encouraged me to write it out and so here I am.

(This is probably one of the most personal things I’ve ever written and it’s a bit raw so I’m keeping it behind the paywall for those reasons.)

I entered that day’s session with so many feelings boiling up just under the surface that I struggled to identify them. They felt overwhelming: grief, fury, frustration, and shame over the continued sadness. My therapist suggested closing my eyes and visualizing them. This is what I saw when I closed my eyes:

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A sweet reader noted a tonal shift lately and encouraged me by saying that it sounds like I’m starting to prepare the soil after pulling all the weeds.

The thing is, it doesn’t feel that way at all and it’s frustrating. Because it’s been two years. Aren’t I healed yet? Why is it taking so long?

I do the journaling, the therapy, the long walks, the working out, and nights on the phone or early morning coffees with friends. I do the drinking enough water, the taking my supplements, the feeling my feelings, the eating nourishing food. (Although eating my feelings sounds like a lot more fun.) I think positively. I find the whimsy. I say my daily affirmations. I’m hopeful for the future. I’m the goshdarn Anne Shirley of divorcees.

Shouldn’t it not hurt anymore? Don’t I get to stop pulling the weeds and exhausting myself by digging deep into the earth? Do I ever get to just be healed and enjoy the garden I’ve been trying to grow?

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Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary.

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Can I be honest? I struggle to write these TWM posts. Because my brain wants to go in a thousand directions. Do I begin with explaining all the things my ADHD brain wants to write about? (My brain has already moved on to writing a tangent post about ADHD hacks I’ve found helpful lately). Do I give an update on life? Kids? Single motherhood? Creative projects? Healing? Recent epiphanies? Milestones and changes? Movies and music? Cultural phenomena?

I have never had writer’s block. I get writer’s flood. Too many ideas, too many directions. An overwhelming flood. All of the journaling by hand that I do now only seems to compound the problem. Because then my brain is trying to sort through what is safe for public consumption and what should kept in a vault for the sake of privacy or prudence. My journaling flits from this thought to that then turns into to do lists, dreams for the future, books I want to read. The struggle is real. But here goes:

Summer

Summer is summering, friends. We’ve been back in Tallahassee for a month. While the transition home and the return to the miserable heat have been brutal, it hasn’t been all bad. I love being back at hot yoga, in my sweet house, and reconnecting with friends. And I really love the slower pace of summer despite the challenge of having kids home during the work day. Sure, there’s appointments at the orthodontist, the dentist, and for therapy. There’s taking the dog to the vet, taking my son for senior photos, and scheduling back-to-school haircuts. There’s prescriptions to pick up and groceries to buy. But somehow it just feels different without having everyone scrambling off to school in the morning and I am loving that space.

Maybe it’s having older kids who can entertain themselves while I hide in my home office during the work day that makes summer easier? Is anybody else enjoying the flexibility of the weekly summer schedule? Parents of very young children, I know summer is a STRUGGLE.

For summer survival (the heat index has been over 110 lately), we are watching cozy murder mysteries in the air conditioning, we are baking and making fancy drinks (my 13yo mastered the London Fog), and we are enjoying thunderstorms. Where are you finding the whimsy this summer?

Healing

I’ve also started back with EMDR therapy (which I highly recommend if you are recovering from trauma). I am noticing significant healing due to this method and have carved out the next couple of months for focusing on it. I’m adding TRE (Tension Release Exercise) to the mix as well. Hey, whatever works? (Related: I’ve noticed that I hold a ton of tension in my jaw. Anybody else? How did you release it?)

The mental medicine of travel this summer, journaling, hot yoga, and hours spent with good friends all are supplementing the official therapy. And I can feel the effects. Always a spiral, not a straight line. But progress and I’m grateful.

If my first year post-separation was shock and my second was grief, this year feels like healthy detachment and new life breaking in. For the first time in two years, I’ve been wanting to write more than Substack posts or fill notebooks just for myself.

I’ve been wanting to write more fiction. I’ve picked up a manuscript that’s been on the back burner for ages and I’m starting to make progress again. It’s a middle grade novel and I’ll tell you more as the project develops. I’ve never tried to publish something like this of my own so finding the right home for it will be a new adventure.

Mid-July I went to the Winona Christian Writers Conference with some of my favorite people. The highlights for me were sharing an AirBnB with my friends and fellow writers and . And also meeting one of my children’s lit heroes: Gary D. Schmidt who is just as wonderful and profound as his incredible books.

Katy, Claire, and I with our new best friend, Gary. (Actually, I may have freaked him out by telling him about bone chapels in Eastern Europe that I want to visit. Catholic problems, I guess.)

I had planned to attend the conference a year ago but had to cancel because of a family crisis. So I was extra excited to get to attend this year and keep learning and growing as a writer and as an editor!

Speaking of editing, I have to admit that I am over the moon that 5 of the books I edited for Votive received major Catholic publishing awards. In fact, we swept some of the children’s book and illustration categories! I’m so proud of our authors, illustrators, and design team and I will forever be pinching myself that bringing beautiful books into the world is my job.

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Reading Lately

• A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter. A re-read of one of my very faves! I also finished Liturgies of the Wild by Martin Shaw on the plane home from Indiana.

What I’ve Been Listening To

• The new Olivia Rodrigo was a bit of a disappointment, tbh. There’s some stand out songs, but overall it left me cold. I’ve been dipping back into folklore lately. What are you listening to?

Upcoming Events

• July 31st-August 2nd: Wichita, KS: Midwest Catholic Family Conference

Currently Watching

• The Young Sherlock and Ludwig. We are in a murder mystery era at Casa Stewart. Suggestions for cozy ones appropriate for young teens welcome!

• HADESTOWN. You guys. If you have the chance to go see the pro shot of the stage musical in theaters, PLEASE go. I’ve seen the show in London (incredible) and seeing the pro shot really does give you a sense of the performance. I do plan to write more about this ASAP.

• The Odyssey. I need to write about this, too!

I was mentioning creative spark and one of my goals is to do even more writing here on Substack. What would you like to hear about?

Hope you have a wonderful Tuesday!

Haley

Haley’s books

Haley’s Catholic Kids’ Cookbook

Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns

Haley’s Book on Jane Austen’s Novels

Haley’s Book about Radical Simplicity

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Yesterday I shared all my tips for travel in London and days 1-2 of a 9 day itinerary for visiting one of my favorite cites. (You can find it here.)

Today I’m sharing days 3-9 of my suggested itinerary for supporters of this Substack as well as telling you which attractions I find rather skippable. I hope you enjoy it!

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London is a place that has lived in my imagination since childhood. In literature, London is almost its own character. It’s the alluring site of the social season calling to Austen’s heroines (if only Mrs. Jennings will invite them to stay!). It’s the charming frame for My Fair Lady, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, 101 Dalmations, Notting Hill, Paddington…the list goes on. I’ve always been enchanted by London but visited for the very first time when I was 36. (It was well worth the wait.)

I don’t really see myself in a huge city like New York or Paris, but my, I can imagine living in London! Since that’s not likely in the cards (although eligible suitors who would like to wife me into British citizenship may present themselves) I have visited as often as I can. The frequency of my visits has increased since a college friend relocated there and sweetly hosts. Do NOT tell me to come visit you in Europe unless you mean it. I will take you up on it! (This is a threat.)

But back to London. There is a version of Haley, enchanted with life, in love with humankind, full of scones with strawberry jam, who emerges when taking the Jubilee line to Baker Street or walking through Regents’ Park with a flat white or taking the Thames Clipper to Tower Bridge to visit the Tower ravens. I like her very much. But I only get to see her in London and with no UK travel plans ahead, I have no idea when I’ll see her again.

While accommodations can be pricey in London, most of the attractions that are my must-sees are absolutely free. There are so many free museums and galleries and tickets to the palaces and historic sites are very reasonable. I have created an itinerary of 9 days worth of attractions and the cost per person for entry TOTAL for these sites is under £200/person. If you take public transportation, getting around London is very affordable. And then you just need to budget for scones.

This post has been a long time work in progress and the fruit of four trips across the pond. I am regularly asked what my must-see recommendations are for a trip to London and I’ve been wanting to put them all in one place, but to be honest, I got overwhelmed and this post has been stuck in the purgatory of ADHD paralysis for a few months. London is a huge city that I’ve barely scratched the surface of! I’ve spent a combined 6 weeks in London which is only enough time to realize that you could spend years living there and never run out of new things to see and do (and eat). So you understand that I’m no Rick Steves. But if you were planning a trip to London and we met up for coffee, I would want to tell you about:

• Must-see places and experiences

• Finding free and affordable sightseeing options

• What’s worth the price and what’s skippable

• Navigating public transportation

• Ways to get to and from the airport into the city

• Why you should take taxis, not Ubers

• A 9-day itinerary with sites and experiences organized so that you can stay in one part of the city each day and walk from place to place! (Mostly free attractions and less than £200/person in total for entry fees/tickets)

So that’s what I’ve put together for you. I tried to put everything into a single post but Substack told me it was too long, so I’ve put all the basic info plus Day 1 and Day 2 of the Itinerary and I’ll be releasing Day 3 tomorrow. This post is extensive, so buckle up! (And if you’re planning a trip, please take me with you.)

This post is available to paid supporters of this Substack as a thank you for the incredible support they provide to me as a single mom of four. Paid supporters also have access to my post about how to find cheap flights overseas and travel on a budget so if you’re interested in how to fly affordably, start there!

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The thing about me is that I fall in love with things: books, movies, cities, food, music, people. And unfortunately for you, I can’t bear keeping my obsessions to myself. What joy is there in life if it’s not shared?

One of my new obsessions is Noah Kahan’s new album. While Kahan’s third album Stick Season made a splash, I was only peripherally aware of it. I listened to some of the singles, but didn’t fall head over heels in love with it. His recent release, The Great Divide, is a horse of a different color. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Suddenly Noah Kahan is a household name and The Great Divide had the best first week of sales for a rock album of any release in the past 10 years. But why? How did this awkward New Englander start filling huge stadiums?

I tend to like music that is dripping with story: characters, plot twists, grounded in place like a good novel. The Killers fits into this category. (I’m waiting for someone to turn Hot Fuss into a rock opera.) A lot of Appalachian-inspired country music fits the bill, too (Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, etc). And this narrative-driven songwriting is the reason I enjoy Folklore, Evermore, and The Tortured Poets Department.

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Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary. This edition is a little bit more travel-y.

This email is free for you to read, but took time and energy to create. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support a single mom and gain access to exclusive content:

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I sheepishly enter your inbox knowing it’s been far too long since my last missive at the beginning of Maycember. The good news is that I survived getting four children through May and all its chaos, but it was a slog (save for the delightful weekend giving a talk and moderating a panel at Joie de Vivre’s Louisiana Arts and Culture Festival)! And then as soon as the kids were done with exams, I drove them up to my parents’ house in the Tennessee mountains.

The Appalachians have been my happy place for my entire life. I grew up going every summer up to Beech Mountain, NC where my grandparents built a house. My parents relocated an hour away in TN in 2020 and their home has been a haven for me and the kids the past few years. As soon as I get out of Tallahassee, FL, my stress level plummets. (Truly! I can track it with my smart ring!) And it’s like the cobwebs in my head get swept away and I can rest and breathe and think and create again. Here I am safe and cared for.

My teenage son kept busy helping my dad install doors and baseboards to finish out the basement and my oldest daughter has been painting walls and crafting and thrifting with my mom. My littlest enjoys tea parties and colors and adores making all the beds and sweeping like a delighted Cinderella because apparently chores are fun if you’re at Marmee’s house. And it was my middle daughter’s turn for an adventure with me.

One of the goals I’ve made over the past two years is to take each of my kids on a solo trip somewhere before they finish high school. I took my son to Paris in 2024, my oldest daughter to London and Scotland in 2025, and my middle daughter to London and Oxford this summer. My youngest is but seven years old, so I am taking a break on big travel for awhile before doing her trip (I need to save up for a few years to do another big trip) and to give her a little more time to grow. She’s an incredible traveler but I think a few more years will make her appreciate the experience even more!

I cannot overemphasize how healing travel has been for me and my kids. It has brought us joy in a dark time, cultivated our family culture, brought us closer together, and expanded our worlds. And I should write an entire post about the fruits of doing one-on-one travel with kids because that has been so good for my relationships with my kids, helped me get to know them better as teenagers, and given them so much confidence in navigating the world when it’s unfamiliar. But that’s for another day!

Back to this summer’s adventure! I am adding all our London and Oxford experiences to flesh out the London itinerary I’ve been crafting for you all, but the short version is that it was a delight. Museums, great theatre, beautiful churches, and history just seeping out of every cobblestone. My daughter turned 13 while we were there and I am so grateful for the opportunity to spend time just enjoying her.

We had a few minor complications along the way: getting soaked with rain while waiting for the bus, our train to Oxford getting cancelled because the whole line was down and having to figure out how to take a bus there, not realizing Hampton Court Palace is closed on Mondays, etc. But the real challenge was for the return trip. Our flight into ATL was seamless and then just before boarding our final flight to TN, it was cancelled. And later flights were also cancelled. Why? BECAUSE A SINKHOLE OPENED UP ON THE RUNWAY just before our flight was going to be headed that way. Not your everyday travel complication, but I suppose a cancelled flight and having to stay in Atlanta overnight and then rent a car the next day because the airport was closed is preferable to landing in a 20x20 foot sinkhole.

I complimented my daughter/travel companion on her positivity and flexibility and the experience just reminded me of all the life lessons you get when traveling. Sometimes completely unexpected things arrive that destroy your plans! It’s not in your control! You can fall into the depths of despair bemoaning the shift, or put your energy towards finding a way out of airport purgatory, requesting and retrieving luggage from baggage claim limbo, tracking down a hotel shuttle, and reserving a rental car. And you feel empowered because you sorted out a new challenge. And then you have a good story about how a sinkhole wrecked your travel plans.

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Reading Lately

• The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is one of my all-time favorite novels. This one is so different but I am loving it and it seemed like the right thing to read on the train in England since it’s about ancient Britain.

What I’ve Been Listening To

• Guys. I’m still obsessed with Noah Kahan’s new album. And there’s a review of it forthcoming for paid subscribers. And I am not buying tix to his Atlanta show because they are HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS of dollars but wow I wish I could go. I also needed to revive my Lily Allen West End Girl listening since I found her portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

  

Upcoming Events

• July 31st-August 2nd: Wichita, KS: Midwest Catholic Family Conference

Currently Watching

• The Other Bennet Sister. Y’ALL. Drop everything and watch this. Is it the best Jane Austen spin-off of all time? I’m leaning that way, but the girls and I still have a few more episodes to watch before I’m ready to commit to that opinion.

Hope you have a wonderful Sunday!

Haley

Haley’s books

Haley’s Catholic Kids’ Cookbook

Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns

Haley’s Book on Jane Austen’s Novels

Haley’s Book about Radical Simplicity

Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary.

This email is free for you to read, but took time and energy to create. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my family and gain access to exclusive content:

Upgrade to Paid

Friends, Maycember is in full swing with end-of-the-year performances, dances, parties, tests, projects, AP exams, 8th grade graduation events, field trips. And of course, sick kids needing to stay home from school or get picked up from school early and put a fork in me, I’m done.

Last night I was digging into the recesses of my memory to excavate slope-intercept form to help one kid review for a math exam and this morning over hashbrowns at Waffle House at 6am I was with another kid going over the different amendments that might show up on the AP US History exam. Parenting four children in May is not for the faint of heart.

But our annual trip to stay with my parents in the Tennessee mountains is quickly approaching and I am so excited to breathe mountain air and go on long walks and spend time with my family far away from the Florida swamp.

Since the last TWM what has happened? A trip to Ireland. Easter. A talk in San Antonio about children’s literature and the Catholic imagination. Two different spring musicals at my kids’ schools. Whirlwind.

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Links:

I was asked to write a response to The Cut’s viral piece about women who regret motherhood for Word on Fire’s Evangelization and Culture (online):

Treating Parenthood like a Lifestyle Choice Results in Anti-Motherhood Rhetoric:

In the trenches of toddlerhood, women often experience the most profound loneliness of their lives. They find themselves burnt out and feeling like a failure for not loving every minute of motherhood when, after all, they chose this. With readily available contraception and abortion, not only are there ways to prevent or terminate pregnancies, these methods are cultural norms. In such a culture, motherhood is no longer part of the normal progression in adulthood for most women but a lifestyle one chooses, like becoming a pet owner or going to law school or getting really into yoga. And just as the presence of a cry room decreases parishioners’ tolerance for babbling toddlers in Mass (“Can’t they just go to the cry room where they won’t bother anyone?”), people have less patience with mothers and less interest in supporting them when motherhood is merely a lifestyle choice: “She chose to have that baby, after all. Good luck to her, but why should the rest of us be inconvenienced because she wanted that experience of motherhood?”

And here’s a short article about the artwork that WOF chose to accompany my piece!

No, Books Are Not Remotely Too Expensive by

Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.

Meanwhile, books are trying their darnedest to save you money. If they were tracking upward with inflation, as mentioned, your Harper Lee and hobbits would be $43 and $54. Instead, they’re 30–40 percent cheaper than we would expect them to be.

I am intrigued by the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Anne Hathaway as Penelope? Yes, please.

And I really wish I could make it to NY before the end of June to see the Raphael exhibit at the Met!

Also, because I don’t have enough creative side projects going (ahem), I decided to start writing a screenplay for a romantic comedy. It is a delightful process.

Reading Lately

• Mind Your Body by Nicole Sachs: I finally finished this one after losing interest for awhile. I think Sachs’ concept of healing chronic illness/anxiety through what she calls JournalSpeak is actually very solid. (Basically it’s about letting all your suppressed and unfiltered thoughts out in writing so your body can stop sending you alarm bells through pain to make sure you’ve got the message about what’s going on with you psychologically.) But as a book I was left underwhelmed. It feels padded, the writing isn't great, and I kept thinking “this could have been a blog post.” I really like JournalSpeak as a method of learning to listen to your intuition and let your feeling out and avoid rumination and suppression but the book was meh.

What I’ve Been Listening To

• Noah Kahan’s new album. On repeat. Can’t stop, won’t stop. Should I write about why I find it so captivating?

Upcoming Events

• May 15th-17th: New Orleans, LA: Joie de Vivre’s Louisiana Arts and Culture Festival

• July 31st-August 2nd: Wichita, KS: Midwest Catholic Family Conference

Currently Watching

• The girls and I went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2. Because I will love Stanley Tucci always and forever. And Meryl Streep is a goddess. We also started the new series of The Count of Monte Cristo. So far I really like it, but it’s been ages since I read the book.

Recently for Paid Subscribers: How (and Why) I Travel Overseas with Four Kids series featuring how to get cheap flights and make travel with lots of kids possible.

Hope you have a wonderful week!

Haley

(Editor of Word on Fire Votive, Author, Podcaster)

Haley’s books

Haley’s Catholic Kids’ Cookbook

Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns

Haley’s Book on Jane Austen’s Novels

Haley’s Book about Radical Simplicity

This email is free for you to read, but took time and energy to create. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my family and gain access to exclusive content:

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I have always understood my life not merely as days and years stretching out behind me and in front of me but as a Story. In general, I think this has served me well (although I look back at certain times in my life and realize I was telling myself a story that wasn’t true). And that is the danger, I suppose. What stories are helpful and what stories are destructive?

But if you think of your life as a Story, you want it to be a good one. We all naturally want to avoid pain, suffering, emotional wounds, broken messy things. We long for safety, security, familiarity. This is normal. Healthy, even! And more than understandable. (After all, our brains are trying to keep us alive and sticking to what is familiar is often the path it takes.) But, as Mrs. Croft in Jane Austen’s Persuasion reminds us, “None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.” And we couldn’t even if we wanted to. Life is full of curve balls. And without plot twists, well, you haven’t got yourself a very good story.

Something that always strikes me about the popular Humans of New York project by Brandon Stanton (combining photography and biographical storytelling of people he encounters by chance) is that we all have a pretty wild story to tell. I doubt anyone has ever said from her deathbed, “Well, everything turned out about how I expected. No surprises!”

A few weeks ago I bought Martin Shaw’s new book Liturgies of the Wild at the oldest bookshop in Ireland and started it on a bus ride to the Cliffs of Moher. (Getting to see Ireland was itself a plot twist I didn’t expect and am grateful for.) I think Shaw is a bit of a kindred spirit who understands the power of Story and of how we all view our own Stories. He writes about the story pattern of Severance, Threshold, and Return. In many stories, there is a breaking off from the familiar, a complete disorientation. The stable world gets turned upside down. Stable ground is split into a vast canyon, like a giant’s open mouth. Or perhaps the sea carries you far away from the shores you know, and you are spit out from the belly of a beast into a foreign land. Here you struggle to survive, to find your way to comprehend the shift in your fortunes. You get lost. And something of the old you, well, dies to make way for the person who will find her way home.

After Severance, the journey to the Threshold is set in a world of danger, of catastrophic mistakes, of reckoning and struggle. The parts of one’s identity and ego that have been tightly grasped begin to slip from your fingers and evaporate. And only after walking through the Threshold to this other world can you begin the journey home. That Return is what Shaw describes as a gift that cannot be simply for the main character, but for the homeland. (My first thought was Diggory in The Magician’s Nephew bringing his mother the magic, healing apple.) Perhaps the gift is knowledge. Perhaps it’s love. Either way, it isn’t just for you.

I know the world of Severance very well--to have your world become a ship in a storm that is rocking side to side as you slide across the deck. There is no way to tell which way is up to breathable air and which is down, down, down, into the depths of the ocean. Which ropes can you hold fast to when your feet are no longer steady beneath you? How do you survive?

I don’t think I’ve fully entered the Return chapter yet. I must be somewhere near the Threshold: seeing it ahead of me, or just having walked through and beginning the journey home. But so much has changed, shifted, fallen away and been rebuilt, that it is a disorienting journey back to myself. What will remain, and what will die? What parts of me will be permanently lost? What familiar lands have fallen into the ocean, into nonexistence? What will the new shoreline look like? How will the maps of my soul need to be redrawn?

The journey is brutal. But what if there is simply no Story without these plot twists and sorrows? No triumphant defiant joy without the unexpected blows?

Stephen Colbert had a powerful interview with Anderson Cooper about grief that I return to every so often. Colbert argues that you have to learn to love the thing that hurt you the most (in his case the tragic loss of his father and two of his brothers). Not because you wanted it to happen. Not because you wouldn’t give anything to change it. But because there is Gift in the mystery of the loss. It is, strangely, possible to be grateful for the worst thing that has ever happened to you and Stephen attributes a quote to Tolkien: “what punishments of God are not gifts?”

In many fairy tales, something profoundly unwanted and often unfair has happened. Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in the woods by the adults who are supposed to love and care for them. Snow White’s stepmother hires a hitman to take her out. Cinderella is reduced to household staff and falls asleep in the kitchen fire hearth’s ashes. Whether it’s illness, death of a loved one, mental health struggles, or relationship trauma, many of the griefs we experience feel paralyzingly unfair. And I can get stuck gripping the sand of the unfamiliar shore where I’ve been shipwrecked with my toes and screaming at the Heavens in fury. And I think there would be something wrong with skipping this step. (God in his Heaven can handle our cries of rage.) But eventually we grow hoarse and must take a breath and make a survival plan. We shed the salt-soaked clothes and find something new to cover ourselves with. We find the springs of fresh water on the island. And one night, as we fall asleep under the stars, an inkling of hope begins to flicker. Maybe the person who enjoyed years in the calm waters couldn’t survive this. But you’re not that person anymore.

You didn’t get to decide where the storm will shipwreck you, but you do get to decide who you will be on the new shore. And if you Return home, God willing, you will be unrecognizable. Is that the homeschooling mom who thought if she checked every box, she could control the outcome of her life and family? No, it just looks a little bit like her.

How will the knots in the plot of our lives be untangled? And what good does it do to refuse to begin the next chapter? At some point, we will find ourselves far out of the shallows into angry and overwhelming waves. Can we see the storm not as an unsurvivable tempest but as the prelude to what Tolkien calls “eucatastrophe”–the unexpected plot twist of grace that breaks in when the battle seems all but lost, the overturning of the curse that brings unprecedented joy? Is your Story’s triumphant ending only possible because of the journey you didn’t think you could survive?

A quick note: most of my posts about my divorce are protected behind the paid subscription paywall for privacy reasons. (Substack subscriptions are a huge help to me financially as a single mom, so thank you to everyone who has upgraded to a paid subscription.)

These are some of those recent posts:

A Year After My Life Fell Apart

Please, let me save you from “Wuthering Heights”

The Terrible Gift of the Truth

Have a beautiful weekend,

Haley

(Editor of Word on Fire Votive, Author, Podcaster)

Haley’s books

Haley’s Catholic Kids’ Cookbook

Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns

Haley’s Book on Jane Austen’s Novels

Haley’s Book about Radical Simplicity

This email is free for you to read, but took time and energy to create. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my family and gain access to exclusive content:

Upgrade to Paid

I have spent most of my life expecting the next season to be easier: when this pregnancy is over, life won’t be so hard…when the baby sleeps through the night…when I can quit my job and stay home…when the kids are older and I can start working again…when I finish writing this book…when no one is in diapers…when the divorce is finalized…

While there are certainly seasons that are more overwhelming than others, I believed a fantasy that life will get easier, that I will have a soft life without so much struggle or pain. When the kids go to college? When work slows down? When I get this or that kid the right diagnosis and therapy? When I can finally have the freedom to move somewhere I want to live?

As soon as I came up for air to face that my life had completely been turned upside-down a new challenge presented itself of getting emotionally accustomed to being away from my kids every other week. And then came the transition of having them full-time solo and the overwhelm that comes with that. And sure, someday I won’t be raising four kids as a single mom. They’ll be grown, and my life will shift yet again. But that elusive soft life will not arrive then, either. Young adults still need help from their mom. Illnesses may emerge. An economic crisis may strike. Or a completely unexpected catastrophe.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the next era for Haley is some European noble falling in love with me and eagerly relieving my financial burdens of raising four kids as we join him in a castle with a moat? And my only burden is all the books I need to carry home to my castle from charming European bookshops? I would love to enter my soft life era. But as unwelcome as the reality may be, it seems unavoidable to acknowledge that the roller coaster of life simply will keep moving up and down. There will be sharp turns and unexpected drops. Things will move backward just as soon as you think you’re finally making progress to the finish line.

I don’t say this to cause anxiety with a grim “SUFFERING COULD BE JUST AROUND THE CORNER!!” message. Instead, I actually have something hopeful to say, something hopeful that’s based in reality.

What I’m learning over the past two years as I’ve recovered from divorce is that while the hits keep coming, I am more resilient and capable of surviving them. I recover faster from the painful things. I have a map for moving through them. I am getting better at managing hard things.

A helpful (and healthy) shift is to focus less on a fantasy of life getting easier and instead more on building our own resilience, strength, and support systems. That way, when the next hard thing arrives, we can thrive in spite of it.

I’ve written about the new habits I’ve been learning to care for my body so that I can stay sane (tldr: giving my body the sleep, water, nourishing food, and movement it needs; working on healing my nervous system from chronic fight or flight). For our bodies to gain strength and resilience, they must experience challenge and stress. That doesn’t mean not letting our bodies rest, of course! But healthy muscles need to be used in order to be strengthened. Our hearts need exercise in order to function well. Lack of struggle doesn’t lead to strength but to weakness. Can we view navigating the hard things in our lives the same way? As a practice in resilience that primes us to handle more when it arrives? And with wisdom and confidence that accompanies each hurdle we overcome?

Just before my kids and I went to Ireland, I read a piece about how kids gain resilience and confidence when they travel. They must navigate the unfamiliar: new places, new foods, new languages, new culture. What do I do if there’s no room in the overhead bin above my seat for my luggage? How many pairs of socks should I pack? Where do I dump the water out of a full bottle before going through security? How do we find a taxi from the airport? What do they call bathrooms in this country? How do I tap my card on the bus and figure out which stop to go to?

Is our obsession with ease a result of not giving ourselves and our children enough opportunity to figure things out when they’re not simple or obvious? Will this only get worse and worse as we offload decisions, research, and tasks to ChatGPT?

I do dream of an easier life. And I wouldn’t turn it down if I had the opportunity to live with fewer hard things to juggle. But I grow in resilience and confidence all the time. (The crazy thing is that I can even track my physical resilience with my Oura ring and see how I am recovering from stress more effectively just by tracking my heart rate and biometrics!) Each time we handle a hard thing, we get stronger and more capable of handling hard things. And we know we can do it again, because we’ve already succeeded.

You have handled every hard thing you’ve ever faced. You have been through it and survived. And that should be empowering! But one thing I’m pondering is why for so many years did hard seasons break me down more and more rather than strengthen me? (And we can all probably think of someone we know who does not tackle difficulties well, but tends to crumble.) Burnout is real and I don’t think that only mindset changes can be the answer to nerves that are as raw as Mrs. Bennet’s and stress-induced health issues. A positive outlook is not enough to conquer significant mental health issues. As I look back on my own experience, I don’t think I could gain resiliency because I was not nourishing my body and mind. It’s like trying to gain muscle by lifting at the gym while starving yourself—a futile attempt.

So how do we cultivate resilience? I certainly don’t pretend to have the answers here and I’m interested to hear how you think this can be achieved. Obviously caring for our bodies helps us deal with the stresses of life. But what about building support systems in our communities, so we have friends to catch us when we are falling into despair? What about a mindset that doesn’t view each difficulty as wholly negative but as a new challenge to conquer? How can we encourage resiliency in our children and in ourselves? Can we balance intentional care for ourselves and be realistic about what we can and cannot handle? And at the same time gird our loins and view each new difficult season not as an unexpected imposition on our soft life but as a new challenge we are capable of overcoming?

I don’t want to silver-lining the difficulties that I or you face. Life is hard, and sometimes it brings you to your knees. It certainly brings me to mine. But while I don’t think it gets easier, I think we can get better at hard. At least I hope I can.

A quick note: most of my posts about my divorce are protected behind the paid subscription paywall for privacy reasons. (Substack subscriptions are a huge help to me financially as a single mom, so thank you to everyone who has upgraded to a paid subscription.)

These are some of those recent posts:

A Year After My Life Fell Apart

Please, let me save you from “Wuthering Heights”

The Terrible Gift of the Truth

Have a beautiful weekend,

Haley

(Editor of Word on Fire Votive, Author, Podcaster)

Haley’s books

Haley’s Catholic Kids’ Cookbook

Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns

Haley’s Book on Jane Austen’s Novels

Haley’s Book about Radical Simplicity

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Traveling with my kids is at the top of my list of favorite things. I’ve traveled with all four of my kids to France and with at least one of my kids to Belgium, Germany, England, and Scotland.

And I spent the weekend recovering from an illness and sitting in bed with my laptop and coffee, putting together a spring break itinerary for another trip (the details of our next trip below!).

Whenever I share something about one of our adventures, I always get asked about travel hacks and especially how to travel with kids affordably. So I’d like to make my little pitch for prioritizing travel and then offer some of my best hacks for making it work on a budget.

Why Prioritize Travel?

I have always been an “experiences over objects” kind of mom. I didn’t grow up in a big travel family (we did a summer trip to my grandparents’ house in NC and that’s about it). But my parents did prioritize experiences: game nights, hosting friends for dinners, going to see performances (music, dance, theatre, etc), picnicking at state parks or gardens, the occasional day at the beach. This is something I really wanted to emulate in my own parenting.

But I’ve also always had the travel bug. I just didn’t get to scratch that itch for most of my life. When my four kids were little we did some camping, short trips to stay with friends, and even one big road trip across the country. But most of our travel was between where we lived in Waco, TX across I-10 to visit family in Florida. But—excepting the misery of the long drives—my kids love experiencing new places and I did, too. But there was so much I was longing to see.

What I wanted to see most was Europe. And I mean YEARNING to walk down cobblestone streets and see beautiful cathedrals and sit in cafes and stroll through museums. I wanted to see the places I had read about my whole life. But that simply was not in my family’s budget. I had mostly come to terms with that when I was delightfully surprised with opportunities to travel. In 2021, I got to go to France. In 2022, I went to England and Scotland. I was hooked. And what I wanted more than anything was to share these experiences with other people—especially my kids!

When you travel with your kids, whether on a weekend camping trip or an overseas adventure, those experiences shape your family culture. You build memories. You experience those waves of gratitude—those “I can’t believe we’re here!” moments. You learn about history, you taste new foods, you marvel at what you’re seeing. And because I love travel so much, sharing those special places with my kids is one of my life’s greatest joys and I am more than willing to make sacrifices in other budget lines to prioritize those experiences.

That being said most of my children’s lives, it simply didn’t matter how much I wanted to prioritize travel—there was no budget line I could cut. We were just getting by. I know what that’s like and the last thing I want is to make anyone feel like if they’re not organizing trips around the world for their kids all the time that it makes them a subpar parent. BY NO MEANS. You know your budget best and you can craft great experiences with your kids that don’t cost an arm and a leg!

So, travel is not an essential. Food and shelter and filling up the care with gas are essentials. (I was 35 before I traveled to Europe! One can survive without spending money on travel!) But if you are wanting to prioritize travel with kids and instead of Christmas and birthday gifts or eating out you want to earmark some money for a trip, I do have suggestions for making it as affordable and delightful as possible. So, I give you a single mom of four’s travel hacks for overseas adventures beginning with FLIGHTS. (In future installments: accommodations, meals for four kids on the go, traveling with neurodivergent kids, recovering from jet lag, balancing needs of older and younger kids, passport basics!)

The question I get asked the most is how the heck I find flights to Europe for so cheap. I only paid $385/ticket for our Paris trip last year! Cheap flights are not necessarily hard to find, but there are some hacks and I’m going to share every trick I know with you:

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Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary.

This email is free for you to read, but took time and energy to create. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my family and gain access to exclusive content:

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Greetings, friends! I began this missive sitting in bed where I was recovering from the Flu followed by whatever upper respiratory thing my kids gifted me this weekend. But this morning I’m feeling mostly better and I’ve relocated to my front porch to watch the sun come up on this foggy Monday.

But I also noticed that the last TWM was sent out at the end of January! I missed a whole month!

But I did manage to

• lead a mini-book club for Wuthering Heights including a conversation with (you can find all of the reflections and discussion questions in the “latest” posts here)

• review the new film: Please, let me save you from “Wuthering Heights”

• share some Lenty thoughts

(I’ve got an podcast interview with Washington Review of Books editor, Steve Larkin, about the film just waiting for me to edit and post, too.)

In non-Substack news, the new edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales that I edited has been released into the world!

Related: I interviewed Dr. Vigen Guroian about Snow White and Grace Fitzpatrick about fairy tales recently on The Votive Podcast.

I also did a book signing and led a women’s retreat in Houston, cheered my daughter on at the district History Fair competition, drove the kids to 13 different health-related appointments, and my son had a concussion that merited an ER trip. (He’s fine now.) We’re also juggling rehearsals for two different spring musicals. It’s a busy spring!

But despite the breakneck pace of everything and the sickness circulating in the household, we’ve been doing really well. Some really good developments in the kids’ lives to celebrate and a spring break trip just around the corner. (Can you guess where we’re going? More on that very soon!) Now that I feel like I’m on the other side of the grief wave I described last time TWM reached your inbox, I am reminded that even though it doesn’t feel like it in the worst moments of grief—joy always returns. Just wait for it.

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Worthwhile Links:

Wuthering Heights looks lush but it’s a bad film and a worse adaptation by

The interpersonal dynamics that underpin Brontë’s story are warped into a vacuous caricature, missing the point with virtuosic flair. And make no mistake: there is flair. The visual design is bombastic, pointedly anachronistic, and utterly at odds with the novel’s gloomy Gothic countenance.

The Viking Era and the Humanities by (h/t to my colleague Andrew Tolkmith for sharing it with me)

So, right now, we are sitting at the confluence of two epoch-defining, disruptive changes in the core activities of human societies — warmaking and communication. And both are being conducted by the same kinds of people — guys like Richard Hendricks — with their disruptive technologies.

Inside Switzerland’s Extraordinary Medieval Library by Mike MachEacheran

With intricate woodwork, balconied gantries and vast stockpiles of leather-bound tomes, it is one of the world’s best-preserved Baroque libraries. And for centuries, Switzerland’s largest and oldest monastery library has been regarded as one of Europe’s intellectual treasures.

How to Break Your Screen Addiction by for

The consecrated religious life is given to the Church and to the world as a radiant witness: a witness to love, to freedom, and to the goodness of God. Perhaps, in the midst of the current anthropological crisis which Pope Leo has described, it is also called to serve as a witness to something else: to the joy and fulfillment of a life in which has at its heart neither productivity nor prestige, but rather the face-to-face encounter with divine and human persons by which we ourselves become fully who we are called to be.

Pinned by an Angel by for

Eventually I gave up even the intention to attend church on my own, but I continued going with my family at home. I would still have described myself as Catholic if anyone had asked. Plenty of people I knew described themselves as such, even participated more or less fully in the faith (especially when family was involved), while admitting when pressed that they didn’t really buy into all of it. I thought of myself as belonging to this ambivalent camp.

I might have remained there—as many do all their lives—had it not been for a chance encounter with a book.

Reading Lately

• The Design of Books by Debbie Berne (I highly recommend for publishing industry folks, authors, editors, etc who want to understand more of the process and art of book design! Book nerd heaven.)

What I’ve Been Listening To

• Did you know that before Hadestown was a musical it was a concept album and Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver) sings Orpheus?!

Upcoming Events

• April 15th: San Antonio, TX: University of the Incarnate Word

• May 16th-17th: New Orleans, LA: Joie de Vivre’s Louisiana Arts and Culture Festival

• July 31st-August 2nd: Wichita, KS: Midwest Catholic Family Conference

Currently Watching

• Bridgerton Season 4 and Love Is Blind Season 10. (I KNOW it’s all trash but I DID HAVE THE FLU.)

Coming this week for Paid Subscribers:

How (and Why) I Travel Overseas with Four Kids series featuring how to get cheap flights and make travel with lots of kids possible.

And, if you saw “Wuthering Heights” and need a palate cleanser, paid subscribers can access my Ultimate Jane Austen Film Guide.

Hope you have a wonderful week!

Haley

(Editor of Word on Fire Votive, Author, Podcaster)

Haley’s books

Haley’s Catholic Kids’ Cookbook

Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns

Haley’s Book on Jane Austen’s Novels

Haley’s Book about Radical Simplicity

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In Lent of 2025 I went to London for a work event and then stayed across the pond for a few days because I needed a hug from beautiful England as I healed from an unexpected sorrow.

I met my friend Sophie Caldecott for a day trip in Bath and we toured the stunning cathedral at the center of the city. (And I love a door photo.)

I’ve been thinking about the image of a door as a chance for a fresh beginning: Advent, New Year’s, Ash Wednesday, birthdays, there are so many doors we have the opportunity to step through and start anew.

As every trite Instagram account (including mine) reminds us, grief isn’t linear. The path of grief and growth and healing is circuitous. I hope upon hope that it’s a Dantean path, leading upwards, inch by inch. But it often feels Sisyphean instead: upwards and then falling back down the hill, taking the same steps again tomorrow.

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Readers often get nervous when one of their favorite books becomes a film. Every detail of costuming, plot, and character is put under a microscope: “Those aren’t the right kind of corsets for the time period.” “They changed a plot point and now we’re missing some nuance.” “This line was said by that character when it should have been said by this character.” We love to get up in arms when anyone messes with our beloved stories, but I often find the pre-opening night outrage to be overblown. Film is a different medium than literature, after all. And sometimes, the right director can make something magnificent and different as they transform the page to the screen, and we all need to just chill out and enjoy it (case in point would be the recent triumph of Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet).

I have been both nervous and eager to see what Emerald Fennel would do with Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. After all, there hasn’t been a decent film adaptation in ages. And Fennell is known as a director who likes to push the envelope. From the promo images and even the quotation marks around the title, it was clear that textual accuracy was not at all what she was going for. Margot Robbie is a beautiful woman, but she’s not a brunette Yorkshire teenager. And it doesn’t take a historical costuming expert to know that red vinyl or iridescent sheer dresses were thin on the ground in early 19^th-century England. Could the costume designs have been great Barbie versions of Catherine Earnshaw’s wardrobe? Perhaps. (And do we even need to touch on the controversy of casting a white guy to play Heathcliff?) Fennell has explicitly described the film as her own teenage interpretation of the story built into its own world. But even with the buzz surrounding the film and the clips I’d seen, I was honestly not prepared for the experience of seeing “Wuthering Heights.”

I struggle with where to begin with this review. But as The Sound of Music taught us, the very beginning is the very best place to start. So I’ll start with the opening credits, when the audience hears what initially sounds like a man masturbating but is then revealed to be a man being publicly executed by hanging as the crowd leers and seems almost aroused by the violence. (In addition, the corpse has an erection, and Fennel also throws into the scene a nun who is staring for extra shock value.) Is this an important plot point worth the graphic nature of the scene? No, it is not. And these first moments are the perfect microcosm of the film: it draws from already disturbing content but then is taken to places much darker and kinkier than you imagined it could. And, while shocking, there is precious little point to anything.

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We had a lot of fun reflecting on this classic and powerful novel.

Some of the highlights of this conversation include:

• How our perception of this novel has changed over time

• Why it’s such a problem that most film adaptations don’t include the second generation story

• What kind of “love” do Cathy and Heathcliff share and is this presented as positive or negative in the book?

• Themes of nature and place

• Differences between Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte, and Jane Austen’s work

• The poisoning nature of revenge

• What is going on with Cathy?!

• Our hopes for the new movie (and past adaptations that are worth watching)

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After all, nothing says Valentine’s Day like a discussion of one of literature’s most toxic relationships, right? So set an alarm for 12pm east and join us!

(And I’m also trying to schedule a chat with , the film editor of to talk about the movie, so that will be another fun discussion for supporters of this space.)

(To access the reading schedule, join in on the discussion in the comments, and get the details for our live discussion, upgrade your subscription to paid. With a myriad of unexpected breaking appliances and plumbing disasters lately, this single mom of four appreciates it.)

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The thing is, this week has been a bit of a nightmare. One of my kids passed out and suffered a head injury from the fall. Urgent care took one look and sent us to the ER where my kid was checked out, diagnosed with a concussion, and sent home to rest (recovering nicely). And that honestly wasn’t even the most stressful part of the week. It’s been one thing after another. So I am hobbling along in survival mode right now, annoyed with pretty much everything, tired from checking on a concussed kid in the middle of the night, and really wishing I had Nelly Dean to just deal with all the details of my life so I can convalesce like the gothic mistress of a Yorkshire estate that I was born to be. Instead, I’m taking deep breaths and ordering pizza. Ok, let’s soldier on, bookish companions.

(To access the reading schedule, join in on the discussion in the comments, and get the details for our live discussion, upgrade your subscription to paid. With a myriad of unexpected breaking appliances and plumbing disasters lately, this single mom of four appreciates it.)

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The plot really picks up in these chapters as the train starts going off the rails. And it’s catapulted into destruction by Cathy’s selfishness, Edgar and Isabella’s idiocy, and Heathcliff’s thirst for revenge.

(To access the reading schedule, join in on the discussion in the comments, and get the details for our live discussion, upgrade your subscription to paid. With a myriad of unexpected breaking appliances and plumbing disasters lately, this single mom of four appreciates it.)

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(To access the reading schedule, join in on the discussion in the comments, and get the details for our live discussion, upgrade your subscription to paid. With a myriad of unexpected breaking appliances and plumbing disasters lately, this single mom of four appreciates it.)

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She claims (after noting the strengths and weaknesses she perceives in their major works), “Neither Emily nor Anne was learned.” What a thing to say of the authors of Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall! It seems either dismissive of the education that prepared them to write complicated classics we’re still reading today or an attempt to highlight their natural talent that was cultivated in their creative family home.

The kind of learning that shaped the Brontes would be a fine education indeed for the student of today! While tackling Wuthering Heights should be something an average high school student should be capable of, I fear that’s no longer the case. The vocabulary alone could be overwhelming and yet, this book is no slog. In fact, it begins with a bang!

(To access the reading schedule, join in on the discussion in the comments, and get the details for our live discussion, upgrade your subscription to paid. With a myriad of unexpected breaking appliances and plumbing disasters lately, this single mom of four appreciates it.)

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