My oldest daughter was mugged last Saturday night. She was talking with two friends in the parking lot of a restaurant in Los Angeles before saying goodbye for the evening. Two young men approached her and asked her for a light, and as she offered her lighter, there was suddenly a gun at her head. T
Valerie Schultz
Valerie Schultz is a freelance writer, a columnist for The Bakersfield Californian and the author of Till the Moon Be No More: The Grit and Grace of Growing Older. She lives on the Oregon Coast.
Posted inFaith in Focus
Emotional Oology
A woman is born with all of her eggs. Unlike male sperm, which are produced continually and by the millions throughout a man’s life, a woman’s immature eggs are contained in follicles in her newborn ovaries. Over the course of her reproductive years, 300 to 500 eggs will mature. Each mon
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The Wearing of the Black
My 13-year-old daughter wore black to school today. When we pulled into the circular drop-off point at school, she said, "Look at everyone. We look like a bunch of Goths." (For those over 30: Goths, short for Gothic, are the adolescents who wear black clothes and black lipstick, resign the
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The Case for Dancing
The angel girls were ready on Easter morning. Their feathered wings were attached, their wreaths securely bobby-pinned to their braided heads, their pastel ribbons around their waists. The nine of them had practiced for this Mass for many hours; they had become an earthly corps of angels. They await
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Faith Like a Seed
My youngest daughter is two weeks shy of 13. In two weeks, she will leave her childhood behind her and take off on the exhilarating jet of adolescence, although in reality she is already at cruising altitude. She has grown an inch a month over the summer, and the expression of disdain on her face ri
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The More Things Change…
“Ch-ch-changes/ Pretty soon now you’re gonna get a little older.”
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Who’s Not Ready? Holler I
My daughter is dating a Baptist. Well, she says, he’s not really a Baptist. He was baptized into some Protestant denomination, and he attends a church that happens to be Baptist. In any event, he is non-Catholic. My daughter is 21, almost self-supporting, a woman on the verge of everything. Sh
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A Fish Out of Water
My grandmother did not pass on to the afterlife without leaving me something. After a life that spanned nearly a century, three generations were on hand to send her off to her Maker. Her funeral was simple and heartfelt, if a bit unorganized. The priest asked my aunt, just before the procession bega
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You Are That Temple
I admit with embarrassment that I found myself, on a recent evening of very low energy, staring at the concluding segment of a television show called “Extreme Makeover.” The three women featured—note that they were all women—had been shown earlier looking the way most of us l
Posted inColumns
Mortal Flesh
My mother went under the knife last summer, sacrificing her left breast to the unkind god of cancer. The uncontrolled dividing by abnormal cells, which raised a tightened, angry welt on her breast that her doctor had recommended watching for over a year, turned out to be an aggressive tumor. After t