Mom to Mom, Day to Day: Advice and Support for Catholic Living

by Danielle Bean

Pauline Books & Media, 2007

155 pages, $15.95

Pauline.org

1-800-376-9121

by CLARE SIOBHAN

Register readers and Catholics frequenting the blogosphere will be familiar with author Danielle Bean’s style — unassuming, down-to-earth, honest — as she holds forth on all the various topics that are important to busy mothers. She addresses mothers trying to live and grow in their Catholic faith while they pass on that same faith to their children.

Like her first book, My Cup of Tea: Musings of a Catholic Mom, her new book, Mom to Mom, Day to Day, contains 30 short essays, all well written and easy to read. The author distributes the essays among six sections covering the major topics that concern conscientious Catholic mothers: how to manage babies and small children, marriage, Catholic mothers’ role in the world, housework, living the faith as a family and within the family, and personal spirituality.

The essays are direct responses to questions the author has received on her blog and are full of the down-to-earth wisdom and humor for which Bean is known. She answers her readers’ questions not as a guru who knows it all but as a fellow traveler who has been there and struggled with the same thing. For example, housework:

“I think the single most frustrating thing about housework is the fact that it’s never done. When it comes to keeping house, there’s just no resting on your laurels. You know how it goes. Just as you close the lid on an empty clothes hamper, some child in your house is going to fall in a mud puddle or vomit in his sheets.”

In the marriage section, she offers her take on the perennial question of romance in a busy household. In the section on babies and small children, she cautions readers to watch out for people who promote their parenting philosophy as a pseudo-religion, and what to do about kids who can’t seem to make it through the night without a visit to Mom and Dad’s room. Her “Corporal Works of Mercy: Stomach Flu Version” is hilarious:

“Watching ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ and reading Gossie and Gertie over and over and over and over again, until you think your brains just might liquefy and come oozing out from your ears, had better count …”

The section dealing with family spirituality is, unfortunately, the shortest section of the book. Bean provides a month-by-month list of family activities, recipes and projects for certain feast days during the various liturgical seasons of the year, and while this is quite helpful for parents who want to provide a hands-on experience of Catholic devotional life in the home, it says little about nurturing the prayer life or spiritual development of children.

But her advice to mothers on maintaining their own personal life of transformation in Christ is full of wisdom. “First and foremost,” she writes, “I think it’s important for mothers, especially those with small children, to recognize that they have been called to an active life and an active vocation, not a contemplative one. This means that while spiritual meditation, daily Mass and lengthy Scripture studies are noble and worthy pursuits, they are not necessarily the particular ways in which God is calling you to a closer relationship with him during this stage in your life.”

Mothers who are in the thick of child rearing aren’t the only ones who will benefit from and enjoy this book. Husbands will better understand the women they live with, young married couples will get an accurate glimpse into the future, and priests will appreciate more fully the trials and the joys of their married parishioners.

Clare Siobhan writes from

Westmont, Illinois.