the female of the species

Stephanie Winn is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist based in Portland, Oregon. She runs the You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast and produced the documentary “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender Affirming Care,” formerly titled “Affirmation Generation”.

Follow her on Twitter, YouTube, and Locals at @sometherapist.

http://nowaybackfilm.com/

Our culture tells parents there's one best way to raise kids: enroll them in a dozen activities, protect them from trauma, and get them into the most expensive college you can. If you can't do that, don't bother.

How is that going? Record rates of anxiety, depression, medication, debts, loneliness and more. In Family Unfriendly, bestselling author and Washington Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney says it's time to end this failed experiment in overparenting.

He joins the podcast today to explain how we can be the change we want to see in the world — and help our kids avoid the pitfalls of hyperindividualism and careerism. Carney’s criticism of what he calls “workism” and liberal feminism as an implicitly anti-human ideology is the same impulse that inspired me to start this podcast. Much to discuss! Enjoy, share, leave a 5-star review, send me a message, and if you haven’t already, subscribe to Ladies’ Late Rome Journal. Chat soon!

It’s Holy Week, which means that on Friday night, I’m probably going to lose the last ten pounds of baby weight in tears while watching The Passion Of The Christ.

One of Gibson’s many genius, and deeply Catholic, choices in the film is his deliberate inclusion of scenes involving Christ’s Mother. One stands out: as Christ first falls while carrying His cross to Golgotha, Mary sees Him. We are given a flashback, where He as a child stumbles on a stone path. Mary runs to Him, arms outstretched, her presence His succor. Flash forward, and she runs again, arms outstretched, as Christ chokes on His own blood, crushed under the weight of the cross. I imagine the profound grief and gratitude comingling in both of their hearts for just a moment of one another’s presence.

The crucifix takes on new meaning from perspective of the woman standing beneath it, soaked in His blood, blood of her blood. In so many ways, His wounds are hers, too. I imagine her human, maternal nature, her desire to bring Him comfort, to take her baby’s pain away, to switch places, something, anything — all brushing up against the knowledge of the greater good to come. The cross is the fulfillment of her ultimate confidence in God’s promise, unchanged by the bitter fact of Simeon’s prophecy. She suffers alongside her Son, as only mothers do, in total surrender. His words in the Garden of Gethsemane and hers at the Annunciation echo one another: Thy will be done.

Catholic tradition holds that we take Christ seriously by honoring who He honors. I love Gibson’s Passion for so many reasons, but primarily because He takes Christ seriously by paying serious attention to His mother — and, relatedly, by refusing to shy away from the brutality He endured, she by proxy.

This sincerity, the act of taking historical subjects seriously, is accomplished by placing oneself in the shoes of those subjects without pretense, judgment, or ideological imposition. Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown, my guest in this episode of Girlboss, Interrupted, in her latest book, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought, has accomplished something so unique and interesting by doing just this. This history of Marian devotion begins with a call for readers to take their subjects, medieval Christians, seriously, by praying the psalms as they did throughout the day.

I won’t spoil any more surprises. This episode was so fun to record. Please enjoy, and as ever, send messages, leave comments, share with friends, and drop me a 5-star review on Spotify and Apple podcasts.

I hope y’all have a holy Holy week. Christ is coming.

“Step by step, I retreated from God and went forth to meet the world, the flesh, and the devil. . . . I’d join the devil himself. . . . There is no doubt that I traveled with him at my side and that he extorted a great price for his company.”

This is how Bella Dodd (1904–69) described her long battle with atheistic communism, an ideology her Church calls a “satanic scourge.” She later described it as a “school of darkness,” a school of “hate,” a school for which she was a master organizer and infiltrator of every organization—public, private, and even ecclesiastical.

Bella Dodd courageously left the Communist Party and its diabolical machinations. Her former communist affiliates then smeared her with eerily familiar epithets to modern ears, dubbing her everything from a “fascist” to a “racist.” Some things never change.

One thing that changed, however, was Bella Dodd. The man who helped pull her from the pit? A priest. A priest by the name of Fulton Sheen. Bella Dodd’s story thereafter changed dramatically from one of seduction by the devil to redemption through Christ. She dedicated the remainder of her life to a special penance: warning the world of the evil of communism and its plans.

https://a.co/d/9Uo8hN8

Many of you already know that the past month has been hell for me. My beautiful mother, Beth, passed away suddenly on June 27th, 2024. I want to share a few words about the woman she was, and the weeks leading up to the unimaginable.

We received my mother’s cancer diagnosis eight weeks prior. She was always the enviable picture of health, beauty, and energy, even at 63. No one could have imagined that the back pain that emerged last fall was the medically mysterious, aggressive killer that it was. By the time she had her first biopsy, it was diffuse. She didn’t let us use the word “metastatic,” because she thought it sounded too grim.

I choose to understand these weeks, however short, brutal, and utterly heartbreaking, as a gift to our family.

Petty disputes of the past faded to nothing in seconds. The thing that was always true, good, and beautiful – our mother’s love – was brought into sharp relief. Dad, Danny, Mom, and I refocused and regrounded together as a family. Each of us, in those final months, created and shared some of our best memories with Mom. We said what needed to be said. We forgave. And, cast into the darkness of tragedy, we looked for the light together. We remain devastated. We grieve to the bone. I don’t know how to be a mother without my own mother. She gave me everything and then some. But I find peace in the memory of her most perfect gift: her example. And I have resolved to emulate her excellence, grace, generosity, determination, and sense of justice all the days of my life.

Immediately after Mom died, the women of my hometown descended into our home like a swarm of friendly worker bees. There wasn't a need unmet or a wish ungranted. Our home quickly filled with pimento cheese sandwiches and hydrangeas. I say with confidence that she is grateful. This diluvian outpouring of love reflects a core part of my mother’s identity: her unyielding devotion to her friends. To be a friend to Beth was to be family. Her friends became my mothers, and my friends became her daughters. The same goes for my brother; the marines she brought into our home every year over the holidays are yet another testament to her effusive generosity. The void she leaves behind aches, but I find sweet solace in this community of people. She did, too.

That these past few weeks have felt so much like a hive is ironic because Beth’s nickname was “Bee-Bee,” which had started as a joke between friends: Beth the busy bee, always flitting to and fro between her businesses, her parties, countries and even continents. She embraced the symbol of the bumblebee and filled her home with it. The bee traditionally represents hard work, community, prosperity, and, well, fertility. Mom’s multiple businesses, expansive network of friends, beautiful home, and rapidly – like, very rapidly – expanding family are a testament to just how fitting her symbol is.

She’s been leaving us with signs of her presence in a very literal sense. On the day that Mom passed, we were loading our (what feels like) millions of tiny children into the minivan to go sleep at my godmother’s house. Because we have millions of tiny children, my eldest has to crawl through a tunnel of carseats in order to get to the back of the car. In pristine condition, placed in the center of her path, Mary Helen saw a perfectly preserved bumblebee lying on the carpet. There’s never been a bee in my car to my knowledge, nor do we leave our windows open. The synchronicity – which my ever intuitive mother always loved to point out to me – is hard to ignore.

Speaking of Mary Helen, she keeps telling me with sweet, childlike faith when she sees me cry: “It’s okay, Mama, Bee Bee is with Jesus and Mama Mary in Heaven.” I know she’s right. On July 4th, my parents’ anniversary, as we were watching the fireworks, Clementine threw her hands to the sky and exclaimed “BEE-BEE, HEAVEN NOW!” I know we will all remember Bee Bee the way she lived, and how she will be in God’s kingdom: lighting up a room, laughing, and cuddling her precious grandchildren. The ones I never got to meet are with her now.

Three years ago, a friend from Budapest called me up to offer a writing fellowship with the Danube Institute. For three years, I have postponed. I kept getting pregnant, to be frank. The timing wasn’t right. This year, though, at my mother’s urging, we accepted. Our last text messages are full of listings for homes to rent in Budapest. She was going to come with us after her last round of chemotherapy.

I have no choice but to press on without her, buoyed by the intuition that she’d want us to go. I’ll be writing about family policy and, more generally, how public beauty can play a role in supporting a family-friendly society. Among her many talents, my mother was an interior designer. Her impeccable taste led her to Europe many times. I will do everything in my power to uphold her devotion to beauty and to family.

So, we ar...