The Mother’s Day posts are in full bloom on social media and say what you want about the algorithm but mine gets me. I forward Rush a video about how the greatest gift you can give your wife this year is to leave her alone, preferably in a dark room with a sound machine on. I make my three nearly-grown girls, gathered around my bed where I’ve been since 7:00 p.m., watch another on how a class of first-graders describe their moms: My mom likes being on the couch. My mom doesn’t like noise. My mom hates ekercize. It’s me, right? I gleam. I want my girls to see and accept and even delight in my limited capacities. One of them, maybe, musters a chuckle.

Learning to celebrate our limits—and how those limits can make us larger—is at the heart of friend and author Jessica Slice’s brilliant new book, Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World. In it, Jessica seeks to “share the deep wisdom disability culture offers and how it could altar parenthood for everyone.” Under this broad welcome, she creates room for all of us to consider how impossible it is to parent without adequate social supports and how those who have been marginalized by the system quite often hold the map to repairing it. Disability reminds us of our collective frailty, yes, but also our collective interdependence. Limits are how we belong.

Since being identified as autistic last year, I’ve been hesitant to call myself disabled. I’m wrestling with my relationship to disability and whiteness. I’m wrestling with my relationship to disability and perimenopause. I’m wrestling with my relationship to accepting my limits and, yes, being capable of more ekercize. I imagine it might feel good to lift a weight or two in the next decade. In the meantime, I’ll be in bed with Jessica’s book, feeling seen and accepted and even delighted in.

Erin Lane: What is your favorite thing about being an adult?

Jessica Slice: Anyone who has been lucky enough to attend therapy has learned that when we are young, we believe what we are told about the world in order to survive. It’s maladaptive to question authority before a certain age. But it’s adaptive once you’re older. I love that as an adult, I get to decide what is true and reasonable.

Erin: You wrote a book called Unfit Parent! Tell us! What shitty script were you trying to tear up?

Jessica: Consumerism, perfectionism, and our collective (reasonable) fear of suffering tell us that a parent must be superhuman. All parents fall short of these standards, but it’s even more obvious when you’re disabled. Child removal, erasure, and lack of access all send the message that disabled parents are an inferior and inadequate version of regular parents.

Erin: Okay. Now flip it. What truer, weirder story did you set out to write instead?

Jessica: Disabled parents are the standard-bearers of a beautiful, creative, and innovative version of interdependence. Because the systems rejected us, we get to form a new path. And that path can offer a way out for everyone. Parenthood doesn’t need to be immaculate. It just needs to be honest.

Erin: Writing—and Christianity—is about the threat of resurrection. What is the scariest thing about bringing this book to life?

Jessica: I didn’t realize how I would be worried about two opposite things at the exact same time: that people would read it and wouldn’t read it. I’ve felt a little scattered in the weeks since its release. Like there are these facsimiles of me all around the world. A writer friend told me that I don’t have to understand my own emotions about the book for three years, and that seems like the right amount of time to process this.

Erin: Publishing a book is a shiny milestone! What is something less shiny about a life well-lived you’re celebrating this week?

Last night, our whole family (two adults, an 8-year-old, and a baby) spent 45 minutes watching the people who live across the laneway try to put a giant rock inside a dumpster. They took many approaches, some dangerous, and when they finally succeeded, we all clapped and cheered from inside our house.

P.S. Want to celebrate Jessica for doing her work and sharing her story? If so, consider joining me in donating to one of her favorite non-profits, the Southern Poverty Law Center.

P.P.S. Fun Fact: You may remember Jessica from Chapter 4 of my own book, Someone Other Than a Mother. Click here for more of her story—and how she gave me the best parenting compliment of all time: “Well, if you can do it, I don’t see why I can’t.”

P.P.P.S. Are you a disabled parent? What are you learning from disabled parents? What’s one thing you’re doing to reject perfection for yourself or your people? Tell me your tiny kazoos (a.k.a. tiny victories) in the comments below.

Were you a camp kid? I was not. I have one memory of one week in the woods. I think I wrote my parents every day. I think I sobbed on my bunk bed every night. I’m sure I did not sleep. The sound of girls giggling or whispering or even mouth-breathing beside me? An irritant to my nervous system. I pined for cool and artificial air. At the end of that one week, I popped my parents' hope of ever getting another week to themselves. And then, when I became a parent, wished hard my kids would be hardier.

This is one of the paradoxes of camp—it can be both formative and de-formative. Add the adjective church to camp? Now, we’re talking not just archery but theology—and, if you look at the church camps with the biggest influence in America, often a white evangelical theology where God is a benevolent father, Jesus is a rascally cowboy, and evidence of the Spirit is best emoted, whether in raised hands or fat tears. It’s this kind of theology that my friend Cara Meredith is debunking and rewriting in her smart new book, Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, & How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.

What I love about Cara is how much she loves church camp. (Her bouncy red hair and bouncy personality exude cool counselor vibes.) She excavates her own experiences of going to and working at church camps, alongside interviews with former church campers who are making sense of their own belonging and dis-belonging in those spaces. Here she acknowledges another paradox of camp—in that space, she was never more alive and never more aware of the damage done in Jesus’ name. And yet her story never turns bitter. She calls to mind Dr. King’s words: “I criticize America because I love her.” She wants better for all those hardy camp kids.

Fingers-crossed my kids are among them.

Erin Lane: What is your favorite thing about being an adult?

Cara Meredith: I think my favorite thing about being an adult, which is to also say, getting older, is not making apologies for that which needs no apologies. It means that I can give a shit, or not. It means that I can say what I mean and believe what I want to believe and be who I am deep down inside without needing to be someone I’m not.

I know this isn’t a challenge for everyone, but in the world I inhabited for a good, long portion of my life (which is to say in white evangelical church camp environments), there was a certain way of being and believing and operating that was most accepted. If you conformed, if you assimilated, if you believed and said and did all the right things, then you were accepted—then you had belonging.

But as I’ve learned from you, Erin, that’s not how belonging works. Belonging happens simply because we’re human, simply because we’re us at the end of the day.

Erin: You wrote a book called Church Camp! Tell us! What shitty script were you trying to tear up?

Cara: Perhaps in the same vein, I was trying to tear up a shitty script that refused to welcome everyone to a table of belonging. I knew that the script white evangelicalism frequently told and embraced did great harm to women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community in particular. What would it look like to tear that script up into a thousand tiny pieces, yes, exposing the harm, but also proving true the value and worth of those who had been marginalized at the hands of those who so often held power? What would it look like to tell a new story of those people but also of God? What would it look like to imagine new ways forward for camps, as well, so that harm is no longer a defining factor?

Erin: Okay. Now flip it. What truer, weirder story did you set out to write instead?

Cara: Well, you know this quite well since you’re the one who helped me identify it, but this book birthed out of a desire to find a singular instance or place in my life of the both/and.

After my first book came out in 2019, this thing called the global pandemic happened a year or so later—and even though I had a really hard time writing for awhile, when I started to come out of the fog of that experience, I was struck by paradox. More often than not, two opposite things tended to be true at the same time.

I finally put together a proposal and a handful of chapters that paired those opposite things together, but when my agent and I brought it to publishers, we kept hearing a similar refrain: We like the idea, but we need a through line. They needed an instance of one thing, instead of a whole bunch of disparate things, if that makes sense.

In the end, church camp was that one thing for me: It was one of the most formative places in my life, and also a place that I didn’t know if I could send my own kids to when they got old enough. As it goes, the weirder story I tried to write was one of paradox.

Erin: Writing—and Christianity—is about the threat of resurrection. What is the scariest thing about bringing this book to life?

Cara: I did not mince my words. I did not hold back. As much as I believe I held the aforementioned tension of the both/and, I also firmly stated my beliefs—beliefs that are not supposed to be questioned, let alone stated out loud to those who might disagree (which is to say, with those whose flag is still planted in white evangelical waters). As much as I make no apologies for Church Camp and am proud of the words I wrote, I also recognize that there are going to be a whole lot of people who are not happy with what I wrote. Sometimes I want to have my cake and eat it too; I want to keep relationships intact and friendships afloat, but bringing this book to life also means the loss of those who do not agree with what I’ve written. I guess I want the both/and even in this area too.

Erin: Publishing a book is a shiny milestone! What is something less shiny about a life well-lived you’re celebrating this week?

Cara: One of my neighbors just helped me put drip irrigation into my backyard garden beds, and I am over-the-moon excited about what this is going to mean for my gardening life moving forward! My hunch is that I’ve not been watering enough in the past, so I imagine the harvest is going to change considerably, just with this one tiny milestone. But, also, can we notice the fact that one of my neighbors helped me install the system? That’s generosity and warmth and welcoming right there, which calls for a celebration in and of itself.

P.S. Want to celebrate Cara for doing her work and sharing her story? If so, consider joining me in donating to The Naming Project, a camp Cara highlights in the book that serves youth of all sexual and gender identities.

P.P.S. Curious what I mean in these q&a’s by the “threat of resurrection?” With Easter this month—the day on which Christians celebrate Jesus’s resurrection—it occurred to me to reexplain—or rather let Parker Palmer do it for me. Yes, Parker Palmer is now on Substack.

P.P.P.S. Were you a camp kid? Do you send your kids to church camp? How are you exposing (and embracing) the paradoxes of it all? Tell me your tiny kazoos (a.k.a. tiny victories) in the comments below.

I’m obsessed with unmasking these days.

The concept captured me around the time I was identified as Autistic last year. (My psychologist, bless her, prefers to say “identified” rather than “diagnosed” to minimize the use of pathologizing language.) Unmasking, at least in the neurodivergent world, is used to describe the process of shedding the skins you’ve put on to fit in and revealing the soft and wild animal you actually are.

Now that I know this word, I’m conducting experiments in unmasking everything. Unmasking how I work. Can you put that in writing, please? Unmasking how I parent. I’ve hit my sensory limit for the day! Goodnight, loves. Unmasking how I believe. Hi God. Okay if I’m not particularly verbal, emotive, or social this season? Thank you for not making me fix my face with you.

So a new book from friend Lizzie McManus-Dail couldn’t be more well-timed. God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us: 40 Devotions to Liberate Your Faith from Fear and Reconnect with Joy is “a first-of-its-kind devotional for the disenchanted, disillusioned, and deconstructed.” In other words, it is a devotional for people who are quite through with devotionals, and “Father Lizzie” is our big-haired, bold-lipped, wise AF priest.

Feminist, anti-racist, and LGBTQ-affirming, Lizzie invites us to shed our (self) hateful faith and become re-enchanted with a soft and wild God. Before my Autism identification, I wouldn’t have claimed any self-hate in my own faith. But all this unmasking has me wondering: How much of my spirituality has been tinged through the years with a quiet fear that I am too woo, too weird, too divergent to be faithful?

What utter nonsense, says Lizzie.

What utter brilliance is she.

Erin Lane: What is your favorite thing about being an adult?

Father Lizzie McManus-Dail: Slice-and-bake cookies whenever I want! Also: getting to set the dress code at work and at home to actually be affirming of comfort and self-expression.

Erin: You wrote a book, God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us. What shitty script were you trying to tear up?

Lizzie: The shitty script is the one on billboards and devotional sections across America: that a wrathful, angry, white male god hates you. And somehow, this is meant to motivate you to love this god, and in so doing, hate yourself and others in the name of love.

What utter nonsense. What a completely fabricated, non-Biblical, anti-actual-Christlike-love grab for power and dominion.

Erin: Okay. Now flip it. What truer, weirder story did you set out to write instead?

Lizzie: Devotionals are bite-sized spirituality for the rest of us. I've always cherished theology that is written for the non-academics, and I longed to see more liberating theologies in the mass market shelves. And so? I wrote a book that invites us into the joyous, sensual, body-affirming, world-spanning, neighbor-loving, offensively merciful mystery of God’s love.

It's a devotional for the deconstructing or deconstructed, sure, but it's also something I hope you can hand to grandma if she's looking for a better way to honor your faith or pronouns or relate to her grandkids’ experience of church. Each section tackles a "myth" in billboard Christianity and invites us into a deeper mystery with God. The secret? None of this is new. It's all very, very old theology and Bible reading. I'm just trying to help us read the Bible like she's living again.

Erin: Writing—and Christianity—is about the threat of resurrection. What is the scariest thing about bringing this book to life?

Lizzie: Uhh...what isn't scary right now?!

Honestly, I don't know if I am more afraid of the book being popular and garnering me more ire from our siblings in Christ steeped in right-wing extremism, or if I'm afraid the book will be a flop. But either way, I know what resurrection is because I lived it while giving birth, twice. To bring life into the world, you have to face death. To speak of God's life in the face of the forces of sin and death in this world, we have to face death head on.

So I'm trying. And I'm eating a lot of slice-and-bake cookies right now.

Erin: Publishing a book is a shiny milestone! What is something less shiny about a life well-lived you’re celebrating this week?

Lizzie: My littlest baby will take a bottle which, if you read the book, is a huge effing deal. I'm still thick in figuring out formula and boobs and pumping and how she wants to eat—and how we can feed her as a family, as shared burden and joy (instead of it just being me…and only me). It is the definition of invisibilized and undervalued labor. I have to eat 1,000 extra calories a day to make this milk and also, I’m supposed to be “bouncing back” and not hormonal and not missing her but also she’s meant to be my whole world. And for me? All the motherhood muck comes out in breastfeeding versus formula feeding.

But also? She takes a bottle. I went to the gym today while someone else fed her. I couldn't do that for almost a whole year with my oldest. What a gift to have two children who are so different, so immediately. And what a gift that their love challenges me to love each of them on their own terms. And what a challenge—and gift—to know there is enough, and I don't have to supply it all. There is enough of a feast for all of us.

P.S. Want to celebrate Lizzie for doing her work and sharing her story? If so, consider joining me in donating to Jubilee, the small LGBTQIA+ affirming church where Lizzie serves in central Texas. (None of this goes directly to Lizzie, as she is paid by the Episcopal Diocese.) A donation to Jubilee funds its operating costs, security, and children’s ministry. Go to JubileeATX.org and click on “donate”.

P.P.S. Other books that are helping me unmask my own faith? Unmasking Autism by Devon Price, Divergent Mind by Janera Nerenberg, and No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz. I also loved, loved, loved the portrayal of a self-accepting faith in the just-ended Max series, Somebody Somewhere.

P.P.P.S. How are you practicing unmasking any tinge of hate, shame, or anxiety in your faith? Tell me your tiny kazoos (a.k.a. tiny victories) in the comments below.

I am an evangelist for alternative loves to romantic love — even as I am as basic as they come in my love for the rom-com. (Watching the new Bridget Jones movie this week is a non-negotiable.) When it comes to love, we must allow ourselves such apparent contradictions, even when the dissonance discomfits.

It was Jonathan Merritt who made a way in the publishing world for my own book about how friend love, rather than familial love, is considered the highest form of love (agape) in the Christian tradition. Two years later, he wrote his own ode to an under-celebrated kind of love in a children’s book called My Guncle and Me.

To be gay and Christian. To be feminist and flexible. To be neuro-rigid and novel. To love your children and wish you’d never parented. These are the contradictions Jonathan invites us to see not as contradictions but wholeness. Wholeness is a virtue for any Valentine to hold, no? May you love the wholeness in yours this year.

Erin Lane: What is your favorite thing about being an adult?

Jonathan Merritt: I feel like there is only one right answer to this question. It's getting to set my own bedtime. I was home recently for Christmas, staying at my parents' house. About 11 pm the first night, I was watching television in the living room. My dad walked by and said, "I think you should probably go to bed, son." And I turned around and said, jokingly, "I can go to sleep when I want. You're not the boss of me." It was funny at the time, but also true. Choosing my own bedtime is my favorite part of being a grown-up.

Erin: You wrote a book, My Guncle and Me! Tell us! What shitty script were you trying to tear up?

Jonathan: My Guncle and Me is my attempt to tear up several shitty scripts, but I'll name just one. I grew up in the 1990s in the Deep South and was raised by an evangelical TV preacher. I was given a script at an early age that said a person could either be a Christian or gay. A person could not be both. This is a terrible script because if a person is forced to choose between practicing a particular religious tradition or loving one's authentic self, then the religious tradition will have to go. Lots of queer people have de-converted because they were given this script.

Erin: Okay. Now flip it. What truer, weirder story did you set out to write instead?

Jonathan: I decided that the main character in my story, Henry, would encounter a better story. So I created a guncle [gay uncle] to model that it is possible to hold together multiple identities even if it makes others uncomfortable or angry. There's a scene in the book where the guncle and Henry go to church, and it says this:

At church the next morning,
My guncle sings loudly.
He prays and gives thanks
And he does it devoutly.

His bright colored outfit
Makes two women stare.
When we pass, they both snicker,
But he doesn't care.

Erin: Writing—and, well, life in general—is about the threat of resurrection. What was the scariest thing about bringing this book to life?

Jonathan: For me, it was scary to write in a new form. I love this book, and I've been pleased by all the positive reviews it has received. But when I started this project, I was not an expert on children's literature. I didn't know how to tell objectively if I had written a great children's picture book or a mediocre one. Additionally, by the time my book was released, America was engulfed in a vicious debate about whether children should even be allowed to read books with queer characters or themes. Books like mine are being boycotted and banned from libraries and bookstores. I knew I would receive some hate on social media, which of course, I did.

Erin: Publishing a book is a shiny milestone! What is something less shiny about a life well-lived you’re celebrating this week?

Jonathan: I won't speak generally here, but rather, I'll speak about my life. I happen to live in New York City, which is the greatest city in America for about 10 months a year. During January and February, it's the worst city in America. Once the Rockefeller tree is thrown into the wood chipper and the confetti in Times Square has been swept up, the city is nothing but dirty slush and dark skies and temperatures that make most outdoor activities impossible. I tend to get stir crazy and a little seasonal depression. But this year, I've purposed to recognize the gifts of this season. I'm going to try to practice wintering, which means drinking lots of hot tea and making tons of soups and stews. It means cozy nights curled up on the couch with a book and sleeping late on Saturdays and building lots of fires on my back porch in my chimenea, which may or may not be legal in New York City.

P.S. Want to celebrate Jonathan for doing his work and sharing his story? If so, consider joining me in donating to the American Red Cross, directing funds to victims of the Los Angeles fire or wherever they are needed most.

P.P.S. Curious about other children’s books that rewrite the script on love? Some of my favorites include: Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress by Christine Baldacchino, When God Made You by Matthew Paul Turner, and Like So by Ruth Forman.

P.P.P.S. How are you practicing holding (and loving) your own multiple identities? Tell me your tiny kazoos (a.k.a. tiny victories) in the comments.

A small irony: I remember being twenty-something and judging older women for becoming loosey-goosey with their spirituality. It drove me wild, wild, when they referred to God—don’t even get me started on the Divine—as Spirit instead of the Spirit, even as I was already conceding that Jesus may not be the Way but a way to tap into truth. The irony, of course, is at age forty I’m well on my way to becoming one of those women. Loose in limbs and church attendance though still committed, irrationally so, to the definitive article for an indefinite presence. Some stability of muscle is still needed, or so my physical therapist tells me.

Which is why Liz Charlotte Grant has my attention. Her new book, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible, came out this month and, if it’s anything like her, is going to be a rather holy mix of flexibility and fortitude. We met at another one of those dreamy writers’ retreats and spent many a night leaning back in the reclining chairs of our cabin as friendship dawned and the sun set. Given her evangelical roots, I wondered if I might ever lean too far for her taste. And yet I don’t recall her ever flinching. She’s the kind of person, the kind of writer, who you can trust to never calcify your curiosity. She’s wise beyond her years like that.

Looking back now, I wonder if I wasn’t so much judging the older women in my life as envying their field of play. I worried that without the apologetic of their attendance, of their linguistics, we’d be conceding orthodoxy to the oligarchy. What I didn’t realize is their rest, their surrender—as Liz says, is itself a kind of a resistance. And if there’s one thing I want more than anything these days, it’s a restfully resisting spirituality. May it be so.

Erin Lane: What is your favorite thing about being an adult?

Liz Charlotte Grant: I adore indulging my many weirdsies—as in, those strange habits, hobbies, or fixations that happen to capture my attention. As a kid, my time was strictly allocated to important things I had to learn and do. That's still true as an adult. But I enjoy taking alternative paths to reach the same goal. So, sure, I have to make dinner...but can I make a new dish? I have to do laundry, but now I can listen to weird theology or science podcasts as I do it. And I have taken up so many hobbies in the past few years—every summer, I grow gallons of tomatoes in my yard and can them so that we can have sumptuous tomato soup all winter long. I have made my own candles. I own chickens. I knit and puzzle. I guess what I'm saying is, I adore being able to adopt grandma hobbies while living in a thirty-something body.

Erin: You wrote a book, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible. Tell us! What shitty script were you trying to tear up?

Liz: I could no longer abide the way that evangelicals—the tribe I grew up within—used [the biblical book of] Genesis as a weapon of the culture wars. Evangelicals read the Bible with no imagination. Then again, mainline Protestants can do that, too! The Bible becomes a tool with which we can bludgeon our enemies. I just did not want to play faith that way anymore.

The other thing I rejected in this writing was the idea of a single narrative existing within the Bible. So often the meaning of the Bible has been determined by a handful of dead white guys. I sought a different lens. I wanted to invite more voices to the table, to learn from those unlike me and to be shaped by their differences.

Erin: Okay. Now flip it. What truer, weirder story did you set out to write instead?

Liz: I wanted to read the Bible as a work of ancient literature, like I learned to read The Odyssey in literature class. I'm not a theologian or seminarian; I'm a creative writer. So I set out to approach the book of Genesis—from the creation of the cosmos to Jacob rolling in the dust with the angel/God/whoever—like the work of art that it is. A masterwork of literature deserves careful attention but does not need to be set onto a surgical table to be dissected. I refused to address the question of historicity, because I wanted to read the book on its own terms, to be swept along in the river of narrative. Reading literature requires a sort of surrender, so I surrendered to the story, the characters, the themes.

I also gave up the idea of being God's apologist. I'm not an evangelist, and I cannot begin to explain why God acts the way God does in the book of Genesis. I have ideas, and those ideas keep me swimming in the stream of belief, but the fact is, no one knows for sure. God is more than God's book, and God is certainly beyond me. So I set out to write an account of wrestling with Genesis that allows for "I don't know" to be a full sentence.

Erin: Writing—and, well, life in general—is about the threat of resurrection. What was the scariest thing about bringing this book to life?

Liz: I had a moment of terror when I heard that Marilynne Robinson had written a book like mine that was releasing six months before; it's called Reading Genesis and she's a Pulitzer Prize Winning author. (I'd already finished mine when hers released!) Meanwhile, I was publishing a humble book on the same topic over here at an indie press, and I wondered, who the hell would buy my version when they could have hers? That gave me heart palpitations, for sure. My agent and editor just told me, Look, you're doing something different. You get to make this work of art. Just keep doing your own thing; that's good enough. Ultimately, my self-doubt was cured by simply doing what needed to be done to bring the book into the world.

Erin: Publishing a book is a shiny milestone! What is something less shiny about a life well-lived you’re celebrating this week?

Liz: Before my book release, I did not have energy for cooking my family dinner, which is my usual daily task. (My husband handles breakfast and cleaning every single dish, Hallelujah.) And I certainly did not have the opportunity to play in the kitchen, as I like to do. But now, I've gotten back to my experimentation. Yesterday I made a Korean Bulgogi rice dish, and I felt that I'd returned to myself.

I'm also a fanatical Denver Nuggets fan, and this year for Christmas, I surprised my kids with tickets to a recent basketball home game. So, a couple of Fridays ago, you could have seen us in the upper corner of your screen, assuming the camera swung up that far. We had an absolute blast.

P.S. Want to celebrate Liz for doing her work and sharing her story? If so, consider joining me (and her) in donating to the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU, a group of lawyers, advocates, and organizers who are challenging the growing wave of attacks on people’s rights and freedoms.

P.P.S. Curious about other books that invite you to surrender to the story—or your story? I’m working through poet Maggie Smith’s Keep Moving and poet Ross Gay’s The Book of More Delights as my January devotionals. Both are quite lovely for meditative musings. Need more surrendering practices? The Calm app is also companioning me.

P.P.P.S. What story are you surrendering to? Tell me your tiny kazoos (a.k.a. tiny victories) in the comments.