October has always felt like such a beautiful month in the Church. It is the month dedicated to the Holy Rosary, and although I wish I could say that praying the Rosary always comes easily to me, the truth is—it doesn’t.
There are days when prayer flows naturally, and then there are days when my vocation is loud, everyone needs something, the house is a mess, and even sitting down to pray one decade feels like a lot. But lately, I have been reminded that our children are watching even the smallest efforts we make.
I’ve wanted our home with little reminders of our faith, and my children love holding their rosaries. They love praying as a family and kiss our statue of Mary and giving her a kiss—the same statue we were gifted before we even had our firstborn. Watching them do this has become such a gift to me. It reminds me that they are learning to love Our Lady simply because she is part of our home, our conversations, and our everyday life.
And somehow, through these small acts of faith, I have seen changes in our days. We still have hard days. We still struggle. But I have also watched my marriage flourish in a beautiful way lately. I see God working in places I may not have noticed before.
At the same time, I have been going back through podcast recordings from last year, editing conversations with Godly women who are now wives and mamas, while also preparing to share the stories of some beautiful single women as well. Listening back has shown me something I didn’t fully recognize when we first recorded them.
So many of us share similar wounds.
One theme that continues to come up is the longing many of us carried for the love and presence of a father. Different women. Different stories. Different families. And yet, somewhere within those stories, there has often been that same little girl yearning to feel protected, chosen, seen, and loved by her father.
Then life continues. We grow. We meet the men who become our husbands, and for those of us who are mothers, we eventually get to watch these men become fathers to our own children.
There is something so healing about witnessing that. We get to have a moment of Jesus revealing our hearts to him.
But with maturity also comes a different kind of understanding. We can love our biological fathers while acknowledging the places that hurt. We can forgive them while recognizing that they, too, have their own story. They were shaped by their own childhoods, their own wounds, what they were taught, what they were never taught, and perhaps by things they never learned how to heal from themselves.
Forgiveness does not erase our story. Sometimes it allows us to finally see the bigger one.
And maybe that is part of what Our Lady continues to teach me this October: to bring all of it to Jesus. The childhood wounds. The marriage. The motherhood. The things I understand and the things I still don’t.
One bead at a time. One Hail Mary at a time. One ordinary day at a time.
I’m realizing more and more that God has been patiently writing a story of healing within our family—and I pray that through the little seeds we are planting today, our children will grow up knowing the love of their earthly father, the tenderness of Our Lady, and above all, the perfect love of God the Father.
