The Thin Trad Line

My Talk at the L.A. Fiat Conference for Catholic Women

It was an honor to be the Keynote Speaker at the Fiat Conference last weekend here in Los Angeles. Some Catholic women I know launched this lovely event in 2015 and it’s been held at the same estate in Altadena, California every year.

To my surprise, I sold out of all the books I brought to sign at the conference, so thanks to all who claimed a copy. If you’d like your own copy, you can get one here.

The following are my remarks, with some light editing for space.

Mom’s Day Off

There are a lot of conferences celebrating women and they’re always celebrating female CEOs or movie stars or women in business talking about how they’ve devoted themselves to their corporate bosses and corporate stakeholders. So its nice to be at a conference celebrating women who are devoted to a much bigger and more important boss, and to much cuter little stakeholders.

And, yes, I am very happy to have a day off from doing laundry.

I’m relieved to see that this home is back and restored in all its glory. We live not too far from here and were very worried it was going to burn down in the fire. A lot of friends were not as lucky, unfortunately. My family members lost several homes in the palisades, along with every single thing they owned. The house I was born in, in the Palisades, burned down, and so did my mothers longtime home in Malibu. She got lucky—after owning it for over 20 years, she sold it six months before it burned to the ground.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m very glad my own house wasn’t destroyed, but I would not have minded watching my piles of dirty laundry catch on fire. That would have solved a lot of my problems.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a writer and a Catholic and a mother of five, here in Pasadena. My oldest turns 20 next week and my baby is nine. I write about politics and culture from my perspective as a former pro-choice atheist turned Catholic “trad” wife. Or as I prefer to call myself, a domestic extremist. Of course, we are not actual domestic extremists, we’re just extremely domestic!

But the only thing extreme about me is how much coffee I drink and how many pillows I have on the bed. After 22 years of marriage my husband is still like, honey do you really need four pillows? Yes I do and hands off my pillows buddy.

I converted to Catholicism 12 years ago. Like many converts, my personal conversion was triggered by tragedy. A miscarriage ended my first pregnancy at three months. The next day my husband told me he was converting. It took me a little longer to figure it out, but I finally made it official.

Of course, I am still figuring out how to be a Catholic—and I confess that I am nowhere near expert levels yet. We were in Rome this past summer for the Jubilee and – although I’d been there before — it was my first time there as a Catholic. After taking the kids on a tour of the Vatican museum, I asked our Italian tour guide if she knew what time Mass was in St. Peters. She looked at me – a little confused – and asked me, “Oh, are you practicing?”

For a second I thought, yes, I AM still practicing, is it that obvious?