Posts by Francine & Byron Pirola
Finding Our Way to Heaven
We’ve been listening to Mike and Alicia Hernon’s podcast called Messy Families. One of their recurring messages for parents is: stop worrying about getting your kids to heaven – parenting is about helping you get there! When we first heard them say this it stopped us in our tracks. Mike and Alicia go on to…
Read MoreWhen a Pregnancy Ends Too Soon
Content warning: miscarriage / pregnancy loss Miscarriage is one of the most common – and most hidden – losses in our communities. How we respond to grieving couples matters more than we might think. For many couples, a positive pregnancy test arrives quietly. Long before a public announcement, a due date is calculated, names are considered, and a whole future begins to take shape…
Read MoreNatural Fertility – Hey What?
Couples in the world are adopting Fertility Awareness Methods (FAMs – what used to be called Natural Family Planning) with new vigour as they access them via smartphone apps. And it’s not only conservative Catholics and alternative lifestyle naturalists doing so – ordinary couples who just want a reliable, chemical free alternative are the keenest…
Read MoreThe Gift We’d Rather Not Receive
What the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly can teach every marriage about frailty. Most of us are far more comfortable giving help than receiving it. We pride ourselves on being the capable ones – the spouse who remembers, the parent who provides, the friend everyone calls in a crisis. Competence feels like love.…
Read MoreAre we outliving marriage?
We’ve heard it said many times – you probably have as well – it goes like this. “People live so much longer these days, it’s unreasonable to expect a marriage to last all their life.” But do the numbers support the claim? It’s certainly true that life expectancy has increased in recent generations in many…
Read MoreThree Couple Saints Still Teaching Us How to Love
The Church gives us a calendar full of saints, and this July it hands us three married pairs worth knowing. Each marriage speaks to something we’re still learning ourselves. We often picture saints as solitary figures – the hermit in his cave, or the martyr standing alone before the lions. But holiness is just as…
Read MoreSleeping our way to a better marriage
Sleep deprivation is a recognised means of torture. But what about when the cause is one of our children? In this post we explore how we might sleep our way to a better marriage. Our granddaughter is three months old. She is pure delight and we are loving being Nonnina and Nonno. Naturally her parents…
Read MoreNewly Married and Already at Risk
Why do some marriages unravel within a decade? We have a personal stake in the question – three of our own children are newly married – but there’s a bigger reason too: research suggests that what eventually breaks a marriage often takes root in the first five years. Long before a marriage formally ends,…
Read MoreThe Art of Apology
· Have you ever experienced the situation when someone has apologised but, while the words were said it lacked something, making it difficult for you to accept it? Sadly, most of us are not as good at apologising as we need to be. We think that it’s obvious, should just be instinctual, or that our…
Read MoreWhen Love Feels Impossible: Choose It Anyway
· It’s at this crossroad that we have a choice – protest the situation or lean into our vows and choose love. This was the theme of the opening talk by a priest at a recent marriage seminar. He began by suggesting that he knew little about the challenges of married life. None-the-less, he held the…
Read More