Meredith Thornburgh @MCMCD_ Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Meredith Thornburgh

@MCMCD_

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In pursuit of human flourishing. Historian of household economics / phd student @Princeton / thinking about dignity, love and work / Catholic / mother of 1 🕊

Princeton, NJ

Joined March 2017

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@MCMCD_

Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

Something insane and wonderful has happened to me. I have no idea how to cleverly lead into this story but here is the headline: I came across a random account on this very website some two months ago, we are now engaged to be married, I have never been happier in my life

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@MCMCD_

Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

this is not a “I woke up early” humble brag but a real question I’m confused about. if you eat breakfast at 5:30am what time are you supposed to eat lunch? can I eat lunch at 10:15am? is dinner at 4pm? do I just eat a fourth meal? can a more experienced morning person explain

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

obsessed with these 1940s paintings depicting coal/railroads/electrification/~modernity~ etc

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

I truly believe that basically everyone in America has 5-25x too much stuff

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Meredith Thornburgh

28 days

@pli_cachete frankly this is horrifying

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@MCMCD_

Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

women were not meant to have totally flat stomachs send tweet

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@MCMCD_

Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

woman sitting next to me on the train has been scrolling tiktok for 30 min, volume all the way up, no headphones. super full train. how do we make the social norm that prevented this come back again

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@MCMCD_

Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

cannot explain how much better I am at communication, conflict resolution, managing my emotional reactions etc precisely *because* my husband has credibly vowed never to leave me. that promise unlocked a much, much better version of me! not possible in the context of insecurity

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Dr. Emily Anhalt

2 years

Instead of “till death do us part” how about “for as long as this feels healthy, safe, and meaningful for both of us”

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

why do people make jokes about marriage being terrible to people days away from getting married. extremely lame

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@MCMCD_

Meredith Thornburgh

10 months

physical buttons are superior to touch screens in 95% of use cases, how did we get scammed into putting touch screens on almost everything

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@MCMCD_

Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

how did the 1950s—a period of wild transitions in political, economic, and social life in the west as the world reeled from three decades of unbelievable mass industrialized warfare and economic ruin—become so associated with “tradition”?

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@MCMCD_

Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

I am so hungry

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@MCMCD_

Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

My deepest thanks for all of your congratulations and well wishes 🤍

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Meredith Thornburgh

8 months

guest lectured on economics for history class at the school where my husband teaches very struck by this small catholic community’s philosophy of just bringing babies along to stuff (instead of sectioning off caregivers, mostly mothers, from much of society)

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

What a way to spend our first wedding anniversary. Welcome to the world, Henry Thornburgh. 🤍

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Meredith Thornburgh

10 months

Introduced a dear college friend to my baby today and it came up that the youngest child she’d ever interacted with before, for any length of time, was five. In 26 years she’d never looked into a baby’s eyes or talked to one or played with their crazy kicking legs, ever

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

I was actually very susceptible to this line of thinking until the pandemic (age 23), at which point it became glaringly obvious that everything in the whole world could be shut off overnight *except* your family. Immediately started thinking way more seriously marriage and kids.

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Tim Kempton

@kempton_timothy

1 year

Hot take: Don’t fall in love from 22-29, there’s to much to lose. Your career will thank you.

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

so many people who’d be great spouses do not have great success in dating if not good spouse material, what does dating select for?

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Meredith Thornburgh

11 months

🤍

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

only a little while longer with this shadow

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Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

And other people see it, I think—our waitress at breakfast the other day wrote this on the bottom of our check

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Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

Fast forward a bit and I’m here with him in Madison, WI. Every cliché is True: feels like we’ve known each other forever, feels like I’ve always been meant to find this person. I don’t feel “crazy in love,” there’s no manic rush—I feel clear, lucid, purposed.

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

“I matched with this boy on Hinge last week, like k, another dude to add to my arsenal, it’s fine” but he is “sick and twisted” because he woke up with one girl on Saturday, then saw another that afternoon (with 0 pretense of exclusivity) I’m begging you to connect these dots

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Meredith Thornburgh

4 months

currently at a hotel that has a dozen of these scattered throughout the room, and no old-fashioned light switches. the little screens glow 24/7, including at night. I do not want to live in this future

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

we didn’t find out baby’s sex in advance and I was vaguely worried about being a ~boy mom~ (I have 4 sisters so unfamiliar territory) but now I cannot imagine any other baby besides my son wow wow wow

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Meredith Thornburgh

5 months

“ok, here is a little person who tags along with me and gets to learn about life by observing me live it.” baby as apprentice vs “I must now suspend living life because I have a little person” (fwiw the latter really was my impression of motherhood as a teenager)

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Meredith Thornburgh

4 months

TSA security theater has always been annoying but I was not prepared for the rage I would feel traveling alone with an infant. That we subject mothers and babies to such absurd measures (imagine taking your shoes on and off with a baby strapped to you) is cause for national shame

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Meredith Thornburgh

5 months

I would’ve had a very different reaction to this photo before having a child, but this looks pretty good to me now lol yes, a million caveats, how many breaks, how many hours a week, status of mom’s physical recovery, baby’s temperament, etc. but two things:

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MC Squared

5 months

America is a capitalist dystopian hellscape. Childcare should be free for everyone. Service workers deserve a living wage and to be treated with dignity.

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

cannot make sense of the current norms lol everyone walks into 40-person seminar, almost no one wearing a mask chit chat continues, no masks seminar is about to start - everyone puts a mask on ????? i can’t lol

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Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

He’d written a charming satirical essay that chanced across my timeline when a mutual follow of ours liked the tweet with the link. I read it, I loved it, I dm’ed him (yes, reader, *I* dm’ed *him*!) to say as much, expecting (naturally) never to speak again

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Meredith Thornburgh

10 months

I agree but for the record I worked out throughout my pregnancy, had excellent nutrition, saw a pelvic floor therapist, ate dates/drank RRL tea/etc, stretched daily to open pelvis, read books about birth, declined induction, delivered with a midwife—and still had a c-section.

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@RizomaSchool

Ashley Fitzgerald

10 months

While we're at it, the vast majority of mothers could have a medication free vaginal birth and it'd be better for everyone's health outcomes if they did

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

it has been fun keeping this somewhat secret but it is also very fun to now shout from the digital rooftops that we are so blessed and excited to be expecting our first child in May of next year, thanks be to God 🥲❤️

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

dreams do come true

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Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

If I didn’t know how to start this story, I certainly don’t know how to end it. I have lots more to say about love and faith and the modern dating paradigm (he and I are thinking of writing some essays on the subject, in fact), but I suppose I’ll stop here for now.

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Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

Instead we simply never stopped speaking—we eventually migrated to text and then email as our exchanges grew exponentially longer and more involved. Our early conversations covered narcissism, addiction, romantic pathology, God, music, teaching, etc

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Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

After a week of thousands of words exchanged every day, we spoke on the phone: a 7+ hour call during which I paced around campus variously discoursing and giggling with this person 950 miles from me

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

princeton is a complicated place for me—this entire chapter of my life has been governed by truly insane people—but one thing I’ll say for it: it really is stunningly beautiful. ordinary things like rain gutters or door handles contain tremendous amounts of art and skill

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

one week from now will be my last night falling asleep as a single girl. surreal cannot believe I get to be the wife of the best man I know

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

other coal pieces

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Meredith Thornburgh

5 months

the integration of a baby into parts of your life where you aren’t doing explicitly mom-coded stuff really does, I believe, make a difference for a mom’s sense of self and relationship with baby

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

changed my pfp to a truly random picture I took in my parents’ closet yesterday because it was getting strange to look at a pre-wife, pre-mother depiction of myself, even though these pics are less than a year and a half apart

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

other favorites by the artist, Rockwell Kent: left: A Load of Peat (1927) right: Workers of the World (1937)

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

finally going home

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Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

We have a few more days of waking up and drinking coffee by the lake (in other unexpected news, I have suddenly been converted to a diehard Wisconsin fan?) before we pack up and drive across the country to NJ. (We signed a lease the day we met in person.)

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

will never get over the fact that I literally met my husband because he replied to a @default_friend tweet

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Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

(Around the 2-hour mark I said “You know, it��s probably good you don’t live closer to me; if you were within driving distance I think we’d meet up and get married tomorrow.” He concurred)

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Meredith Thornburgh

11 months

I used to think being “good at cooking” meant making really tasty food. I now believe tasty food is max 20% of it, and 80% is building processes/routines that are resistant to stress and chaos. It’s no good to be “good at cooking” if you can only do it during very easy times

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

I have a feeling that labor, whatever it is, becomes less alienating/soul-crushing when it’s performed with exceptional skill

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Next Level Skills

@NextSkillslevel

2 years

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Meredith Thornburgh

11 months

bff

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Meredith Thornburgh

6 months

This line of thinking makes me think of the C.S. Lewis quote about keeping yourself safe from love by avoiding love—and thus life—entirely. This is made physical in a mother, who offers her heart in a metaphorical sense but also her entire body to be “wrung and possibly broken”

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@jjfitzgeraldMD

Jocelyn J. Fitzgerald MD

@jjfitzgeraldMD

6 months

Ladies: your pelvic floor is one of your most precious commodities for healthy aging. Please think very seriously about if childbirth is something YOU really want, or something society has taught you that you want.

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Meredith Thornburgh

5 months

and it is really such a profound societal failure that the best we can come up with is: “leave your baby for the majority of their waking hours with someone else (by the way the economics make NO sense)” or “exit public life almost entirely for ~2-3 decades”

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

officially in my wrap era 🤩

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

I highly recommend choosing an executive function king as the father of your children

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Meredith Thornburgh

5 months

1. after having a baby it feels nice to do some Normal Civilian stuff. if the baby can *conveniently* accompany you while you do it, all the better. partially because: 2. there really is a very strong instinct against Being Away From Infant for long periods of time but also—

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

rich people marrying poor people has a tremendous impact on inequality—wealth is not only transferred from the rich spouse to the poor spouse, but often to the poor spouse's extended family this is a source of redistribution that operates outside of gov tax + welfare policy

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

what in the world

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

In the last few years I’ve become exponentially less interested in pursuing the kind of anonymous, Instagramish beauty that makes people look less like themselves and more like everyone else I want to be beautiful (doesn’t everyone…?), but as *myself*

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

🤍

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Meredith Thornburgh

7 months

funny discovery: the american website for this popular high chair always shows the baby clipped into the safety harness, the european versions (germany showed here) just show the baby in the chair what a bizarre expression of different parenting philosophies

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

why do no new construction homes have real hardwood floors these days? are they prohibitively expensive? did we forget how to make them? do people just not choose them anymore? what’s going on here

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

and there’s an interesting intergenerational dynamic that occurs if a family’s income has risen over time where you combine “poverty hoarding” (can’t get rid of this, might need it later, can’t afford to buy it twice) with simply a lot more stuff (because more $)

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Meredith Thornburgh

5 months

the 26th year of my life was unimaginably radiant, deo gratias. onward to 27 🤍🕊️

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Meredith Thornburgh

5 months

and by the way, the third way that McDonald’s Mom and I are both pictured doing in this thread requires very little, if any, in the way of public policy or funds. it just requires us to let babies exist in public. to expect to see them there

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Meredith Thornburgh

5 months

very grateful to live somewhere that lets babies “apprentice” like this I literally did not know this was an option growing up and I was not ready to be done doing stuff like this by my mid-20s, so I thought maybe I wouldn’t have kids or if I did I would wait a long time

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Meredith Thornburgh

8 months

guest lectured on economics for history class at the school where my husband teaches very struck by this small catholic community’s philosophy of just bringing babies along to stuff (instead of sectioning off caregivers, mostly mothers, from much of society)

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

getting married tomorrow?!?! omg

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

the amount of grown adult men who cut in front of me (very obviously pregnant woman) to snatch one of the few remaining seats on a train is civilizationally depressing

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

do kids eat more like adults outside of the chicken-nuggets-and-mac-n-cheese enclave I was raised in? are all kids naturally picky, or is that somehow manufactured by this version of american culture?

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

@kitesthlm I think between pregnancy and an early morning workout I need something to get me through the 6-hour morning stretch 😅 I just don’t know if I should just commit to this being lunch time or if I should try to have a snack now but a fuller meal at a more normal time

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

I love this man

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

everyone who’s like “my 30’s have so far been better than my 20’s”—do you regret not doing “30’s” stuff earlier? would you hypothetically trade 5 years of 20s stuff to get 15 years of 30s stuff, so to speak?

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

you have to be able to entertain a position between “everyone is objectively as healthy and attractive as everyone else” and “it’s good that young women who look like this hate and/or starve themselves.” like those are not the only two options

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

@MariaAntwan @arisroussinos said…a father

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Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

ps—two sides to every story! love you @trycypress

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

this is Highly Unpractical but I am so tempted

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Meredith Thornburgh

10 months

But the mere learning-by-osmosis that I received—even if I was just doing homework at the table while my mom and sister and aunt did the baby stuff in my vicinity—has been invaluable. The first baby you ever interact with is not supposed to be your own.

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

to me, the 50s are an interesting and chaotic *middle* chapter of the craziest story of all time (how we got here). but “tradition” implies some sort of “state of nature,” a before-all-the-action-started scenario. the 1950s is no prologue!

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

until just a few years ago, I thought this sort of stuff was nice but essentially just window dressing, gravy, etc.—a cool but optional garnish no, nope, wrong. beauty is essential, and not to be dramatic, but I literally believe the soul withers in its absence.

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Meredith Thornburgh

4 months

babies love trains

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

(and I say “credibly vowed” because keeping the promise we made to one another is contingent on more than just our word—in order to leave one another we would have to first abandon our religion. there are stakes attached, and that is very meaningful and weighty and helpful)

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

experiences I do not recommend: waking up to your first ever kidney stone @ 27 weeks pregnant baby was miraculously fine throughout the whole ordeal, and I am feeling much, much better (for now…?) but please spare a prayer for us if you would be so kind 🙏

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

this is not an original observation, but it’s really striking to see the fruits of the skills we’ve lost there were many people whose job it was to make ordinary things unbelievably beautiful—they accumulated knowledge over centuries, then we just decided we were done with that

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

I love love love love love love love this man. (and the other one)

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

@ebruenig wrote about this vis-a-vis motherhood last year—it’s probably not too much to say that essay changed my life—but these two beautiful paragraphs apply to this idea broadly.

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Meredith Thornburgh

5 months

another round of birth discourse means another opportunity to be strangely grateful for the very traumatic and unexpected birth experience I had, which knocked the insufferable know-it-all energy right out of me on this topic

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

only a little while longer with this shadow

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Meredith Thornburgh

3 years

@EdHerdman @mattyglesias but that’s not the content of his apology - it’s focused on the harm done, the pain caused, not an acknowledgement of having tried and failed to do something properly outside his expertise also it seems the latter would be addressed with a critique and response, not retraction

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Meredith Thornburgh

6 months

parenting observation: there’s a lot of advice like “don’t get into this habit or it will be hard to break later” but it’s like saying “don’t take out a loan or you’ll have to pay it back with interest” sometimes you really do need the loan, and can afford the interest later

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

I love this man

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Meredith Thornburgh

22 days

🌿🤍

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

We got our wedding pictures back when I was in the throes of first trimester morning sickness so I didn’t get around to sharing many of them but seeing lots of wedding pics on the tl today so here are some favorites 🥲

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Meredith Thornburgh

8 months

spring, summer, fall

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

hornomonal birth control…getting pretty angry about it

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Meredith Thornburgh

4 months

Extremely high return on using your force of will (a scarce resource) to shape your environment, because your environment exerts a force on your behavior every moment of every day

@simonsarris

Simon Sarris

4 months

So the gist of the draft is: WHY buy a house w land (vs condo etc)? What is a yard for? Can't you make it for something more real? Can't you use your force of will and shape the world around you, literally shape it, until its pleasant?

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Meredith Thornburgh

9 months

🥹

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

@nitesounds 3 egg veggie omelette was the 5:30 breakfast 😅

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

this is kind of silly but our due date is tomorrow—pentecost—and we were married on the vigil of pentecost last year. for that reason (among obvious others) I would really love if this baby would arrive on schedule, though I know very few do. say a prayer for us if you would 🕊

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

what is happening

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Meredith Thornburgh

7 months

The title of this piece is interesting because it’s the exact opposite of the Christian call: to give your entire life over to love, to abandon yourself to it, to stand at all times ready to do what love demands. But in this essay love means “hanging out with your boyfriend”

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Meredith Thornburgh

9 months

Baby’s first trip to the library 📚

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Meredith Thornburgh

1 year

I interrupt the baby pictures for some real talk: my mom and two younger sisters have alternated staying with us since Henry was born. Their support, plus the meal train from our parish, has been invaluable. This is NOT a job for two people, especially the first time through.

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Meredith Thornburgh

2 years

how do people miss the glaring contradiction involved when a product whose marketing sets it up as a shift *away* from industrial food processing has an ingredient list that is only made possible by industrial food processing

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