Posted in Me

I was thinking the other day that it is ironic that my username is "cathmom," yet I rarely ever post things that are specifically Catholic.  I've seen other blogs where they post about every saint's feast day and holy days of obligation and write about Catholic theology.

So I wanted to share why my username is cathmom.

I remember exactly the first time I used the Internet.  It was August 21, 1998.  Mary was born 2 days later.  Then I didn't bother with it again until early summer 2000.  I decided to check out some websites listed in the back of the book A Catholic Homeschool Treasury. Somehow in my searching around I found an email list for Catholic mothers and signed up.  The list is called, appropriately enough, cathmoms.  I still belong to it.

When I joined, I was pregnant but miscarried a month later.  I lost a lot of blood and recovery was long and slow, further complicated by the fact that our household was out of control.  My daughters were 4 and 2 and had no routine and I was getting very little sleep.  Desperate for ideas and help, I posted to the cathmoms list about the situation.  One mom told me about a book called Managers of Their Homes by Teri and Steve Maxwell, and also mentioned their website.

I bought the book (which helped me immensely) and joined a message board they had, which no longer exists.  Most of the ladies on there had their real names as their usernames.  Then they got a little more security conscious and asked everyone to use a username.  Because I had 3 living children and 3 miscarried children, I chose 3and3, and that's what I was known by for several years.

Most of the ladies on that message board were Protestant, but I found that I had more in common with them than many Catholics that I knew IRL - homeschooling, letting Christianity be a large part of your life and not just a "Sunday" thing, wanting a large family, etc.  And I would share things with them about Catholicism as they came up. Eventually the Maxwells made a rule that no specific denominations could be mentioned, and that helped protect me from more entrenched anti-Catholicism.

Many of the ladies had also chosen names with the number of children in them, and many of them (including mine) were now out-of-date! So, the Maxwells decided to do a big name-change.  Anyone who wanted to change their name was supposed to submit their top 3 choices.  I wanted to have a Catholic reference in my name, so my top choice was "cathmom."  I honestly did not expect the Maxwells to approve it, but they did.  So I became cathmom.  I have been "cathmom" pretty much since then.  However, many people didn't realize that the "cath" meant "Catholic."

So there you have it, in case you have ever wondered why my name is "cathmom."  Later on, I plan to post a bit more about Protestant/Catholic issues.