Co-parenting brings you face-to-face with realities you can’t ignore. Sometimes the hardest part isn’t the schedule, or the school forms, or the hand-offs — it’s the emotional swirl happening between two parents who love the same child, but respond to him in completely different ways.

Lately I’ve been watching my son bounce between us, trying to figure out the rules of his world. And without even realizing it, he has learned something powerful:

If he expresses a big emotion, he can change the plan.

When I first learned how St. Faustina wrote about the Child Jesus in her Diary, something in me softened. I’m a parent, a co-parent, a man trying to walk in faith, trying to stay steady in a world that doesn’t always feel steady back. And the more I read Faustina, the more I understood that God wasn’t inviting me to become stronger, louder, or more “in control.”

He was inviting me to become smaller.

My ex-wife has struggled with a relationship that has ended and restarted more times than I can count. Her friends see the red flags. Her family does. I do. She even sees them herself—she has shared the pain, the drama, the disappointment.

But then something pulls her back.

There are moments in co-parenting that don’t just sting — they cut deep. Moments where you’re doing your best, holding the house together, protecting routines, planning time for your child, and then everything shatters in a single sentence:

“Why is he acting this way? I don’t do that so it must be You”

After sitting with the feeling for a minute, I realized this was actually an opportunity. Not to lecture. Not to shame him. But to teach him something he’ll need for the rest of his life: how to handle embarrassment, respect others, and understand faith without fear.

So tonight, after religious ed, I plan to talk with him gently.

We are living in a time where the family is not merely neglected—it is under direct assault.
And if you look closely, the same three weapons show up again and again:
violence, nudity/shame, and lies.

This is not abstract.
It played out in my own family story.
And the saints warned us it would.

There are moments in the middle of the day when a heaviness comes over you without warning. You’re working, parenting, trying to be faithful, trying to hold your life together with maturity and trust in God—and suddenly a sadness or anxiety slips in. It doesn’t always have a name. It doesn’t always make sense. But it’s real.

If you’ve felt this, you’re not alone. And you’re not weak. In the Catholic spiritual tradition, this has been recognized for centuries. The early desert fathers called it acedia, the “noonday devil” from Psalm 91:6—a kind of spiritual fatigue that tries to discourage the soul when it’s striving to walk with God.