Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed

Refreshingly frank, if somewhat gooey entries from a blog (monastery.com) offer advice on parenting and exhaustion to women trying to be tolerant Christians and helpful wives. Raising three kids in the Florida suburbs while wife to a software salesman, and part-time model (with perfect teeth), Melton shares her comments on life’s adorable moments, such as letters of encouragement to her grade-school son, Chase, if he is being bullied for presumably being a homosexual, or reminders to herself to “quit chasing happiness long enough to notice it smiling right at [her],” yet tinged with some excoriating, revelatory, and self-forgiving details that raise the work out of the merely platitudinous. A self-described “recovering everything,” that is, former alcoholic, bulimic, smoker, and ongoing shopaholic, Melton reveals some truly desperate moments of her life, such as a premarital pregnancy in 2002 that prompted her to get sober, an early abortion that has allowed her to be more accepting of others’ failings, a “twisty, mapless” marriage that has proven ultimately sound and gratifying, a recent diagnosis of Lyme disease, and a six-year attempt to adopt a Guatemalan child that was rejected by the agencies because she and her husband were considered to be “too much of a risk.” Writing, or as she calls it “living out loud,” is for Melton a bracing therapy to chase away loneliness, learn humility, and banish the fears of revealing the less than flattering sides of herself. (Apr.)