Love Warrior

Product Information

One helpful aspect is Melton’s analysis of how addictions and other unhealthy behaviors are often means of hiding and self-protection. Love Warrior is the offering I’ve been working on in the dark every day for the past three and a half years. I’m torn because while there are so many thoughtful, penetrating conversations we can have about this book, it ends with a church, and claims about God, his Word, man, and the gospel. There were times where I felt like Melton really over shared, and I wondered about her family, her friends, and her kids. As I clutch my now-empty bowl of potato chips and lick the salt off my fingers, an aunt passes by and notices me.

She moved into herself by cleaning up through feeling every feeling, polishing up through double checking every action and creating a home in her own body by finally the co-existence of body, mind and soul.

I read the pitch for the book, about how Melton fought through bulimia and alcoholism to embrace motherhood, only to discover later in life that she would face the toughest rock bottom News of all---her husband was a serial adulterer. It’s about one woman letting go of the gendered messages she’s been surrounded by her entire life, and communing with her fullest, most authentic self.

I survive middle school the way a whale might survive a marathon: slowly, painfully, with great effort and conspicuousness. It’s about how our ideals of femininity and masculinity can make it impossible for a woman and a man to actually know each other. I stop and look back at them and I feel frightened by how small they seem huddled together in the cold, white, fluorescent hallway. I can also imagine a roomful of these aforementioned women in a room together somewhere, having paid for one day what I spent on my entire grad school tuition to hear Ms.But this is what a bride is supposed to look like, and since the day I decided to become sober and a mother, I've been trying to become who I'm supposed to be. My sister's legs are long and she uses them to move through the world easily and beautifully and confidently. My eyelids were smeared with purple and my cheeks were pink, but I just looked like me wearing my cousin's makeup.

It’s homecoming week at school and I’ve been nominated to the Homecoming Court and voted “Leading Leader” of my senior class. It is the ultimate victory to be a girl handpicked by a member of this discriminating group of boys. It will take me another twenty years to understand what my fourteen-year-old sister is trying to tell me. She gives words to things many women have felt or experienced yet may have been unable to form into cohesive thoughts or sentences. She understands the unique relationship between spiritual and romantic love, and in finding one, she masters the other.Like cats pouncing on scratching posts or kids playing with each other’s toys but mostly ignoring each other.