Shannon Barbosa | The Grit and Grace Project

To the Mom Who Feels Like It Never Ends

These are the words I have found myself speaking over and over in my head: the bills. The chores. The driving. The working. The hustle and bustle of each day. They can often seem never-ending. Sometimes, like the other day while loading the dishwasher, I even let the actual words slip out of my mouth. “It never ends.” As I uttered those three small words so effortlessly, they echoed in my ears. It was almost as if the words were on repeat. Because, the truth is, the words are an accurate reflection of how I’ve been feeling on a regular basis lately. I’m tired. I’m worn out. I’m overwhelmed. I feel each and every syllable of this phrase, as I try to […]

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5 Things I Know About True Friendship

By Shannon Barbosa / Relationships

What is a true friendship? I know, such a loaded question. Especially because as humans, we are constantly evolving, changing, growing, and morphing into newer, hopefully better, versions of ourselves. What I might have needed in a friendship in my 20s is profoundly different than what I need now as a 40-year-old woman. Some friends come and some friends go. Some friends are there for the mountaintops and others for the valley lows. Some friendships are seasonal, while others are lifelong. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned, both good and bad, through many types of friendship. Have a Safe Place, But Beware! I remember my younger days of chatting on the land line with a certain friend of mine. We were

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This Is Why We All Need to Be Unfiltered

By Shannon Barbosa / Life & Culture

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.” –E.E. Cummings “She has no filter.” This has been said of women for years upon years and comes with a deeply negative connotation. It immediately conjures up an image in our minds of an outspoken, loudmouth who will tell you like it is. I automatically think of Fran Drescher in The Nanny. But, dang, in a world with Photoshop, Etsy presets, auto-correct, Snapchat filters, and perfect Instagram feeds—pretty, pretty, please let me be her. Let me be the girl with no filter. The girl

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This Is Why Choosing Life Was Hard

By Shannon Barbosa / HerStory, Motherhood

On June 20th, the most heartbreaking thing happened in my state. Rhode Island state senator, Gina Raimondo, passed an “abortion protection bill.” She stated, “The essential protections instilled by the RPA will ensure all Rhode Islanders—and especially people of color, people with low incomes, and anyone who struggles with barriers to health care—can access the reproductive health care services they need,” she said in a statement. “Abortion is health care, reproductive care is health care, and health care is a human right.”1 How anyone can fight so hard to protect the act of abortion and not human life and call it a human right, I will never understand. I fell under two out of the three categories she described as hardships. I,

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