It doesn't seem like that long ago when I was playing dolls with my sister and swinging carefree on our swing set in the backyard. Now I am not merely playing house anymore; I am trying to find a way to manage my own real life household. Sometimes when the kids are getting out of control, there are messes to clean up and dinner needs to be made, I look around and wonder "now who's going to take care of this?" Then it dawns on me and I realize, oh that would be me! While I am comfortably past the phase where I stumbled around in that new mom sleep deprived stupor, I still long for the days when I was someone else's responsibility instead of the other way around. I took it all for granted: the trips to the playground, library and ... Read More...
Why It’s Okay That You’re Not Enough For Your Kids
I have always been a perfectionist. I guess it comes with being the oldest child, especially growing up in a family that tried to maintain a wonderful outward appearance while crumbling apart on the inside. I've carried that legacy, or should I say bondage, right into my own family. I have never felt so inadequate as the day a nurse handed me my newborn son, and I looked at him and literally thought "Now what am I supposed to do with this?" You would think that ten years later and with another child under my belt, I'd feel equal to the task of mothering. But I still struggle with my mommy alter-ego. You know, the one who shows up to point out everything you're doing wrong. She keeps me down and focused on how NOTHING I do measures ... Read More...
7 Things Every Good Christian Mom Does
What makes a good mom? If you ask 100 people this question, you'll probably get 100 different answers. We often imagine someone who is always patient, available, and bakes cookies from scratch. Someone who never has emotional outbursts or gets irritated with her kids for making messes. The ideal standard is hard to live up to. And Christian moms face this pressure even more. In our quest to elevate the role of motherhood and encourage one another that it is a worthy calling, we've gone to the opposite extreme of equating mothering with sainthood. I can think of no mother I know who would even remotely qualify for this status. Because we're all human. We're imperfect, saved sinners just trying to do our best to raise children for ... Read More...
How To Fit More Joy Into Your Motherhood
Out of all the adjectives my children could pick to describe me several years ago, I don't think "fun" would have been high on that list. "Stop running around and get ready for bed!" "Be careful. You're going to make a mess." "It's not time to fool around and play now. It's time to be calm." I've said all of these phrases at one time or another to my kids. Out of context, they are understandably normal things a mother would say to her children to redirect them to pay attention or begin a task they've been asked to do. However, in my haste to maintain order and discipline, I frequently ended up putting the kibosh on their joy. I believed that efficiency was the highest priority in my homemaking, so I became a multitasking ... Read More...
6 Myths Christian Moms Believe
So often there is a disconnect between the mom I am, and the mom I want to be. Or make that the mom I think I ought to be. A lot of times, I feel like Julia Roberts' character Isabel in the movie Stepmom. In the opening scene, Isabel is frantically trying to get her live-in boyfriend's two children ready for school. She struggles with making them breakfast, getting them dressed, and even finding the youngest child, who has hidden himself in one of the kitchen cabinets. She has a moment of panic when she realizes that she hasn't washed the daughter's shirt for Purple Shirt Day, and as she suggests that the girl just wear orange instead, she's met with eye rolling and obvious disdain. Then in the middle of all this chaos their ... Read More...
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