Tag: encouragement

"We had zero wiggle room. This is not what I always hoped and dreamed for my family! As my grandmother would say, we had a 'come to Jesus' meeting."

It’s party day in your child’s classroom and you just-don’t-have-two-hours for that. You have laundry, dishes and maybe even a paid job. Pssssttttt…. What...

Painful as it may be that I may not experience precious moments like these with another child, I am compelled to dwell not upon the bitterness of my motherhood passing me by. Rather, in realizing the brevity of motherhood, of life, I cannot help but surrender to the sweetness of each moment and give thanks for having experienced them at all.

I’ll just get it out of the way and say it up front: I was hugely unpopular as a kid. I was the nerd, the kid that got bullied, all of it. For that reason, and also for the fact that I’m just a nice person who believes in being nice to other people, I was determined not to have adulthood turn out like that for me.

We all do it. We have those things that we tell ourselves during certain situations to help us to remain calm or at least not bite the head off of our children or significant others. Over the years, I have slowly shifted from, “You are driving me crazy, why can’t you do anything right” to “Breathe, you’ve got this”.

This season of motherhood can be daunting. The days are long. Patience runs thin. Free time is rare, and the effort to connect with friends is sometimes more energy than what is left in the tank at the end of the day.

The truth is that once you lose a baby, you are not the same. Each of your children, whether they make it to babyhood, childhood or adulthood, changes you. And while you have been rocked, changed, rearranged and never to be the same again, by their loss, something you never wanted, the change that happens in you doesn’t have to be a bad thing.