Becoming a stay at home mom was was something I had not even considered.
“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” – Marilynne Robinson
When the baby of our family was born over nine years ago, I had a seven-year-old and a four-year-old.
With seven plus years of motherhood under my belt, I’d learned a few lessons about letting go, chilling out, and realizing that it’s all going to be okay. In light of this hard-won Zen version of myself, I decided to enjoy my third baby like nobody’s business.
I would not fret. I would not pursue unnecessary work or projects. I would bask in this last brief season of babyhood as a stay at home mom and love on my darling boy whose very name means “mercy.”
Mercy. That’s what he meant to my husband and me.
For a very long season, I assumed that I wouldn’t have another baby. My marriage had almost ended. I was working full-time. Life was terribly messy.
And then, it wasn’t.
God breathed compassion into our story.
Our third child represented the undeserved gift of new life for our family and I resolved to enjoy his babyhood in a way that my angsty, younger-mom self wasn’t able to do with my other children.
Today he is a curly-headed, third-grade boy with a perfect sprinkle of freckles across his nose. He’s much too big for me to carry and he talks like a teenager, compliments of his older brother and sister.
I’m sure his babyhood seemed like a long stretch of time when we were in it — short nights, ear infections, teething, smeared pureed food in his hair. I can barely remember those episodes now. What I do remember is that I received that short season of my life as a gift.
I devoted myself to adoring him.
Much of my life’s work up to that point seemed irrelevant. My education, my career, all the books I’d read, the ambition I’d cultivated — I didn’t technically need any of those things to be an adoring mother.
Sometimes I wondered if I’d wasted the gifts I’d so earnestly stored up.
I’ve been many different moms over the last sixteen years.
Grad school mom, part-time working mom, full-time working mom, homeschool mom, stay at home mom, work-from-home mom, single mom.
I don’t feel like I’ve ever gotten it quite right.
As I look back across my story as a mother, the one chapter that feels most “right” to me is the one I just told you about — that one to two year season when I cherished my last baby with lavish intention as a stay at home mom. I did not call it wasteful. I called it beautiful.
Lest you think I’m someone who believes motherhood is my highest calling and the one thing I was put on this earth to do — I assure you, I am not that person. Though I’ve always longed to be a mother and I was over the moon about each one of my babies, reconciling family with personal ambition has been one of the greatest struggles and missions of my life.
Originally posted on November 20, 2025 @ 5:01 am
