For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! 2 CORINTHIANS 4:17
There are days when my life seems to be narrated like “When You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” My daughter is an only child but she manages to make quite an adventure of our day as she moves from room to room creating new scenarios wherever she goes. Especially during summer break or sick days when she is home all day, this can undo any feeling of control I might have about how we organize our day. Have you ever experienced this?
In the morning I may find her digging into the craft drawers to pull out every conceivable material, from markers, to buttons and glue, felt and yarn. Don’t forget the scissors and construction paper and all those tiny colored dots that litter the floor from the hole puncher. Our kitchen table sometimes looks like we never eat there; it’s most often devoted to spontaneous craft projects.
Then comes lunch, when I attempt to clean up the kitchen to prepare our food. Little one runs outside to the backyard for a few minutes before we eat, only to barge in through the back door screaming, “Mommy, mommy! I found a rolly polly! It’s gonna be my pet so I need a container. And here,” she hands me a fist full of yellow dandelions, “These are for you.” *smile*
I search for a vase to fill it with water for the, um, flowers. And so it goes throughout the day, chasing one proverbial white rabbit after another. By the end of the day, I’m looking at my to-do list and that mounting pile of laundry in the hall, and I want to crumble in a heap of shame for not having anything productive to show for the time.
Next, I worry about what we’re going to eat for dinner, and getting the clothes cleaned for my husband to wear to work tomorrow…and on it goes. If anyone walked in on the scene it might not appear that much had happened at all today, and yet, everything happened.
Do you ever feel like this? At the end of this post I’ve included a checklist of 5 tips to help the mom who is feeling somewhat un-productive. It is full of grace–for you, for your child, and all the good things you are producing.
I want to encourage you not to despise the quiet days at home and small beginnings. Don’t forget that you are already productive—you are raising a tiny human for whom you are producing life every single day. You may have been blessed to produce this child from your womb. Or maybe you have made a home for your adopted child, and together you’re producing one extraordinary family.
Mine is a story of secondary infertility. Our daughter is a singular miracle, we’ve come to understand. This means, however, that I sometimes put an unbalanced amount of pressure upon myself to be the perfect mom. Somehow I have believed that I get this one chance to get it right. In the early days, I did everything in my own strength to do just this. All the while forgetting that this calling of motherhood is a gift of grace.
Maybe this is part of your story as well. Maybe, like me, you struggled to get pregnant and experienced miscarriage before your first child was born. Or you were able to conceive once only to be told you have a health issue and you’ll never conceive again. Or there was nothing conclusive except that your only chance at having kids would be if you adopted. You might have been blessed to birth three kids, but you never told anyone the story of why your first born is seven years older than her siblings because of the miscarriages in between. If you’re a mom, you have a story about how you produced your family.
