Loving Motherhood as a Stay-at-Home-Mom

A friend of mine recently posted about life with her toddler, and she confessed that she wonders how some moms just seem to love everything about being a mom.

Well, I'm here to talk about that. Because I'm an expert...

...on not loving everything about being a mom, that is.

When I had my ultrasound with Stephen to find out if he was a boy or a girl, I didn't cry, and the ultrasound tech seemed seriously disturbed by it. The same thing happened with Cohen. In fact, they did a surprise 3D ultrasound with Cohen, and Christian said, "He looks like an alien!" and I laughed. The ultrasound tech may have been wondering if she should call for a social worker at that point.

I say all this because I have found that my emotions, or at least the way I express them, don't always match what I see in other young moms. We have a plethora of babies born at our church (at the time when I was pregnant with Cohen, I think there were about 11 other moms who were also pregnant!). Especially with the first-time moms, it seems like someone is always asking them if they are just so excited?about having their baby, and they respond with a beautiful glow and gush about how excited they are.

It's not that I didn't want to meet either of my boys. But with Stephen, I honestly didn't know what to expect, and Christian and I hadn't even been married for a year, so I didn't know if I should be excited or terrified. With Cohen, I did?know what to expect, and I knew that being a mom wasn't easy. So while I welcomed him into our family with open arms and tremendous affection towards him and his chubby cheeks, I wasn't screaming for joy or sobbing when I saw him for the first time.

Fast forward past the newborn stage. Now, especially when I meet people for the first time and they ask me if I stay home with my boys, and I say yes, I then feel like I'm expected to go on and on about how great it is. Don't get me wrong; I am incredibly, incredibly blessed to be in a position where I can be at home with my boys without our family suffering financially. And that's something we have as a top priority. But just as working moms may look at stay-at-home moms and see lots of free time (ha!), the grass is always greener on the other side.

I want, and I have wanted for many months, for the grass to be a bit greener on this side. And it has been a long process and a lot of "Lord, help me!" prayers in my laundry room where I sometimes sneak for a few seconds when both the boys are crying and I don't know what to do for either of them.

Motherhood, in any form, is not easy. There is no other job that I know of that requires your attention for the better part of the 24 hours in every day, and which, when you feel you've messed something up or fail at something, can make you feel tremendously guilty. These are little people, after all, and they don't always respond how we think they will, and we don't always know what to do.

It's hard. Hard with one child, hard with two, hard with six. And you know Jesus promised not just life, but life abundant. Honestly, things don't ever look too abundant around here (other than dirty clothes - seriously).

Slowly but surely, the Lord has been working on my heart and showing me that the only answer to any of my problems is the gospel.

I know. I know. It seems so easy.

But when you get to where the rubber meets the road and you took your boys to the park even though you didn't want to and two minutes after getting there your toddler goes face first down the slide and ends up with mouth and eyes full of sand and he's screaming and you wonder why you even went to the park in the first place... it takes some thinking to figure out what in the world Jesus?has to say or do about getting all that sand out of your child's mouth with only an old rusty water fountain to help.

Here's what I know. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Free from the penalty of sin, free from the power of sin. And that means we don't live our lives in a spirit of fear, wondering what God thinks about what we're thinking. No, we lay ourselves bare before him. We confess that we don't love what we do each day and that we desperately need help. And we ask, plead, beg?for grace. And in my experience, he has never, not once, turned me down when I've asked for grace. He gives it. Every time.

Sometimes it doesn't come right away, and you think that what grace?would look like is your teething baby having some relief so you don't have to carry him around all day. But then a few days later when your toddler is sleeping, you take your baby outside on a warm February day and let him have his first taste of a fruit popsicle, and he smiles at you in his diaper and laughs at you and tries to put that whole popsicle in his mouth, and as it melts all the stickiness pools in the rolls on his belly. That, my friends, is grace. And it's always there for the taking, even if we can't always see it clearly.

And how does that fit in with loving what you do each day? Because after you have a bunch of those grace-filled moments that you wish you could take a picture of to keep forever, you start to realize that they wouldn't have been quite so sweet if the prior morning hadn't been a little bit hairy.

It's a rollercoaster, motherhood is. And the lows can sometimes be really, really low. But the highs... oh, the highs. Even when they're rare, they're worth it. And so you pray for the strength to love the lows, because you know that they will happen again, sooner or later. And after a while, the lows don't seem quite so low - or at least if they're low, they're familiar.

He got me through last time. He'll get me through again. And this time, I'll rest in the finished work of Jesus (Wouldn't we all love to say our work is finished?) and trust that all these lows and highs are adding up to make me more like Jesus. And honestly, in the grand scheme of things, the home is not such a bad place in which to be made more like Jesus. The company is good, and if at times you start crying, no one will even notice, because everybody else around has probably cried at least once in the past hour.

Ask for grace. Take it. And remember there is always, always more.

Source: http://chelseykcrouch.blogspot.com/2012/03/loving-motherhood-as-stay-at-home-mom.html

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