so many tiny boys on a visit to Jessi’s house
To the mom with a few small kids (or even one, really!):
Hi, there. Have you sat down lately? Why don’t you go ahead and do that? Put your feet up, if you can. I know somedays you feel like you can’t keep your head above water.
I think this is the time in a woman’s life when she feels like “this is a blur”. This is when she looks at her kids and wonders how their feet grew so big and their limbs stretched out so wild and gangly. This is when a momma looks at a freshly born baby and feels the rush and the NEED to tell the bone-tired out mom to savor every bit because it flashes along at a frightening pace.
These are wildly productive years, where you are sustaining small humans and shaping them into tolerable young people. We haven’t yet traversed the teen years, so we mostly still only view our little ones as precious and pretty innocent.
Even in the busy, let’s savor the strange and oftentimes exhausting pleasure that is mothering small children. Motherhood can wring out even the strongest of women. None of us are immune to throwing our hands up or being tempted to throw the towel in.
But even so, we generally keep at it. There is something that pulls us from under the warm covers each morning and into the day. There is a delicious duty that beckons us again and again. Somedays it’s drudgery and other days it’s divine, but all of it is motherhood.
The great thing about these years, is that you don’t have to go out of your way to become a better woman. There is no checklist that needs to be made when it all comes down to it. Motherhood is refining in her own way. You wake up, you care your guts out, and your head hits the pillow again at night. Wake up, repeat. These kids are going to age whether it’s on your list or not.
Maybe the drudgery of the days and the speed of the changes is what refines us the most. Like water coursing over a stone, motherhood will soften and change a woman. These days, the stone is almost completely submerged by rushing waters–but she is there and she is beautiful.
