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I know there’s plenty of conversation and controversy over what kids should, how much they should eat, whether you should make them eat or not… We discuss it endlessly, from when to start babies on solid food to how many snacks a toddler should get to the factors of childhood obesity.
I think it comes down to a simple statement: continue reading…
I’m talking to you women who are going through the motions. You’re listless, confused, bored, frustrated, tired all the time. You seek distraction. You depend on your spouse or your kid or your dog to make you feel needed, seen, alive. Unfortunately, your spouse/kid/dog doesn’t always get it.
I’m talking to you women out there who have thought of a dozen new businesses, but started none of them. You’ve dreamed up new products, contemplated marketing ideas, started little projects… and never gone past the dreaming. You’ve always stuck at the starting line. It wears you down.
I’m talking to you women who feel stretched to the max, pushed and pulled and demanded and needed and wanting to be everything to everyone. But also, inside, you’re wanting to scream because you’ve pushed your own needs down for so long.
I’m talking to you.
Are you listening?
Do you look back at photos of yourself and think, “Where did that girl go?” Do you stutter and mumble when people ask you what you’ve been doing lately? You mutter a boring answer like “oh, the job” or “oh, the house” or “oh, the kids” and then change the subject. Are you excited about anything in your life right now, or are you just tired? Kind of bored. Listless.
The world is so full of a number of things… and so are you. You’re in there, stuffed way down near the back, crammed into a little wad behind “money worries” and “family obligations” and “taking care of other people” and “trying to get life figured out” and “large chunk of self-doubt I keep banging my shin on.” Yep. There you are. I see you. Hi! Go on. Give me a little wave.
Let’s talk about something inspiring, something fresh and energizing, something that awakens you… something like house cleaning. Yeah. That’s it.
Look, here’s the deal: some things aren’t a matter of choice or preference but of necessity. House cleaning is a great example. I don’t love it. It’s not a natural high. It’s not my fun activity for the weekend. (Is it yours, because if so, let’s work out a deal…). But it has to be done, for a number of reasons, so we do it. Sometimes finding yourself isn’t about what you do but about how you do it.
You still have a choice and personal expression in even the lowliest of tasks. There are three ingredients:
1. Attitude
2. How you do what you do.
3. Where you put the attention (yours and everyone else’s).
“There is choice involved in the very simplest form of creativity…” says Schaeffer, and then she goes on to say that those “‘if-only’ feelings can distort our personalities, and give us an obsession which can only lead to more and more dissatisfaction” (1).
Let’s take that housecleaning example a little bit further.
…the sanctity of what you do as a modern homemaker, the benefits for your children… though those issues certainly deserve thought and attention. But let’s just look at you. You live in a house. You don’t want to live in a dirty place. So you clean. You pick up your clothes, you wipe off a counter, you sweep the floor.
You can either do all those things (for yourself and for the other people living in your home) with a grudging, bitter, woe-is-me attitude that can’t wait to be getting to the important stuff in life or you can find a way to make the necessary duties less drudge, more lively. Schaeffer refers to this as “bringing the artistic into life” (2).
I’m not saying you have to don a lacy apron and make sweet love to the vacuum cleaner.
Like this: get your organizational powers to work and make up a cleaning schedule that is the most efficient thing anyone’s ever heard of. Figure out how to get your house sparkly in ten minutes a day. Or this: make your own aromatic, natural cleaning potions, if that’s what toots your horn. Use them to clean your own home, wow your friends with the non-toxic goodness, and start up a side business… Or this: Put on some loud, fast, fun music, your old grubby clothes, give all the kids a dust rag, and party like it’s 1999 while you clean. Or this: wear your Bluetooth and chat up your old friends while you wash dishes, wash windows, wash clothes. Or this: carry a trash bag and challenge yourself to declutter each space as you clean, week-by-week creating the simple, minimalist space you crave.
Why are we talking about housecleaning in a series that is supposed to be about rediscovering the you that got buried under all those cleaning supplies?
I’m guessing that even though you feel like you want to run away from home some days, you have a commitment to staying. You love your husband. You love your children. You’re not going to run away, which means that you need to rediscover yourself in that home you have to clean, while you’re with those kids you need to care for, when you’re spending time with that husband who loves you, too.
If transforming your life can’t happen in the daily grime and grind, then it’s not real transformation; it’s just redecorating. We don’t want that. That’s a waste of time.
Look at the obstacles which those we call great overcame to give action to their passion, their creative impulse. How many other greats are unknown, not for lack of talent, but because they settled down into and hid behind life’s circumstances? Maybe you are one of them. Great people refuse to be defined by situational constraints.
Not a single one of us is meant to live a mediocre life. Every one of us has the potential for greatness, for genius in some way or another. And the world needs all it can get. The vast majority never challenge themselves beyond a little circumscribed circle some person or culture or situation has drawn around them.
The vast majority live in unsatisfying, unfulfilling mediocrity due to lack of action. There are several key reasons why we often don’t take action, and we’re going to figure them out. Which statement rings true for you?
1. I don’t want to be, but I feel kind of stuck in the “if-only” attitude, simply because I just don’t see how it’s even possible to make time, space, energy, money or otherwise for anything else in my life.
2. I’m frustrated, unfulfilled but I’m busy with daily life and I don’t even know what I would do if I had the time. Hobbies? Interests? Did I ever have any of those?
3. I know what I want to do – it’s been bugging me for years now – and I know I could make it happen, somehow, but… I just don’t. I’m scared or lazy or uncertain or something, but I just can’t seem to build up enough momentum or even desire.
4. I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do, living the dream you could say, but really? I’m disappointed and afraid to admit it. If this is “my thing” and I’m not excited about it, what else is there?
It’s time you blew away that smoke screen and figured out how to get back to the you that is excited about life. You don’t even need a pretty journal (but you can go buy one if you want to).
1. Schaeffer, Edith. The Hidden Art of Homemaking. Page 25, 33.
2. Schaeffer, Edith. Page 33.
3. Schaeffer, Edith. Page 33.
We do need to compare, we just need to compare ourselves to the right person. We need to look unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith. But that’s not what I do, most of the time. I look at somebody a little more, oh, down to earth. Somebody not perfect. Somebody I can find fault with.
Two things can happen when we compare ourselves to others. Either we will find somebody who is struggling in the areas in which we are strong, and we will mentally pat ourselves on the back and think something like, “Well I’ve got nothing to worry about… I’m way ahead of that person…” And we feel self-satisfied and we become prideful and we are headed for a fall.
Or we find somebody who is very strong in the areas in which we struggle, and we mentally berate ourselves and see only our failure and think something like, “Well I’ll never even come close to that… I might as well give up…” And we feel discouraged and we become disheartened and we are already falling.
Neither scenario is the way Jesus wants us to live. Comparing ourselves to others is deadly, and when we start extending that bad habit to how we parent, we bring our children into a situation without any good options. This is not of Christ, my dear sisters. This is not freedom. This is not truth. This is not joy.
I have three antidotes to offer, ones I’m learning to apply in my life as I try to drop this comparing habit and start living the way God wants me to live.
Okay, so I’ll just be honest here. I feel best about how I’m doing as a parent after a trip to the mall, or Chuck E. Cheese, or even the grocery store. If I get the privilege of watching another family whose children are clearly out of control, I walk away feeling pretty confident about my own parenting skills. After all, my kid didn’t shove that little girl off the slide in the play area. My kid didn’t scream and refuse to eat because the pizza had pepperoni on it. My kid didn’t grab boxes of Mac’n'Cheese and launch them across the aisle…
But my kids do other things that require my vigilance, attention, and loving discipline. My bad habit of comparing makes me apathetic to those other things.
Colossians 1:10 tells me to “walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work.” That’s my standard. That’s where I need to look and see how I measure up. Am I walking worthy of the Lord who gave me these children? Am I being fruitful in every good work as I raise them? Hmm.
You’ve heard the adage about the blind leading the blind, haven’t you? That’s what I do when I base my values and decisions on what other Mommies are doing. They may have clear leading from the Holy Spirit, they may have based their decisions on Biblical principles… but I don’t know that. And what if they didn’t? What if they, like me, are often just stumbling along, looking around, and making random decisions based on what other people are doing? Is that really the foundation I want for the way I raise my children?
No, it isn’t. And even if the woman I am watching is following Jesus, what He directs her to do may not be what He directs me to do. God is very personal.
Colossians 2:2-3 tells me that it is in God that I will find “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Colossians 2:8 tells me that I should “beware lest any man spoil [me]… after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” People may not mean to mislead me, but they might anyway. Why would I take chances when I can go to the source of perfect wisdom?
It is such a temptation to just wander into the forest of self-pity and stay there for days at a time. I can get lost there so completely that I lose my vision, I lose my joy, I lose the knowledge of who I am in Jesus Christ.
It’s the first step we need to avoid, and it usually starts when I start looking around at other women. Then I ask myself impossible questions: “What does she have that I don’t? Why is God blessing her finances/work/relationships/ministry and not mine? Why doesn’t my house look that good? How does she have it so together? She has so much more. She has better this and that. She has an easier situation. I can never get there…”
I allow the frustration to make me feel inadequate, unable, defeated, and then I just settle into this swamp of selfish self-pity. What a horrible way to spend my precious days!
Colossians 2:10 tells me that I am “complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power.” Colossians 3:9-10 tells me that I have “put off the old man with his deeds. And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him who created him…” I never see the complete picture of another Mommy’s life; that’s why I shouldn’t try to compare myself with the part I do see. My vision is imperfect; that’s why I look to Jesus, who has perfect vision.
Don’t fall into the comparison trap. No one else looks like you because no one else is supposed to.
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This post is linked up with
Steady Mom’s 30-Minute Blogging Challenge. 24 minutes to write.
I feel a little funny writing an article about having fun together. Questions assail. First, do I know enough about having fun with my spouse to actually give people advice on it? Two, after a bunch of far-more-serious articles about respect and trust and intimacy and the like, will people get this? Will it come across as flippant? Is it flippant? And most of all, this problem: fun is a relative term. What is fun to me is boring, strange, unnerving to a lot of people. So I’m not sure how to introduce the concept and give help that might be practical on a topic that is so subjective and preferential. But here goes. continue reading…
Sometimes you just got to let it go.
Short End of the Shtick
I had a good cry last night and felt immensely better. It’s difficult for me to just cry, let out the excess emotion, and then pick up and go on with good heart: I want to analyze and find a problem that caused the need for the crying. continue reading…