Oh, my dear mamas.  I love you and pray for you all. Summer motivators got derailed, and it’s been a full three weeks since I posted.  I planned on doing a follow up to THIS POST and I guess, well, I was too busy getting a break.

Beach time, lake time, family time, company time, warm time, happy time.  It’s been a beautiful summer.

Mornings are getting cool, I tidied up my sit down work area today and I’m excited about starting up some projects we laid aside for the summer.  But that last few weeks of sun, well…can’t resist.

Last post I talked about getting a break.  Expectations, realities.

But all expectations and realities aside.  Our culture is not set up for us to feel like embracing motherhood, wifehood, stay at home hood like it might have been once upon a time.  We are transitioning, I think.  The reality of parenthood is sacrifice.  Time, talent, treasure.

Sleep.  Oh, precious world of sleep, elusive princess.  Where did you go?

“I left you when you had your first child, and will return when you are in your forties.”

Oh.

At any rate, I digress.  It’s a tough world, being a mother.  Beautiful and hard and tough.  And, to be perfectly honest, after having seven kids and raising them into adults and semi-adults I can say this with absolute certainty.

YOU CAN’T SCARE ME.

Sometimes, though, in all the raising and worry and lack of sleep and what can I do better and what is wrong with me and what is wrong with my kids – I needed a break.

It wasn’t about being a “me” generation.  It wasn’t because I wanted myself all to myself.  It sure as hell wasn’t because I was selfish and I was never a princess.

It was simply that I needed an opportunity to gain perspective.  I needed to step back and see my husband for who he was, my kids, in all their individuality for who they were, to see myself as not just the person who makes the milk and the lunch and all the people happy.

I needed to step back so that I could see myself as God sees me.

He doesn’t see me as the person who picks up the toys and sweeps the floor and enfolds the tantruming toddlers in my arms.

He sees me as his daughter. His own precious daughter.  He wraps his arms around me when I’m the tantruming thirty-something.  Or fifty-something.  To Him, I’m not a homeschool mom or an evangelist or a homemaker or a florist or a wife. I’m not the meal maker or laundry doer.  The success or the failure.

I am simply me.  Clothed in the same dignity as every single person on the planet.

And sometimes I need to be able to step away from what I “do” to know who I “am.”

Sometimes I need to step away so that I can realize that I chose the life I chose, and my potential lies in the joy I both give and attain.  To give joy, we need to feed ourselves.  We need to put our oxygen masks on first before we help the helpless.

For our family, that didn’t mean weekends away, or mom’s retreats or holidays without my kids.  But it did mean that I needed to plan time to myself.  The success of that came with the planning.  Knowing that I would have an hour or two, all by myself, once a week allowed me to live my life with more grace, a sense of reality…a sense of peace.

For some moms, maybe that means twenty minutes a day to go for a walk, or a few hours after everyone is asleep, or a hot bath after Dad gets home.  But plan it.

We will never “find” the time to do anything in our lives.  We MUST make that time.  Create that space.

Find time.  Create joy.  Rest in Him.  Love hard, mamas.