motherhood/family/parenting

Well, it happened again, but this time, it was absolutely absurd. There I am pushing my buggy with one of my children, and a lady I “used to know”, is checking out. “Well hey girl!” She yells across the aisle. I smiled and greeted her. She glanced down at the tummy and her eyes got really big.

“Your pregnant?!” she asked like she was shocked.

The reason I found this response strange, is that to my knowledge, she didn’t know I had five other children at home. “Yes, I am.” I smiled. We talked a little longer, and of course the number came up.

The dropped jaw didn’t surprise me. Hers, or the one’s of the women checking her groceries out. The bewilderment, the shock…I’m used to it all. But this lady then began a barrage of comments/questions that even my “warrior” temperament found difficult to handle.

She started with the typical, “don’t you know what causes that?” And I gave her my typical, “well, I believe the Lord does.” (This lady is not a Christian.)

Then she insisted that she had something at home for me to “help” me. Trying to be gentle, yet use the opportunity to affirm the blessing of children (and remember my five year old is taking all this in!) I just kept answering her positively.

At one point I said “I haven’t had any yet that I wanted to send back”, and she said “well I didn’t either, but I don’t want any more!” very emphatically.

And THEN, when she said, “well I hope this is the last one” (as if my having children affected her life in any way!), I said, “well, we’ve decided to take all the children the Lord give us”. She audaciously said, “Well the Lord has given you too many!”

I was about to not be nice anymore when I decided to smile, say my parting goodbyes, and walk away gritting my teeth. Her last words to me?…”don’t you have anymore!”

I think I just walked away, which is something I don’t usually do. But I could see there was no point in casting my pearls before swine, and my one little pearl had already heard enough.

After the anger subsided (somewhere about 9:00 that night), I felt a recurring, stabbing realization of Satan’s successful attempts at dehumanizing God’s most treasured creation. And really, to speak of a child, any child, in the above fashion, is to discredit your own worth and value.

It’s almost as if we have put children into a separate category as other humans. No one speaks to an adult as if his existence were tragic…but that same adult was once a baby, once the little soft bundle that created a lump underneath his mommy’s shirt at the grocery store. Whatever value that adult has now, he has always had. If people only thought about how ignorant their reasoning is when it comes to children!

And this proves, yet again, my biggest contention with birth control: there is just something about the acceptance of preventing children that made the idea of having them absurd. The two concepts are polar opposites. I can’t be for both.

Is it hard sometimes? Sure it is…like all things that are worth anything in life. Being a full time wife and mom to six children is challenging, especially as my pregnant belly begins to impair me and make my feet swell if I’m up too much.

And I fail. Sometimes, miserably. I get impatient, I lose my temper, I scold for accidents, when a forgiving glance is in order.

The dishes are often piled up on the cabinet. The floor ALWAYS needs to be mopped. I get my priorities upside down. Children disobey, forget, and we start all over again tomorrow.

But then a brown-skinned little girl with an angelic expression asks me, “Mommy, can I sit on your wap?” Or my oldest daughter tells me to sit down while she cleans up from supper…or I just watch the excitement on my son’s face as he discovers a new “creature”…or the baby points intently at a book and babbles in quiet up and down tones, knowing exactly what she is saying.

I feel the soft punches of a new life inside me. She’s a brand new thought of God, and she’s the heartbeat of the love between my husband and me…

How can this not be the greatest life? The glorious opportunity to see them and be with them, and read to them, and laugh with them, and love with them, and learn with them–every minute of the day?!!!

Motherhood! To know these little people are going to grow up into men and women, and God has given me a small span of time to press my fingerprints all over them!

When I’m away from them only a short time, my arms ache to hold them, my fingers long to caress their soft faces. This is God’s blessed gift…this is the abundant life.

Devotions, Advice & Renewal for When Motherhood Feels Too Hard

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I recently had a conversation with a young woman expecting her first child. The topic of work came up (she has held an outside job for about 9 years), and I asked her would she be assisting her husband in his self-employment so she could stay home and raise her baby. Her response was cavalier, and summed up, what I believe is the problem with our entire society. She answered, “I don’t know yet, I’ll have to see how I feel when the baby is born.” She went on to say she had a baby sitter lined up to care for the baby.

This “feeling epidemic” has poisoned our entire culture, including the church. It goes right along with a refusal to embrace a standard of right and wrong. “What’s good for me, may not be good for you” penetrates every line of thinking.

In my opinion, a woman is given a child to raise, if that is at all possible. I don’t believe it is one of those gray areas. I believe it is wrong to leave children behind in the care of someone else, if there is any way possible, including reducing living expenses, etc., for the natural mother to care for him.

And why am I so bold to make a statement like that in a society that disagrees with me? Because of my command to “teach the younger women to love their husbands and children and to be keepers at home so that the Word of God is not blasphemed.” It does not say to teach the women who feel the same as I do. It does not say teach only those who won’t be offended. It says if I don’t teach women the principles of Scripture, I will be blaspheming the Word of God.

And as I ponder that, I conclude that the kind of love we think about is a feeling; one can’t teach a feeling. So there must be something more that I’m instructed to teach. If a feeling is the essence of what Paul was referring to in Titus, then we older women would not have a job, and the young woman I spoke to was perfectly open to love her family however her feelings directed her to.

Feelings, while given to us for a reason, must not dictate the way we interpret right and wrong. Our very nature tells us that a child is given to his mother’s care. (Before the bottle, the baby would not have survived apart from its mother.) Let’s be bold enough to lay our feelings aside and do what is right.

What do working women, or should we say, women who pursue outside careers, have to do with children? Everything. The issue of children, and women’s roles, and all the issues surrounding those, are intricately intertwined, and difficult to separate. They all follow a continuum, beginning “way back when”, influenced by wrong thinking and wrong practices that subtly became part of our worldview. What used to be commonplace, is now appalling to the ears of modern women, sadly, even Christian women.

Though many factors started the ball in motion, the Marxism movement played a large role in the changing roles of women, which has affected every aspect of our lives. I’m not about to try to go into all the details of that movement, because I don’t know all of it, and there isn’t room on this blog to discuss it. (It makes for interesting research though, if you want to look at some of the foundational thinking behind the feminist movement. Just google “Karl Marx and feminism”.

Women were told that they were too valuable to “sit at home and raise children”, and that they could contribute much more to society by going out and doing “men’s jobs”. (In truth, a movement fueled by the communist agenda recognized how powerful women devoted to their families were, so aimed at what they viewed to be the biggest threat to their agenda and determined to root them out.) So, a discontentment began to bubble in the hearts of women, even if they did not leave home, and the quiet lie grew.

By and by, as women did pursue careers in place of fulfilling their calling at home to be a help meet to their husbands, lots of things resulted. First, they received instant gratification for their work, which perpetuated the notion that they were more valuable somewhere else.

Secondly, the cost of living began to increase, because of the employment conditions with so many new employees entering the work force. (This conveniently created an “excuse” for women to leave home…now they couldn’t afford not to work.)

Thirdly, the government had to step up to the plate to provide child care for all these children left unattended, so school days were stretched, and the school season was lengthened and programs like Head Start, and after school care were implemented, (and continue to grow). We were also sold the lie that the more hours a child was inundated with academics, the smarter and thus better he would be. So now, Mom and Dad didn’t feel as guilty about carting their two-year-olds off to the “Academy for Tots”.

Next, the divorce rate reached alarming heights. Several factors were involved in this tragedy. Women were now more financially independent, and didn’t need a husband to support them like before. (Contrary to our selfish notions, this dependency on each other is a GOOD thing.) Women were now devoting much more time helping another man instead of the one God gave them, which caused obvious marital problems (It is not good for men and women who are not married to spend lots of time together…nuff said). Affairs in the workplace became prevalent. (The common acceptance of birth control at this point also played a big part in the ability to have “harmless” affairs.) And still another factor was the ongoing delusion that “I deserve to be happy”. So, if a spouse woke up and found himself or herself “unhappy”, that was grounds for divorce.

Finally, it became obvious that children were a hindrance to this lifestyle. Of course, one or two were still fashionable, and barely affordable, but any more than that would be ridiculous. After all, how can I possibly pursue my own life, with all these other people to deal with? Children no longer fit well into the picture. A far cry from a time when women would beg God for more children! And you know what else? For many women, working outside the home is just easier than the often delayed rewards of raising children, especially if she does not have a long-term vision for the importance of the work she is doing. If it’s just about changing diapers and settling arguments all day, who would want to do it??!!

So, our current aversion to children was born out of problem rooted in selfishness. WE LOST IT! We lost the ability to see that nothing was more important in a woman’s life than being the strength that undergirds her husband’s pursuits; nothing could be more important than shaping the lives of great men and women (by the way, “great men and women” are become fewer and fewer. Have you ever stopped to consider why?) Nothing could be more important than strong, wise women who are the pillars of a community, helping those around her in need, educating and training her children, taking care of family, walking alongside of other, younger women, holding families together–how long can our society continue to exist without such women?

When will we be smart enough, and bold enough, to say “this culture depends on my obedience to God’s order”! When will we stop humiliating ourselves by allowing Satan to belly-laugh at our ignorance in believing these lies! Think about it, if what women are doing is right, if it is God’s plan, why are so many doing it? Shouldn’t the Christian community be using the world’s methods as a litmus test to measure its obedience? And the most blaring and obvious irony, is that IT’S NOT WORKING!!!

“But wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many there be that find it. But narrow is the gate, and strait is the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it.”