Category Archives: Parenting

A job with no glass ceiling

Posted on by

My husband is good at giving compliments and has given me hundreds over the years. But the best one, the one that stands above all others, was just three little words.

A visitor to our home, a man, was asking about our family. When he learned I was a stay-at-home mom “just” caring for children, he said, “Oh…. so, she doesn’t work?”

Nate lifted his eyebrows and responded, with an effective pause, “Oh… she works!” Something about the way he said it in that context lifted me like no other compliment.

Mothering is hard, constant and open-ended. It felt good to hear Nate recognize the work of my job. Whether we work outside our homes or not isn’t the issue. If we have children, we’re working with and on them every day. After they’ve grown up and left home, we continue to care, to love, to pray, to work for the benefit of our kids. Much of what we read and hear about motherhood, however, brushes aside our honorable, challenging work with a, “Yeah, yeah, yeah… blah blah blah.”

Recently, I stood in line at a grocery store deli next to a woman with a toddler in her cart. She turned my way and asked, “You got any kids?”

“Seven,” I said, smiling at her little girl. “Aren’t kids wonderful?”

Her response startled me. “Being a mom is totally boring. There’s nothing to do. I just watch TV all day.”

I thought back to my own mothering of young children and can’t recall ever being able to watch TV. There was too much happening with my kids for me to tune out of mothering and tune in to television. There was too much we wanted to do. I suppose children can adapt to a mom’s habits, even if it means leaving her alone as she watches TV. But what about the golden opportunities lost?

We can make of motherhood whatever we want, putting forth massive effort or very little. The good news is, there’s no glass ceiling on the career of motherhood, no CEO holding us back. No one in a corner office discriminates against us when we rise to new levels of excellence in being moms. We can shoot for being the very best.

We’ve all read the long list of what every mom needs to be: teacher, chauffeur, nurse, secretary, inventory manager, recreational director, safety instructor, record keeper, spiritual mentor, nutritionist, cook, play partner, shopper, tutor, counselor, psychologist and more. These tasks can’t be done well while watching TV.

Even though some people think raising children is menial, unimportant, and not real work, we know the truth. It’s the most important job on earth. And in doing it, we have the freedom to set it up any way we want to, a freedom unavailable in most other working positions. May we never tire of pouring ourselves into it with enthusiasm and joy…. and lots of hard work.

Let’s play “Cut the Cake!”

Posted on by

My family spent a great deal of time at the beach when I was growing up, a sandy, dunes-style beach on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore. Mom was untiring in her efforts to make sure we had fun there. “The more the merrier” was a motto she embraced, which meant we could invite all the friends we wanted, whether for a day or a week. She never complained about youthful crowds. To the contrary, she was energized by them.

After we arrived at the beach with our big, black, truck inner-tubes (the kind that rubbed black onto our bathing suits), Mom was always first into the water, teaching visitors to stand on their heads by going under without holding their noses. She made her shoulders available for kids nearly as big as she was to jump from. She raced us all to the anchored raft “out deep” where no one could touch bottom.

Mom never brought a magazine or a book to the beach. Her first choice was to play with children. One of the beach games Mom loved was “Cut the Cake.” Using a bucket for a mold, she turned out a cake of wet sand that was perfectly round. “Go find stones to decorate it,” she directed, “and bring something for the middle, a feather, a stick, whatever you want to make it pretty.”

We “sugared it” with the soft, dry sand and then stood back to admire our work. “Now,” she said, “we’re going to cut the cake.” With a thin stick found in the dunes nearby, she demonstrated what she meant by slicing a piece of sand-cake thin enough not to disturb the rest of it.

Handing the stick-knife to the nearest child, she said, “Your turn. If the cake falls when you slice it, you have to run up and down the dunes five times (or run into the water and stay under 30 seconds, or carry someone on your back anywhere they want to go, etc).

Each person took turns slicing a tiny bit more of the cake while the sun slowly dried the wet sand, increasing the threat of “a fall.”  At long last, someone’s slice caused the remaining cake to crumble, causing hoots and hollers from those who hadn’t lost1 the game. Mom always laughed the hardest.

The sands of time ran out for Mom, but she left behind her spirit of fun for our grandkids to enjoy. Last week I taught a child how to make a bucket cake. (Use only wet sand, pack it tight at the bottom, pile sand slightly above the rim, flip it fast). As I watched him struggle to master this “baking” task, I thought of Mom. She left a lofty heritage in many categories, and surely one of them was how to experience joy among children by playing “Cut the Cake.”

Over and under

Posted on by

Having kids can put life over the top. Overworked, overstimulated, overwhelmed and overboard, which is where a mom often wants to jump. Simultaneously she feels very much under it all. Underappreciated, underpaid, undermined and under water, which is where she’d be if she jumped.

Is there any middle-mothering between over and under? The truth is, most of our days fall somewhere inbetween. It’s just that having kids, being a mom, can toss us to either extreme in a flash. We know it, and we fear it.

In our family, each time I became pregnant, I puzzled over how another kiddie-commitment could possibly fit into our over-the-top lives, especially the part about stretching the love we felt for the ones we already had, to cover over another.

But children, when they arrive, seem to come pulling a wagon load of the extra everything that will be needed, an over-abundance of flexibility, of energy and especially of love. It’s one of motherhood’s wonderful surprises.

As we plug away at mommy-hood, riding the waves of over and under, we can sometimes be overtaken by good things, too. Overworked and overwhelmed might morph into overflow, i. e. an abundance of whatever we need at the moment. Underappreciated and undermined can transform into understanding, i.e. wisdom of how best to handle a confusing situation.

Whether children are newborns or fully-grown, our challenge to sink or swim as moms will always be with us. When we get nervous about that, it’s good to look for those positive overs and helpful unders. If we see them, the wild ride of motherhood becomes a joy, sometimes even making us overjoyed.