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Mamahood Messups


Welcome to the Women Living Well book review!
I missed a chapter last week - oops! So I thought I would do a quick catch-up right now!
Chapter 13 Mamahood Mess-Ups
Ever feel like a failure? Like you are the only one who doesn’t have it all together? Wonder how all the other moms do it all when you can barely do much right? Feel like your kids are the worst? Why won’t they sleep? Or eat their veggies? Or refuse to keep their clothes on? Or get potty trained?
Ever feel like giving up? Wishing for your old life where you got to sleep through the night, only had yourself to get ready in the morning and never stepped in mac and cheese on the floor or spilled grape juice? Some days mamahood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We get disappointed and discouraged. We wonder if we will ever have a normal life again.
When you brought that little bundle of joy home from the hospital, you envisioned happy days filled with laughter and love. You wanted to be a happy family. Then the sleepless nights started. And next the terrible twos. This mamahood thing isn’t all you expected it to be.
Key word: expected. Expectations get us into trouble. They set our hearts up to be disappointed. They set our minds up to be frustrated. Struggles and hurdles will happen. That’s just life. But they aren’t all for nothing. God can use the struggles to grow us. Just as that little bundle grows and matures. So are you. As you parent your child, God, your heavenly Father, is parenting you to mature. And He uses the struggles to do it. Consider them opportunities to grow. Divinely designed opportunities.
As your children grow, you see more and more the character in their hearts. You see areas in their lives, attitudes in their hearts and viewpoints in their belief system that need removing, refining or redirecting. You are training little hearts to have a God-oriented world view. And it’s a process that takes much time and slow progress. Progress. Look for progress, don’t expect perfection. Just like God parents you.
Don’t let your heart get discouraged when it seems you’re making little to no progress. Ask your Father how He wants to grow you through this time. It may be that He is growing you more through a particular time than your children. Keep on keeping on, Mama. You will see the progress down the road.
 

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