We can stop living in fear of what others think of us. We can stop measuring others against the yardstick of our own preference and personality. And when we do, we will all be free.
We will all be living in God’s design.
We will all be confident girls.
My daughter is not my world, and I’m a better mom because of it.
Not better than other moms who do things differently; better than the mom I would be if I did things differently – if my world revolved around her.
I love her. She is a light to my life: her smiles, her giggles, and those milky blue eyes that search my face from behind her Tommee Tippee. The little fingers that grip my pinky – I love them. I love her eagerness, her excitement, and her energy.
Christianity will always offend. But we should more concerned with offending the gospel than with offending the world. Jesus was offensive even as He poured out love and kindness. He was offensive because He claimed to be the Way.
We don’t qualify our jobs by demeaning them. We don’t say, “I’m just an engineer” or “I’m just a recruiter” or “I’m just a hairstylist”. We’re taught to take healthy pride in our skills and accomplishments, to embrace and celebrate what we offer to our communities. Yet so often this world is an unsafe place for the family, where the longest hours are put in and the most patience is required, all for the compensation of a sleepy smile, little steps, and first words. So we cloak our motherhood with disclaimers and admit we are “just moms”.
Scandal.
That’s what it is, not just what it’s called.
And they knew it would be, when they wrote that episode: the one where a child’s life is taken to boost viewer ratings or cause a ruckus across the internet for a few days. They knew that’s how it would go when they wrote an abortion scene. #Istandwithplannedparenthood, right? It’s just a show, right?
But it’s not.
As someone who finds joy in being busy, I always have multiple outer and inner expectations to meet. But the busier my schedule, the more likely I am to forget something, run late, or overwhelm myself to the point of anxiety. Marriage revealed to me just how often I lived in a stressed-out, anxious state – despite the habits I had already formed. So I began to devote more time to developing a real schedule and establishing a morning routine.
There was a time, not so long ago, I had to decide which of ten different blazers I would wear for the day. I had concerns like, “Which of these complements my brown stilettos?” and “Will this matching suit set make me look too much like a lawyer?” But these days getting dressed is much simpler. I only put on three things: a bra that doesn’t smell like milk, enough clothes to prevent the mailman from calling the police, and lipstick bright enough to qualify me for the red light district.
We don’t need to apologize for our “perfect lives” because there is no such thing. We should feel safe to celebrate our successes: our clean floors, our happy marriages, our birth stories, our weight loss, our non-scale victories. These are just as authentic as the rawness of struggle and difficulty. Both are genuine. All are real.
It started simply as curiosity, but as time went on, I found more and more information touting the benefits of an unmedicated birth: quicker recovery, greater comfort, more presence of mind, awake baby, and many more. This is all great, I thought. But I still have to do it MYSELF.