Is there anything more beautiful and sanctifying than motherhood? X

I’ve spent four weeks trying to write a Mother’s Day entry, in little pockets of my days.

I have so many versions of it, all with so many offshoots, and nuanced little convos, that it started doing my head in.

Maybe now I understand why people posting little 5 second reels is all the rage.

I want to make everything a full on book, it seems. But really what it is, is that I have so much I want to say about motherhood— the sanctification that it’s been for me, and perhaps not enough devoted time to say it like I want to. What’s funny is that one afternoon I sat down to try and finish a piece about the push pull between a woman’s creative desires and her day-to-day life as a mumma, and I got so caught up that I burned brownies in the oven. How’s that for a joke?

Anyway, this morning I sat down for 45 minutes and wrote a quickie because I didn’t want Mother’s Day to come and go and I’d gotten so entangled in my 8329054 pages of musings that I’d not celebrated inside of honeycomb.

So, with that….

I love doing the laundry for my family.

I love cooking for my family.

I love being the one who runs my home and the one responsible for beautifying it.

It’s my domain.

Pre-kids I’d have eye rolled all the way to Switzerland at this comment.

My mum was a single mum and her mum was a single mum.

Women who stayed home and baked all the time and even worse— took care of their husbands… Gross.

I’d be a boss-babe-mum, I said.

This is how I’d break the chains, I thought.

I’d become so successful and financially independent…

And so I did.

But learning how to be a successful, independent, boss babe, was not the reaaaaaal sanctification I needed. They came easy to me. So easy I had published scientific research and had a multi 7 figure business in my early twenties. Still, I yearned for a satisfaction I’d never known.

God knew.

Learning to give myself to the chop-wood-carry-water days of motherhood,

to lay down the constant striving,

to rest into all the ways I need my husband…

that’s the work God had for me.

I’ve been a world travelling, home schooling mumma for nearly 7 years.

I’ve always been the unconventional type who thinks differently, with an endless appetite for beauty, creativity, and to do good work in this world. I have multiple passions and a really big capacity to give.

I don’t think that’ll ever change and it doesn’t need to.

I don’t believe God needs women to put down their creativity and natural enterprising spirits. He made us that way.

This is something I’ve wrestled with over the years as I learned to tend to the inner division which had me feeling torn between my creative urges and my desire to be the best mum and wife I could possibly be.

I’ve gone off social media for months at a time when I could feel myself getting try-hardy, caught up, sucked in…

I just care so much that my life is oriented correctly, and because of my excitable personality, I’ve needed to take extra care with the temptations of ‘everything I could be that I’m not being’.

Mother’s Day is my favourite day of the year because motherhood is the gift of my life. The same goes for my marriage.

I have never known a satisfaction like the one I get from the chop-wood-carry-water reality of tending my home.

I never knew that sustained sacrifice could be so life giving.

"A woman is capable of more sustained sacrifice than man. Man is more apt to be the hero in one great, passionate outburst of courage. But a woman is heroic through the years, months, and even seconds of daily life, the very repetition of her toils giving them the semblance of the commonplace. Not only her days but her nights, not only her mind, but her body, must share in the Calvary of Mothering. She, therefore, has a greater understanding of redemption than man, for she comes closer to death in bringing forth life." — Ven. Archbishop Fulton Sheen

God knows what He is doing when He makes us mothers.

The sanctification offered is one that nothing else in the world can.

We’re not meant to be self indulged.

We’re not meant to take self-care so seriously that we do it 24/7.

It’s okay that we die to the self that has a 3 hour morning routine, lots of sleep and lengthy workouts.

There is life, there is peace and there is joy when we reach the end of ourselves and our desire for importance and instead ‘wash feet’ selflessly inside our homes (for a season, because it doesn’t last forever).

The real dreams I had as a little girl weren’t to prove how smart and clever I was or that I could take care of myself like my mum and nanna had to. Independence, hyper vigilance? I mean, give me the trophy already.

Sure, I dreamed of travel and a nice house and to be free of the financial stresses of my ancestors… thank God for how he blessed those dreams.

But the deep soul satisfaction I longed for, I realized through what this quote says:

“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”

G.K. Chesterton

The gift of my lifetime has been that God blessed me with three children and a loving, solid husband, and an opportunity to rest into my role as their mother and wife, without needing to overlay it all with the hyper-independence and cleverness that is so familiar to me. I know not everyone has this freedom and luxury. I am so grateful for it, and so careful not to waste it.

Being able to be ‘just a mum’ is the real chain break for me.

Still, I want to make things.

Still, I want to help people.

Still, I have an insatiable desire to DO BIGGER THINGS AGAIN….

But these all swirl around the calm truth that…

Nothing is as beautiful, important and sanctifying as motherhood.

There are so many women aching to be mummas, and there are also women like beautiful Ash who are taken from their babies too soon. I think of her at so many points during my days when I’m doing ordinary things with and for my kids… It’s THIS— the slow back tickles before they drift off to sleep.

It’s THIS— the cuddles when they’re sick.

It’s THIS— the surprise pancakes.

It’s THIS— the rainy day spontaneous movie night.

It’s THIS— the cleaning up after yet another regular dinner together.

It’s THIS— the bedtime story, even while it’s interrupted 277484 times so the kids can give alternate endings.

It’s THIS— the washing their laundry and reliving the gloriously ordinary days we’ve had.

It’s THIS— the way they NEED us, and only us, for absolutely everything.

It’s THIS that will have mattered the most when it’s my time to leave this earth.

There are so many people in the world who may claim they need us…. But only a few really do.

As my friend Kyree said to me the other day— “How good is being a mum?”

I’m wishing all mummas a beautiful and blessed celebration of the privilege it is to be somebody’s mum. I keep in mind, heart and prayers those who yearn to be a mumma, to bereaved and grieving mothers. I keep in my heart and prayers the mothers in war torn places whose only longing is peace and safety for their families.

I keep in heart, mind and prayers my friend Ash, as well as Jade Young, and their daughters who will live now without the irreplaceable love of their mother, except in spirit and memory.

May we forever remember the blessing that motherhood is, and may we hold the correct perspective without needing to be hit with a fever or tragedy. May we not need a knock around the head to centre ourselves in this season and pull out the tentacles of distraction.

God bless the women reading this, that you will give them an undivided heart with motherhood, that you will show them the path to what is most life giving for their families, that you will help them use their gifts in ways that serve your goodness and beauty while most importantly, creating and nurturing a home that stewards wonderful children. May we find joy in the job that is creating a home and may you help us do it more excellently, and with more peace.

“The Most Important Person on earth is a mother. She cannot claim the honour of having built Notre Dame Cathedral. She need not. She has built something more magnificent than any cathedral—a dwelling for an immortal soul, the tiny perfection of her baby’s body….The angels have not been blessed with such a grace. They cannot share in God’s creative miracle to bring new saints to Heaven. Only a human mother can. Mothers are closer to God the Creator than any other creature; God joins forces with mothers in performing this act of creation….What on God’s good earth is more glorious than this; to be a mother.”

-József Cardinal Mindszenty-

Love Pk xx