A Nourishing Home

Nourishing Your Children With The Uniqueness That Is You: Mothering With Authenticity

Photo by Web and The City

Motherhood is rigorous work. We all know this. Oh. So. Well. Which is why often we turn to communities of all sorts, online or in person. For support. For tips. For resources that can help us to love what we do, to embrace especially the mundane and the monotonous stuff. Rightly so. I am an advocate of putting back the sacred in our everyday tasks, of letting motherhood change us, of slowing down, of simplicity. Anything that can spur us to keep doing the hard things day after day. Often we grasp for tools outside of us, but today, I want to focus on the tools within us. The unique tools God has entrusted only us with. Loving what we do is good, but so is doing what we love, and consequently being who we are in our homes.

Because mothering with our best self is an expression of God’s glory.

Someone once said that the glory of God is (wo)man fully alive. And one aspect of living fully is to live authentically, to embrace all of who we are just as God does. The good and the bad. For many of us, the multi-faceted role of a mother and a homemaker brings us face to face with parts of ourselves that we don’t necessarily like. Which will be for another post. Today, I want to start with the parts of ourselves God has made nourishing, naturally.

Mothering With Our Positives:

Leverage Your Strengths: Because We Can’t Be Everything To Our Children. We have to do a whole lot of things, but we don’t have to excel in them all. Instead, we can focus more on what we do best and then strategize how to tackle tasks we are not so good at. I’m not the best chef, so I try to simplify in the kitchen. I’m not the cleanest housekeeper and I’ve lowered my expectations for what a clean house looks like. I just try to make sure the essentials get done and instead, I focus on decluttering and having a minimalist home, something that comes naturally to me. I’m not very crafty, but I sure can sing and dance which I often do with my daughter. When I do these tasks as often as I can, I end up enjoying myself and giving a gift to my family without much effort.

What are your Verbs? If you haven’t given it much thought lately, I invite you to think of “verbs” that you do well. The stuff that comes naturally to you. Find ways to showcase these strengths daily. It’s a way of honoring God, who made us this way. And it’s a gift to our family to see mom enjoying herself so much that it doesn’t seem like work at all!

Mothering With Our Personalities

The Steady You: Our Inborn Temperament. Few of us go from one extreme to another. There’s a steadiness to the personality we are born with, though we grow and change over time. Know how to bring out the best in your personality. We often have ideas of what an ideal mom should be, the ideal mom your children can have is you being simply you! I am a strong introvert and can’t handle too much people time without an equal amount of alone time (or I get really crabby!) When I am able to recharge throughout the day and week, I am also able to give undivided attention to my daughter joyfully.

What Are Your Adjectives? There’s a lot of different personality tests out there, like the MBTI and the Birkmann. I like them all, but if you are not an avid test-taker like me, just a simple observation will do. Where do you get your energy? Do you like to plan ahead or do you like to keep your options open? How do people describe you? When we nurture our nature, we respect how God made us. We are then able to embrace differences with others and learn to work with them. We are better able to nurture our children’s nature as well.

Mothering With Our Passions

Dare to Live Your Life. God calls you to be no one else but You. To live out your story. Model that for your daughter. We can’t force our values on them, but we can reflect them in our choices and actions. I’m born to live cross-culturally and I identify with those who have been uprooted from their home culture well. My husband and I have chosen to live in a multi-culture community where a lot of refugees and immigrants resettle. One day, I hope to live overseas again. We also host international students in our home and are currently thinking about possibly becoming foster parents to unaccompanied refugee minors who are waiting to get resettled in the U.S. These choices are just part of who we are, and not because we feel like we should. And our daughter is growing up with plenty of opportunities to see our passions lived out in simple and practical ways.

What are your Nouns? What is it that gets you fired up? What are the dreams God has given you? List them all and figure out ways to live them not in the near future, but now. Motherhood does not mean we have to give up on them. We just need to get a little creative.

What do you think? What are your verbs, adjectives and nouns? Please do share!

Everyday Marriage: It’s The Small Things That Count

Photo by Adam Foster

When I read about blogs focusing on marriage, I kinda feel guilty. Because my husband and I don’t “work” on our marriage like we’re supposed to, at least according to the experts. Take date nights for starters.

See, my husband and I haven’t had a date night in 20 months. We went out for his birthday a few months ago during the day when we left little munchkins with grandma and aunties and nephew who were eager to dote on her for a couple of hours. And that was about it.

We talk of one day finding a sitter, and one evening venturing out just the two of us, like we used to. We talk of what we did before we had a baby and laugh about how absurdly easy everything was back then.

But we are content. We like how things are, and are grateful for our growing little family.

Maybe Date Nights Are Overrated
So I’m thinking that maybe there is so much hype about marriage because we all know that half of us will end in divorce. We want to be the marriage that makes it all the way through. And so we read every book out there on how to save our marriage before it starts. Or we make sure we know what every woman needs to know about men. And so on. I know. I’ve been there. Done that.

But what if marriage was not all that complicated? Kathleen’s post at ProjectM Online got me thinking about this. What if we don’t need to always have a date night (especially in this kind of season a.k.a. having a wee little one) to improve our marriage? What if we don’t need to attend any seminars on how to make our marriage work, ever?

Simplifying Marriage
Marriage is simply a joining of two separate lives into one. My husband and I promise to share everything we have together. Our joys, our sorrows, our stuff, our money, our debt, our space, our dreams, our insecurities, our strengths, our wounds, our gifts, our bodies, our souls. Every day, of every week, of every month, of every year that we are alive. What else is there to it but that?

And perhaps it is in that sharing so extravagantly in such an everyday way that trips us all. Because we are all a little bit more selfish than we’d like to admit. We are given an opportunity to be less about ourselves and more about others, through our spouse daily (and of course children, but this post is about marriage.)

The Small Things
So I say, focus on the small things that you can share with your spouse. The everyday things. Because they all add up. And because, well, that’s what life is about: the everyday small things.

So here are some of the small things I can think of:

Stories. Listen about his day at work. Ask questions. Tell your adventures, no matter how small.
Food. Eat together. At least once a day. You don’t need to go out on a fancy date. Just whip up your favorite food once a week and indulge.
Space. I mean, give space. Embrace the space between the two of you. Let go of fears, of all that you need to “work” on. Pray.
Dreams. Share your personal goals. Hopes. Cheer him on with his.
Sex. Yes, I said it. Sex. Whenever you can. It’s good for you both. (I need to blog about this topic soon because there are some stuff brewing on my head about this, and why we moms don’t talk about it so much.)
Affection. Just hold hands. Kiss every morning. Hug lots. Touch his face. Look in his eyes. It doesn’t have to be PDA, just genuine.
Hobbies. Pick one or two hobbies that you can do together on a regular basis. This is hard for us, because we are both strong introverts, but we both enjoy walking and traveling.
Memories. Think back often on when you were just dating. Or just think back five years ago. Or the funny moments. Talk about it and have a laugh,
Grace. Withhold judgement. Remember all the ways you desperately need grace in your life. Share that need with your spouse everyday.