Motherhood: The Survival Continues...

Yesterday was my daughter's eleventh birthday. She is my diva, she is my clown and she is the reason most days someone in this house is smiling, laughing, or if you are her little brother you are crying.

Man those two are like monsters together.

These are my three loves in my life:

Aren't they just adorable? Well let me explain something to you. This blog is titled Learning to Survive and even though all the post lately have been about the potential of surviving cancer that is not the only thing in my life I have to survive. I have to survive being these three little "angels" mom!

I used to think when they were babies that I survived the hardest part of my life. I had carried the oldest for 9 1/2 months and endured a gruesome 36 hour labor where it took 3 hours to push to no avail and had to get an episiotomy to be able to deliver her. The second one I carried exactly 10 months ( I knew her due date was accurate because she was the only one we planned and I knew my date of conception and she was born exactly on her due date) and even though her labor was only 5 hours of laughing, joking and sharing my love of the soap opera: "Days of Our Lives" with my Obstertrician who had no other patients that day and sat in my room with us the entire time I thought I overcame the worse with her difficult pregnancy. We went into pre-term labor with her at 5 months, I kept fainting with her pregnancy and was put on a 4 month bed rest with her. And then there is my son. Oh the one my husband had been waiting for since by the time he was born my husband was over run by estrogen having a wife, two little girls, a female dog and the house looked like a giant bottle of pepto bismal had exploded everywhere because you could not turn around without finding something pink everywhere. His pregnancy ran just a day or two over the 9 month mark. You see I developed diabetes with his pregnancy and they were fearing he was going to be a very BIG BOY! As you can see by this picture of him where his jacket is ten sizes too large he never has been and I am almost positive he never will be a BIG BOY. I was induced much to my husband's dismay on the 22nd (We named him after Michael Jordan and my husband wanted him to be born on the 23rd because that is Michael Jordan's number and in my opinion he had no say since I was the one with the bowling ball in my stomach!) and with my son's birth my first epidural did not take so I had to have two epidurals, I had my two best friends and my husband cracking jokes during my pain and misery and none of them even noticed my silent cries in the background of their noise until the nurse pointed it out. My son was born, whisked away after I held him for less than a minute and put him an incubator in the NICU. Once my babies all were about 6-9 months old I thought wow I went through all the sleepless nights, the incessant diaper changes, the screams of shots, the endless doctors appointments and so on and so forth. Wow my life from now on was going to be a cake walk. My kids were going to be perfect angels, my kids were going to be each others best friends (mind you I had not even thought about homeschooling for them but I thought they were each less then 2 years apart so they were going to be the best of friends), I thought my kids would see me as the perfect mother like I thought of my mother as ( I completely forgot about my teen years when I thought I knew more than my mother ). I thought my husband and I would go on beautiful date nights while the kids stayed with a trustworthy teen who would be our babysitter and I thought my kids would never, EVER do anything wrong.

Wow I must have still been high on the epidurals to think that?!?!?! Let me tell you all what motherhood really is. Motherhood is being a referee to your kids. They fight! They fight all the time!! So and so took my toy, so and so looked at me funny, so and so called me a booger-face doodie head! Motherhood is being a nurse when your kids are sick to their stomach and are vomitting every two seconds for 24 hours. Motherhood is being an educator and that is for all mothers not just the ones who are crazy like me and choose to homeschool three kids. We have to teach our kids respect, we have to teach our kids compassion we have to teach our kids how to do chores, cook and the most dreaded of all when they are potty training how to wipe their own behinds! Motherhood is being a taxi driver and taking your kids from one activity to the next. Motherhood is all about being selfless because guess what? These sweet looking, smiling faces forget that the world does not revolve around them and that they need to say thank you for all that you do for them. Motherhood is also about being a counselor when your child's heart gets broken from a fight with a friend or a bully who said mean things to them. You are also their mother first and not their friend first. This one is hard. You have to be the one who tells them things like it is and not how they may want to hear it. You have to say NO when deep down you desperatly want to say YES because you know it will make them happy. You also can not go and dress in their clothes, hang out in their room with them and their friends and talk about boys because they will scream: "MOM YOU ARE SO EMBARRASSING!" You learn that lesson fast after the first scream when you tried to see if they were Team Edward or Team Jacob.... LOL

Motherhood is hard. It is a survival at all times. But it is so worth it. My life wouldn't be as wonderful as it is if it wasn't for the joy my kids give me. The love they show me. The respect and compassion. Being a mom has been the greatest job I have ever had even when it seems the hardest as well. Even though I love my children I do not mother them for my own sake or even for their own. I know that sounds bad but it is true. These three blessings were entrusted to me to care for them by God and I know one day I will have to answer for them as to how I handled my job as a mother. The Bible tells us in Colossians 3:23 "Whatever you do, work heartliy, as for the Lord and not for men" ESV. I am surviving in my motherhood abilities because I know one day I will stand before the LORD and he will ask me what I did with my blessings. Did I raise them to know Him? Did I raise them to work for Him? Did I raise them to honor Him and bring others to Him? If I have then I have succeeded in motherhood and I can take comfort in knowing that when the bad days come when they are either embarrassed by me, they are fighting with me or one another, or they just feel that they know more than me I can know one day if I raised them to be Godly then I did my job right.

Mothers out there take comfort and allow me to share my ALL time favorite passage from the B-I-B-L-E with you: "And it came to pass...." The bad times did not come to stay they came to pass. Just as the good ones as well. When you are having a day where you understand and can relate to why some mothers in the wild eat their young remember that it came to pass and just ride it out waiting on God.

Be blessed HIM!