Finding Hope, Calling, Purpose, & Adventure Between the Mess & Mom Jeans of Motherhood
Today, as I write these words, it’s January. The start of a new year. And I can’t help but think about all the things I want to do this year. I’m thinking about how I want to show up, who I want to be, how I’d like to serve. I find a note in my journal about all the beautiful, wise, wonderful mothers I know and my prayers for them. There are so many of us dealing with anxiety and mental health concerns. So many of us lonely. So many carrying far too much for far too long, so many burdens we were never meant to carry.
We don’t want to be naggers, pryers, overbearers, controllers, but sometimes we don’t know any other way.
Sometimes we don’t know how to show love, take care of the people we love the most and keep all the plates spinning for everything and everyone without nagging a little. We tend to think everyone else has great big fancy lives and we’re the only ones dealing with serious obstacles and challenges in our marriages, relationships, minds. We feel left out and spend way too much time and talent faking all kinds of things just to fit in. We wish everyone would stop faking it—ourselves included.
We worry about money. We look for someone to smile at us, to nod when we tell a story. We use screens to babysit our babies and teenagers even when we don’t want to because work has become the driver of our days. We need a creative outlet but wonder if we’ll ever have the time and what’s the use anyway.
We wonder if we’re ever really going to discover all life has for us.
We know motherhood doesn’t have to be a drudgery. It doesn’t need to be a boring slog from dirty dishes to piles of laundry and back again. Some days, we just don’t see any other way.
We want to find life, hope, and adventure in the midst of our mess, mom jeans, and disappointments.
We just need a little inspiration to remind us what’s possible. I find inspiration in the words of other moms.
Like these:
“If everywhere you look these days, it’s wintery, desolate, lonely, practice believing in springtime. It always, always comes, even though on days like today it’s nearly impossible to imagine, ground frozen, trees bare and spiky. New life will spring from this same ground. This season will end, and something entirely new will follow it.” (Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet)
And comfort in words like these:
“Divine Substance—which is your only Reality—provides abundantly. But you must ask. Ask for help, supply, guidance, Grace. Ask for the Power to be switched on. Ask to catch the flow. Ask to soar. Ask. Ask. Ask. . . Ask to be surprised by joy. . . Get excited. Open your arms as wide as you can to receive all the miracles with your name on them.” (Sara Ban Breathnauch, Simple Abundance)
And companionship and sisterhood in words like these from Alexandra, a writer mom I met during our full-time traveling days:
“I panic. It’s what I do. Not to toot my own horn but I’m actually very good at it. It’s not something I’m proud of, though. So when it comes to parenting a young child I try and lean away from the rising anxiety and worry and fear that compounds itself into Panic (yes, with a capital P), take a few breaths and reevaluate a situation before sounding the alarm bells. . .”
But my friend Alexandra perhaps has more of a right to panic than most of us.
Last year, her beautiful, brilliant toddler stopped talking properly for no reason. Then she stopped being able to use her arms and legs, and they found themselves searching for treatment and a diagnosis for the next 3 months. Now, one year later, she’s digging through her notes to write a beautiful blog series for parents, documenting her journey to a diagnosis and beyond. She publishes it beautifully in daily posts and sends an email to her readers every day through the 89-day journey. (You can read along and sign up for the emails at RaisingNashville.com.)
I wrote to Alexandra to thank her for the work she’s doing because it’s important work. Because as women blogging the way we do for other women, we know we’re not going to get a paycheck or even that many responses from readers.
We do it because we love it, because we feel called to it.
But we’re not always sure it’s helping anyone other than ourselves. And I know how good it feels to hear from my own readers, so I just bet she loved hearing how much her daily blogs have impacted me.
Living part of our purpose in this season makes such a difference.
When I think about my own journey to publishing a book and various magazine articles and blogs, I realize my collection of stories about finding life, hope, calling, purpose, and adventure in the midst of my mess, mom jeans, motherhood, appointment, and disappointment has changed me and changed with me.
In the past, my years seemed to be defined by changing my mind over and over and over again, living life somewhere between stuck-in-a-rut and running-from-reality. Then, like a flash, with the help of a few good friends and a few new kinds of books, soaking in new kinds of wisdom, and pushing myself past a few self-imposed boundaries, I started finding my calling, my place, my peace, and Togetherness Redefined was born.
Now, for the past three years, I’ve been settling into my stride and trying out everything from personal growth coaching and online program teaching to self-publishing and consulting (and even a little website building for fun). Raising teenagers into young adults. Running my own business. Facing my failures, choosing my marriage and family over external praise and subsequent burnout, seeking healing from the anxiety I’d been ignoring for years, and realizing that learning never stops and no one has it all together.
A dedication to get my stories down not because they’re unique or original—just authentic. They’re not my stories alone. They’re just stories that matter. Just like yours.
Your stories matter, too. So, my dear friend, I have to ask you, where are they?
Please tell me they’re at least in your private journals. Please tell me you’re getting them down. If not, start today. The world—your world— needs them.
Here’s how I know: My mom passed from this life way too young, and it’s her journals that I’m most thankful she left behind. A true, soul-filled, authentic piece of her that will live with us as long as those pages are preserved.
Where are your pages?
Please, please write them, save them, leave them where the people you love can find them when your days on earth are done.
They are a treasure with a value inestimable.
(Yes, even if you’re the lone male reading this blog thinking writing is just for women. It’s not. We need your stories, too.)
And if writing isn’t your thing at all,
What if you could be true to yourself and your purpose and calling in some other way?
We ask ourselves:
➳ What if I could stop trying to be/do/have it all and get still enough to listen to my true calling?
➳ What if I made time to step into that calling a little bit each day?
➳ How different would I feel this time next year?
➳ What would I need to move out of my mind, off my heart, and away from my calendar to make it happen?
At the end of last summer, I read a book by Rha Goddess by the name of The Calling. It’s a book on my list that came highly recommended, but I avoided it for months before finally purchasing it in desperation, looking for something, anything, to help me get out of the mess I had gotten myself in.
I was working way too much, living way too little, constantly finding myself unable to do life the way I wanted to—working nonstop, hiking very little, and only seeing my family in a daze of tired, jaded haze, feeling more like a computer-nerd tornado than a real person. I was killing it at work—more productive for more clients than ever before, earning more money than ever before, and constantly on Zoom calls or in deep focus mode like the software engineer I always knew I could be.
But something kept nagging at me reminding me this wasn’t the life I wanted to live.
It’s amazing how we get ourselves into these messes sometimes.
In fact, I was living the exact opposite of the life I wanted—totally negating the reason I had turned my family’s life upside down over and over again to move to Acadia National Park after living in an Airstream for 7 years, embrace minimalism, and travel. And yet, here I was after that amazing experience sailing headlong into a life I loathed. I had more excuses than anything—my kids are teenagers so they don’t really need me like they used to, the money is really great so I wouldn’t feel good about passing it up, these organizations really need me so I don’t want to let them down.
And yet, I was dying inside, spending day after day stuck at my computer for far too long, night after night barely hitting the pillow before I fell asleep, and morning after morning dreading my alarm.
Rha’s book did the trick, evidenced by the fact that, as I entered the final chapters, I had already gathered strength I didn’t know I had to end a consulting contract I never should have entered.
It was over.
I had learned to be brave.
I was free, and I set about enjoying my life again. And yet, here I am again with a choice to make.
Here we all are with a choice to make.
➳ What will we do this year?
➳ What kind of life will we create?
➳ Will it be one we can feel good about? One that serves the people we love? One that empowers and inspires? One that’s really, truly us?
➳ Will we spend our birthdays hiking in France? Greece? Ireland?
➳ Will we finish our manuscripts? Publish our blogs? Get brave enough to pitch a literary agent?
➳ Will we launch our kiddos toward their dreams—even when it makes us uncomfortable?
➳ Will we love our partners, husbands, families well?
➳ Will we speak up when we feel disrespected?
Will we really live?
Will we step away from other people’s expectations?
Will we step toward our calling, our purpose, the thing we were put on this planet to do?
Or will we get quiet, play small, and pretend to like jobs, foods, places, activities, and movies we don’t really like just to go with the flow?
The choice is ours. Ours alone.
I’m choosing to be true to myself—to find out what that means and do it.
I’m starting today.
What about you?
➳ What are the things you’ve been feeling called to do for ages but haven’t gotten around to doing yet?
➳ Where do you want to spend your birthday this year?
➳ How do you want to look and feel — who do you want to be — this time next year?
Don’t let this call to passion be a cause for melancholy.
We’ve got enough causes for that these days.
Instead, let this be a call to lean into the people who love you like never before, to show up as the real you, and to see the beauty of your mom-jean life.
➳ Plan the trip.
➳ Write the book.
➳ Bake all the things you’ve never baked before.
Whatever your thing is, do it.
It doesn’t have to take you away from your family. If I know anything about you, it could never do that.
(Just the fact that you’re reading this right now tells me it could never do that.)
Love your family, be there for them, AND be there for yourself, too.
It’s not an either-or.
I could go on about this for days. (I’m realizing that maybe I already have in a long list of blogs about the topic.) Instead, I’ll leave you with these words from Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance that—I kid you not—popped up on the open page today just as I was editing this piece and getting ready to hit PUBLISH here on this blog:
“Perhaps the heart of our melancholy is that we miss the woman we were meant to be. We miss our Authentic Selves. But the good news is that even if you have ignored her overtures for decades (‘Wear red. . . Cut your hair . . . Study art in Paris. . . Learn the tango. . .’), your Authentic Self has not abandoned you. Instead, she has been waiting patiently for you to recognize her and reconnect. Turn away from the world this year and begin to listen. Listen to the whispers of your heart. Look within. Your silent companion has lit lanterns of love to illuminate the path to Wholeness. At long last, the journey you were born to take has begun.”
What’s right in front of you today?
Start there.
And know I’ll be doing the very same thing, too, cheering my heart out for both of us.
Want more?
➳ Start your own new season of personal growth today.
➳ Read a whole stack of really good books.
➳ Get a copy of the Togetherness Redefined book and share it with a friend.
➳ Hop in the email group to get fresh encouragement in your inbox every Friday morning (and hit reply to tell me how it’s going).
I’m incredibly honored to be walking this way with you.