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I’m starting to raise sympathetic eyebrows everywhere we go since I now have more than the requisite two kids. “You have your hands full,” strangers comment at the grocery store.
“Here, let me help you.” Knights rush in everywhere to hold doors for me.
Just recently, at a checkout line, a father with one older daughter tagging along beside him looked at me trying to juggle three kids and a full cart and smiled, saying, “Don’t worry. It won’t always be so hard.”
I always appreciate the support and I know everyone means well, and sometimes I need to hear it’s going to get easier. Being the mom to what I gently refer to as “three little black holes of needs” can be physically exhausting.
But you know what I’d also like to hear every once in awhile? That this season of motherhood isn’t some lengthy penance, that I’m not “paying my dues” for days of freedom ahead.
I’m fortunate because all of my family and friends are very supportive of me being an at-home mom and my openness to new life. The same holds true with most of the strangers I encounter when my brood makes a public appearance.
Occasionally, though, I have to deflect a derisive zinger. Like: “You want more?” I even had a mail clerk tell me she’d pray I’d have a boy next time so I could be “done.” And who knows? Maybe I am done. I don’t know how God’s plan for my family might unfold.
Still, it irks me that there seems to be this constant undertone in society that being a mom to little ones is just me “doing my time” and that one day I’ll collect my “get out of jail” card, and I’ll be free again.
I just don’t like the idea that my kids are burdens to be emancipated from and shackles that tie me down.
Of course, there’s a ceiling to my martyrdom. I often say I’m taking life one day and one child at a time. That’s all God asks me to do...
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