What's on my Fridge

There's a comedian - a father of four - that tells this joke:

"You want to know what it's like to have a fourth kid?  Imagine you're drowning.  Now imagine someone hands you a baby."

Indeed.

Everyone's sick here.  I'm deeply entrenched in a phase of growth spurts/Wonder Weeks/mental leaps or whatever the current research calls it when babies suddenly have absolutely no idea how to sleep and their mothers lose their mind trying to figure it all out.  Currently I've chosen to drink coffee and laugh  off the lack of sleep...Bananarama's song "Venus" is playing and my two-year-old is putting on a dance clinic.  (Yeah baby she's got it.)

Wow.  What I'm trying to say is, I feel like my sanity and I have parted ways.  I'm drowning.  I'm treading like crazy and trying to keep my head (and the baby) above water.

I'm being dramatic of course.  But let's be honest...everything just seems so much more tragic when you're sleep deprived, doesn't it?  At times like this it's easy for me to look around and feel like I'm failing at mothering.

But I'm learning something.

Mothering is not a set of skills that you can fail at.  It's a heart thing.

The English Major in me likens it to a state-of-being verb like is and are, in which there is no definitive action, just a state of being.  We are hard on ourselves and we try to assign value to Motherhood that does not belong...we make it an identity thing.  Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.  Forgetting to sign my daughter's homework folder doesn't make me a bad Mom any more than doing-the-cutest-Christmas-craft-with-the-kids-and-posting-it-to-Pinterest makes me a good Mom.

The fact that I sometimes mess up simply speaks to my identity as a human, a sinner - prone to serve myself above others.  The fact the I sometimes get it right shows I'm saved by God's grace, and by the power of His Spirit I'm able to love others out of the overflow of love He pours out on me.

And so speaking of overflow...today as I stand here looking at all the laundry baskets, the dishes left on the counter and the clock ticking it's way to dinner time, I'm tempted to let that drowning feeling take over.  I'm tempted to assign value to those jobs of motherhood that have nothing to do with my effectiveness in my ministry here.  And I feel the need to speak truth to my inner self.

Hence the point of this post (Finally!).  Here's what's on my fridge today:

I guess my fuzzy brain just needed the reminder.