HappyMama

A happy momma is what I am if you give me 5 minutes of solitude & quiet to reflect on my life!  I am living a life freely chosen.  Both marriage & motherhood are far more difficult than I once imagined them to be, but there’s no question that this is the path I carefully discerned and freely chose.  In the midst of all the noise and busy-ness of my daily life, I often lose sight of the beautiful, bigger picture of my existence, and I become frustrated, edgy, angry, or some other negative state.  I get caught up in the little things, like:

• the 2-year-old decides he wants to go potty standing up like his big brother (instead of sitting down) and somehow loses control and I witness a fire hose spraying every direction except in the toilet bowl;
• meanwhile I hear the baby start crying in the kitchen, so I hurry in there to find that he’s pulled a half-eaten bowl of cereal down from the table, spilling it on his head;
• the 4-year-old has begun his daily game of 500+Questions and wants his answers NOW:  “Mom, are there thieves in our town?  What do they look like?  Mom, what is a carpenter?  Mom, do you know what a baby armadillo is called?  Mom, will there be cars in heaven?”

And it’s only 7:30 in the morning.  I just have these moments when I feel incapable of meeting everyone’s needs.  But these moments are fleeting.  Most of the time, I just wander from one need to the next, enjoying one moment and then the next.  Like yesterday afternoon I was sitting down nursing the baby and we were having a little conversation back and forth - baby talk - and he starts to laugh and spits out milk all over me.  A few minutes later, he looks me straight in the eye and smiles, then starts to bite me… I said, “NO Biting!” And he smiled again and backed off.  He understands exactly what that means.  And he listens.  Because he wants to keep nursing.  And I want him to keep nursing.  It makes for one happy momma.

I’ve resumed taking Mom’s Night Out on Thursday nights.  We have two perpetual adoration chapels in our area, and I stopped in last week while I was out.  When I pray, almost always the same words come out:  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.  But thank you, thank you!”  As today’s 2nd reading says so perfectly,

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
{Col. 1}