Hi, friend! I am so glad you have stopped by my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll take some time to look around and join our wonderful community of moms here as we learn to be better moms together!
To my friend Susan, the dirty coffee mug symbolized everything that was wrong with her marriage.
"He'll just leave it on the counter, ABOVE the dishwasher."
Every morning she'd see that coffee mug. And every morning the resentment would grow.
Five years into their marriage, Susan blew up. "I am not your maid! Why can't you just put your coffee mug in the dishwasher like everyone else does?"
Laughter bubbles up from the living room, with my six year old's squeals piercing through the serenity of classical music I'm enjoying. When I look down over the railing onto the scene below, I see my two smallest sons tumbling about like bear cubs, with our newest polar-bear puppy dancing around the pile and occasionally jumping atop the pillows and blankets they've wrapped one another in. They play at fighting, typical boys joyfully expressing theirboy-ness.
Death can provide an exclamation point on a life that was already expressing the glory of God.
My friend passed between that one-day-will-be-thin sheath of death and life and I tried to remember if I'd ever told her how much of an imprint she'd left upon me.
Claire and I shared a small city but couldn't have been more different, back then. She had six children. I had none. My womb was empty -- and sometimes I wore a suit to work. I was fumbling through my twenties, both unsure of myself and also overconfident and she had bigger concerns than her weekend plans. She'd earned her grey hair.
We live in a culture where people are pulled in a thousand different directions. With so many distractions, it’s easy to live in the same house with children and a spouse without really engaging in deep relationship.
In other words, if we’re not careful, family members could become mere roommates
This is my first morning, you guys. My first morning waking up as an empty nester. After a 60-hour road trip from Montana to Texas and back, our son is settled at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. Our daughter and son-in-law are settled at Montana State University. Our house is strangely quiet and free of size 11 tennis shoes consuming every square inch of my kitchen floor.
Tackling the kitchen first, I started putting away all the traveling paraphernalia the car had vomited from the night before. That’s when I saw the Band-Aid on the floor –the one that had been wrapped around my son’s toe because he took a layer of skin off climbing a tree before he left for college.
Only a mom who misses her boy this much could get choked up over a nasty Band-Aid on the floor.
