On Balancing Motherhood and other Priorities

Written by Jenn, Contributing Writer

**special note from Rachel: Jenn has been contributing for a little less than 2 years. She has shared her heart, tips, encouragement for mothers, frugal budgeting tips and so much more. Her very first post way 9 Ways to Improve your Health and 2 of her most popular posts were 7 Realistic Ways to Eat Real Food on a Budget and How to Rekindle the Romance in Your Marriage. She has been a blessing to me and I hope she has to you. Today is the last time she’ll be posting here, she’s about to have her 4th baby and needs to cut back on writing here to be able to be the wife and mother she wants to be as well as nourish her own blog. I hope you’ll continue to follow along with Jenn over at The Purposeful Mom!

The world seems to pull us in a lot of different directions, doesn’t it?

Oftentimes having several different directional “options” at one time makes life rather complicated. For the last couple of generations, we’ve been told that we can “have it all”. A career, family and fun, with nothing falling to the wayside. Sadly, that’s a lie. At least the way the world sees it.

I actually do think that it’s possible to spend time doing all of these things, as long as they’re properly balanced. The trouble is that they’re often unbalanced, and take a guess which one gets left behind the most. As much as I don’t like to admit it, it’s motherhood.

I think if we’re honest with ourselves, we find that it’s easy to pursue excellence in the things that we want to be recognized for. The hope of worldly achievement, whether in the workplace, blogging world or homeschool environment, pushes us to the limit sometimes and our families are usually the first to fall. Who among us hasn’t found ourselves saying, “Just one minute, honey, I just need to check an email,” or “Mommy can’t play with you right now because I need to finish this project”?

That doesn’t mean we should be constantly giving ourselves a guilt trip. But it’s worth it to think about the times we’ve done that and evaluate how often it’s happening and where our minds are focused when it is happening.

Just recently I read a comment on a blog post where a woman said she didn’t have even 20 minutes to spend with her child each day. How sad. It didn’t appear that she felt bad about it but she certainly may have. If something like that is happening in our own lives, in any shape or form, there needs to be a change.

Those changes will come in different forms in each of our lives if the Lord, our children and husband are not getting the most of our energy, effort and time. We may need to pray about ways to cut back on work time. There may be activities that we need to say no to (for both us and our children) in order to spend more time together as a family. The worshipping of some idol in our life may need to be confessed. Don’t underestimate the reward of exchanging the good for the best.

After all, we are called and empowered by the Holy Spirit as Christians to “choose this day whom we will serve” (Joshua 24:15). Most of you know the rest of the verse: “as for me and my house we will serve the Lord”.

Our family, baby coming in October!

The time has come in my life where I need to cut back on something that has turned into somewhat of a distraction from my family life. That something is blogging. After allowing myself to be pulled in too many different directions in this particular area, I have been reevaluating my priorities. It’s not that I don’t enjoy blogging and writing–I love it! But when my attention has been turned more to that than to my family life, I need to take a few steps back.
This will be the last of my posts at day2dayjoys. I have greatly enjoyed the opportunity to contribute here and I’m thankful that Rachel took a chance on me when I was a very new and inexperienced blogger. I’ve been challenged to become a better writer and have been able to reach out to and hear from a variety of people throughout this experience and for that I am so blessed!

If you have enjoyed what I have written here, I hope you will join me over at my blog, The Purposeful Mom. As we look forward to the birth of our fourth child in early October, I’ll be cutting back on blogging there too but my less-frequent posts will continue to be well-thought out and meaningful, worth your time to read as a busy mom! Thank you for supporting and commenting on my posts here as well!

I want to close with one of my favorite poems which I think accurately describes the struggle we have daily as women to live the life God intended us to without compromising His deepest purpose for us, to live for His glory, walking in His will each day.