Ambition

Recently, a friend asked me what my goals were for the next year. I mumbled something about a trip to see my brother and finding a preschool for KK, but really didn't know how to answer the question.

Being a stay-at-home mommy doesn't look very ambitious. It looks more like endless dishes and snacks and meals. It is finishing the laundry, only to find that another load has been created in the time it took to wash, dry, fold, and put away. It is cleaning up the mess in front of me, just to turn around and find twice the mess behind me. It is waking several times in the night and then trying to selflessly care for selfish little people all day.

Staying home with young children is so all-consuming that it is easy to feel like I have no ambition... until I get asked about my goals, and I mumble the wrong response, and I wish I could go back and change my answer.

Now, I realize that I'm not a full-time stay-at-home-mommy, since I do work on the weekends, but I call myself that because of where my focus lies. I really feel called right now to have my focus at home. Not to simply provide for my family's physical needs and clean my home, but to really know each person and to make our home a place of rest and healing.

Mommying doesn't look very ambitious because my goals are not the kind that you can complete and then check off the list. They are ongoing goals that I will never fully meet. Here they are in random order:

- To spend quiet time with my Lord each day so that we are walking side by side.

- To be a good steward of our finances, budgeting carefully and paying off our remaining student loans as quickly as possible.

- To find contentment in the present.

- To thoroughly dust my home, at least once, on purpose.

- To make time each day to look into my children's eyes when they are talking to me and really hear what they are trying to say.

- To interact with my kids in a way that builds a healthy self-esteem into them.

- To teach my kids how to be under authority, so that one day they can understand their place under the authority of God.

- To carry my daughter from one room to another, when she asks, more times than not, just because it makes her happy.

- To make my kids laugh at least once every day.

- To guide them and teach them in a way that is individually suited to their personalities.

- To keep in touch with and support my friends.

- To keep my freezer stocked with prepared meals so that I can deliver them to a friend at a time of need (as my friends have done for me).

- To love my husband the way that he receives love and to the depth that he loves me.

- To always show my husband respect, even at the very rare times that he doesn't deserve it.

- To support my husband as he transitions from school to career.

- To figure out a way to get my daughter to eat (hey, I can dream, can't I?)

- To do my physio exercises so I can be free from my daily back pain.

- To recognize that this job is hard and that some days, it's OK to just make it through the day without hurting anyone.

This is me at my high school graduation, full of ambition and dreams, with great plans for how I was going to succeed in life. (And out of control eyebrows, but that's another issue).

Where is that girl now?

She's still here. She's not been ignored or neglected. She has set certain dreams aside for the meantime, but only because she's trying more and more each day to focus on what really matters, right now. She doesn't lack ambition or drive. She just has her attention focused here at home, where it matters, right now.

She is mom.

And the three other people in her home, who matter the most to her in this world, are very happy about that.