Blog — Praises & Life

I inwardly giggle when my kids complain about the toughness of life, or when they take issue with the fact that sometimes I let things be hard. I giggle because they have no idea really of all the “hard” I spare them. I was thinking about it more tonight. How things are like that between me, and God. Sometimes I grumble and complain about the toughness of life, and I feel upset that God allows some things to be hard. I have no idea, really, about all the hardness He spares me from. Maybe the virus he flicked away at...

In February 2017 my marriage came to an end.  I'm not here to get into the details ... those are private and involve too many people for me to share.  But I will say, at the time I had a 6 month old and a 2 year old, and I was scared beyond belief.  I'd given up my career to be a stay-home-mom, as was my hope and dream.  I didn't want to give that up.  But I knew I couldn't depend on my children's father to support us when we weren't even together anymore.  I *certainly* couldn't afford to...

When I got married in 2009, we were blessed with several lovely sets of dishes as wedding gifts.  When our divorce was finalized in 2018, those dishes (along with some other wedding-gift-type things) became a source of pain and sadness for me.  I'd tell myself how silly it was, and yet, I couldn't quite shake the emotions I had every time I thought about how different my life was, the first time I ate off of that plate or drank from that mug. Nevertheless, parenting solo, I wasn't going to do something frivolous like buy myself new dishes when the...

On the day of Valentine's, it's fun to talk about love -- one of my favourite conversations to have with my kids is "what does love look like?" Depending on the day, they tell me it's pink hearts, or maybe unicorns, or sometimes they say that you can't "see" feelings so love is invisible. To me, in truth, you CAN see love, and it's not glittery or pink. Here's what it looks like: - it looks like making heart pancakes when I'd rather sleep - it looks like breathing deep and praying when I'd rather get mad - it looks...

This is hard to say.  But it's true. Some days, I'm not a very good mom. Those days, I DON'T do my best. And while I appreciate all of the wonderful friends who are quick to reassure me, "it's okay, you're human", I always have to be careful to ensure that doesn't become a trap, letting me off the hook day after day. Because the thing is, it's NOT ok to be cavalier about damaging the hearts of our children. Whether we intend to or not, whether parenting is hard or not, we just can't see it as "okay". The Middle...