dear mama: you’re fighting the important battles

Dear mama of strong-willed littles,

This can be exhausting, right? You’re trying so hard to teach these small humans how to behave, how to be people, what is right and what is wrong, and how to choose right over wrong. And they seem determined that you’re not the boss of them. However they say it… fits, screams, sly disobedience, or (like one of mine) outright shouting “YOU DON’T HAVE AUTHORITY OVER ME!”… Well, it makes for long days and furtively consumed chocolate, no?

And sometimes the standoffs can last FOREVER. It’s stressful. It’s exhausting.

But you know what?

These are important battles you’re fighting.

These days feel like the WORST. But really? They’re also some of the best opportunities.

Seriously.

Any time you can handle defiance with calmness, consistency, and compassion, that’s the biggest possible win. You’re actively guiding your people towards right behavior. (And when “calmness, consistency, compassion” ends up being more than you can scrape up? It’s okay. Actually, it’s always more than I can scrape up- that’s where His grace is sufficient for me and His power is perfected in my weakness.)

Good days are nice, right? When everyone behaves reasonably well and keeps a happy heart?

But I’m convinced that the only way to get those with any regularity is by doing the hard work on the rough days.

So I just want to encourage you today. If this is what your life looks like right now, more often than you’d like… soldier on, sister. Don’t grow weary in doing good. Well, I don’t know. I’m weary of it… The rest of Galations 6:9 says, “for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we don’t give up.” So it seems like the important thing is more about continuing, not allowing weariness to beat us. And doesn’t reaping a harvest sound great?

These hard days sometimes can make you feel like you’re doing it wrong. They may even cause people to tell you you’re doing it wrong. But actually? They may just be your golden opportunity to do it right.

There’s grace enough for this.

In case it’s not obvious, this is to me as much as to you. I don’t actually claim any authority to tell you how to do anything. But this is something I need to preach to myself an awful lot, so I thought maybe I’d share.

Published by robininalaska

Robin Chapman is a part-time writer, editor, and birth photographer and a full-time imperfect mama, wife, Jesus follower, and normalizer of failure. She’s trying hard to learn how to do this motherhood thing in a way that doesn’t land the whole family in intensive therapy. She has a heart for helping other mamas buried in the little years with hope, humor, and solidarity. You can find her hiding out in the bathroom with an iced dirty chai, writing and editing and making spreadsheets for KindredMom.com where she is a cheerleader for mamas, or online looking for grace in her mundane and weird life. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska with her four delightful (crazy) kids—some homeschooled, some public schooled, some too young for school at all—and her ridiculously good looking husband, Andrew. View more posts