I wish I had seen this post a few years ago...

Being an only child and the first in my generation of acquaintances to be a homemaker with children, my images of what my life as a homemaker would be came mainly from blogs. It seemed smart to listen to what other women, several with many more children than I, were doing during their day and find out what life as a homemaker would be like.

I wish I would have read this post, at a most excellent blog, several years ago. It may have saved me months and months of doubt and emotional heartache because I just felt like an utter failure as a homemaker and mother for not being able to create that same blog picture home here, while my baby didn't sleep for more than three hours during his first nine to ten months!
I honestly was ready to go back to work to pay for daycare because I was clearly not capable of doing this mothering thing. I hung in there, thanks to some people who were honest to me. Who told me that, while people may tell you to 'just enjoy this time because they are so tiny only so shortly', it sometimes simply isn't possible to enjoy it, because you are overexhausted. And the only thing you then have to do is love your child and survive. You don't need to love the situation, to love your child.
Seeing what a happy, healthy boy my Joseph is, I must have done something right.

I really want to encourage the women further along the mothering and homemaking path to be true Titus 2, 3-5 women:

"Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored."

Please encourage us to love our husbands and children, by showing us the beauty of being a homemaker IN the chasing of crumbs, the overexhausted days, the giving up of hobbies and sometimes even of our brain. My world has always turned around words, and sleep deprivation actually robbed me of the ability to find even the simplest words like 'fridge'. And I did not expect it. I didn't know being a mom and a homemaker was like that.

Many young women of my generation never had a real homemaker as a rolemodel. I tumbled into homemaking expecting hours to scrapbook, embroider pretty towels, set my table with linnen napkins, always have 5 shirts ironed for my husband, ready with full make up and perfume to greet him with a kiss when he came home while happy children crooned around my skirts exclaiming 'papa, papa' showing him the homemade cards and cupcakes we had made during the day.

And I am sure some glorious days will be like that. I have had days of utter contentment, playing with blocks after all the chores were done in a snap, towels folded, dinner in the crockpot, hair pinned in a pretty do and just happy, to enjoy my little boy. I have had a few days of that. But mostly I have had mere moments of that, in between chasing a todler, chasing crumbs, trying to cut up bell peppers for supper, to add to storebought sauce while someone is tugging at my leg saying 'mama, mama, mama' a hundred times over....
And I have days in which it all seems to fall apart and I am just whispering to God "please give me patience, please give me patience" in an unending prayer to just get through the next hour.

By now I accept this. I've adjusted the picture and I learned to love the reality. But I was very close to giving up on being a stay at home mother and homemaker all together, because I wasn't able to pose next to the 'glamour shot' of homemaking that I found in several blogs.
Sometimes it is easier to hang on if you know that you are not the only one who just found a five day old moulding banana hidden in the pan you were about to use for dinner for which you are already late, while the child you love more than life itsself is trying to get on your last nerve by tugging on your arm incessantly..
Or IS that just me?