In my childhood home there was a hand-painted plaque that seemed to watch over one small corner of my growing-up years.
A plaque with the following poem painted:
My Nana, my mother’s mother, had painted it by hand.
It hung in what was supposed to be the dining room of our double wide trailer tucked into the hills of North Carolina, although that room had become my mother’s sewing area because life often decides the true purpose of a room after the house is already arranged.
I can still see it clearly in my mind’s eye.
The curls of my Nana’s unique handwriting.
The soft little mother in the rocking chair near the bottom.
The blue-painted edges.
A tiny shimmery cobweb tucked along one side as if the whole message needed that quiet little reminder of ordinary home life.
It is funny what childhood preserves.
I cannot remember the day I memorized the words.
I only know they have always felt as though they were written somewhere inside me.
I studied that plaque as a little girl with the serious attention children give to things adults hardly notice.
The words settled into me before I knew I would need them.
There is an irony in that memory too.
My Nana was not what I would call a naturally nurturing woman.
She was gifted, artistic, capable, but not soft in the way a child often longs for softness.
I have wondered, now that I am grown, if perhaps those painted words were her own confession.
Maybe there was longing in the brushstrokes.
Maybe a regret she could not quite say aloud.
Maybe a tender wish that somewhere, somehow, she might have known how to mother differently.
Most mothers of grown children can understand that ache.
Even good mothers.
Even faithful mothers.
Time teaches us all how much we did not know while we were in the thick of it.
Maybe that poem helped shape me?
Or maybe it was the baby dolls I longed for and unwrapped with delight every Christmas.
Maybe it was Ma Ingalls in my books, steady and warm, making home seem like something noble and sacred.
Maybe it was the Golden Book Little Mommy, with its sweet pictures of a little girl pretending at the life I already felt drawn toward.
Somewhere deep in my girlhood, before I had the words for it, I knew I wanted to be a mother.
As I grew older, the desire did not fade.
It became clearer.
I wanted children.
Many children.
A home full of life and motion.
A little troop of souls to love and feed and rock and teach and pray over.
When I met and married my husband, I was grateful to learn that his heart wanted that too.
Our first baby came ten months after our wedding day.
A honeymoon baby.
A beautiful daughter with golden curls and the roundest little cheeks.
I loved motherhood before I ever held her.
I loved her from the first flutter in my womb.
I loved the wonder of carrying life, the labor of bringing her forth, the sacred ordinary work of feeding her from my own body, the smell of the top of her head, the curl of her fingers, the little wiggle of her toes.
Motherhood became the shape of my days.
And I loved it.
Five babies came in just under eight years.
There was exhaustion, yes.
The kind that gets into the bones.
The kind that makes a woman forget why she walked into a room.
The kind that leaves her standing in the kitchen with a baby on one hip, a toddler asking for something, another child needing help, and supper still only half imagined.
Yet it was the best sort of life to be spent on.
From girlhood to marriage, there had been this steady longing in me to love babies, to nurture them, to gather them close, to make home around them.
God gave me the desire of my heart in ways I could never have earned.
He filled my arms.
He filled our rooms.
He filled our ordinary days with eternal souls.
I have been a mother now for twenty-three years.
Each season has carried its own beauty.
The baby years.
The toddler years.
The school years.
The teenage years.
The strange and holy shift into mothering young adults.
Every season has asked something different of me.
Every season has taken something too. Motherhood is full of gifts, but it is also full of small farewells.
The old poem was right.
Babies do grow up.
And there is sorrow in that, even when everything is happening exactly as it should.
There is a grief in realizing that the pitter patter of little feet in the hall has become a memory.
That the handprints on the windows once wiped with weariness now seem like sacred evidence that life was bursting in every corner.
That crumbs on the floor were not simply messes.
They were signs of children eating, growing, laughing, living.
I have lived the dream I carried as a little girl.
I had the house full of tiny feet.
The sticky hands.
The baby breath snuggles.
The small bodies curled against me.
The laundry that never ended.
The windows marked by little fingers.
The constant need.
The beautiful noise.
And motherhood has never disappointed me.
Not once.
There were hard days.
There were days I cried.
There were seasons I felt inadequate and stretched beyond myself.
But I have never looked at the life God gave me through my children and wished it had been something else.
The cobwebs of life could indeed wait.
And I am thankful for all the times I let them wait.
I am thankful for the times I sat down when there was work to be done.
For the babies I rocked longer than necessary.
For the stories read past bedtime.
For the little hands I held.
For the breakfasts that lingered.
For the ordinary moments I did not know I was storing up for later.
At forty-one, I became a Mimi.
Our oldest son and his new wife were blessed with their own honeymoon baby, and suddenly the love I thought I knew found a new room inside my heart.
Becoming a grandmother young is a curious gift.
I am still in the season where some friends my age have children under ten.
Some women I know online are still having babies, still nursing newborns, still chasing toddlers through the house.
My own body could still carry a new life itself, but that is not the season God has me in now.
I am crossing into grandmotherhood.
(Or better yet, Mimi-hood!)
Young enough to run, to rock, to laugh loudly, to get on the floor, to answer every FaceTime call from one bouncy baby boy with no apologies.
If that baby FaceTimes me, the world can wait.
The laundry can wait.
The errands can wait.
The cobwebs, if they are still gathering somewhere, can certainly wait.
I am answering my grandbaby.
There is mercy in this season I did not expect.
A renewal of mother-love, softened by time and deepened by memory.
The urgency is different.
The pressure is different.
The view is different from this side.
I know now how quickly babies grow.
I know now that the sticky years are not endless.
I know now that ordinary days become holy in hindsight.
So I hold the moments more carefully.
Not always easy.
Not always tidy.
Not without ache.
But beautiful in the hands of a God who gives gifts we do not deserve and then teaches us, slowly, how precious they were all along.
“Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.” Psalm 127:3
I believed that as a young mother.
I know it in my bones now.
And as I look back at that little painted plaque in my memory, at the blue edges and the shimmer of a tiny cobweb, I think perhaps the words were planted in me long before I understood them because the Lord knew the life He would give.
A life of babies.
A life of letting some things wait.
A life of being poured out and filled again.
A life I would choose again, and again, and again in a moment.
But we don’t get to chose again—that’s the whole message of the poem ♥️
Biblical Womanhood
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