Mama friends, this book is for us. It is for all of us who share the story of having our hearts and lives wrung dry and filled full from raising littles. It is the gift you should put in every baby shower bag from here to eternity.
Here is a snapshot of my own motherhood journey and why I think Surprised by Motherhood: Everything I Never Expected About Being a Mom is a life-line of truth and hope to every woman who has ever mama-ed.
When another car crossed the center line and slammed head on into my mother on a humid Carolina June evening I thought the story was over. I thought that my days of being a daughter had ended as abruptly as her life.
A little over three years before that night my father's heart had given up it's lifelong fight. I'd clung to my mother for the tether a child's heart needs. She had been my anchor when the storm had tossed all of us hard on the rocks. When my Dad's heart gave up my Mom's heart beat stronger and it found her on her knees in the wee small hours prayers, on beyond early morning drives to work to put food on the table, her journals full of Scripture and hope that kept us afloat when the world wanted to drown us.
There I was un-anchored and uncertain in the worst sort of way at the age of twelve.
My untethered teen years found me wondering what it was like to be normal, to be like all the other girls butting hormones with their own mothers. I wish that someone would have warned me about how the grief would find it's way out through the cracks of a broken life in the most unexpected of places.
Fast forward a decade...It was early fall and I was piecing together handmade decorations for our tighter than tight wedding budget. I remember telling my sister-in-law over the phone, a motherless daughter herself, that I felt lost. That was one of the first times that grief snuck up on me. It blindsided me with the force of how much I missed her and the way it found me floundering and gasping for air.
Six years later and an ocean away from home in West Africa I found myself stretched body and soul and pregnant with our daughter. I was in total denial. Not here. Not now. I was the epitome of "surprised by motherhood".
It wasn't that I didn't want to have children. No, I never quite felt that way. I was convinced that I had been disqualified. By the time my first daughter was born I had been twenty years an orphan. Twenty years of being an outsider to the parent-child relationship.
Every question I ever had about my mom and mothering flooded my mind. I knew the mechanics of pregnancy and birth. I'd labored with women through the night as a birth doula holding hands, rubbing feet and nodding "Yes, you can!" to mamas exhausted and nearing the finish. It was everything after which terrified me. It was the knowing that birth is never the end and only just the beginning of the weary-wonderful ride of motherhood.
In the wee smalls of a January morning I bared down and my girl entered the world superwoman style with one hand over her head- a certain prophecy over this girl.This time I didn't pack my doula bag and get back in the car to make the drive home and collapse in my bed. This girl was my own flesh woven with DNA as thick as the Southern accents that run back a dozen generations in my family. She is a part of me and has rarely been a part from me since that day.
The surprises of motherhood began in a cement room where roosters crowed outside of our lappa curtained slat windows and nuns sang across the yard every morning, and they have continued every single day since.
Millie was born wide-eyed and got sent back from the nursery her first night for "disturbing the peace". She never slept. All the books and methods ever preached fell flat when tried out on Miss Millie. Her disregard for schedules and sleep brought me near the edge of lunacy. I've still not recovered entirely.
All the while God was breaking me and remaking me, teaching me what I had forgotten because I was so long an orphan. He places the orphans in families. We're programmed to think that means we get one as a child, but for me I've been placed in a family that is my own and I am the mother. Mine is a life come full circle.
Whatever it is you think disqualifies you from motherhood- be it a failure, a loss, a shame, a grief so big it has seeped into every corner of life- let me say with your beautiful face cupped in my hands and with eyes locked, "Your story isn't over."
I'm so blessed to share bits of my story with you and my friend Lisa-Jo has written a book that is her story and battle cry of truth over the harder than hard moments of motherhood. I love this book like I love chocolate. <------{Click to tweet} Seriously ya'll, that means a whole lot coming from me. Says the girl that just polished off some brownies while writing this.
She wrote it for herself. She wrote it for us.
She wrote it to be the one to say our stories make us into mothers and even if motherhood doesn't initially fit like our favorite pair of jeans (even worse makes our favorite jeans obsolete) we can find our way to better, fuller, realer versions of ourselves.
Surprised by Motherhood: Everything I Never Expected About Being a Mom is a gem and that is why I want to invite you all to cheer Lisa-Jo on today by grabbing a copy of her book as it launches. She has labored long over this new baby of a book and today we all get to join with her in the joy of it all.
If you want a book that will wrap you in a superhero cape of courage to keep going in this motherhood journey then this is the one. It is filled with the Word and her own story from a woman who has such a gift with words and weaves stories like a cherished blanket. If you're like me your leisurely days of reading are gone, but I promise this book is not to be missed.
You can download a few chapters by going here, but I promise you'll want to read the whole thing.
Watch the trailer with a box of tissues. Seriously, get the tissues.
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