I Can... Will I?

Yesterday I could not take my eyes off my little baby boy rocking away in his swing, fast asleep--his perfect little nose, his floppy cheeks, the peaceful look on his face with his eyes tight shut.  So much beauty I can hardly take it in.  My heart can hardly hold so much love.  And then I thought of God, and how we are made in His image and likeness.  If this is His image, I was thinking, how great must our God be!

As I have been reading and reflecting on the book A Mother's Rule, I have been skeptical about the amount of time she devotes to prayer and scripture study.  I can hardly believe that that could fit into a mother's schedule, especially a mother with more kids than me and who homeschools.  At first I doubted that it was possible, but then I became afraid, afraid that God might be calling me to make more sacrifices in order to invest more time into my relationship with Him.

I have become accustomed to excuses, as a mother.  A priest told me in confession not to feel bad for being late to Mass because I had a baby.  I often felt faint during pregnancy or was physically unable to kneel during Mass.  My prayer is constantly interrupted by a child.  As moms, we know that our lives do not look like nun in a convent, and sometimes a half hour of quiet prayer is an elusive pastime or a rare luxury.  We have so many reasons to not be able to hear everything said at Mass or to find that we have had difficulty entering into prayer, mind and heart, for months.  I often long to express all of my feelings of inadequacy to a sister in Christ with the hope that she will tell me it is ok... that it is to be expected that I would not be accomplishing more.  However, this book seems to do the exact opposite, not in anyway to discourage a mother who is seeking to live out her faith and to lead her family in holiness, but to challenge her to make decisions and to grow in diligence so that she actually can do more and have more peace in her relationship with the Lord. 

Instead of a pat on the back and a keep doing what you are doing, I am seeing more and more that often the lack of order in my day is not just due to dirty diapers and unpredictable risings from naps.  So much is due to my own lack of self-discipline, the little decisions that I make to lay in bed for twenty more poor quality minutes of sleep after a morning nurse instead of jump starting the day, or of trying to do more than I know is possible in an allotted amount of time and then paying for it with rushing Agnes to bed way too late or leaving my husband with dirty dishes as I go off to nurse or go somewhere for the evening.  I can do better if I want to do better, but it means that I will have to grow in self-knowledge and self-control. 

For some reason, my daughter is up from her nap after 30 minutes and is not going back to sleep, so I am cutting this off without finishing to practice what I am talking about!!  Self-control and first things first!