At the time I am writing this article, I have a 2 year old child and an 8 month old child. For the first time I had to spend three weeks with them without a nanny. Just my husband, I and the kids.

The words of God in the bible have during this period, become much more meaningful to me. I find myself in all sorts of little stormy situations where the Word is the only thing can bring me out successfully or see me through.

LOVE: I have had to sacrifice myself. My life ambition, agenda and everything about me has been put on hold because my children need attention 24/7. It’s like they depend on me to thrive. I literally have to give them a purpose for living. Without me, they do not know what to do with their time, with their lives.

JOY: In between sweeping, Mopping, scrubbing, gardening, cooking three times, teaching, changing diapers and poo filled pants, putting baby to sleep, and so on, it is hard to find time to smile. We want our children to grow up to be grateful, happy people but the reality is that its hard to mirror that attitude to them when you are constantly trying to stop them from killing themselves, going from chore to chore and task to task. It takes the Holy Ghost to put a smile on my face when all I want to do is cry.

PEACE: I have been learning to be at peace with my children. To stop fighting them internally. To embrace their current developmental stages and personalities and all the troubles that come with them. Usually, you can choose friends with certain personality traits that you like and cut off friends with traits you don’t like. However, you cannot choose your child’s personality, you cannot cut off your child because of the personality he was born with. You have to come to terms with it, you make peace with him or her inside.

LONGSUFFERING: Potty Training. Potty Training. Potty Training. Need I say more? If you know, you know.

GENTLENESS: There are times when I know I should scream my head off because my toddler keeps doing the one thing I just told him not to. But then I am reminded that he is only a child and that he does not fully grasp consequences of actions. I am learning to be gentle in my actions and my tone of voice when it would feel satisfactory to rounghen him up a little.

GOODNESS: I don’t mean reacting to them in a kind way. I mean proactively being good to them like deciding to play with or spend time doing something they love with them before they even ask or bother me too much to do it.

FAITHFULNESS: This means showing up everyday. Being there for them every time in all these ways I have written about in this article. No breaks. Being there 24/7 even if it is costing you your time, your relationships, your life.

MEEKNESS: When you introduce yourself as a manager, CEO or even any professional in some company, people respect you, they admire you. But when you introduce yourself as a mother, people wait for you to finish, they listen for you to say something more because in our world today, being a mother is not enough. It is too low a position. You must be the lowest of all for you to be just a mother. Also washing people butt’s is not necessarily a job people covet 😶.

SELF-CONTROL: To do all of these I have written about above while struggling with your strange Mommy-body, perishing-career and spiritual life that is experiencing technical imbalances… It takes the temperance of the Holy Spirit not to give up physically, mentally and emotionally.

Through all of this, I have decided to just keep my head above water. I have decided that I will not drown. Remember Job 14:7-9? It says, “For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.”

I am that tree. There is hope for me. I will bud again. MY. TIME. WILL. COME.