The Brave Art Of MotherhoodSample

Fighting for Every Inch of Time

As my oldest daughter nears adulthood, I am realizing that the art of life, of motherhood, happens when we exhale and cherish today while we also seize the moment, the inch of time today, and move ourselves forward to reclaim who we are meant to be. 

For so many years I went through the motions. I got busy with motherhood, learned to accept reality as unchangeable, and existed. I didn’t have a fire to appreciate that inch of today. Instead I took it for granted. You probably do that too. 

At a certain point, the inches will run out. Time will pass and the urgency to change will either shrink or disappear into lives where we settle.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my college-aged kids to be sitting in their hip coffee shop, chatting with their friends about their mom, and saying, “Yeah, my mom, she was a good mom, but she settled.” 

Nor do I want to sit with my friends when my home is an empty nest and say, “I just don’t know who I am anymore.” 

You are worth not settling. 

But you have to decide not to assume that you always have tomorrow to do what you need to do today. I know you didn’t intend to forget yourself. I know you want to be happy. I know you want to fight for your heart. I know you want to rightly order your life. I know you want to have that deep bravery and sense of purpose. I know you want to rediscover your passions from your childhood. 

It’s not that we’re trying to forget ourselves. We just get busy. 

And it’s so easy to lose track of time in motherhood. It’s even easier to overlook the importance of our own hearts. 

I know I did. 

Stop saying, “I’ll get to that tomorrow.” That’s your first task. You owe it to yourself, your family, your friends to live without fear and with wild abandon. You owe it to yourself to get to everything on your tomorrow list today. 

Whether you have one child or fifteen, are married or divorced, are wealthy or poor, have direction or none, you can recapture time’s inches in life. 

You are worth fighting for each inch today. 

When do you most often say about something for yourself, “I’ll get to that later”? And with that something, how can you make today different?