Being Mrs. Mom™

Woman, Wife, Mother

You are here: Home / Mrs. Mom’s Blog

Mrs. Mom’s Blog

Why do we struggle with identity

By 4 Comments

As women living in today’s society, it so hard to identify ourselves.  I can personally say that I have been through this.  Often times, life wants and tries to identify me by what I’m currently doing, how many children I have, my work status, and even my husband.  While all of these are apart of who I am, they are not my identity.

If this is true, why do we struggle with it and how can we overcome it?

Studies have shown, that women are relational by nature.  We want to connect, deeply, with others. Yet, we generally fear that we are too much for those around us and once those in relationship with us realize it, they will run away in fear, leaving us relation-less.

Due to this relational nature and our desire, we tend to dive completely, heart first, in to our relationships and endeavors. By doing this, we find that we care deeply for the people that we care for.  We find that we want to nurture and help them to be the best that is humanly possible.  We take the opportunity, while in relationships with others, to cultivate our love and compassion for them throughout our relationship.  We want them to know how important they are.  In essence, when women love, we love hard.

These loving relationships, if we are not careful, can begin to completely consume us.  And this total immersion into the who and what, that we are into, begins to become how we identify ourselves.  We become proud of our connections and work.

Remember, when we love we love hard.  Do you know anyone that, when they truly love a person or thing, hides it.  No, you don’t because it doesn’t happen that way.  Love proclaims, I love _____.

So what is the problem with this?

Well the problem is that things and people change.  They were never meant to be the indenting factors in our lives.  We were never intended to mimic or display the characteristics of a person or a thing.  Not our husbands or our children.  Not our jobs or our passions.  No matter how great they are.

When I was first married, I had completely lost my identity.  I, like many other women, love my husband passionately and this caused me to immerse myself in who he is.  However, this total consumption of him, continually, caused me to forget who I was.  While as a wife, I was called to take on my husband’s name and cling to him, I was never called to become him.  Together we become one, but this is through a process of continually becoming the unified couple that God has joined together in Him.

Not becoming him.

Identifying myself by my husband, left me lost, hurting, and confused.  It also brought problems into our relationship.  I had to begin to learn who I was again and what it meant to be me.  Thankfully I had help with this.

Yet, my help was not one that many would think of.  It came from God.

Because of how lost, broken, and confused I was, I began to cry out to God for help and He led me to His Word.  Through it, I began to see that I could be passionately in love with my husband and still be me.  The me that God created me to be, not the me that I was trying to be for my husband.

I began to learn that God had created me a certain way and this complimented my husband, children, relationships, career, and so much more.  I began to understand that my identity in Him was more important than any other identity that I would ever attempt to take on.

Today, my husband says that one of the reasons why our marriage works is because he is he and I am me. 🙂   However, the struggle to get here was…well hard.

Now how did I get from point A to where I am now?

It was not easy.  I had to begin to let the Word of God consume me.  Some people thought that I was changing, but if I am to be completely honest, I was.  I was changing from the rejected, fearful, and confused little girl who the world and situations had created, into a confident, loved, and courageous woman who God has always known that I was.

I did this one day at a time…one page at a time…one prayer at time.

It’s like the Bible says in Isaiah 28:10 ,

…precept upon precept,

line upon line,

here a little there a little

Yet, at that time, I was in such a hurry.  I thought that if I did not hurry up, I would never become…me.

The truth is that God loves me so much that He was going to make sure that I was completely identified by Him.  His plan was never to leave me the way that I was, so I had to learn to trust Him.  The process has been difficult and I continually find that life attempts to define me, but I trust in Him.

The situation for you is that same.  He loves you too.

If you have read my blog for some time, you know that I have a few favorite scriptures.  One of them is 1 Peter 5:7

casting all  your care upon Him,  because He cares for you.

This has always reminded me that no matter how unloved I feel, I am loved.  No matter how much I want to hold on to the situation and take care of it myself, there is a Great and Mighty God that wants to do it more and He does it a lot better than I ever could.

Today I want to encourage you to take that first step in solving the issue of displaced identity.  Read Psalm 139 and see what the Lord says about you.  Think about how it makes you feel when you realize how much He loves you.  Do you see how He sees you?  How can it change how you see yourself?  Take a moment, a piece of paper, and pen.  Write out your thoughts.  This is how your process with begin.  With looking at God and becoming aware of your own feelings & emotions.

I look forward to hearing from you. Leave me a comment below and share your thoughts with me on this topic.  If you don’t want to share below, just send me an email at info@beingmrsmom.com

Remember, you are loved.
(watch this)

5 Reasons Why You Don’t Always Have To Be Strong

By 2 Comments

My entire adult life, I have been married and a mother.  I had to mature very quickly in order to fulfill my role as mother and wife. I remember when I was a child, I wanted to hurry up and become a grown woman.  I didn’t know that it would come so soon.

However, when the time came, I stepped into my shoes as mother and wife.  I did my best in everything and I learned how to be strong.  Over time, being strong began to take a toll on me.

My friends seemed to think that I didn’t need encouragement or a helping hand because, I was always doing those things for them.

It wasn’t that I didn’t need it.  It was something completely different.

When I was in the first year of my marriage and had just had my son, I had an encounter. This encounter would begin to shape my life for years and I didn’t understand why until recently.

At this vulnerable and very impressionable stage in my life, I turned to a minister that I thought could help me.  I thought he would lead my husband and I, as we traveled the road of learning to be great parents and spouses.  In my heart, I longed for a word that would show us how to walk with God and with one another.

This leader would speak into my life at various points. I remember going to him because I had found that I was different from my peers at the time.  They were all single and doing things that 20 year olds do.  However, I was a mother and a wife.  I was in the military and I owned my own home.  I had more in common with the 30 and 40-year-old women, than I did with the women that were my age.  His advice to me was simple.  He said show yourself friendly.  If you want a friend be a friend.

That is exactly what I did.  I was there for people as I had wanted them to be there for me, but when I needed them, they were not there.

I have to admit that their unavailability, allow God to be there for me more and more.  However, I began to build up this aspect of myself that had to be strong because if I became weak, no one would be able to help my friends and my friends wouldn’t be able to help me.

I couldn’t understand why thing were this way, but I never gave it any thought until one day.  My family and I were over 2,500 miles away in a new state.  I didn’t know anyone and no one knew me.  I started thinking about all of my relationships and my desire to have people in my life that genuinely cared for me as much as I did for them.  I saw that when I was strong and helpful, people clung to me.  However, I also began to realize that those types of relationships were not healthy for myself of my friends, so I began to make some changes.

When my friends would call, I would listen more.  When they awaited my answer to their problem, I asked them questions about what they were going to do.

At the time I was also going through some training as a Rehabilitation Counselor and I was learning that there is power is asking questions that are not leading.  I started telling myself that in order to truly build up my friends, I had to back off and allow God to do His work through the Holy Spirit in their lives.  I could not solve everything for them.

Setting Boundaries

I stopped answering the phone at 2 o’clock in the morning and worrying about how they were going to fix their lives.  Instead, I fell on my knees and I prayed for them.

When I wasn’t able to handle their lack of desire to do and be better, I said so and then asked them what they wanted me to do to help them.  If their expectations where what I could handle, I did it.  If they weren’t, I simply stated this.  I had to make sure that my friends understood that I was being strong for them, but in another way.  I was setting some healthy boundaries.

Do you know what happened?

My friends started to grow up.  They no longer expected me to be strong and they began to make better choices in their own lives.

Thinking on this helped me to realize that so many women are always trying to be strong.  We are strong because it is always projected that in order to be great you have to be the stronger one.

Why do we fight it?

In our society, it is never encouraged to be the weaker vessel.  Why?

They say that only the strong survive.  They also tell us that what we want, is to survive.

Well, I want to challenge that thought.  I want to thrive.  Not only do I want to thrive, but I want to live  because I am alive.  I am not dead and avoiding death is not the sole purpose of my life.

This is why so many women have trouble submitting to their husbands.  They feel that if they submit, it means that they are weak.

YES!!! It does.  It means that you and I are the weaker vessel in our marriages.  We should be proud of that fact.  What woman, honestly, wants to be married to a man that is weaker than she is?  He could not protect her or their family.  She would have to do it all.

If we are to be honest, in order to thrive as a married couple…be prosperous and develop well, as a married couple, we all have to love each other well.

Do you know that it wasn’t until I took this stand in ALL of my relationships that my quality of life began to improve.

Here are the 5 things that I learned.

1. Always being strong drains you

I found that being strong left me with little energy.  I had to be strong enough to listen to people’s problems and to solve them.  I had to be strong enough to take what they threw my way and not flinch.  I had to always be ready.  This was tiring.

2. If you are always strong, you leave no power for God’s strength

You have probably heard this before, but I am going to tell you again.  God has given us strength for this life, but He also knows that there will be specific points, where He will need to be strong for us.  These times allow Him to show us how much He cares for us.

“For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” 2 Corinthians 2:10

Yet when we cover up our weakness and pretend to be strong through it all, we leave no room for Him to be God in our lives.  In our strength, we tell Him, “I don’t need You to be strong for me.”

3.  Being strong all of the time tells everyone else in your world that you don’t need them

Just like our strength communicates to God that we don’t need Him, other people in our lives begin to receive the same message.  They feel that they are not strong enough to help us because we have it all taken care of.  We make them think that we are super human, when in reality, we struggle just like they do.

4.  Always being strong can lead to pride and pride leads to a fall

When we are always strong, we can begin to fool ourselves in to thinking that we don’t need anyone.  We feel that no one is capable of helping us and with this, pride begins to move into our lives.  Pride can be very dangerous because it takes away our ability to see all of the needs that we have.  The only way for us to recognize those needs is for something to happen, the fall…

5.  It might be someone’s else turn

Have you ever thought that perhaps your strength was standing in the way of someone else being strong?  I didn’t until it happened to me.  I had a friend that was really strong.  She was so strong that she would not let me help her.  I had never been that way, but her actions caused me to wonder if my other friends had perceived me as such.  I waited a while for an opportunity to show her how much I cherished our friendship, but that opportunity never arrived.  I had asked to help and volunteered, but she never would take any type of help, encouragement, or friendly gesture of caring through gifts.

This relationship showed me that sometimes it’s just not our turn to be strong.  It might be someone else’s turn to be strong and we need to back off.  From then on, I wanted to do my best to allow my friends to be strong for me and I would continue to do the same thing, when needed.

If you don’t get anything else out of this, I want you to know that you don’t have to do it all or be it all to everyone.  All you have to do is be you and give this life all that you’ve got.  Your strength is not who you are.  It is a quality that you possess.  It also does not define you.  You are so much more than one word, strong.  There is great value in you, but in order for you to see it, you’re going to have to step out of your own strength and into God’s strength.  There is a time and place for everything.  Just know that when you decide you don’t want to be strong, there is still greatness in you.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.  Please leave me a comment below or better yet, email me at info@beingmrsmom.com

If you find that you enjoyed this post and would like to stay up to date on my writings and encouragement, make sure to subscribe

Are You Successful?

By 2 Comments

Are you successful?

Do you feel successful?  Why or why not?

If you answered no…what would it mean to you if you could, honestly, say yes?

 

For a long time, I struggled with this question.  In my mind, I had always known what it was that I wanted to do and that I would be successful doing it, but as my life and the dynamic of it changed, my idea of success changed.

Let me preface this… I am about to talk about something that I have not talked about publicly before, not to this degree, anyway. Ok.  Now that I’ve said it, let’s get into it.

For a long time, I found myself in a place where I thought I was enough.  I felt capable of doing what I was called to do and I had the education to do it.  However, due to what I had been taught, I went to those who were in authority for approval and, well, they disapproved.  They didn’t disapprove because they had tested my knowledge or life skills.  They disapproved because of two reasons.

  1. They did not know me
  2. I did not have a piece of paper to prove that I was qualified

This world is full of standards, I do understand why, but sometimes those standards disqualify the very people that have been qualified by a higher power…God. On the pathway of qualifications, wordly standards crush people.

In his book, “Read for your life,” Pat Williams talks about education.  He says that the normal masters degree requires a student to read a minimum of 50 books on one specific topic.  After reading these books and immersing herself in the topic, the student is then required to write about the topic.  This writing, proves the degree to which she has learned the material.  From there, an educator, who has assigned the readings, takes the writing and examines it.  When this process if finished, if to the standard set, the student is given a masters degree in a specific topic.  She has now been deemed an expert in her field.

After reading this, I once again felt the need for validation.  Isn’t that what the process of obtaining a degree is all about?

However, Pat Williams put a different spin on this, without disqualifying the necessity of education itself.

Before we go any further, let me ask you a question. Has your level of education had an impact on what you believe you are capable of doing? If your answer is yes, why? Keep this answer in your mind.

Pat Williams said that the average American does not read at all.  They spend so much time watching television and doing other things, which do not educate them, that to be an expert in a specific field, in relation to our peers, requires very little.

Ok, ok…I’ll explain.

We are going to do a little bit of critical thinking here.  Make yourself a promise.  Say, “I will finish reading this article.”  Go ahead, say it.

Did you say it?

Now…

If A is true, then B is true,

If B is true, then C is also true

This means that A and C are both true

It will make sense in a moment.

Here is A:  According to the world’s standards,  a person who spends time immersed in books, reading approximately 50 of them, studying, and researching a specific topic is an expert.

Do you agree with that statement? Is it true or false?

My answer is yes, A is true.

Here is B:  Statistics have shown that the majority of people in America spend little to no time reading, on any given topic.  They spend more time immersed in electronic games, making a living, and social activities.

Do you agree with this statement?  Is it true or false?

My answer is yes, B is true.

Here is C:  If an individual spends her time immersed in books, approximately 50 of them, reading, studying and researching a specific topic, regardless of the lack of certifying authority, she has now become an expert.

Is C true?

My answer is yes, C is true.

If we are to think on this topic logically, both the individual with the certifying authority and the one that lacks the certifying authority are experts.

So why, was I so easily disqualified?  It was because my expertise was not recognized.  No one at the upper level of that industry had taken the time to examine my qualifications for authority.  Instead they dismissed me and ultimately, I disqualified myself.

What is your purpose?  Why are you on this earth?  Are you living out your dreams?  If you answered no, why not?  Have you disqualified yourself?

For almost 10 years, I allowed those words to echo in my head.  I felt that I was not enough.  I often times attempted to convince myself that I was, but I had not been allowed to do what I was called to do because someone didn’t invest the time required to investigate my knowledge.

In many ways, I felt unsuccessful.

I never disqualified myself as a mother or wife.  My teacher was experience and no one was going to tell me that she had not done well in teaching me the best way to be me for my family.

However, this same message did not permeate into my vocational purpose until I was working on my masters degree and they told me.  What did “they,” the educators tell me?  They said that everything I needed to accomplish what I had been placed on this earth to do was in me.  I just needed to make sure that I continued to obtain the wisdom and knowledge of those that had walked this path before.  This would keep me wise and maintain my level of expertise. I needed to keep doing what k had always done. Read, research, and study.

Now, in all that I have said, I am not advising anyone to out and begin practice professions in fields like psychology and medicine because someone could be hurt and it is illegal to do so without that certification.

What I am saying is that it is time for you to stop disqualifying yourself based on individuals who have not checked your credentials or tested you to affirm that you are capable of walking in your purpose.

It is time for you to stop questioning who you are, what you possess, and your capabilities.  Stop questioning God.

My journey through discovering who I am has brought me to a place where I no longer allow people to tell me something other that what God has already told me and what I know to be true.  I had to decide that I am successful and no one can determine my level of success but me.

This was not an easy conclusion to come to.  There were many obstacles in my way, but I have realized something.  I am not the only one that has had this experience.  It is a problem among our generation.  It is plaguing us and trying to tear us apart.  We are all beginning, and for some continuing, to take the words that someone has spoken over us to mean that we are of little value.  We have said to ourselves, “I am not enough.”

But guess what!!! I am not going to stand by any longer and watch you do this to yourself.  I am doing something about it.

I have decided to establish a company that focuses on helping you become your best.  I am taking all of the skills and resources that I am able to put together, for you.  I want you to realize your value, potential, and worth.  I want you to be successful so that you can do what you were put on this planet to do.

How am I going to do that?


That subscription is not for this blog.  It is for the business that I am launching.  If you would like updates on the services that I will be offering, with you in mind, subscribe.

I am also preselling my course “Discovering Your Pathway to a Life of Success.” It deals with topics like this and so much more.  The pre sale will end on February 29th and then the price will go up.  I am only accepting 50 people, so if you want to be apart of this course, please don’t wait.  I will be reaching out to everyone who signs up to find out what their struggles are, in this area.  From the information that I gather from the group, I will be adding additional content to the course.

What does that mean?  It means that this course is different from many other courses out there.  I want you to begin to grow as you find what it is that your heart has been searching for, purpose.

I want you to be in a place where you are successful because you feel successful.  I want you to live a Life of Success.  Take a moment to review the course, Discovering Your Pathway to a Life of Success and if you know someone who could be helped by it, share it with them.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.  I hope it has blessed you and I pray that God would continue to give you all that you need to keep moving forward.

Leave a comment below on your thoughts or send me an email at info@beingmrsmom.com

I look forward to hearing from you.

What am I worth

By Leave a Comment

I have to remind myself of this, sometimes, because the world tries to tell me otherwise. I’m sure that it says the same thing to you.

It says that our value is based on what we can do and on what we have. Yet that is not true!!!

Your value is in who God says that you are. It is obvious by the price that He paid, that your value is in Christ Jesus.

His blood brought and paid for you…

Let us not forget how valuable we are.

The Son of God is our value and our worth.
#priceless #broughtwithHisblood #ChristJesus #ChristianWoman #knowyourworth #inChristalone