20 posts to encourage young new moms {from 3 years of first-time mothering}

My son turned three last week. Which means I have officially completed three years of day-to-day mothering. I felt like the occasion definitely deserved cake, with pink frosting and sprinkles, of course!

This blogging space has been a place where I have journaled through those three years. Through the good days and a lot of the bad days. The days when I was losing my sanity and the Mondays and the days I actually wanted to remember…and all the days in between.

I don’t consider myself to be any expert mom. I’m not the best advice-giver or encourager. But what I do here at Beautiful in His Time is remind moms that life is messy, they aren’t alone in the mess, and God can make that mess beautiful – even when it’s overwhelming.

So what I’d like to do is bring up some of those archived posts and share them again in one place so that my readers can read, be encouraged, and encourage others.

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1) Let’s start at the beginning with Ezra’s birth story: a planned natural, unmedicated birth turned into an intense painful augmented labor, fetal distress, and an unplanned cesarean section of a big malpositioned baby. Motherhood and I definitely got off to a rough start to say the least!

2) Ezra’s difficult birth threw me headlong into several difficult months fraught with breastfeeding difficulties, severe recovery complications, and postpartum depression. You can read about that part of my mothering story in this post, Reflections on the Darker Side of Motherhood:

3) Checklists, control, and motherhood:  With my expectations and picture-perfect view of motherhood dashed to pieces, I grasped onto controlling every possible thing about mothering that I could, from breastfeeding to parenting styles – and even doing research into VBAC while Ezra was only a few months old! I realized very recently that I was also compensating for my strained relationship with God, which also felt completely out of my control.

4) My slow journey away from attachment parenting tells a lot more about how my desire for control bled into mothering, especially in my parenting style. In this post, I share how I realized that the ideal image I had for my parenting simply wasn’t working for my child.

5) Every feel like what you do doesn’t matter? Like you constantly have to work harder to prove your worth? I faced these lies head on in this post, I do a lot… I matter.

6) “Mommy and Me” ~ The Bigger Picture is yet another post where I learn the same lesson all over again. My ideals of how motherhood SHOULD go didn’t meet up with the needs of my child when I tried to attend a “mommy and me” fitness class.

7) When “mommy breaks” just aren’t enough is a very raw and honest look at how I struggle with introversion as it pertains to both being a mom and being a wife: how I failed one morning to control my temper and got sent away to have alone time, yet it still didn’t feel like enough.

8) After reading #7 you’ll want some comic relief. Real mom offers just that. I actually invite you into my home to see it in all of it’s beautiful mess. Your eyes may never recover, but if you are anything like me, you just might feel a little less alone.

10) My mom-of-a-two-year-old self wrote a letter to my brand-new-mom-who-won’t-put-her-baby-down self in this post, Dear Aprille-who-is-trying-to-be-a-perfect-mommy.

11) When I’m not enough to be a good mother is a post about how I realized how much I needed God to be enough for me after 2+ weeks of being housebound with a toddler due to illness.

12) The illness that inspired me to write #11 also exhausted me to the point of unexpectedly weaning my son from nursing at just shy of 29 months. In How weaning happened, I share how I was originally against “extended nursing,” how our nursing relationship evolved, and how we peacefully and unexpectedly transitioned away from breastfeeding by simply saying “no.”

13) Someone landed on my site by Google searching “how can I tell I’m going to be a good mother?” In this post, I give her my response.

14) In When you’re “too tired to be a good mother,” I respond to yet another {exhausted} Google searcher, sharing with her some of my most tired days of mothering – and how I made it through them, one day at a time.

15) How to be a better mom while being exhausted is probably one of the most practical posts I’ve written for moms, taking my readers through a very exhausting day and how I did my best to turn it around and stay positive.

16) In When you feel threatened by her choices, I step on my own toes and the toes of moms in general, begging us to get to the root of mommy wars: our inability to control our own emotions.

17) Knowing that the mundane matters: a very recent post about how I’m (once again) setting aside my high ideals of what “intentional” mothering should look like and focusing on finding meaning and beauty in simply “showing up,” in even the lowliest of mundane tasks.

18) This post is written for the stay-at-home moms of three year olds, in case you think you are the only mom whose 3-year-old is NOT in preschool. It’s encouragement for the day-in-and-day-out, a call to embrace where God has us even when He has a different path for our friends and those around us.

20) I’ve chosen this post for last because it is far less about my journey as a mom and far more about my journey as a friend to other moms. My two closest friends have boys the same age as my son, but their boys have both been diagnosed with autism and sensory processing disorder. How to encourage a special-needs mom (when you aren’t one) is a compilation of practical advice from both them and myself on how moms of neurotypical children can better encourage their friends. This post has had just shy of 30,000 views and the discussion on the comments is amazing. I believe that every mom should read this post because childhood special needs, diseases, and disabilities are so common in this day. We need to come together and encourage each other. This post is about building community and tearing down the walls that divide us as moms.

I hope and pray that this compilation of posts will be encouraging and helpful, or at the very least, assure you that you are never, ever alone in this life-wrecking, amazing, beautifully-wonderful mess of motherhood.