Life Is Not a Dress Rehearsal

   When a woman has her first child, something amazing happens...something new is created that has never existed before. A woman births, adopts or acquires a child, a miracle in itself, and then miraculously she changes into a mother. Something that she never was before.

   How or where do you even get training to be a mother? Everyday life is your training ground. Life on some days is a hard task master and on other days can be the sweetest of all instructors. And when it comes to rearing up the children, there are no dress rehearsals, it's the real performance, everyday, all day. What they see and hear on your stage is what they will perform on their own stages.

   You know what a dress rehearsal is don't you? You wear what you would wear in the real performance, you sing, say, or perform exactly what you are going to do in the real performance, but it's a mock performance. The audience is not there only technicians and the players. I call it the only time you get to boo boo. If you're gonna blow it, blow it at dress rehearsal, not the real performance. But in reality, there is grace for when we blow it, but stuff done and said in front of our childrens eyes and ears cannot be, like eggs, unscrambled.

   The miracle of motherhood brings forth from the woman a beauty that is beyond surface beauty. My mother always taught me, "Pretty is as pretty does". No make up can make up for inner beauty. A beautiful soul DOES  pretty things, not just LOOKS pretty. My mother also taught me that selfish is not part of the mother equation nor is giving up.

   If the mother/child relationship is going as planned, not only should your child be learning from you, but you should be learning from them also. I learned from my oldest that there is more than one way to get something done, she is persistent. My middle child taught me that smiles and laughter in the middle of hurts and disappointments are a strength, and my youngest has taught me to not to ever let go of my dreams. They WILL come true.

   I'm inserting my O right here, I believe mothers loosely but naturally 'know' the course that their child should follow and part of our call, as a mom, is to keep those things hidden in our hearts and pray for them to actively pursue the hidden things planted as we were rocking them and kissing their tiny hands and feet and looking at them in amazement as we wondered what they would become in their futures. That's how we just 'know' when a decision that is being made by our child is a good one or not. We gauge it to the hidden things of our hearts and compare it to the rocking days.

   My mama is the standard that I have to measure my own success as a woman, wife, and mother. She activated and set in motion my motherly skills like how to handle having children from different decades. And how to laugh later at the horrible nightmares that we put her through, that are now part of our family history and story telling. Also how to live off of 4 hours of sleep because her children were sick or hadn't come home yet, there is no sleeping during that time. One trick she learned to make things fun for us that I have passed on myself is cooking breakfast for dinner, we never knew that it was because groceries were low. She could whip the daylights out of us and we still knew that we were loved because she would hold our heads while we threw up and nurse us back to health, stay up all night to sew for us (even our Barbie clothes) and cook every single night for dinner and we sat every night at the dinner table. Yep. My mama is a Proverbs 31 woman.

   She knew there were no do-overs, she got one chance with us girls to form us and send us into our futures and with absolutely no mother conferences or mom support groups to attend she did and still does have the status of "The Best Mother I Could Have Ever Been Given". A dress rehearsal is to see if you can do it, a real life performance is you did do it! And she did do it! I will always be thankful for your gift of love to me mama, I love you!