Hello my dear, and welcome.
This is meant to be a collection of pearls of hard-won wisdom that I would like to pass down to my daughters when they are up and running their own families and figuring out how to juggle all the innumerable tasks involved in motherhood. I would like to spare them some of the pain that I had to go through while discovering motherhood all on my hard-headed own. I would like to guide them away from the false lights that seem to be lighting the way only to disappear altogether, or, worse yet, to lead you into a swamp or to the edge of the cliff, leaving you more desperate and hopelessly tangled. My hope is to start by a rough draft, and then fill it into some sort of an impressionist painting of what is involved in motherhood. This is the first attempt in planning the composition, figuring out the lay of the land, first faint strokes of pencil.
The rough areas that I am planning to cover are, first of all, you, your mindset, and how to take care of your sanity. It is your family’s most precious possession, and it has to be protected at all costs. After all, “if Mama ain’t happy, no one ain’t happy”. This will be a big part. Then the nitty-gritty – how to streamline taking care of the baby so that it doesn’t kill you and leaves room for doing other things. Then the other things – how to acquit yourself of household tasks quickly and effectively. Then kids – disciplining, teaching, guiding. Resolving conflicts. Inspiring. Then a bunch of things on homeschooling. On virtue and character formation. And finally, the book section – both the review of reference resources that I found helpful or otherwise, and some book reviews on the kids’ books. I might be forgetting something important, and I am sure some other areas and issues will come up and crystallize as we get deeper into it.
Some things are going to come into focus before others – and that would most likely be the baby part. It is so fleeting, and now I fear might be my last chance of drawing this particular part from nature! Little Mary-Rose is already almost three months old, even now the beginning is starting to fade, like the reverse polaroids in Memento, and it is a very important part. Forgive me, my friend, if it sounds like a stream of consciousness – I will get to edit it much later. Right now, I can only justify 15 minutes a day dedicated to this endeavour. So stay tuned, baby coming up over the next few posts. In the meantime, get some sleep.