Unsupermommy E-Book

Maggie Combs

• Herausgeber: BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 167

Beschreibung

Imperfections are opportunities to receive God's unending strength. No mother can live up to supermommy expectations. Thankfully, God isn't looking for perfection. He's calling on imperfect moms to be faithfully plugged into his superpowers. In Unsupermommy, Maggie delves into expectations every new mom faces—for her baby, personal appearance, housekeeping, marriage, parenting, and more. She shares that by having three babies in three years God used the trenches of motherhood to transform her life, releasing her from the pressure of perfection. Her desire is to see discouraged moms freed from expectations prevalent in society, social media, blogs, and even our own hearts. Maggie's candid motherhood story will inspire you to embrace your own imperfection as a means to receiving God's grace. You don't need to be a supermommy when you rely on a superpowered God.

Leseprobe

Endorsements

“It’s time for moms to step away from the self-help books, the comparison traps, and the lies that flood our minds and hearts. When we begin intertwining the gospel into parenting, it is life-changing for everyone involved. Unsupermommy shows just that, and it’s a must-read for all new moms navigating the road to motherhood. The pages of this book are overflowing with grace and the abundant love that Jesus offers! Maggie offers honest advice and God’s truth as you start on this incredible journey of being a parent. Drink an extra cup of coffee today, tired Mama. You do not want to miss this!”

—KARA-KAE JAMES, founder and executive director of Thrive Moms

“Perfectionism crushes and suffocates. Unsupermommy is more than laser-honest confessions of a young mother’s angst. It’s an invitation to breathe and thrive. These pages are packed with wisdom and counsel that will set you free. Learn to breathe the gospel hope for motherhood.”

—JOANNE THOMPSON, author of Table Life: Savoring the Hospitality of Jesus in Your Home, speaker at Family Life Marriage Conferences

“After battling infertility for three years, we were blessed to birth our sweet son. I knew the newborn stage would be an adjustment, but no one could have prepared me for the most challenging and debilitating fifteen months of my life to follow. From waking close to every thirty minutes for over thirteen months straight, to feeding challenges, to anxiety, to deprivation on every level, I often found myself on the floor, rocking myself and asking, God why? What did we do wrong? Why was it so hard just for me, while others were flourishing? How was this connected to your plan, Jesus?Unsupermommy answers the questions I so deeply wrestled with then and still do today. Maggie Combs shares her whole heart and brings you back to the truth on every single page. She helps us remember that we aren’t self-sufficient and shouldn’t want to be, that we have a Father who first loves us intensely and is using this season to grow an irreplaceable reliance on a fountain that never stops giving. Momma, if you have questioned the Lord in this season of motherhood, please pick up this book and be encouraged, challenged, and blessed.”

—GINA ZEIDLER, blogger, educator, coach, and lifestyle photographer

“What mother doesn’t want to be the best mother she possibly can? I’m not a mother, but I’ve watched this up close for almost thirty years now as my sweet wife has poured her life into our five children, so I can honestly say it is an amazing thing to see the sacrificial love of a mother. But along with the joys of motherhood, Maggie Combs honestly identifies one of the dangers that accompanies this great joy: the temptation to be the perfect, super mommy who falls into the comparison trap that leaves her deflated and battling despair over everything that falls short of the perfect ideal she had in mind. My hope is that God will use Combs’ honest insights to rescue mothers from the pitfalls and free them to experience more of the joys of motherhood, to the glory of God!”

—BRAD BIGNEY, senior pastor, Grace Fellowship Evangelical Free Church in Florence, Kentucky, and author of Gospel Treason: Betraying the Gospel with Hidden Idols

BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC

Racine, Wisconsin, USA

BroadStreetPublishing.com

UNSUPERMOMMY:Release Expectations, Embrace Imperfection, and Connect to God’s Superpower

Copyright © 2017 Maggie Combs

ISBN-13: 978-1-4245-5411-9 (hardcover)

ISBN-13: 978-1-4245-5412-6 (e-book)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Copyright © 2000, 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Stock or custom editions of BroadStreet Publishing titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, ministry, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

Cover design by Chris Garborg at www.garborgdesign.com

Typesetting by Katherine Lloyd at www.theDESKonline.com

Printed in China

17 18 19 20 21 5 4 3 2 1

To my husband, Wes, who always believed this was God’s plan for me.

Contents

 1

Embracing Imperfection:

Step 1 — Give Up on Measuring Up

 2

Releasing Expectations for Baby’s Sleep

 3

Releasing Expectations for Feeding Your Baby

 4

Releasing Expectations for a Superbaby

 5

Embracing Imperfection:

Step 2 — Get Connected!

 6

Releasing Expectations for Your Appearance

 7

Releasing Expectations for Your Housekeeping

 8

Releasing Expectations for Your Free Time

 9

Releasing Expectations for Your Purpose in Life

10

Embracing Imperfection:

Step 3 — Charge Up

11

Releasing Expectations for a Superdaddy

12

Releasing Expectations for Parenting Together

13

Releasing Expectations for Your Marriage

14

Embracing Imperfection:

Step 4 — Ignite with God’s Superpower

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Embracing Imperfection: Step 1 — Give Up on Measuring Up

Have you ever met a supermommy? Her baby sleeps soundly, nurses happily, and meets every milestone ahead of schedule. She tosses her perfectly wavy hair over her shoulder as she tidies her already sparkling house with nontoxic, organic soaps while her sweet cherub plays quietly with a wooden teether on a knit blanket on the floor. Naptime is just long enough for her favorite hobby and a spunky exercise routine. Her doting husband arrives home in time to kiss her cheek and pinch her baby-weight-free behind before playing with the baby while she creates a healthy and delicious dinner.

If we’re honest, we all want some of that supermommy life. Unfortunately, it’s a fantasy. It’s time to be transparent about our real lives and give up on measuring up to supermommy standards. Trust me, embracing an imperfect life as an unsupermommy serving a super-powerful God is joyful freedom.

This book won’t instruct you how to do motherhood perfectly. I won’t tell you how to raise your child, but I will push you to let God change your heart. You’ll discover how the gospel offers redeemed imperfection and more of God even if you’re failing by the world’s standards. If you’re pregnant, your heart is full of lovely desires for how your motherhood will look and the kind of home your child will experience, but if you’re already a mom, you probably know the brutal truth: motherhood often feels like failure upon failure.

The world around us is filled with bloated expectations for moms. Even though logically you probably know that no one can live up to those standards, it’s nearly impossible not to internalize them. These standards aren’t all bad on their own. It’s the assumption beneath the standards—that we can control our circumstances—that’s fatal to our joy.

But there is hope! You may not have the ability to succeed at the expectations piling up at your feet, but God’s strength is mighty in your weakness. He has more than enough power to connect to when you discover that you just aren’t strong enough. Ultimately God’s goal is not to enable supermommies, but to develop us into women whose humble hearts earnestly love and desire more of him.

I’m a fairly new mom myself. I had my first baby five years ago. Then I had two more, for a total of three boys in just shy of three years. Only God could orchestrate such chaos. With the first two boys, I experienced not infertility but delay in getting pregnant. We knew we didn’t get pregnant easily. We were wrong. My second son was only five months old when I took a pregnancy test on a whim after some morning queasiness. I needed to put my mind at ease. So much for that!

I’ve had three newborn baby experiences in quick succession. I’m not reminiscing fondly from ten years down the road; instead, I’m soldiering through the endless loads of laundry, a constantly messy kitchen, showerless days, and sleepless nights right along with you. I don’t have this all figured out. God is teaching me his truth as I write. I’m not a perfect mom, and I’m not an expert, but I have to speak this word: Dear Mommy, don’t live in shame for being pushed beyond your limits. You can break free from unnecessary expectations and embrace imperfections covered by God’s superpower.

Here’s What You Don’t Know

My dad loves to remind me, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Let me tell you, I had no idea what I didn’t know about the spiritual impact of being a mommy. When I was pregnant, everyone told me the first year would be rough, but no one explained why. Now that I have done it three times, I’m starting to figure it out. The problem with motherhood is that you’re starting from scratch with everything. I didn’t know the first thing about taking care of a baby. I had a major learning curve there. Even if I had been a baby person (I’m not) or a full-time nanny for ten years (I wasn’t), I would have been completely unprepared for the real trial: identifying the good desires of motherhood that are usurping the best desire—knowing, loving, and glorifying God.

With the birth of her baby, a mother also births an entirely new set of desires for her life. Some of these new desires come from the lengthy set of expectations our society has for mothers. A pregnant woman is inundated with expectations from her doctor, fellow moms, friends, parents, blogs, baby websites, social media groups, and pregnancy books. She develops a master plan for motherhood, full of the grandiose expectations she has willingly (or sometimes at the insistence of others) adopted to fashion the best life for her baby. It’s more than a birth plan; it’s a life plan, and it feels awesome and untouchable.

Then baby comes and one or all of her plans don’t work out. Now mommy feels like a failure. Of course, she’s not really a failure! She’s just a real-life imperfect woman, with a unique child, whose perfect plan needs to be adapted to meet their combined needs. The real trial stems from her reaction to her circumstances; when a mom lets her expectations become more important than God’s plan, her good desires can develop into something ugly.

God explains it best in James 1:13–15: Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” forGod cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

James explains that we can’t blame God or Satan for our temptations; they stem from our desires. God doesn’t say “evil desires,” which means even our good desires can trip us up. Desire gives birth to sin—oh, how appropriate for mothers. We have so many desires—for ourselves, our children, our husbands—and they’re good desires!

The problem is allowing our good desires to reign unchecked by our desire for God. A good desire starts so small that you can’t even feel it growing inside of you. As that desire grows, it starts kicking against everything around it. Eventually you can’t think about anything else anymore. Everything you do is impaired by it. Sound familiar, pregnant mommies? Unchecked desires become expectations, and expectations become wants, and wants become needs. When something we feel we need goes unmet, we sin to get it.

Sin doesn’t feel justifiable for a simple desire, but a need deserves drastic measures. This is the conundrum of the Christian life: we can never completely escape the growth of our desires into needs. Paul David Tripp calls the word need “the sloppiest, most all-inclusive word in the human language.”1 There’s an endless list of needs for our babies, our husbands, and ourselves when we allow our desires to become more important than God’s plan for us.

The hardship of motherhood isn’t our strenuous circumstances; it’s our stubborn hearts. Before motherhood, I knew what my normal sin patterns were: worry, need for the attention and approval of others, and pride, just to name a few. Despite these sin patterns, I had always been capable to perform any job given me in my own power. Then I underwent the colossal lifestyle modification of wife to mother, shifting my desires and revealing new sin patterns. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t able to meet simple expectations, and I fought endless emotional battles to win back the feeling of being capable and productive. No matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t manage to measure up to either the world’s standards for moms or my own standards for how I thought motherhood should go.

Unfortunately, this didn’t lead to victory but to discarding the one thing I truly needed: more of God. The hardest part of becoming a mom isn’t the loss of sleep or crazy hormones; it’s the raging unchecked desires for our new lives overtaking our desire for God. It’s the grasping, endless pursuit of the unreachable goals for our babies, ourselves, and our husbands.

We know the problem. Now we must search out solutions.

This book outlines specific, good desires for your baby, yourself, and your husband. We’ll walk together through unplugging from some common expectations in motherhood that are commandeering the throne of our heart. We are weak and fallen. We will never be perfect moms. We will fail every day. But he gives more grace (James 4:6).

God is grace and mercy, perfect love, and complete rightness. When we get mothering wrong, God gets everything right. His power is stronger than all our weakness. God’s grace is sufficient for our tasks, redeeming of our failings, transforming of our attitudes, and abundant enough to always surpass our expectations. God’s grace is always greater than our imperfections. It’s time for us to give up on measuring up and fall into the faithfulness of our super-powered God.

This book will also walk you through four steps of fully embracing your imperfection as a means to God’s superpower. We’re already working on Step 1 right now: Give Up on Measuring Up. God doesn’t want our self-made supermommy. He wants to use our failures to give us more of him: For when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Corinthians 12:10). Let’s embrace our weakness as the ticket to God displaying his strength in our lives. Let’s release the control of raising our children into the hands of the One who loves them infinitely more than we do. Then we can move forward in our imperfection, expecting God’s super-powered grace to redeem it for his glory.

Let’s begin with believing the gospel: Jesus came to sacrifice himself for all our sins and imperfections. The grace offered to us on the cross is all we truly need for this life. When our hearts are filled with his unending goodness to us first, we don’t need to grasp at our expectations. If God is sufficiently big in our lives, we no longer worry about measuring up.

Jesus measured up for us on the cross. If we keep the throne of our heart filled with Christ, there’s simply no room for expectations to promote themselves as more important than God’s perfect plan. Will you join with me? Let’s start by giving up on measuring up. Then we’ll let go of our expectations, embrace imperfection, and accept God’s grace for the perilous journey of motherhood.

Let’s become unsupermommies together.

An Unsupermommy’s Imperfect Plan

1. Give up on measuring up. Accept that God doesn’t want you to be the perfect mom.

2. Actively trust God to meet all your needs.

3. Expect to receive God’s superpowers in your moments of imperfection.

Releasing Expectations for Baby’s Sleep

Five years ago, I was very pregnant with my first big baby boy. As I eagerly awaited his birth, women felt compelled to rub my burgeoning belly and regale me with incomprehensible tales of newborn baby sleep … or lack thereof. They warned me that my baby would wake up every four hours to eat. I couldn’t even comprehend the exhaustion of spending thirty to forty-five minutes awake to feed my baby several times each night. In my ignorance I assumed it wouldn’t happen to me. I read that newborns slept sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Surely I could manage a total of eight hours if my baby was getting eighteen! I knew my baby would sleep through the night in six to eight weeks. I could handle anything for six weeks, right?

I had no idea.

Then Isaac came. He was not the soft, cuddly, cooing lamb I expected. He was a lion, ravenously hungry and constantly roaring. When he awoke, he was up. He would sleep an hour, then be up for at least two, sometimes three, before going back to sleep. I spent endless hours rocking him, singing old hymns with a quivering voice as tears streamed down my face. Between fluctuating hormones and sleepless nights, I hit rock bottom.

The relentless tears only perpetuated my exhaustion. In my desperation, I searched for hope in the wisdom of the world. I figured there must be a sleep method that could help me overcome this first obstacle of motherhood, but I couldn’t get him sleeping long enough to put one into practice. I told my husband I was drowning. Poor man, there was almost nothing he could do. He tried to lull Isaac back to sleep, but because he couldn’t provide Isaac with any food, it rarely worked. It had to be me. I did what a mother was supposed to do: I got up and rocked my son over and over while my heart rebelled with anger and unbelief.

Around ten months of age, Isaac began to sleep through the night occasionally. Sleep got better from there, until I had my two babies within thirteen months of each other. I have not had consistent, good sleep for over two years. That’s what happens when you get pregnant five months before your baby is ready to sleep through the night. Some say the feeling is hard to describe, but I found a word for it: exhausted. I told my husband, mom, friends, and especially myself several times every day, “I am exhausted.”

I had a two-year-old and a six-month-old and was struggling through the first (exhausting) trimester of my third pregnancy. I had every reason to wallow in my exhaustion, right? Wrong. It took an immense act of trust to give up the word exhausted, but I released it to God. He would see my need; he would fill it.1

Guess what happened. No, I didn’t stop being tired, but I stopped feeling the emotional turmoil present in the word exhausted. Instead I relied on God’s mercies, new every early morning. Great is his faithfulness.

Sleep Is a Big Deal, but God’s Power Is Bigger

I know, mommies, we need sleep. God wired us this way. Sleep consistently reminds us that we aren’t God. God doesn’t need sleep but we do. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep (Psalm 121:3–4).

Sleep is not important because we need it, but because God doesn’t need it. One of the purposes of sleep is to humble us and remind us that we aren’t God. If we fixate on how little we are getting, we miss the point completely. Our sleep, or lack thereof, should constantly remind us of our need for God’s power to sustains us. We must obsess less over our rest and expect God to provide.

Weren’t we talking about expectations for your baby getting enough sleep? Your baby’s sleep and your sleep get so