Baby on the Brain

When a woman gets the news she is pregnant, often times all she can think about is nursery planning, cute clothes and diaper bags.  Trivial things can begin to take over and the focus can be on having a “perfect baby experience” instead of a “faithful baby experience.”  Wise women who love Jesus will see things like a pretty nursery, cute clothes, and catchy names as secondary to Jesus.  Wise women won’t be fooled by the wrong kind of pressure to have a “perfect baby experience” because they will be concerned about the right kind of pressure – the pressure of being a faithful mother.

When I recently discovered we are expecting a baby girl, I was (and still am!!) totally elated!  Hair bows, crystal chandeliers and everything girly invaded my mind for days.  While those things aren’t wrong (after all, they are gifts from God), they can be given a wrong priority in an expectant mother’s mind.  I’m thankful God has gradually brought my heart under the right kind of pressure and I have begun to feel greater concern over something else with this little girl. 

She will look to me as she will to no other woman on the planet.  Her ideas of biblical femininity and godly submission will come directly from my behaviors and attitudes.  That’s scary.  I’m not just creating a sweet little nursery for a precious baby girl so I can have “my perfect baby experience”, no, God is using me to create a woman Who fears His name, Who loves Him more than anything and that is quite a challenge.  We can’t undertake that on our own and that is why I commend the sweet woman at church expecting her first child who recently asked me what young mothers should do to prepare for their child raising years.  In this post, I’ve adapted my answer to her.  Whether you are expecting a baby, hope to at some point or know someone who is, I pray this is helpful to you.

Being a mommy is nothing other than a tremendous blessing and I’m sure you are already feeling that immense love and grace being poured out by God in choosing to bless you with a baby.  But, the sad thing is because we are sinners we mess up things that are supposed to be good.  We take a wonderful gift like a baby and we do things like: 1. complain about how tough it is when we are sleep deprived, 2. put our husband on the back burner and make an idol out of our baby, 3. become impatient, frustrated, lazy [insert your sin of choice here].  I don’t know your particular sin tendencies, but hopefully you can apply this list of things I wish I had done differently with my first baby and somehow find it helpful…

1.  I wish I would have prepared myself for hard work.  Having a baby is a lot of work.  There are many days where you have to get by on 4 hours of intermittent sleep while continuing to do laundry, make meals, and be kind to your husband!  If you haven’t prepared yourself to work hard it is a particularly difficult transition.  Getting 10 hours of sleep a night before baby comes along, watching way too much tv after work, complaining about how hard it is to be pregnant and devoting 99% of your thoughts to what sounds good for dinner is no way to spend the training days of motherhood!  I wish I would have trained myself to wake up a little earlier, spend time with Jesus and practiced how to push through my work without complaining.  By doing so, I would have saved myself the trouble of having to work much harder at breaking those bad habits after baby arrived.

2.  I wish I would have kept the first things first in my relational priorities.  When a baby comes along it can be a temptation for women to totally neglect their husbands.  Since mom is the one waking up most with baby and caring for baby throughout the day, it can become easy to get angry and bitter at your husband because you think you have it harder than he does. Husbands are a huge help (and should be) when a baby is born into a family, but no one can change the fact that babies need their mamas most.  That’s just the way God made them, and instead of treasuring that privilege it can be easy to begin to resent it. If you go to church and frequently have to leave service because the baby is fussing, it’s easy to begin to resent your mommy role and blame it on your husband. If you have a hobby you used to enjoy before baby came along and now you have to give it up to take care of baby, it can be very easy to resent your mommy role and blame it on your husband. It’s really important that in this next season you are entering, you remember – it’s only a season.  Before you know it, it will be gone and you’ll be onto something new. You have to keep the first things first, otherwise there will be a bunch of sin to repent of and an entire season of life wasted.  Treasure your husband and love him on this journey together.  Don’t allow the enemy to get a foothold in your marriage while you are just starting to raise a family together.

3.  I wish I would have had a greater understanding of the deception of sin and how it commonly affects women during the baby phase.  Had I known that having a baby would reveal things in me I never thought I would see (impatience, complaining, laziness, etc.) I would have been horrified!  I would have desperately wanted to heed the warning in Proverbs 27:12: “The prudent sees danger and hides himself but the simple go on and suffer for it.”  I would have wanted to hide myself from those dangers by studying Scripture and listening to other women talk about how to combat those sinful feelings when they arise.  I wish I would have taken complaining more seriously, impatience more seriously…I wish I would have fought my sin more diligently in the days leading up to having a baby and in those days after baby was born.  I wish I wouldn’t have sat in judgment over people who sounded flustered with their kids and thought to myself, “I’ll never sound like that!  I’ll be a perfect mother!” but instead realized that when I silently complain in my heart about waking up for the fourth time in two hours, I am showing the same impatience to my child.

4.  I wish I would have enjoyed the time more!  If my eyes weren’t focused on how hard I had it, I would have seen how wonderful it really was!  I wish I would have spent more time snuggling, more time praying, more time singing over my little newborn instead of worrying, wondering when they’ll fall asleep, etc.  It is devastating when mommies turn a beautiful thing like a baby into a burdensome thing.  Just enjoy your baby.  Plan for the house to be a little messier than usual, plan to be more tired than usual and be as prayed up and as studied up as you can be before baby comes along!

A wonderful thing to know is that God loves redeeming mommies.  Many have been through the same struggles and by the grace of God are being conformed into faithful mommies.  Having kids is the very thing that God used to begin His beautiful, sanctifying work in their lives!  “Women will be saved through childbearing – if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self-control” 1 Timothy 2:15.   

It can be very very good to have baby on the brain.

Posted by Erika