For Moms, whether working or at home :)

I have days where I feel like I'm still brand new to the mom thing. London changes so fast that about the time I feel like I have a grip on our relationship, she goes through a new phase, learns a new trick, or gets a tooth which sends us right back to the start where I'm clueless.
Then...there are other days, most days. The days where I can't remember my life before diaper bags, nap times, and toys strewn across my living room. I forget the Heather that was single and used to shrug her shoulders when questioned on the urgency of a midnight walmart trip. I look to my past and see only pregnancy and London, and I look to the future and see only soccer games (hopefully ;)) and math homework, and my present is consumed with Mommy-ness. On these days, I get lost. Lost in my world, my kingdom.
A struggle I've had since London and will probably continue to have is knowing where the line is drawn between my identity as a mom and everything else. I hear from other moms about their love of being a stay at home mom and how it's what God meant in making our children our main priority. Then, I'm plagued with guilt. I know for a fact that God has called me into His ministry and given me a heart for women. I don't know what that looks like exactly with small children at home, and I don't know what my future will hold, but I know of that calling. I'm grateful that for the next couple of years at least, I will not have to be away from home more than part time, but that God has led me to a church where I can have all the girl time I can handle with so many University girls around me.
In the meantime, God is showing me little by little what it looks like to be a wife, woman, and yes, mother. I was beginning to think the other day that I had gotten it all wrong and that wife and mother were what I was this season of my life and I was being selfish to think otherwise. This is when God led me to Isaiah 9. In reading about Christ's future first coming, I read the list of roles he would fulfill: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Everyone knows the different roles a mom is just within that one job: nurse, cook, cleaning lady, and so on. However, God revealed to me that Jesus came to fulfill many roles to many people and that I am to look to His example for that. I have no plans on leaving my stay at home position (other than school) for quite some time, but in this verse, I have more freedom in seeing things when I will go back to work and have to be away. I thought I would share this verse with other moms, whether staying at home and wondering if this is just their identity now, or moms that can’t be home, whether from financial reasons or because it is not their calling. Either way, you are loved by God. He created you to raise your children up to know Him, to support your husband as he follows Him, but mostly, to be His daughter and bask in the knowledge that you are beautiful and perfect in His sight.