Although I can’t pinpoint the birth of this blog back to a certain moment, I consider the entire first year of my daughter’s life the inspiration for the idea. You see, during that year I sat down at my computer countless times looking forward to writing out my thoughts, memories and lessons about life and motherhood, and ten minutes into my writing session, I would get interrupted by my cute bundle (of joy as well as cries).
I would try to go back and finish my blog entry later, but by the time I returned to it, so much time had passed that I just scrapped it and tried again. And the cycle would repeat as the half-written blog entries piled up into cyberspace.
I had many conversations with my husband during this time because I wasn’t prepared for how divided my heart would feel as I entered motherhood. I had been looking forward to becoming a mom since, well, I was a little girl. It was all I ever wanted, and the thought of doing anything else but frolicking in the fields with my offspring seemed like a waste of time.
But then I became a mom. And because I experienced a ton of growth in the long process of starting our family, by the time I became a mom, I was elated and thrilled but also conflicted. I realized there was a lot more to me as a woman than just being a mom, and I didn’t want to lose those parts of myself.
During my first year of motherhood I texted with my college friend who got married and had her first child in the same years that I did. We were in the same season of life but led totally different lives, as I lived in suburban Midwest and she lived on a farm in Idaho. However, new mom problems defy all geographical lines, so we exchanged random, sleep-deprived texts to find out if someone else out there could relate to our challenges of balancing motherhood, marriage and life.
At one point in our texting conversations, we joked with each other, “We should write a book about the conversations between two moms.” And although we were kidding, the idea stuck. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
But at that point we both had added another child to our families, and finding time to do anything but basically survive wasn’t on our radar. Yet thankfully, God doesn’t give up, and I kept daydreaming about the whole idea of “texts between two moms.”
So when my husband and I got away for a few days without our girls (amazing, I know!), and I had some time and space to think and pray, I felt God nudge me to send an initial email to some writer friends and share my vision with them.
Well, let me rephrase that: God’s vision. I was reminded of a quote that I heard in college, “When God originates He orchestrates.” I felt a freedom in knowing that if this was God’s idea, which I believed it was, He would bring it to pass in the way He wanted.
So here we are. After a lot of chats around my fire pit, on FaceTime, and through Google docs and texts, we established our team and launched the blog. We don’t claim to have motherhood figured out. Actually quite the opposite. We’re a group of women who first and foremost love the Lord and want to honor Him with our lives and talents. And we decided that what better way for us to sort out this beautiful and messy thing called motherhood but to process it together through text messages?
Our prayer is that as we share our real-life stories and honest experiences, every mom who visits our blog will receive tangible truth and experience real grace. Grace that comes not only from us, but from the One “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14) — a place of real grace for real moms.
Blessings,
To read our first text conversation and more of our vision behind the blog, go here!