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I sat in the darkness with my hungry nursling chowing down hard on my breast. I cringed as I heard my husband on the first floor retching loudly. When that man gets sick, he gets SICK. My heart skipped a beat as my second child began crying and I lunged up from my seat in the dark and said, "It's OK baby, Mama's here, Mama's here!" With one hand I held my still nursing baby and with the other I held out the puke bin. Suddenly my third child began crying. My second stopped puking just long enough for me to hold the bin out to my other child. I caught his then caught a second time for the other, passing the bin back and forth like a gravy bowl at thanksgiving dinner. My nursling was oblivious, though he did let his protest be known in squawks between gulps at being jostled around. Finally each child was done getting sick and I offered them sips of water to rinse their mouths out before tucking them back in and resuming my seat in the dark. I caught throw up 6 times that night before finally being convinced they were done for the night.

Finally I went wearily down the stairs with throw up in my hair and on my shirt. As I got to the bottom step my nursling began crying. Was it really time already? I turned back around and went back up for his 11 o'clock feeding.

My husband and I made a decision when I was 21 and newly pregnant with our first to be the ones to raise our children fully and completely. I would feed them, bathe them, take them to church, and AND teach them. I would play with them, guide them, and keep them at home, where they belong. Of course it was a lot cuter when I was a young girl in a pink maternity shirt looking at the adorable mommy with her ONE child on the cover of parenting magazine.

Now a'days I walk into a grocery store and people either go silent scowling at me and my brood or they ask me if I'm continuing to have kids so I can "finally get a girl". I tell them I'm not trying for a girl, but for 12 sons. My children and I bet on how long it will take them to back up slowly before running.

Motherhood is not cute. It is not a life of milk and cookies and cute cuddles. Oh, sure, those things happen, as do many other joyous moments. But by and large motherhood is poop and snotty noses, crumbs (actually it looks more like an entire trough was dumped under my table after each meal) and spilled drinks, pee-pee accidents and muddy jeans. It's sweeping the floor multiple times a day and swearing socks are either multiplying too fast but in singles or running for their lives into a dark hole somewhere nowhere to be seen. It's hair cuts and clipping nails, combing bedhead and decluttering again and again. It's calming the toddler who screams in the bathtub when you reach for the shampoo and teaching the preschooler how to properly brush his teeth without just sucking all the toothpaste off.

Motherhood is a constant battle against the forces of darkness that not only try to destroy from the inside out of every member of the family but from the outside in. It is labor, hard and furious, but in many ways it is refining. It purges selfishness and strips you down to your bones in desperation to succeed...that none may be lost.

But thanks be to God through Christ Jesus our Lord that we have a God more powerful than that darkness who has in-dwelt us from our Baptisms and will sustains us...moment by moment, day by day.

Christ keep us and Christ keep you and yours.