For all we spend it surrounded by many tiny humans. And their big, gaping demands. And their tugging, tireless hands.

We can tend to retreat, to hole up, to recede from life and each other because, let’s face it, just managing our own homes is more than enough crazy for a lifetime. This might work for a season, a day, a week or two. But there is a danger of withering beneath the weight of the every day, 24 hours set on repeat over and over again with no off button if we keep at it alone.

There is something you can give. Something you can receive.

From your sisters. From the women you might never actually meet. From the neighbor who lives at the end of your quiet street, your mother-in-law, your church friend, school friend, PTA parent, baseball-bleachers-sitting sister.

There is this one thing we can do for one another. This one thing that is everything. And costs nothing.

Holding up the arms.

Rubbing the tired shoulders, folding the laundry, sharing the recipes, reminding each other about free donut days and birthdays and showering grace when we’re late to the preschool pick up.

Not comparing our kids. Celebrating the victories. Weeping the pain. Delivering the casseroles. Sharing more than just, “I’m fine.” Rocking the colicky babies, offering the girls nights out, teaching the best teething gels, powders, rings.

Admitting the temper tantrums.

Sending the cards, loaning the good boots, complimenting the jeans. Sharing the best books, driving the car pool, ignoring the squabbling kids, making time for the catching up. Coming when she calls when her man’s out of town. Showing up with the Starbucks and sticky buns. Telling her, she can. Especially on the days when she’s still wearing her pajamas. Telling her to be kind to herself, and that comfy clothes are always the right choice.

Not comparing.

Not comparing houses or laundry piles or kids’ behavior.

Cheering.

Cheering for each others’ dreams, kids, work, art, new hair cut.

Crying alongside. Holding on. Hoping. Passing the tissues. Buying the chocolate. Holding the hands. Opening arms to the grief. Patiently walking the valleys, flash light packed, stop watch left at home.

Believing the best, giving the benefit of the doubt, calling. Complimenting.

Spending time in each others’ kitchens, laundry rooms, living rooms, cars. Meeting up for breakfasts, sending notes just because. Praying. Cracking knees to the mat and praying for her story, her life, her rabid fear of parenting.

Sharing the mess ups, the upside downs, the glimpses into your chaos, the dog days of motherhood when you want your money back. Not cleaning up before she comes over. Being OK with being seen just as you really are.

Welcoming her.

Welcoming her into your real life. So she can exhale.

And you can be encouraged.

This. This we can do.

So, here’s the skinny: every Friday for over a year hundreds of people have joined a kind of writing flash mob over here.

We write for five minutes flat. All on the same prompt that I post here at 1 minute past midnight EST ever Friday. And we connect on Twitter with the hashtag #FMFParty (short for Five Minute Friday party). In fact, starting at around 10pm EST on Thursday you’ll find a lot of writers hanging out and chatting on Twitter with this hashtag.

No extreme editing; no worrying about perfect grammar, font, or punctuation.

Unscripted. Unedited. Real.

It started because I’d been thinking about writing and how often our perfectionism gets in the way of our words. And I figured, why not take 5 minutes and see what comes out: not a perfect post, not a profound post, just five minutes of focused writing.

So now on Fridays a group of people who love to throw caution to the wind and just write without worrying if it’s just right gather to share what five minutes buys them. While the kids are changing into their swim suits, while the pop corn is popping, while the dog is outside doing his business, while the show cuts to commercial. Just five minutes.

Your words. This shared feast.

How to Join:

It’s easy to join in, just:

1. Check what the prompt is on my blog.
2. Write a post in only five minutes on that topic on your blog (or in the comments if you don’t have a blog).
3. Link over here and invite friends to join in.
4. Select the permalink to your post {so not your blog url www.lisajobaker.com but your post url www.lisajobaker.com/2012/07/five-minute-friday-2/ }
5. Using the blue linky tool at the bottom of my Five Minute Friday post enter your link.
6. It will also walk you through selecting which photo you want to show up in the linky.
7. Your post will show up in our Five Minute Friday linky.
8. Be sure and encourage the person who linked up before you!

Our most important requirement for participation: There’s really only one absolute, no ifs, ands or buts about it Five Minute Friday rule: you must visit the person who linked up before you & encourage them in their comments. Seriously. That is, like, the rule. And the fun. And the heart of this community.

Featured Five Minute Friday:

And every week I’ll pick a post that caught my eye and share it down there in my side bar – see where it says “Featured Five Minute Friday”? Yea -that could be you! Hop on over and visit some folk who make fireworks in just five minutes. They inspire me.

So, now be brave, set your timer, clear your head, for five minutes of free writing without worrying about getting it right.

OK, are you ready? Please give us your best five minutes on the word:::

Listen…

GO

And there are things I think are important. Things that are important. All those boxes that haven’t been unpacked yet (more to come on that later). All those floors that haven’t been swept, those carpets that haven’t been vacuumed, that hamster that hasn’t been fed. I have a long line of check marks waiting to make their way onto my list.

She’s following me around. Bumbling over my feet. Getting in my way. I’m busy and my head is full of all the things. And she’s humming behind me, dragging a collection of dolls in my wake and slowing me down.

That sweet  curly-haired two year old I sweated to deliver. Lisping her way through the hand motions of her favorite Sunday School songs and me stuck on the chorus of making order out of this chaos and cooking dinner and picking up all the wet swimsuits. Again. She has dark blue leggings on and the pink T Shirt that Morgan gave her for her birthday and a while later I notice it’s quiet because she’s given up the chase.

And the kitchen is empty except for me and my stupid, big lists and a baby voice trails out of the bedroom down the hallway. She’s sitting on the pink carpet and singing to her bears, rocking in her little brown chair and I’m missing it. Except that I’m not because it’s never too late and I’m cranking up that radio and that baby girl into my arms till we’re two stepping our way through the house, rock me mama like a wagon wheel and she’s laughing with head flung back and that dimple in her cheek that makes me want to wail with the wonder of having a girl child.

Baby girl, this is your mama distracted and this is your mama forgetful and this is your mama sorry for stupidly choosing the kitchen and this is your mama remembering herself and you and laughing and spinning till we are both so dizzy and beloved and landing in a heap of limbs and forever memories into this chocolate brown sofa and tomorrow.

And tomorrow.

And the day after that.

STOP

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And then one night someone carves a pattern into the leather sofa. Or someone just  dumps a pencil sharpener out all over the floor. After you’ve told them not to touch it.

Or someone else gets out of bed for the ten thousandth time. When you’ve just finally sat down and there’s only an hour left before exhaustion slams into your eyelids.

There’s no rage like the exhausted rage of motherhood.

These aren’t the things they don’t talk about in the parenting books, or play groups, or coffee dates. How you will one day lose your ever-loving mind because two boys sat and watched their sister pour an entire bottle of purple Motrin all over the beige carpet and didn’t think to stop her.

These are the ragged fringes of motherhood that don’t make for pretty pictures.

These are the moments that no one teaches you about in the breast-feeding classes or includes with the instructions for putting the baby to bed on her back or thinks to write on a warning label.

It was late one night when I stood outside my sons’ slammed bedroom door that I remembered the one time someone had cautioned me on temper.

I was a senior in college. And there was a couple in our class who got pregnant and married and brought their bundle of toddling, delicious chub with them all over campus.

We were all sort of awed and infatuated by this threesome.

We’d bump into them in the dining hall, hand over our meal card to contribute lunch, babysit their boy with the forever long, dark lashes in Jenks Library, take him for dimpled walks under those big East coast trees.

I was a South African girl a long way from home. I missed the horizon.

But that baby reminded us all of family and that there was a slice of life far beyond these dorm room walls that we hadn’t tasted yet.

They’d have us over for dinner in their small, beautiful space and it was a welcome warmth away from bunk beds and communal bathrooms. This place they’d carved out that always had room for one more of us to crowd around their table and spill over onto their sofas.

They made it look so easy.

I never offered to help, not really. I babysat around campus because it made me interesting to cute boys and friends who would always stop by to share in the fun of the baby. But I didn’t ask what it was really like – this juggling a family and a full class schedule at the same time. Or how to fit work into the mix.

I was much too interested in the story of me.

But there was one night after we’d come over to meet beautiful baby number two,  the Isaac of the summer after our senior year, that the door swung open on a world I couldn’t begin to imagine.

She was sitting in their small apartment, both boys asleep, telling me the story of temper. It struck me as odd that this is what she would choose to tell me. Not how precious the kids or how priceless the moments, but that,

“Lisa-Jo if you struggle with temper at all you better learn how to control it before you have kids. Because you can’t parent with an out of control temper.”

My head is resting against the bedroom door as I remember her words.

At the time I barely heard her.

A decade later and I am intimately acquainted with the wild temper that runs in these veins, inherited from generations before me and last night’s discovery that the boys had dug holes all over the new lawn.

More than the battle of sleeplessness or figuring out how to make broccoli appealing or mastering potty training for the third time, this full out war against my own angry, shouty spirit will be the biggest victory I am determined to win through motherhood.

Tame it I will.

Because when my son gets out of bed and is too afraid to ask the question burning in his heart because, as he lisps, “I was scared you’d be mad at me, mama,” I know this is a fight worth winning. I know by the awful pit in my stomach. And how hard I hug his long, gangly limbs.

Because there was a moment last week when I held Jackson’s hand as we walked through the grocery store parking lot and I asked him, “Do I lose my temper more or less than I used to?” and he cocked his head to the side, thoughtful behind his glasses and said, “less.”

Dear God, please help it keep being less.

Because I want to be a safe place, a Cape of Good Hope for these kids, no matter how much they may infuriate me at times.

I will not be ruled by my tongue or my temper.

I will not be controlled by my out-of-control reactions.

I will stop, drop, and take a time out. Behind locked bathroom doors or alone in the minivan if necessary.

I will quiet myself amidst the chaos. I will hold onto my run-away-frustration and chew hard on a piece of ice if that’s what it takes to cool down.

I will remember to eat. To treat myself will the same care I’d treat an explosive device and disarm with regular rest, exercise, food and friendship.

I want my kids to have memories crammed full of family as a safe place and not an unpredictable hot spot.

So I learn when it’s OK to say OK to another episode of Barney. This is better than a mother unhinged by her own limitations and the craft that went all wrong

I teach them what it looks like to say sorry; down on my knees and eye to eye, I say it. These words that can stick in the throat but that are like sacred, unexpected treasure when you place them in the tiny hands of your children.

And then I will move on. I won’t carry the baggage of yesterday’s explosion or last week’s near melt down into tomorrow. I will practice grace on purpose. To my tiny people and myself.

I will keep on with the laughter and watermelon seed spitting and ice cream serving and bed time reading and diaper changing and vacation celebrating.

I will live in this one, new, beautiful, white canvas of right now and not be afraid to paint all over it with the wild abandon of today. Grateful always for the gift of tomorrow.

***

Related resources:

The Orange Rhino – most amazing story of a mom who blogged her way through 365 days of working on not losing her temper after a lifetime of feeling like it was out of control.

10 Things I Learned When I Stopped Yelling at My Kids

What All Mamas and Us Need to Thrive This Summer

If you’re visiting from Glennon’s place over at Momastery today – welcome. I’m a mom of three kids and me and my good man make our home under the cherry blossoms just outside of Washington, D.C. But my heart is buried under a Jacaranda tree in Pretoria, South Africa. I write here about life lived in between – countries, kids and the daily, holy chaos of raising them.

I think that trying to survive motherhood while under the impression that other mothers somehow have it all together is dreadfully discouraging. So on this blog I do my best not to dress up motherhood. I try to tell it straight. Like how my daughter has cracked my heart right open. Or how every tired mom might need to recite this reminder before breakfast. And that you’re mighty because you mother. Especially on the days you don’t feel like it. And if you subscribe by email for my updates – see the box there in the margin? -  I’ll happily send you a copy of my {free} eBook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms.

For those of you who are new around here, if there’s one thing I’d like to let you in on, it’s this:

I was the girl who swore she’d never end up anyone’s cliche — barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Which is interesting since we currently have three kids, a hamster and a back yard where toys go to die.

I grew up in South Africa, where the streets turn Jacaranda purple in October and we take our tea hot with milk and sugar, and I hadn’t turned 18 yet when I swore I didn’t plan to be anyone’s mother.

It was after my mom had been in hospital for about nine months and the pastor’s son was over and caught me trying to figure out how to cook dinner for my kid brothers. I was barefoot. And in the kitchen.

I remember how the late afternoon sunshine was coming in at the window and I had my mom’s wooden cutting board out – the one with the pot burns blackened into its surface. We’d been living on takeout, dad was burned out from the hourly evening commutes to the hospital, and that night I was chopping onions to get a real meal started instead.

But William laughed at me and I promised myself I’d grow up to do something big and brave and important.

For a while I did.

After my mom died. After I went to college. After I graduated law school. After I told the boy I was in love with that I needed him to marry me and not my ability to have kids. And he did. There was a while when I felt significant in all the ways that I thought were the opposite of helping someone finish his homework or someone else root through the piles of laundry for clean undies.

I was a legal specialist in Ukraine and we fought human trafficking with gritted teeth and bared hearts and our guts tied up in knots. It was awful and incredible and necessary and there are things I will always wish I could un-see.

That’s the part I need you to know because it’s what makes being a mother to three kids so surprising to me.

I turned 30 in Ukraine. And by the time I turned 31 we would be back living in South Africa after a decade away. And I would give birth to our first born three days later.

Here’s what I learned in between.

Here’s what I want you to hear. Especially you, if you’re wondering how life turned out like this, if you feel lost in your own story and looking for a way out.

If you’re up to your eyeballs in kids and under the weather and desperate for the laundry to cut you some slack.

If you’re gasping for breath and wrestling worries and bills and sweating the end of year report cards.

If you can’t bear to come up with one more way to cook chicken.

……then click over here won’t you? To keep reading with me.

Where a beautiful crowd spends five minutes all writing on the same topic and then sharing ‘em over here.

How to Join:

Want to know how Five Minute Friday got started and how to participate? All the details are here.

Featured Five Minute Friday:

And every week I’ll pick a post that caught my eye and share it down there in my side bar – see where it says “Featured Five Minute Friday”? Yea -that could be you! Hop on over and visit some folk who make fireworks in just five minutes. They inspire me.

Now, set your timer, clear your head, for five minutes of free writing without worrying about getting it right.

1. Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking.
2. Link back here and invite others to join in.
3. And then absolutely, no ifs, ands or buts about it, you need to visit the person who linked up before you & encourage them in their comments. Seriously. That is, like, the rule. And the fun. And the heart of this community..

OK, are you ready? Please give us your best five minutes on:::

Fall…

GO

You boys are so beautiful to me. I know you don’t like it when I call you that. But you are. Those muscles on skinny legs and shoulders. How does a seven-year-old pack such a six pack into all that sinew?

You are beautiful and brand new still and I can smell it in your hair that’s got that summer and chlorine flavor to it. I’m scared so much of the time of the innocent parts of you getting broken. Where you’re fearless, I’m afraid. Where you leap, I want to build fences. Where you climb I want to strap you down. Where you launch yourselves off ramps and beds and diving boards I want to find a way to hold this heart in my hands and not in my throat.

Sometimes – and sometimes more than that – you show up at our bedside in your angry birds tighty whities because of bad dreams and tuck your long and gangly legs under the covers between us. It’s crowded. I push you over, tell you to move up. I complain and grumble and sleep so badly because of it and still there you are all smiles in the morning.

When did this happen?

When did you graduate from babies?

It’s a long way down when I see how far you’ve got.

You teach me the kind of courage that’s terrifying to learn.

Hold my hand, let’s cross the road together now.

STOP

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Loading InLinkz …

If you’re visiting from Ann Voskamp’s place today – welcome. I’m a mom of three kids and me and my good man make our home under the cherry blossoms just outside of Washington, D.C. But my heart is buried under a Jacaranda tree in Pretoria, South Africa. I write here about life lived in between – countries, kids and the daily, holy chaos of raising them.  I think that trying to survive motherhood while under the impression that other mothers somehow have it all together is dreadfully discouraging. So on this blog I do my best not to dress up motherhood. I try to tell it straight. Like what a real life dictionary definition of “mother” might read like. Or how every tired mom might need to recite this reminder before breakfast. You’re welcome to join us. And if you subscribe by email for my updates – see the box there in the margin? -  I’ll happily send you a copy of my {free} eBook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms.

Sunday afternoons in South Africa there were always watermelons bopping in the swimming pool.

It was to keep them cool till they could be split for dessert. But to us kids they were just a challenge to ride, to raft, to water polo between ourselves until a grown up finally noticed and yelled to quit it before we turned the insides into pure pulp.

Sunshine on the watermelons and their green striped skins and our shoulders and legs all gangly and growing up living large on the hospitality of our parents.

I can still feel the water running down my back from wet hair as we stood dripping around the table under the thatch roof lapa as dad cut into the melons slice after juicy slice.

We’d stand and bite and suck and spit seeds and there were always more people than chairs.

Hospitality as I’ve grown up has looked different.

I discovered a dirty pot in the microwave last night.

We’ve had a lot of guests pass through our conveniently-located-right-outside-D.C. house. My desire to host them with the carefree abandon of my childhood has gone head-to-head with my desperate self consciousness about how small our home is.

I’m writing about it over at Ann Voskamp’s place today – our story of learning that hospitality is always more a matter of the heart than the architecture. And often a slice of good, sweet watermelon.

On a Monday, just this reminder:

God is for me, more than my laundry.

God sees me, not just my kids’ trail of weekend destruction.

God delights in me, tired eyes and all.

God sings over me, when the baby’s crying, the toddler’s whining, the teenager’s “but why?-ing”

God breathes into me, when I’m all run out of breath from all the drop-offs, back packs, school lunches, car repairs, house moves, work deadlines, laugh and worry lines.

God understands more than I do about tomorrow.

God is comfortable in my chaos.

God is waiting for me at the end of the day.

God holds me. God loves me. God welcomes me into His arms.

God believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things with me and for me.

God is awake when I got to bed tonight.

God is waiting when I wake up tomorrow.

Ready. Delighted. Friend.

At the check out line, in your Zumba class, along the side walk. It’s like we’re longing to love each other and sometimes that can’t help but spill out of the business man in his perfectly pressed suit when the baby girl with the blonde curls waves at him.

Last week I met three kids who added a whole new level of awesome to Five Minute Friday for me.

Three girls ages 8, 6 and 2 who have been taking the writing challenge with you all. Their mom, Tina, has been linking up their writing.

It kind of blew me away. My three kids have no clue we host a writing workshop here every week. And it’s never occurred to me to invite them.

But it occurred to Tina.

She and her girls want to invite any other kiddos out there to join a kid’s edition Five Minute Friday link up over here at Desperate Homeschoolers.

How fun is that! I figured those girls could pick us a good writing prompt this week and sure enough they did. Imagine was all their idea.

So if you’re new here, and want to know how Five Minute Friday got started? All the details are here.

And every week I’ll pick a post that caught my eye and share it down there in my side bar – see where it says “Featured Five Minute Friday”? Yea -that could be you!

Because, as we all know, the most important rule of Five Minute Friday is leaving an encouraging comment for the person who linked up before you. So getting to feature one of your fine posts is like frosting as far as I’m concerned.

So, set your timer, clear your head, for five minutes of free writing without worrying about getting it right.

1. Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking.
2. Link back here and invite others to join in.
3. And then absolutely, no ifs, ands or buts about it, you need to visit the person who linked up before you & encourage them in their comments. Seriously. That is, like, the rule. And the fun. And the heart of this community..

OK, are you ready? Please give me your best five minutes on:::

Imagine…

:GO

It’s purple October. There’s a tree blooming at the top of a steep cobbled drive and a carpet of petals that smell the littlest bit sweet when the tires crush over them. Rolling uphill and home again she needs to watch out for the swing strung across the drive. Little boys fight for their turn; wait fitfully, impatiently in line.

Parking at the top of that steep lane is an art and a science and her dad will helpfully hang out the top window and yell down directions in both English and Afrikaans if you like. She can hear him from across the Atlantic. Almost.

Jasmine blooms, whispers, comforts, remembers her a season of home.

The kids that burst out the front door come in all shades of human. Her sons will go to bed too late tonight, be up too early tomorrow. Her baby daughter doesn’t know how to hold all this new wonder in her hands. The family hold her long.

Someone somewhere is serving melktert. Someone is pouring tea into Spode. Someone is restraining sticky fingers from grabbing at the delicate cups and saucers and pouring smaller portions into studier mugs. Sentences begin and end in different languages. Bath time is a long ritual. Cats have to be fed. And dogs. And fish. And always one more mouth.

She closes her eyes and they’re all there. Only one long, Southern Cross wish away.

Stop

If you’re reading in an email – just click here to come over and join us.

I lived in a part of town that I probably shouldn’t have. The part that meant I usually needed someone to walk me home. He always walked with me. Remembered the umbrella when I forgot. And on days I wasn’t expecting he filled the freezer with ice cream. Chocolate and vanilla. The fridge with fruit and vegetables. The cupboards with unhealthy delicious. He’s always known my favorite things.

We’re more than a decade older. He still stocks the fridge.

But there’s less time to tell him thank you.

Less time to look into his cowboy-green eyes and see the man behind the gesture.

I’m the “stop pinching your sister,” “pick up that wet swimsuit,” “who left this dirty bowl out?” woman now.

When he’s snoring here in bed beside me I walk back in my mind to remember the girl who packed a can of coke and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day of a summer she fell in love with the boy who was stocking her refrigerator.

I saved enough that summer to offset the parts missing from my financial aid. We’d been married years before I found out he went back to school with a zero balance in his bank account and the hook, line and sinker heart of a South African girl who shouldn’t have been living in that part of D.C.

I’m his wife now.

But some days my words say different. Some days I’m just the mother.

I slip my hand into his while he’s sleeping and his reflex is always to curl those strong fingers around – hold mine. Yesterday or the day before or maybe it was Sunday I learned something new about him. Nearly seventeen years and still room for surprises.

I want to keep building it in – breathing room – so we’re more than just two people running a small daycare together.

I want to keep making room for the old memories and love for the new.

This book of love that is never boring. I want to read him and not just tomorrow’s field trip instructions.

I need to mother less and wife more.

I want to listen faster and list slower.

I will thank before I think of just one more honey-do.

I will dance like we used to instead of just demand.

I want to flirt with him instead of my fear of tomorrow.

I’m thinking it’s good to tell the kids no so I can tell him yes.

I want to watch more of my man than my children’s movies.

I will hold his hand before I hold onto my frustrations.

I will laugh at old jokes instead of this small kitchen.

I will keep ordering pizza and stop ordering him to pick up his socks.

I will leave off tidying all the things and just tender a hand wrapped ’round with wedding rings.

I will kiss him instead of comment on whose turn it is to change the diaper.

I will smell the soft place in the curve of his neck and nothing else, if only for a minute on a Wednesday afternoon.

I will hear the music and not get lost in the monotony.

Tomorrow.

And tomorrow.

And when we wake up tomorrow.

“You’re just no good at that.”

There’s a voice that tells me this often.

It’s funny how it doesn’t matter what I’m doing. I can be cooking or organizing the pantry or picking out new curtains or working on a piece of writing or trying to remember to read the Bible to my kids or planning a conference.

That voice slides into my ear and just says the same thing it always says with the same confidence, “You’re just no good at that.”

I’m a grown woman with three children, a career that matters to me and a blog where I get to share my ups and downs with women who are strong, and funny, and wise, and also in the raw places of raising kids. And many, many times I believe that voice.

And maybe today you’re scared too?

Maybe there’s a voice been whispering how no good at anything you are?

Maybe there’s a lie been slyly slipping a measuring stick with impossible units to live up to into your life this afternoon.

Maybe you need a sister to snap that stick in half and hand you a flash light when you’re facing the dark. 

We’re doing that over here today – where I’m sharing what I do when I hear that voice. What I hope you can do too.

Click here to join me on (in)courage and keep reading.