Hello and welcome to the MS-Mama podcast. I'm your host Abby Halberstadt, happy wife,

Mama to 10 and Bible Believing Christian.

And on today's episode, I want to address something that as mamas, we can so easily get drawn into without any clue of how to get back out.

And that is the whirlpool of negativity in motherhood.

If you are already nodding your head along to those words

as they sink into your brain,

then you already know that this is something that either

you've seen over and over again amongst friends or acquaintances or relatives or maybe on social

media or in a blog or in a book that you've read or maybe it's something that you have battled

through personally or are still dealing with and let me just tell you you are

not alone you are in I wouldn't say good company as we talk

about negativity in motherhood but you are in common company. You've heard me talk about this book that I

wrote called Emmmas for Mama a rebellion

against mediocre motherhood and that term mediocre motherhood has a

polarizing effect on some people because some people think that it's a

derogatory term and some people think oh yeah I think I know what she means and some people are like I have no clue what that means at all and what I mean by that is that we all tend toward in life a mediocre way of approaching righteousness and goodness and that's because of some nature and what I mean by mediocre is we tend to give ourselves a lot of passes. We call it grace, we call it real life, we call it being

authentic, but a lot of times that's code for living for ourselves. And the Bible calls us to something radically excellent and I'm going to tell you that without the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we are not capable of that excellence. But thank God that he gives us his strength, he gives us his grace, he gives us new

mercies every morning and he gives us new discipline as we lean into the challenges that we face, both in motherhood and in other areas.

So when I'm talking about the whirlpool of negativity in motherhood and whatever that evoked for you, and when I wrote this book to kind of push back against that hey I may be negative about motherhood but so is my friend so is my mom this is what I grew up with. I see my aunts doing this. They're constantly

making jokes at their kids' expenses because that's how we do this, right? That's how we cope.

This is how we get through this drag, this drudgery that is motherhood.

And if you are thinking, wait a minute, I don't think of motherhood as drudgery, that's great.

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