Hello and welcome to the M is for Mama podcast. I'm your host Abby Halberstadt, happy wife,

Mama 10 Bible believing Christian, and I'm so excited you're here and we get to do this together today.

This is the very first episode of this podcast and in the future we're going to delve into all kinds of topics from motherhood of course to culture to what the Bible says about who we are

happy topics sad topics hard topics good topics and everything in between but today I wanted to give you a little bit of background

on why so many people in the world call me mama, other than the 10 biological children

who legitimately can use that

term because they came out of my very own body.

I get messages and dams and emails all the time

that just start with the phrase,

hey mama, and then they proceed to pour out

their life story to tell me their hurts and their sorrows, to ask me for prayer, to give me advice,

to ask me for advice.

There's a lot of give and take in these messages.

But it's funny to me that they don't even remember that I have a

real name. Most of that is because I've gone by the blog name, MS-HRAMama, for

years and years, but it wasn't always that name and I haven't always been that

interested in blogging. However, I have always loved to write many many years ago

back when I was six, seven, eight years old when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I would say an astronaut or an actor or an architect or an author, apparently all things A appealed to me.

All of the rest of those went by the wayside except for author.

That always remained as a dream in my heart.

And while it never came to fruition in published form until just a few years ago with my first book,

...