Reclaiming Your Sense of Adventures in the Trenches of Motherhood

Today, we are going to talk about what it looks like to reclaim your sense of adventure when you feel like you have lost it in the trenches of motherhood.

And as we examine what exactly that looks like, I want to take you guys back to some examples of my own trenches of motherhood moments.

If I think of the trenches of motherhood, honestly, I can think all the way back to newborn and toddler years with my oldest two, or I can think back as far as yesterday, when I texted my husband in tears asking him to pray for me on a particularly hard day with my two youngest.

The reality is that the trenches of motherhood can follow us through so many years.

Some of us with teens feel like we are in the trenches at times, but there is this true reality of feeling like you are completely exhausted and in survival mode, and all of the creativity has been sucked out of you as you are washing another pile of dishes, and navigating school and co-op drop-offs, and packing another lunch, or finding yourself elbows deep in yet another mountain of laundry.

And I know in those moments it can start to feel like true adventures and stepping outside of your comfort zone when you are just begging to feel comfortable at times [laughs] in your own life, that adventure feels so far out of reach.

The idea of being creative and actively pursuing the unfamiliar just feels like too much.

And here's what I want to encourage you, and I wanna name this tension directly.

I don't think you've truly lost your sense of adventure.

I think it's just probably buried under a pile of laundry, [laughs] and that's okay.

And here's the reality.

Adventure requires margin.

Going on adventures, having this attitude and posture in life of pursuing the unfamiliar, of stepping outside of your comfort zone, it requires margin.

It requires capacity, and sometimes motherhood in the trenches feels like it strips that from us, and that's not a character flaw.

That's not just something in your personality.

If this feels hard to you, that's not a flaw.

It's a season, and I wanna normalize that before we move forward, is that you may be in a season that this feels really hard, and that's okay.

But I also want to speak directly to the lie that adventure has to be something big and extravagant.

Yes, adventure sometimes can look like a passport full of stamps.

I talk about that.

I think there is so much joy in exploring the incredible world that God created.

But also, there is so much beauty in the adventures that God opens for us right in our own backyards, in our own cities, in our own communities.

And adventures don't have to involve passports and airplanes to count.

I wanna redefine adventure for you guys, and I've already ...

I said this phrase a few times already in the podcast, but I think how we should define adventure is doing something unfamiliar or a little bit outside of our comfort zone on purpose.