"I am a mother"

I don't belong to LDS Church, but I love their messages. From time to time I visit this page of Mormon Messages and I like them. Recently I discovered a really special one, from my point of view: Hi, I'm Jane. She spoke to me, so I purchased her book:

Yes, another book on motherhood. But her example is something so rare in nowadays: she left her successful career at CBS News and dedicates her time for being "just" a mother! Did you hear something similar lately? I didn't!

I read her book in 3 days. She quotes a lot of persons in her book. There are motivational stories and wonderful words on motherhood.

I quote here some paragraphs I love:

"If I were Satan and wanted to destroy a society, I think I would stage a full blown blitz on women. I would keep them so distraught and distracted that they would never find the calming strength and serenity for which their gender has always been known."

Patricia Holland

"Our mother provides us with our first experience of nurturing. She is our first and most powerful female role model. It is from her that we learn what it is to be a woman... Our cells divided and grew to the beat of her heart. Our skin, hair, heart, lungs, and bones were nourished by her blood, blood that was awash with the neurochemicals formed in response to her thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. If she was fearful [or] anxious..., our bodies knew it. If she felt safe, happy, and fulfilled, we felt that too...

...every daughter contains her mother and all the women who came before her."

Dr. Christiane Northrup

Motherhood is the ideal time to "live in the moment" because it is the perfect time to see life in action, to witness your child taking his first step, picking her first flower, walking out the door for his first day of school, or leaving with a fine young man on her first date. These thing will never happen again.

I love this oft-quoted proverb, which seems so applicable to my life right now:

   The cleaning and scrubbing can wait for tomorrow,

   For babies grow up, I've learned, to my sorrow.

   So quiet down, cobwebs! Dust, go to sleep!

   I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.

                             - Author unknown

Teenagers grow up fast, too. And so do grandchildren. Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow just down and really watch our children - at every age - change before our eyes?

Rather than trying to be Supermom, try being simply Mom - and let the wonder in your child's eyes give you the strength to keep on going.

Jane Clayson Johnson

"Don't judge someone until you've walked a mile in her shoes."

In August will be 2 years since I'm home only for my family and I think often that if you want to do everything right, by yourself (cooking, laundry, cleaning, daily walks in park, blogging ;-), education...), with a lot of help from husband!, 24 hours is no time enough! So I totally agree with Jane when she says that stay-at-home-moms shouldn't use the "just" word, but simply say proudly "I am a mother"!

Being a mother is more than enough, and it's such a pity that it's considered by many as "doing nothing"!
Anyway, I feel so uplifted everytime I remember that somebody once said:
"The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world".
:-)

Kisses from a happy mother!
Raluca

P.S.: On a scale from 1 (worst) to 10 (best) I give for "I am a mother" by Jane Clayson Johnson an 8.

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Book: Sarah's key/Se numea Sarah (TatianaDeRosnay) - 9

'I'll come back for you later. I promise.'
Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old Jewish girl, is arrested by the French police in the middle of the night, along with her mother and father. Desperate to protect her younger brother, she locks him in a cupboard and promises to come back for him as soon as she can.

That's written on the book's back cover and those were enough words to make me want to read the book.
I'm always interested to read and find out more about Jews' fate during WWII. I still cannot believe my ears when I hear there are people nowadays denying Holocaust! There is so much evil in our world...
The book is fascinating. It's easy to be read. It took me only 3 days to finish it. And the actions described in it are so exciting that I was surprising myself on many pages reading few words on top of the page then jumping directly to the page's bottom, as I couldn't stand the tension and just wanted to find out faster what's next!
The story is fiction, but it could have been so easily true, in those days full of terror. 
A very good novel which worth to be read. It made me appreciate my life and my freedom, as they are. I could be angry daily on a neighbor, on a fellow citizen, on an insolent person, on a particular situation, but at any moment of the day and night I am free to live my life as I want, near my family!
Don't take your freedom for granted! Remember! Never forget! There were times when others could order for families to be split, for lives to be shortened...

On a scale from 1 (worst) to 10 (best) I give it a 9.

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Book: The secret life of bees (Sue Monk Kidd) - 6

Reading this book took me about 2 months. Not because it's really bad or too vast, but it seems I don't dedicate too much time for reading, lately (since I discovered blogging..). As Manu and Sue commented on this post, I have to admit that me too spend a lot of time surfing the Internet. But, unlike the TV, on Internet you are the master; you choose what you want to see/read and it's much quality time spending. Currently I'm looking for a method to cut off  the Internet every evening around 10 PM, but I didn't find anything yet. My will seems not to be enough. Your ideas are welcomed! :-)

Back to the book: I have to admit I decided to read this book as I was attracted by its cover and title. I imagined I would become a bees expert after reading it :-)

From the first pages I felt a discomfort reading it, partly because of the too mature thinking and acting for a 14 years old girl (the narrator), partly because of the disturbing ironical style of exposing some events and partly because it doesn't have too much artistic value.

Of course it has emotional and beautiful paragraphs, as it's about a girl which lost her mom at a very young age. And some interesting facts about bees' life can be read there.

Reading this book I remembered Tolstoy's theory, which was saying something like this: **life is too short to afford reading contemporary books. Contemporary books are to be read by future generations. We should read books written centuries or at least decades ago, seriously filtered by our predecessors.**

On a scale from 1 (worst) to 10 (best) I give it a 6.

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Book: Of Mice And Men (John Steinbeck) - 9

I've just finished this book:

It's very good. Very well written. The best descriptions of landscapes, people and situations that you can get. Your imagination doesn't have to work hard, as Steinback did all the hard work writing a marvelous book.

If you are interested in real life of Americans during the Great Depression in the 1920s, I highly recommend this book.

It has a feature for busy people: it's short - you need about 5 hours to read it.

But being a drama, it's not nice. No, not at all...

On a scale from 1 (worst) to 10 (best) I give it a 9.

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