Revelations and Motherhood

This post is mostly for me, so I can remember how I am feeling right now. It's not meant as a Toot My Own Horn post by any means. I just need to get what I've learned down so I can remember why I'm doing this.


Every single night I pray. During the day I pray a lot, too. The night prayers always include and the daytime prayers are usually entirely me asking for help with the kids.Specifically Emma and Jeremy. Megan, I pray for, but not with the same urgency and tears. She's my "Good Child" although she has her moments. Emma and Jeremy are the ones that keep me on my toes and frustrate me constantly. Especially Emma.

I pray all the time for God to bless me with some amazing piece of advice or knowledge, to bless me with some wisdom, that will open my eyes and help me understand my children and know how to get through to them. That He will bless me with patience, a more gentle voice, understanding, etc.

It never happens.

I might come across a scripture that helps me for a day, or a week even, before I'm back to being tired, frustrated, and still feeling confused and hopeless.

Sunday as we were on our way to Church we were stopped at the intersection right by our house and as I stared at the red light, waiting for it to change, I thought about revelations. God doesn't grant us new revelations like He did so long ago because we aren't all doing much with what He's already given us. This is something I've heard since primary, that was reiterated in my youth, and have been reminded of probably once or twice a year in Sunday School. It's something I've thought of on my own sometimes.

I realized, while waiting for the light to turn green, that I'm not consistent with a family scripture study routine, we don't have family prayer every day, or even every week for that matter. We are ok with Family Home Evening every week, but there's definitely room for improvement.  At Church, we are told these are three of the biggest things we can do to help our families. And I know that, but we haven't been doing them like we should.

If I'm not making these a priority, why should God bother giving me new revelations, more help? Sunday night we had a family meeting and I shared my thoughts with the family. We are all committed to doing better now. We're waking up with Nathan before he goes to school and reading a chapter from The Book of Mormon, then having family prayer. Mornings and I aren't friends, but if we put it off til after dinner, it won't happen because we'll be too anxious to put the kids to bed and we'll be crazy with getting lunches and clothes ready for school the next day.

Today is only Tuesday, but we're determined. Yesterday and today have been better. For instance, Emma has told Nathan and me (separately) that she wants to be more obedient and we can see that she is actually trying. There has been just as much bickering and fighting between the older three, but it's been smaller scale. The kids have actually cleaned up their toys.If we feel instances of extreme frustration, so far it's only been at night when we've gone through the whole day relatively without raised voices.

I'm so grateful for personal revelation. Even if it's something I already knew and wasn't paying attention to. I really feel like this is something that is going to make a huge difference in our family.

Midnight Madness Leads to Morning Madness

Ok, so just as I thought, I can't do my writing at night. I stayed up late last night to do it because I never (honestly, not making excuses here) got a chance to do it during the day or early evening. In fact, I didn't start writing until after midnight. Now this morning I am grumpy and feeling mean. I babysit today :/, so maybe the older kids can entertain each other while the younger ones nap (hopefully at the same time) and I'll be able to get some writing done.

My Manuscript

Nathan set up a percentage bar on the blog. It's just right there on the right. It should change every day as I should be writing every day. And just so you know, the manuscript I decided to work on for now is one that I actually had a lot of work completed on as a non-fiction, but at the conference I digitally tore it up and decided to make it fiction. Much easier that way. So that is why the completion bar is so low. I started all over. Kind of. And I think right now, a reasonable daily word count goal is 300. I've done more than that tonight, but I may not always be able to. So for those of you who care, there it is.

And for those of you in my ward who write, we need to start a writing group. I think that would help us all out.

The Best Writer's Conference Ever!

(This is a small portion of our online writers' group, Authors Incognito)

I got back late last night from the LDSStorymakers Writing Conference. IT WAS AWESOME! (Once again.) This is my fourth time attending and every year it just gets better. I'm still a little tired from traveling yesterday and getting up at 4:30 AM (Utah time) to be with my kiddos today who decided to wake up at 6:30 AM (Ohio time).

While I absolutely loved going, I felt guilty this year. You see, I haven't done a lot of writing in the last year (not counting blogging). Since the last conference I have been really busy with anything but writing. I traveled, I had a baby, I moved across the country, I started babysitting three or four times a week, and I played lots of board games with Nathan and friends from dental school and Church. But my worst excuse is I stopped believing in myself and my abilities. It was pretty easy to say I didn't have time to write. I did a little bit of therapeutic writing shortly after we moved here, but that was it. I didn't work on my books at all. I blamed it on lack of time, but really it was lack of faith in myself. I'm terrified to submit. Thinking about it makes me tear up and get shaky.

Any confidence I had gained in writing from my college professors (because that is where nearly all of it came) was gone. I hadn't been in school for a long time (or at least hadn't taken an English class in a while). I'm not sure what happened to zap my confidence, but it was gone. I had a blog that people told me they enjoyed reading, I had a couple stories accepted for a collection in a book, and recently I was asked to write some articles for our Stake's summer musical, This is Kirtland! and in the past I've had letters to the editor published in USU's paper, The Stateman, a paper that isn't easy to get into if your letter is actually well-written and thought out. But I haven't worked on my stuff for a long, long time.

If there is one thing that I learned at this conference (ok, I'm going to list more than one here, but they all go together) it is this: write anyway. Write, write, write, and stop editing my stuff so much. I never get very far because I stop to edit and try to make those first chapters perfect. Then when I can't, I get discouraged and stop writing altogether. I need to make writing one of my priorities and that scares me. What? I have to have ANOTHER priority? I don't have enough priorities already?

Yeah. I have to make it a priority and make myself do it because, hey, it is what I want to do, it is something I do actually love doing when I believe in myself (and like what I'm writing about--payday loans and injury lawyers are topics I do not enjoy writing about so please do not ask me to write about them as a ghost writer on your nephew's website simply because you don't want to do it yourself. I will say no.).

So, from now on I am not allowed to tell myself that I was stupid when I thought I could write. I WILL write every day and after seeing what is reasonable for me I will make a daily word count goal. I will hold myself responsible to those of you who read my blog (I will try to create something that I can check off daily on my blog to let you know, as if you care, that I reached my word count goal for the day), the wonderful people in my writing group, and to my husband. Oh, and to Jeff Savage because he made me promise I would have one manuscript finished (not polished, just completely written) by the end of the summer.

I'm ready.

So here I go. Ready, Set, Go!