As someone who spent three years working in a college career development office I have spent a lot of time thinking about the concepts of vocation and calling.  I have contemplated how personality type, interests, skills, and education correspond with academic choice, career fit, and job change.  I am familiar with the interpretations for the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) based on the work of Carl Jung, John Holland’s theory of Career Choice and the RIASEC interest assessment, and the DISC inventories developed by John Geier.  If you need help with a resume or cover letter I’m your girl.  However, despite this array of career theory knowledge I have spent very little time contemplating the vocation of Mom.

For the first several months of Eli’s life I worked full time.  Mom was simply thought of as one of my roles in life.  A vocation was something you did outside the home, a paid position to be done alongside other employees.  However, I longed to be able to be home with my son.  I longed to be there to see every little change and development occur for the very first time, to be able to say I was there for every milestone.  I longed to be a stay-at-home-mom, but I still didn’t think of it as a vocation, simply a dream.

Then we moved to Mexico.  One of the many reasons we moved was to enable me to live out this dream.  Here we can afford to live on my husband’s teacher’s salary.  Here we can afford for me to stay home with our kids.  I am a stay-at-home-mom. 

Before we moved here I heard many people say that the transition to stay-at-home-mom was hard.  They said that they struggled with the change from being out in the work world to being at home all the time, the transition from spending the majority of one’s time with adults to with a child (or children).  I didn’t get it.  This was my dream.  This was going to make my life so much easier.  There would be more time with my little bundle of joy, more time to get things done around the house, and more time for me.  I would be a better mother and a better wife.  I could happily live out the life of Susie Homemaker – cooking, cleaning, and raising my child with a song in my heart and a smile on my lips.  It would be like that scene in Enchanted where Giselle simply begins to sing and suddenly the apartment is clean, she has made herself a new outfit, and the world is a better place filled with incredibly helpful little creatures.

Here’s the problem: 1) I can’t sing, 2) I hate sewing, and 3) I’m pretty sure I would freak out if my apartment was suddenly filled with rats,birds, and other little critters.  As much as I would like my life to be a musical that’s just not the real world. 

Instead we moved to Mexico, I became a stay-at-home mom, and suddenly I understood what all those women were talking about.  Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love being able to stay home with Eli and feel incredibly blessed to be able to do so.  I love getting to see him grow and develop with each new day.  I even love the exhaustion of chasing a toddler around.  But it’s still exhaustion.  There’s still plenty of less than enjoyable work to be done.  I don’t think I’ll ever come to love washing dishes or cleaning toilets.

And then there’s the loneliness.  My sweet little boy with his 4 word vocabulary can only provide so much intellectual stimulation.  Plus, we moved to Mexico.  My whole world has turned upside down and I’m trying to learn a new language in the process.  It’s a challenging adventure to say the least.  But that dreaded loneliness has left me with plenty of time to contemplate the job of mom.  And I’ve come to the conclusion that being a stay-at-home mom, at this stage in my life, is truly my vocation. It’s a job that I am called to do to the best of my ability, a calling if you will.  I am not monetarily paid, I don’t really have a boss, and I’m not sure it can be put on a resume for future career opportunities, but God has given me this opportunity and I long to fulfill it to the best of my ability.

I’m still learning how to be a stay-at-home-mom, how to be a mom in general for that matter.  It’s a lesson I have a feeling I’ll be working on for a long time.  However, there’s something important about seeing it as my vocation and realizing the blessing and the calling that God has given me for this stage in my life.  Mothering doesn’t require a specific personality type, interest set, or education level.  It requires dedication, patience, unconditional love, and a lot of hard work.  Even if I go back to work someday I hope that I will never lose sight of being a mom as part of my vocation.  It’s a high calling and a blessing.  It’s beautiful and overwhelming.  It’s part of the adventure.  

I have asked myself this question many times.  Every instructional piece I’ve read on blog writing states that in order to have a successful blog you must know your purpose and your intended audience.

Well…

I write this blog to share with friends and family who do not live here in Mexico about what is currently happening in my life (and show off a few cute pictures of Eli). 

I write it to keep my mind active and share my general thoughts on life, parenting, and faith.

I write it largely because life in Mexico has been a bit lonely and I feel like this is just one more way to use social media to somehow feel connected with the rest of the world.

None of these are the clear, concise mission statement or specific audience the blog-writing experts tell me I should have.  I’m not there yet.  Maybe one day I’ll sit down and actually pen a mission statement and make sure that every entry on my blog fits my stated purpose from then on, but for now you’re stuck with whatever I come up with from day to day.

However, as I was pondering this question I came across the following quote in Eugene Peterson’s autobiography, The Pastor: A Memoir

“All language, all true language, is not so much communication, getting something said accurately and persuasively, adding to the information and knowledge that can be put in a library.  True language has to do with communion, establishing a relationship that makes for life: love, and faith and hope, forgiveness and salvation and justice.  True language requires both tongue and ear.” (pg. 243)

I’m still pondering this.  How do I create true language in a blog?  Is it possible to actually establish “a relationship that makes for life” through short entries read on a screen?  Probably not, if this is all the relationship consists of…so this brings me back to the same question….why blog?

I’ll keep pondering this.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of Eli pondering as well:

I, like Sheldon Cooper, believe in the power of a hot beverage.  Unlike him, I did not develop this belief due to my mother’s insistence that anytime someone is sad they should be offered a hot beverage for comfort.  My belief stems from my personal experience.  I have seen the ability of a hot beverage to open up conversation and develop new bonds among individuals with very different backgrounds.

My first experience with this phenomenon occurred on a trip to Mexico when I was just 13 years old.  I was visiting Tijuana with a friend’s family and a group from their church along with several other groups from across the country.  Our goal was to build homes for several families who were living on as little as $2 a day.  We succeeded in this goal, but more importantly my 13 year old eyes were opened to a world beyond the comfortable American suburbia I called home.  During that trip I bonded with the 4 year old girl for whom my group was building a home.  Our bond started with something simple, our shared name - Abby, but by the end of the trip, at least for me, it became something far greater.  On the last night of the trip we prepared a “feast” for the families.  It reality it was simple meal of steak and potatoes, but for these families it was truly something special.  At the end of the night we sat under stars with cups of hot chocolate and stared up at a beautiful show of fireworks.  While Abby sat in my lap enamored with the lights in the sky, a show like none she had ever seen before, I sat enamored with this little girl who would grow up in a slum in Tijuana and probably never know much more of the world.  That night, over a hot beverage, my heart grew for the world beyond my own.  In reality, Abby was no different from me; she was simply born into very different circumstances.

Five years later I left for college.  Like any college student I bonded with new friends as we shared our lives over hot beverages in numerous coffee shops and dorm rooms, but these were not the hot beverages that truly changed my outlook on life.  The hot beverages that impacted me more were those I shared with a 13 year old girl.  I met Jasmine through a club I joined at my college.  The club, known on campus as Building Behind Bars, was an outreach of Prison Fellowship Ministries. Prison Fellowship works to bring reconciliation in the lives of prisoners and their families.  Angel Tree, the particular facet I was a part of, works with the children of prisoners, helping to bring reconciliation between parents who are in the prison and their children and providing mentoring for those children.  Jasmine was the child whom I was matched with to mentor.  For two years a friend and I regularly made the 45 minute drive to the small town where Jasmine and her sister lived.  We met and talked with them in various locations, but some of our most profound conversations occurred over hot cups of coffee at a local Panera Bread.  We talked about their lives growing up and their dreams for the future.  Over hot beverages we bonded across cultural and socioeconomic differences.  Like Abby, Jasmine was no different than me, she was simply born into very different circumstances, circumstances that shaped her life up to that point, circumstances that I still regularly pray do not shape the rest of her life.

Today, I once again had the chance to bond with other women over hot beverages.  These are not women who are circumstantially impoverished by place of birth, lack of money, or familial relations.  These are women like myself; stay-at-homes moms with husbands who are gainfully employed, healthy, happy children, and generally well-rounded lives.  The only difference is the country where we were born and the language we grew up speaking.  The language barrier has truly been my greatest barrier here in Mexico.  How do you develop a relationship with someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you?  How do you have a deep conversation and truly share your experiences?  These are the things I miss most here; these are the things I’m learning to overcome.  So, when a new friend from church invited me to come and get to know some of the other women over coffee I jumped at the chance with open arms.  I know the power of a hot beverage to develop bonds.  So, today I drove off to Starbucks nervous and excited.  I sat with other women and chatted, some in English, some in Spanish.  The conversation wasn’t particularly deep, but for me it was an open door; the beginning of something new.  It was a chance to find commonality, a chance to develop new relationships, and a chance to overcome my longing for more here in Mexico – my loneliness.  Today, the power of the hot beverage once again worked its magic to begin to overcome differences and build relationships.  I pray that this is only the beginning of this particular hot beverage story.

I’m generally really good about not losing things.  I’m one of those everything has a place and everything in its place kind of people.  I’m the alphabetize your movies kind of person.  So, when I lose something it really bugs me. 

Somewhere along our road trip I lost the charger for my Kindle - my brand new Kindle I got for my birthday.  My birthday was the day we left for the trip.  Sad, I know.  So, for now, my reading has been limited to the few books we brought with us.  It’s a limited selection.  However, the book I’m currently reading, entitled Spiritual Parenting, by Michelle Anthony, happened to have just what I needed the other day. She writes:

“When my daughter was only eighteen months old, my husband received a phone call offering him a position teaching at a college in Kenya for three months.  My daughter was just a baby, and I wasn’t far from that either. I was a very young mom still trying to figure out this whole thing called parenthood.  During those months in a little village called Kijabe, I grew in ways that are hard to define.

I grew as a woman, as a mother, as a wife, and as a child of God. I was desperate most days, I cried out to God to help me, support me, strengthen me, and befriend me.  I didn’t have any of the luxuries that I had at home…I was profoundly lonely, and I was raising a child without the community of my friends or my family in a foreign place.

During those months that would ultimately shape my life as an adult and a parent, God taught me an enormous amount about simplicity and what was most important in the grand scheme of life.  By the time I left my tour of duty in Kenya, I felt as though I could conquer anything in parenting with God by my side.  Looking back, I see that God was setting up the posture of my heart toward this environment of being out of my comfort zone.”

You can probably see how this spoke to me.  I definitely have my lonely days here in Mexico City.  I have my times when I wonder what I’m doing as a parent.  I’m out of my comfort zone.  I pray that at the end of my time here in Mexico that I, like Michelle Anthony, can say that I have grown, that I have trusted God, and that I am somehow more comfortable outside of my comfort zone.