Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! This week, we have the honor of hearing from Kendra of The Ruth Experience, an amazing mama whose heart to love kids with hard stories is beautiful.  I know lots of families fighting for the hearts of kids through foster care and adoption and Kendra gives an honest, revealing glimpse into what that life looks like behind the scenes.  Thanks for sharing, Kendra! 

I sit staring at the last Christmas card envelope I need to address. Next to me, a completed stack for family and friends sit ready to go. I pull out my daughter’s card, look over her note again, the one she thought up by her seven-year-old mind alone –it’s addressed to her birth mother. She’s wondering if she would care to come to Christmas, “if she’s not too busy.”

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! I love this series and am honored to have the chance to share the real life stories of beautiful woman like my friend Haley.  Haley, the creative mastermind behind June and Mae, is a brave warrior of a woman who has found healing and hope in the aftermath of what she describes in this post.  It’s an honor to have her story on my blog today! 

I thought my life was perfect. I was so blinded by my intense desire to feel needed that I completely lost myself in the process. I was with a guy who cared nothing about me yet I fell so hard I was clueless. He wasn’t the first male to come along and whisk me away with fancy words while having other motives. This wasn’t the first time I wore rose colored glasses out of ignorance. The string of disrespectful boys numbed me to the intense pain I would feel with this boy, though. This wasn’t just another boy.

He was handsome and charming, had quite the gift for weaseling his way into the deepest parts of your heart. He would get upset with me a lot, cursing me out in public parking lots over his alcohol problem and then bringing gifts the next day out of an apologetic spirit, or so he said. I learned the art of forgiveness quite well and threw the phrase around that “no one is perfect” a little too often. But the day he told me I was too skinny to be sexy hurt more than it should have, I hid the pain because I never wanted him to think I was emotionally weak.

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As a first time mom, you have these expectations. From the desire to love every part of motherhood and this new journey to balancing it all to never losing yourself. Then motherhood happens and you find that things aren’t always going to be sunshine and happiness. It’s in those sleep deprived hours that you find yourself wondering what you’ve got yourself into. The next thing you know, your tired mind starts running wild and the thought crosses you mind: “What if I’m not made to be a Mama?”

Let that sink in for a second. This is supposed to be the happiest time of your life. You are a mother. You’ve experienced a miracle in that of growing a baby. You have this precious new little one to love and dote on yet you can’t kick the feeling that you might be in over your head. Not only has this been my mindset before but over the last 3 years, I thought this often. I wonder who God thinks I am to bless me with a son that doesn’t sleep, is the pickiest of eaters and likes to push limits on a daily basis. Why didn’t I get a child that was sweet as sunshine and easy to raise? Because God knows me and knows that I am not one to back down.

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! This is the first Womanly Wednesday post of 2016 and I can’t think of a better way to jump in.  My friend Laura is vulnerably sharing about how heroin addiction impacted her family and her honesty is beautiful.  Make sure to check our Laura’s blog, Willful and Wildhearted, to read more about her story and her travel adventures! 

Everyone has at least one subject in life they don’t like to discuss with others. Unfortunately for me, a topic I have continuously struggled with my entire life is family. When many people think of family, their mind goes to a happy space filled with memories of laughter, inside jokes and traditions. I am fairly certain it’s not terribly common that most people I meet will ever be able to understand where I’m coming from on this – and that’s totally fine.

You see, I grew up with an older sibling addicted to heroin.

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday!  This week, we have the honor of hearing from my friend Chandler of Life As A Larsen.  She’s opening up and sharing about what it’s looked like to wrestle with body image over the years and I love her honesty about a side of this issue we don’t usually hear about.  This post is a great complement to Maegan’s post from a few weeks back about her weight loss journey and body image struggles, so make sure to check that one out too! 

“You’re so tiny!” “I wish I could be as skinny as you are.” “Do you ever eat?”

These are the type of questions/comments I hear every single day; and let me tell you it gets old. I know they are compliments but to me they are just a reminder or how much I need to be aware of my size and health.

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Just like our broken world, our broken bodies constantly remind us that everything is not as it should be.  On this Womanly Wednesday, my sweet friend Rebecca of Caravan Sonnet is sharing about her journey with Lyme Disease and cancer and how those battles have shaped her into the woman she is today.  

When I started this blog back in April, I dreamed it would be a place where women could gather round the table and share their hearts, stories, and lives in real and beautiful ways.  I dreamed that it would be a place where women could talk about the struggles they wrestle with on a daily basis so that other women could come out of the silence and breathe a sigh of relief as they admitted, “Me too.”

One of my favorite ways I’ve seen this unfold this year is in my Womanly Wednesday guest post series.  Since May, I’ve had over 25 different women share their stories on Wednesdays, opening up their hearts so other people wouldn’t feel alone.  I have continually been amazed not only by the beautiful words these women have shared, but also by how you readers have responded. These posts have gotten hundreds of shares, thousands of views, and so many supportive, encouraging comments.  This guest post series has been one of my favorite parts of blogging so far, and I’m so grateful to all of you who’ve participated.

I have loved EVERY post that has been shared in this series, but today, I’m rounding up the six posts that have gotten the most views and shares since I started the series in May.  And just to clarify…I’m not playing favorites here. I took these straight from my blog analytics about which posts had the most total views in 2015! I really did love every post I got the honor of sharing this year and couldn’t possibly pick favorites based just on my own preferences.  If you haven’t read these six posts or the rest of them, you need to check them out! So much goodness here, my friends.

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! This week, my sweet friend Maegan is sharing about what it’s looked like to wrestle with body image throughout her weight loss journey.  She frames her struggle beautifully in the context of our hearts and God’s heart for us and it’s an honor to have her story on the blog today! 

For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with my weight. When I was little, it was cute, because who doesn’t love little chubby kids? As I got older, though, and realized it wasn’t just cute “baby fat” that I had, it became a problem for me.

I knew I was bigger than the other girls in my class. I never got bullied for it and still had lots of friends, but it was something that I was constantly aware of. I have always walked into a room and immediately done a scan to see if I’m the biggest person in it. If I saw someone heavier, I would sigh with relief and feel better about myself. I would even, sometimes, try to stand near that person to make myself look better.

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! Today’s guest poster, Sierra, is a dear friend with whom I led Young Life at Davidson.  She is one of the most thoughtful, loving, and wise people I know and when she offered to share about what it’s been like to walk through cancer with her dad, I jumped at the chance to share her story.  Sierra, your heart is beautiful and I’m honored to join the many people praying for your dad’s health and joy.  

On a beautiful, warm Friday in June, I was at a friend’s house, getting ready for her rehearsal dinner. As one of the bridesmaids, I moved from room to room upstairs, pulling on my dress, doing my makeup, asking a friend to help with my hair. I held my phone close, waiting for a call from my parents with the results from a biopsy my dad had gotten earlier that week. They had assured me that it was probably nothing. The friends I had told echoed them, certain that it was just a lump and nothing to worry about.

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Welcome to this week’sWomanly Wednesday! When I found Amberly’s blog a few months back, I spent WAY too much time scrolling through all her old posts about marriage.  I love her wise heart to see wives fight for real, honest, and loving communication and connection in their marriages and have learned a lot from her posts.  Even though I’m not in this stage she describes here yet, I love her honest words about what it’s looked like to wrestle with her identity as a mama when it comes to breastfeeding.  Thanks for sharing your story, Amberly! 

A couple of years ago, I attended a class on breastfeeding as an assignment for the Prenatal and Infant Nutrition class that I was taking. I wasn’t in the mindset of having kids of my own yet, but it was one of the most educational couple hours of my life and afterward, I made the solid decision that I would be nursing all of my kids in the future. The lactation consultant who taught that night filled us with valuable information about the benefits of breastfeeding, techniques and helpful hints for making it a smooth experience. I took a lot of notes and just knew that I would be so good at this when I had my own child. Other moms made breastfeeding look so easy, so I was bound to be a natural at it. Never did I think that breastfeeding and milk production would make me feel insecure and inferior and bring up feelings of jealousy toward other women.

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