Guest Blogger: Lessons of a New Mom: Love is a Discipline

Hey everyone!! A few weeks ago I asked for guest bloggers and my wonderful friend and very new Mommy, Olive, decided to contribute!!! Here's her post!! You can check out her awesome blog (it's 3 blogs in 1 really...) and follow her if you like!!!  Enjoy!!!! Thanks again Olive!!!

~Lessons of a New Mom:  Love is a Discipline~
Living life with an infant, I feel like I am learning afresh that love is often a discipline. The word "discipline" might come as a surprise to you.  But what I mean is that love is made up of all the little choices I make throughout the day.  Some of these choices are easy (like dropping everything to play with my smiling baby) but many times the choices require more effort.

Babies are cute, but the reality is that they're not so all the time. When there's a big poop leak at the end of an exhausting day, I need to choose to love my daughter and to offer her grace in the practical ways of cleaning her up and washing the clothes and whatever else she soiled.  Or when she's fussing and crying at the top of her lungs - even after she's been fed, burped and changed - it takes discipline to keep on holding her, rocking her and doing whatever I can to soothe her.  When she awakens at 2am, 4am and 5am hungry, it requires a deliberate decision on my part to get out of my comfy bed and feed her (which also means burp her, change her and soothe her back to sleep.)

With a child in the home, it is also a discipline to keep loving my spouse.  Not because he's hard to love, but because I forget to love him.  In the throes of feeding, changing, washing endless piles of laundry and trying to maintain some semblance of sanity, it's frighteningly easy to forget to love the one beside me who is helping me feed, change, do laundry and stay sane.  It's easy to take his help for granted, to neglect saying thank you or to ignore the needs he has for my time and attention.  So love is the discipline to pause and ask, "How are you doing?", to look him in the eye and really listen as he replies, to offer a back rub or even to stop my busybodying and sit with him on the couch once in a while.  Love is the decision to take the early morning feeding so that he can sleep a little longer.

Loving these most important people in my life requires work.  It is an exercise in selflessness that often has me asking God for help because I don't have the generosity of heart that's needed.  To love them means treating them with dignity, respect and care, sometimes in spite of how I feel.  Being a mother of a young child means my own tasks and ambitions are often interrupted.  On any given day, I'll be left with a half-written blog post, dishes that are partially washed, laundry sitting in a heap and a conversation with my husband that was put on hold mid-sentence.   What I'm learning though is that it matters not whether the floors are swept, if my inbox is clear or even if I checked one thing off my ever-growing to-do list.  What matters is whether I have loved.

So when my head hits the pillow at night and I'm tempted to berate myself for having finished so little, I ask myself, "Have I loved today?" If I can say yes to that, I consider that day a success.