Tending Your Soul While Tending Your Family by Jolina Petersheim

by Guest Jolina Petersheim

January 29, 2019

I’m writing this at the kitchen table while my four-year-old gets settled in her sleeping bag next to me. My twenty-month-old is taking a nap in the nursery, and I can hear the washer gurgling as it swirls another load. Laundry litters the couch, the white sheets piled up like dunes, and library books scatter the floor from when my four-year-old “read” to her little sister.

It’s a full life, a good life, and sometimes that fullness prevents me from folding laundry or picking up books because if I get two hours a day to myself, I want to create something that will last beyond me.

Honestly, two hours a day seems generous. Those two hours are usually broken up with questions and snack requests until my four-year-old cuddles in for nap time. But broken up or not, I’ve written five novels in two-hour nap time chunks over the past six years.

I began writing my debut, The Outcast, shortly after I found out I was expecting our firstborn daughter, who will be seven in February. I began writing my second novel, The Midwife, when she was three months old.

I wrote two novels before The Outcast, but neither were publishable. I went to the UK with two other women, one my best friend, and while I was there—sitting in a punt on a slow brown river in Cambridge, having cream tea in the Cotswolds, hiking along the Irish Coast—I laid my author dreams on the altar and vowed to pursue an entire new vocation: motherhood.

Turns out, becoming a mother was far easier for me than becoming an author. Six weeks after I returned from the UK, I found out I was expecting.

Two months later, I met a white-haired gentleman after an author reading. Hearing each other’s Dutchy last names, we launched into discussions about our Mennonite/Amish heritages, family reunions, and shoo-fly pie. He asked if I was working on a novel. I told him I’d just started writing a contemporary retelling of The Scarlet Letter set in an Old Order Mennonite Community in Tennessee. He asked to read it. I was suspicious until I realized he was a legitimate agent with a client list that made my mouth dry.

So, I sat in front of our fireplace and wrote as my expectant belly grew. Working eight-hour days, five days a week, I finished the novel in six months. I have since never written for eight hours at a time, and yet I wouldn’t trade my broken writing stints for peace and quiet (though, once a week, I do enjoy writing at a bustling coffee shop in town).

In the beginning, way back there in 2012, I struggled with mama guilt. I barely knew how to be a mother, and here I was adding authorship to the mix. I remember going outside with my clunky laptop and typing away on the front porch while the ceiling fans beat the summer air and my husband took care of our daughter. My insecurity prevented me from seeing this for what it was—a well-deserved break—and I instead wondered if I should go back inside and clean the kitchen or vacuum the floor or read War and Peace in Russian to my daughter to ensure I was doing enough. (I wear myself out, just thinking about how I was back then.)

Seeing that season through the clarifying lens of seven years, I believe God allowed me to step into motherhood and authorhood around the same time because he knew I would need a creative outlet to help me understand this new, very important role.

My family means more to me than anything on earth, and I take my role as a mother far more seriously than I take being a novelist. I am my daughters’ greatest example. The way I live my life will—for better and for worse—be the way they model theirs. Even if they don’t want to, even if they tell themselves they will go in the opposite direction, my habits will become their own.

What a responsibility, but also what a gift.

In eighteen years, my three little girls will be three young women, and I don’t want them to jump on the escalator of a never-ending to-do list that never allows them the opportunity to be still, to create, to think, to breathe.

Too often, we mothers believe we can’t tend our souls while also tending our families. Fathers too, of course, though I’ve witnessed far more women struggling with guilt than men.

But the truth is, our families need us to tend our souls—to take time to sit in front of the fire, to read books, to drink tea, to take a quiet moment to pour our hearts out on a keyboard, an easel, or the page. We were created in the Artist’s image, so is it any wonder a part of us isn’t satisfied unless we create?

Art—in any form—helps us process this beautifully winding maze of life, and while we are processing, our little ones are watching. They are seeing the validity of taking time to understand our hearts instead of lashing out due to our confusion, and therefore they will one day take the time to sit down and understand their own.

Friends, learn from me. Learn from that tired mama who would glance over her shoulder toward the French doors to check on her infant daughter and husband rather than letting her soul rest for an hour on the page.

Tending your soul while tending your family is not selfish. Tending your soul sets an example that will be carried down not just to your daughters and sons, but to their children as well.

What a responsibility. What a gift.

How are you going to tend your soul while tending your family? Try to name three different ways, and set aside time on your calendar to make them happen. 

(Comment below for your chance to win a copy of Jolina's latest release, How the Light Gets In, courtesy of Tyndale House Publishers)

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Jolina Petersheim is the bestselling author of The Alliance, The Midwife, and The Outcast, which Library Journal called "outstanding . . . fresh and inspirational" in a starred review and named one of the best books of 2013. That book also became an ECPA, CBA, and Amazon bestseller and was featured in Huffington Post's Fall Picks, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and the Tennessean. CBA Retailers + Resources called her second book, The Midwife, "an excellent read [that] will be hard to put down," and Romantic Times declared, "Petersheim is an amazing new author." Her third book, The Alliance, was selected as one of Booklist's Top 10 Inspirational Fiction titles of 2016. Jolina's nonfiction writing has been featured in Reader's Digest, Writer's Digest, and Today's Christian Woman. She and her husband share the same unique Amish and Mennonite heritage that originated in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but they now live in the mountains of Tennessee with their two young daughters. Jolina blogs regularly at www.jolinapetersheim.com.

From the highly acclaimed author of The Outcast and The Alliance comes an engrossing novel about marriage and motherhood, loss and moving on.

When Ruth Neufeld’s husband and father-in-law are killed working for a relief organization overseas, she travels to Wisconsin with her young daughters and mother-in-law Mabel to bury her husband. She hopes the Mennonite community will be a quiet place to grieve and piece together next steps.

Ruth and her family are welcomed by Elam, her husband’s cousin, who invites them to stay at his cranberry farm through the harvest. Sifting through fields of berries and memories of a marriage that was broken long before her husband died, Ruth finds solace in the beauty of the land and healing through hard work and budding friendship. She also encounters the possibility of new love with Elam, whose gentle encouragement awakens hopes and dreams she thought she’d lost forever.

But an unexpected twist threatens to unseat the happy ending Ruth is about to write for herself. On the precipice of a fresh start and a new marriage, Ruth must make an impossible decision: which path to choose if her husband isn’t dead after all.