Janalee's Reviews > Mere Motherhood: Morning Times, Nursery Rhymes, and My Journey toward Sanctification

You probably won't find this in the library (or Amazon, strangely), so just buy it. My friend, Shannon, lent it to me, after texting me pictures of certain paragraphs she thought I would like.

So here we have a mother, married at 18 I think, of nine children who homeschools and has moved A LOT around the country. Christian living. Educating children with lots of reading. The way she reflected on her life - the sunny times and awful times - touched me so deeply and made everything seem ok.

So many things to comment on:

*She begins, "It's a brash thing to write a memoir involving a family, who really has the right to tell her side of the story, the family story could be written eleven different ways. Some would be comedies, some would be tragedies". Isn't that so true, which is why you can't ever just gulp down one individual's story as fact, because there are a hundred other angles to it that the just one person can't relay. Which is fine, just always know that going in. This happens in my family all the time. I always remember things differently than my kids do and then they act like I'm making things up. But that's how I remember it!

*How they moved to a farm and she said, "I could write this chapter two different ways" - one would be to romanticize the farm life, Little House on the Prairie style - lots of opportunities to work hard for the kids! Animals! Space! But she chose the realistic route which was pretty torturing - I loved reading the unsugared version.

*Living in too many centuries. She said her husband would go to work in the 20th century and come home in the 18th century - to his family chopping wood, eating oatmeal, caring for animals.

*The answer to sorting socks - you don't. Or that turns into your whole life. Just put them in a basket and pick out what you need. This is brilliant and I'm doing it.

*Listen to how she lists her boys (8 boys, one girl). She had her first boy, then.." A second boy could play with the first. A third boy would be easier. A fourth boy would save money. A fifth boy would save energy on my part. A sixth boy only made sense. A seventh boy seemed like a necessity..."

*Talking about all the trouble the boys go into. The explosions and fires, etc. It got to the point where after an incident, she'd be like, "He was alive; I was unmoved".

*She never touched on meals or food. That's huge. Maybe she knew if she touched it, it would add 500 pages that she didn't want to include.

* I could have written this one - "When the boys are telling stories to each other, I am amazed at the things I knew nothing about. I thought I was with them all the time. Yet they managed to do so many things when I wasn't paying attention." You should hear the stories my girls tell me. I'm always thinking, But I was in the same house at the time. Wasn't I paying attention.

* How much she clung to the Bible and read it over and over. All the daily hours of reading she did with her kids. All the thousands of books she had. The living books. She dropped so many book names that I need to get looking.

*The idea of, after your kids are grown and gone, plugging your valuable self and mind into the lives of at-risk children to teach them.

And finally, something interesting. The author is on Goodreads - not just as an author but as a reader. It was fun to use the Compare Books feature and see all the things we've both read- lots! - and read her reviews on them. It's like we're friends now.