Do you remember being little and grown-ups asking you what you wanted to be when you grew up?
 

I always said I wanted to be a teacher, a veterinarian, and a singer. Before I was out of grade school I had discarded singer and added writing books.
 

 

As I grew older, my list of career goals changed. In seventh grade, I discarded them all. I was going to be a psychologist. I wanted to study sleep and dreams. By eleventh or twelfth grade, I was going to go into fashion design. I already designed lots of my own clothing, so it was a natural fit.

 

Psychologist. Fashion designer.
 

 

Then I started college. I majored in psychology. I worked in the psychology labs running experiments for four years. My last two years of college, I tutored other psychology students in statistics (for the research aspect of psychology) and helped the head of the department analyze his data from the experiments that I was conducting in the lab. Of course, my junior year I had also added an anthropology major. Psychology was still very interesting, but my intent was to finish out the psych major since it was almost complete and then have a double major at graduation. Anthropological study was now my new focus. I loved learning about and studying other cultures.
 

 

It's funny the courses that growing up takes…
 

Nine years ago, Hubby and I were studying through the book Living on Purpose: Finding God's Best for Your Life (affiliate link) by Tom and Christine Sine. (By the way, this book is amazing! Well worth the time!) One of the things we did in the course of the study was to take a retreat and work through discerning God's ultimate calling for our lives, how our callings fit together, and determine what to put our hands to in the present to work out those callings.
 

The authors had us begin by reflecting on our childhoods. What did we love? What did we want to be when we grew up? What were we good at?
 

The amazing thing was that I had circled back to many of my first loves. I was a mom of four young children. I was home educating them.
 

Mothering and teaching were my primary activities, but I had a longing to help other young moms. You see, I was the first of all my close friends to have babies, and there really was no older mother that reached out to me in a significant way to help me along. There was one woman, whom I met when Judah was just a week or two old, who was a mentor to me without meaning to be. She helped me so much by her example, but I was still on my own in many areas.
 

As we finished the study, I felt that God really wanted to use me to reach back to those moms who were a few steps behind me on the "mothering road" and encourage them. I wanted to offer support. Even this has been an odd sort of road for me. We were in a place where those sorts of relationships just did not happen. Then God moved us to another church. A church full of college students. The next thing I knew, God was using me in all sorts of women's lives. They were asking me questions, and I could share my experiences with them.
 

 

A few years later, I was expecting my fifth baby. We have always used cloth diapers, but I had not known much about wool soakers. Then I learned that you could knit and crochet these wool soakers– these amazing cloth diaper covers. Once baby was born, I tried them and fell in love. I very quickly began creating my own patterns for soakers because I couldn't find a pattern quite like I wanted. Since I would need all the sizes eventually, I decided to go ahead and do all the math and all the figuring, write up a pattern in all the sizes anyone would need during the diapering years, and then share my patterns.

 

 

I loved designing. I loved all the knitting or crocheting, all the figuring out how to make the item just like I envisioned, and then sharing it with the world. Then one day I realized that knitwear design and the pattern writing process is really similar to writing, especially all the tutorials that I include in the soaker patterns for beginning knitters. My soaker patterns are around 60 or more pages long~ I really have written a few short books.

 

Before I started designing, I had started a blog. I kind of felt like I should write articles on mothering. I wanted to share where I had been and what I had learned along the way. I wanted to share online with women all the things that I was sharing in real life with women friends. I was writing sometimes, but I just didn't feel that is where I should spend the majority of my time. Then I began designing, and my mothering blog took a back seat.
 

This year I have felt a pull to come back to writing. It's time. Designing has taken a back seat. (Although I will never stop designing~ it just happens.) I finally feel like God has said this is what I should put my hands to for this time in my life. So I trust that there is something He has for me to share with other women– with other moms– with other homeschool moms. These are the places I have traversed. I have walked some hard paths. If I can help another woman walk that path a little more easily, then my struggles have borne fruit. Then I have helped to lighten a load.
 

This is why I write.
 

It's amazing to me how God put these things within my heart as a very young girl. I had no idea that He would really use them. He planted the seed and watered it all this time– patiently. All the while, I experimented and tried interesting things. I didn't understand where my life was really taking me. Until it was time.