It’s the month of May, our Lady’s month, and Mother’s day is just around the corner. So let’s talk about motherhood and a mother's prayer life. Prayer is absolutely necessary for our sanctification and perfection in God's love. We know that. Yet it can be a temptation to let the demands of motherhood excuse us from a consistent, daily prayer life.
We may not be as disciplined as we'd like to be with our spiritual life. We miss our times at prayer. We fail to rise early. Our minds dart about, wandering and distracted. When we do actually get to pray, we are interrupted by babies crying and the endless needs of our children. Or….we fall asleep.
Perhaps we can't find any time to pray ourselves but the one thing we can count on is praying with our children throughout the day. Yet, maybe prayer with them looks something like this…
“Hail Mary…. stop making faces at your sister!…Full of grace…No, stay in the room…The Lord is with thee…Stop using that Rosary to play with the cat!….”
It isn't pretty. Hardly ever. But it is full of grace.
Motherhood is Demanding. It is perfectly understandable why we may not be able to pray as we wish we could all the time.
In the same breath, our “busy-ness” can also be a mask for the vice of acedia or a type of spiritual sloth in which the demands of motherhood become the excuse of why we can “hardly ever” pray. There is a difference. And in the face of an almost constant, nagging exhaustion, it's easier, well, to just not pray.
Prayer is part discipline, and discipline is painful at first until one's faculties and habits begin to fall in line. We must be careful to not use exterior activities as a reason for not having a daily habit of prayer:
