Expectations

José Manuel Ríos Valiente – Creative Commons, some rights reserved

I have bantered back and forth with myself about this blog for several months now and I have finally come to the place that I want to do this, I mean I think (we’ll see in the months to come), after all with the hormones that are raging one can’t be too sure of anything.  But truly, what brought me to create this blog was the continued sense of “expectation” that I have felt since we publicly announced that we (my husband and I) were pregnant.  Sure, we’ve felt a personal “expectation” in the sense that we are expecting our first child together, but the expectation that has brought me to begin to share my thoughts publicly are the expectations that others and society have for me as a woman, as a pastor, and as a soon-to-be-mother.  These expectations have ranged from, “Oh you should expect to feel tired all the time” (which I have!) to “Oh, you’ll have to breastfeed” or “You’ll have to take six-months at least off from your position to do it right” to “You’ll finally get the scheduling pressures of life with kids.” Some of these have been quite easy to hear and move on from, while others seem to imply that the 40 years of life and experience – including being a public school teacher, a youth director, and now a pastor – don’t amount to anything until I have a child.  Well, I am here to be open and honest about what I am feeling, what my own experiences have taught me, and to share some stories of ways that we (all of us) are helpful or burdensome in our expectations and advice that we so generously heap out on expectant mothers (and fathers).

So who I am?  I am a 40 something woman who serves as a pastor in a Christian congregation in the Pacific Northwest. Prior to serving as a pastor I was a middle school language arts/reading teacher, and a university instructor in Children’s Literature and Reading Methods.  My husband, who is also a pastor, and I met when I moved to begin new call in a new congregation. My husband has two children from a previous marriage – a 20 something, and a teenager who don’t live with us but are here throughout the year.  We found out in February 2014 that we were expecting, and after waiting some time to tell the kids, we went public to both of our congregations in April.

With that, I invite you to join me as I reflect on this journey, rant at times at important and not so important things, rave about people’s love and care and probably the latest and greatest gadgets, experiences and giggles, and generally just ramble about this life of becoming a mother, while living the very public life of a pastor. I don’t pretend to be an expert in any of this, yet I don’t pretend to be a complete novice.  I believe that we learn in and as community and I hope and pray this is another space of community in which we grow, laugh, learn, and love together – while trying our best to set expectations aside and simply and boldly live!