Our cups are not always going to runneth over with joy. At least in a my-cup-runneth-over kind of way. The thing is, we all have times in our lives when we don’t have anything nice to say about where we are at in that moment. Jesus is keeping my head above water, but some days, I just don’t have anything nice to say. The fact is, I’m three-babies-four-and-under in to this marriage and motherhood gig, and I’ve got some common as well as not-so-common crosses and challenges in my life right now. (“ God gives us all the grace we need, though, right?”) I knew that I hadn’t fooled anybody with my half-hearted, cliché attempts to stay positive during the evening. At the end of the evening, I climbed back into my old blue Odyssey feeling like I had done nothing but complain about my life. We giggled as we each tried to one-up each other on whose two-year-old was most like a tornado, whose infant slept the least number of hours in a row, and whose husband was away from home the most. Our conversation started out as so many “mommy talks” go, with broad, familiar questions like, Where do you live? How many children do you have? How old are they? It wasn’t very long, however, before our conversation took on a slightly negative tone.

I was super-excited to make a new acquaintance and to have a little night out. A few weeks ago, the planets finally aligned for the three of us-all mothers of multiple small children under five years old-to meet up one evening at a local coffee shop. A friend of mine had been dying for me to meet another friend of hers for some time.

Negative nancy positive