What Every Woman Can Learn from Three Sisters in a Bathroom

I can’t get to the shower Sunday morning without tripping over bare feet and gangly legs.

The girls have taken over the master bath, and so I shuffle back into the bedroom and decide to wait my turn.

I dump a basket of clean laundry on my bed and begin to fold; my hands busy, but my ears leaning toward the bathroom door.

“Maggie, you are beautiful,” says big sister, the one wielding the curling wand.

A pleased giggle rises from my four-year-old, and she raises her voice above the din of the blow dryer.

“Do you think I look like a princess?“

“Of co-o-o-o-o-urse,” Lizzy replies with a sing-song twang. “You don’t just look like a princess. You are a princess.“

“Oh, yeah,” Maggie replies, “Cause Jesus loves me.”

“Uh-huh,” agrees big sister.

The blow dryer grows quiet, and Hannah chimes in on the girl chat.

“Maggie!”

I hear a low whistle and the clapping of hands.

“You look gorgeous.”

“I know,” says little one, confidence oozing from her staccato words. “Lizzy already told me that.”

I stack the underwear in piles, begin matching up a mountain of socks, and I marvel silently at the power of a sister’s words.

One of the girls is humming Amazing Grace in that crowded bathroom.

Another is drumming her flighty fingers on the edge of the sink.

I pick up a heap of bath towels and tiptoe to that door cracked open.

I stand quiet and watch my girls giggle and banter, their blue eyes dancing with joy.

Lizzy adds one last curl to Maggie’s bouncy blonde and then lifts little one eye-level with the mirror above the sink.

Maggie puckers her lips and tosses a kiss at the beauty in the glass.

Lizzy eases her sister to the ground, and preened princess flips her curls and skips happy past me, her shoulders held high like the royalty she rightfully is.

And for just a moment I wonder what the world would be like if all of God’s girls lived like the sisters we’ve been created to be…

If we spoke words of hope instead of hurt.

If we esteemed rather than steam-rolled.

If we magnified one another’s strengths rather than searched for flaws.

What would happen to our work places, our homes, our communities, and our churches if we spread grace instead of gossip?

If we celebrated rather than condemned.

What kind of world might our daughters inherit if daily we chose to lift up our sisters to the mirror of the Word and whisper, “You’re beautiful.”

My big girls pad out of the bathroom with guilty grins.

“Sorry, Mom,” Hannah says with an apologetic curtsey. “You can have the shower now.”

“Yeah,” Lizzy adds. “It’s your turn to get gorgeous.”

I pat my bed-head with the palm of my hand and mutter, “I may need to borrow your magic wand.”

 My firstborn daughter smirks, and I close the door and savor the empty room.

As I step under the stream of hot water, I do what I always do in the shower.

I pray.

I pray that my girls will live with eyes wide open, that they will continue to see beauty in all the sisters around them…

In the ones sharing the bathroom beneath their roof and in the ones sharing life beyond their door.

And then, as my petitions soar heavenward with the rising steam, I ask God to help their mommy to do the same. 

 Counting with gratitude….

• 1927. Crumbs beneath the kitchen table—proof that all my children ate today.
• 1928. Quiet conversation with my boy in the dark, me perched on the bottom bunk as he talks and I listen.
• 1929. Rising at 4AM to do a “morning gig” on the radio. Sipping coffee and praising God over the airwaves as the sun rises over the city.
• 1930. Hannah leading the little ones in a game of “cop kids” in the backyard—the gift of creative children.
• 1931. A long walk alone along the lake—buds waving quiet from the tree limbs.
• 1932. Leading a poetry workshop in Josh’s kindergarten room—unearthing all those college poems and putting them to use again. So thankful for teachers who let me get my “teaching fix” in their classrooms!
• 1933. God stirring. Hope building.
• 1934. Maggie—”Mommy, I love my WHOLE FAMILY to the moon and back!”

 

Happily linking with Ann for multitude mondays, laura for playdates with God, Jen for soli deo gloria, The Mom Initiative, and Jen at Rich Faith Rising and Pamela at Our Sheltering Tree