Preparing for your real career

As I've written these blog posts and talked with friends about the difficulties we often have in transitioning to motherhood, one thing has become very clear. None of us were really prepared for what motherhood actually involves. The reasons for this are manifold. Some women had mothers who worked full-time and never had an example of what a stay-at-home mom does. Even those of us who had moms who stayed home, however, seemed not to have absorbed quite as much as we should have. Moreover, anything we might have picked up from our moms somehow seems to have been erased by the college experience. While I loved my college and am so thankful for the years I spent there, I can't say that it really did much to prepare me for the real career that now faces me. Even the churches and Christian ministries with which I was involved in college seemed to ignore the fact that most of the girls attending their meetings or volunteering with their ministries were not going to be in college forever nor be devoted to full-time Christian ministry. And so, thousands of Christian girls graduate from college each year, heading out to some exciting new endeavor--a new job, graduate studies, overseas service. Five (or so) years later, most of them find themselves in a very different place--married, with a baby, sitting at home, wondering, "This is what I said I always wanted, but how on earth did I get here? And now what the heck do I do?"

This post, then, is aimed at my female readers who are not yet mothers or wives, who may be in college or pursuing that exciting post-college endeavor. If this is you and you are hoping that one day you might be a wife or mother, take this word to heart--start thinking now about how you are preparing for your real career.

Read these articles and do what they say. You future self will thank you.
http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001979.cfm
http://www.cbmw.org/Journal/Vol-11-No-2/Homemaking-Internship
Also, on the Girl Talk blog, they are doing a series on making the most of singleness. I highly recommend reading through these posts as well.