Sugar and Spice–10 Days of Inspiration (Guest Post)

My girls are wonderfully well-behaved. Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice… and all of that.

Except when they’re not. Then I would have to say they are more akin to that of a WWE match, except they aren’t acting.

My oldest (“old” being a relative term in this family, considering she is 4) and my middle child, 3, know how to throw down and throw tantrums like the best of them. And you better believe their 18 month old sister is learning the art quickly.

But the truth is, for the majority of the time: Sugar and Spice.

But not this day. I take that back. Not this hour.

Because the truth is, don’t we as moms tend to dismiss a perfectly good day all too often, simply because of a hard (read: REALLY HARD) hour or two?

On this day, I entered Walmart, all three of my little chickens in tow, feeling partially defeated to begin with I’ll admit. Afterall, come the afternoons of most of my days I can’t help but feel at least a little worn thin.

Command Strips. That’s all I needed. No food, no crafts, nothing! Simple in and out, right?

This is the part where all of you knowing moms shake your head because: you KNOW what comes next.

My ordinarily even tempered eldest little girl lost it. I mean GONE! A tantrum I have never before seen to this scale in my mom-life, and have never seen since. So right there in the Command Strip aisle I sat next to her, I tried to talk her down, I hugged her, I cried, I did everything short of bribe her to calm down, to no avail.

Amidst my panic and frustration, and her tantrum and big emotions, a Walmart employee walked past the madness and, for a moment, I was certain I was going to be asked to leave.

I was devastated. Mortified. Embarrassed. Certain of all the judgements being made on me as a parent from onlookers, which only fueled my defeat.

But a few minutes later (though it felt like hours) the tantrum stopped. The situation diffused and we chose our product and moved on down the aisles, slowly, as I continued to compose myself.

And then there she was. She looked like your run-of-the-mill 40-year-old employee of Walmart. The same one that had walked by me moments (or was it hours?) before. But she wasn’t that at all. She wasn’t just a “run-of-the-mill 40-year-old employee of Walmart”, she was my guardian angel in that moment.

Without any effort at all, she turned to me and said, “you’re doing a great job mom”.

Before I could even think about “helping it”, I burst into tears. And right there, in the home repair aisle, this angel, this hero, this fellow-mom, filled with intentional inspiration, wrapped me in a hug and calmed my weary heart.

While I have always been filled with a spirit of “women power”, and particularly women empowerment, it was in this moment that I truly saw it in action for the first time since becoming a mother. She loved me, she encouraged me, she inspired me, she “fixed my crown, without letting the whole world know it was crooked”.

These are the women we should strive to be like. These are the people we should strive to be like. Be it a neighbor, a friend, family or a stranger in a Walmart, at some point, we can all use some love, some encouragement and some inspiration to keep moving forward.

May we all be brave enough to speak up, reach out and love all our fellow moms.

Cause they all need it, just as much as I did.

About the Author: Tiffany Bigler is a stay at home mom to three amazing little girls, a supportive and loving wife to a graduate student husband, a best friend to all, a lover of food, an explorer of passions and, above all else, a child of God. She spends her days going on adventures to far off lands with her girls  (in their living room mostly) and her evenings cleaning up more crumbs than she ever thought possible… and she loves it all!