More Than a Mom

How Prioritizing Your Wellness Helps You (and Your Family) Thrive

Kari Kampakis

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780785234166
• eBook ISBN: 9780785234173
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What if taking care of yourself was the first step to helping your family thrive?

If you’ve parented long enough, then you’ve learned firsthand why your personal wellness matters. You’ve felt the pain (or consequences) of devaluing yourself. Whether your wake-up call came from a diagnosis, a breakdown, an issue with your child or spouse, anxiety, or simply feeling depleted and numb, it most likely unveiled this truth: 

Mothers are humans too. We require love, compassion, rest, and renewal. Taking care of our needs strengthens us and equips us for the road ahead. 

In More Than a Mom, bestselling author Kari Kampakis offers a practical, approachable, and attainable framework to stay on a healthy path. You can take your kids only as far as you’ve come–and since their strength builds on your strength, you must take time to focus on you. More Than a Mom is about unleashing God’s power in your life and standing on timeless truths that will help you

• know your worth and embrace your purpose,
• build strong, uplifting friendships that you can model for your children,
• quit the negative self-talk and make peace with your body, and
• learn to mother yourself by resting and setting boundaries.

The world shaping your children is more callous and complex than the world that shaped you. Kids need to be stronger, smarter, and more rooted in what’s real. Empower your son or daughter by tending to your heart, soul, body, and mind. Give them a vision of a healthy adult–and know that as they launch into the real world, they will build on what you started.

1

KNOW YOUR WORTH

A Mother Needs to Feel Valued

Your value doesn’t decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth.

ANONYMOUS

The pediatrician made friendly conversation with my fourteen-year-old daughter as she scanned her body at her annual checkup.

They laughed as they talked about Halloween costumes and making slime at home.

As the pediatrician finished, she sat down in her rolling chair. She smiled at my daughter, the same age as her daughter, and leaned in. I’d been to enough visits to know that this was where she switched gears from doctor mode to mom mode. She’d focus less on my daughter’s body and more on my daughter’s heart.

“As a teenager,” the pediatrician explained, “you’ll have a lot of new experiences in the years ahead. Boys will enter the picture, and some won’t be that great. I want you to always remember something.”

The doctor leaned in and paused for emphasis. “Always remember that you are a gift. Some people won’t treat you like a gift, but that doesn’t change your value. You are still a gift no matter what anyone else says or thinks. You got that?”

My daughter nodded, not fully understanding the context. I blinked back tears because I did understand, and I was thankful for this truth being impressed on her heart.

In this new season, my daughter and her friends would get a taste of adulthood. They’d meet people who are quick to use or manipulate others. Some encounters would make them feel rejected, insignificant, disposable, or overlooked. Inevitably, they’d question their worth. They’d wonder what must be wrong with them to make a guy (or a girl) act in hurtful ways.

Before these realities kicked in, our pediatrician wanted my daughter to know her value. Because when you know that you are a gift, you don’t let hurtful people define you. You protect the gifts God gives you, like your confidence and self-esteem.

It pained me to imagine anyone treating my baby as less than a gift. Yet I knew it was only a matter of time before someone would come along and try.

I often think of this story when I see women struggle with self-worth. I’ve struggled myself, and chances are, you have too.

Why? Because one irony of the sexes is that while men tend to struggle with pride, women tend to struggle with insecurity. While males tend to think too much of themselves, females tend to think too little of themselves. Our culture of “girl power” tries to counter this, but this confidence often takes a narcissistic view of self. It’s about self-worship, not self-love, and confidence like that isn’t healthy or sustainable.

My pediatrician’s advice to my daughter is equally true for you. No matter where you’ve been or what you’ve been through in the past, you are a gift. That truth still stands regardless of old wounds and hurts. Your value comes from within because you were born with inherent dignity. And if you could see yourself the way God looks at you, with the loving gaze of a proud Father, you’d never question your worth again.

What God creates, God loves, and what God loves, He loves forever. Even on your worst days, He loves you at maximum capacity. Love begins with God because God is love. He doesn’t love us because we are good; He loves us because He is good. Thankfully, His love doesn’t depend on what any human being does or says.

God loves you first, and He invites you to respond to His love. Open your heart to receive His transforming grace. Embrace Jesus as your Savior, and unlock the gift of the Holy Spirit. As God’s grace works inside of you, it empowers you to love yourself (and others) in response to what Jesus did on the cross.

Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

1 JOHN 4:8–10 (NIV)

WORSHIP THE RIGHT GOD

I’m sure you have had days when you loved your people, yet your people didn’t love you back.

It hurts, doesn’t it? Whether it is your child, your spouse, a family member, or a friend, feeling your love go unreciprocated is a dagger in the heart.

When this happens to me, I try to remember that we, as humans, are sinful. We hurt the people we love sometimes because we’re in a mood, going through a phase, wrestling with a problem, or feeling some brokenness that impacts our behavior.

I love my people with all my heart, but relying on them to always make me feel worthy sets the stage for disappointment. It keeps my confidence at the mercy of their fickle human nature.

Like me, they are a work in progress. They have baggage, backstories, and blind spots. If I measure my worth based on how they treat me today or whether they reciprocate my efforts, then I’m in for a rocky ride. I’ve rooted my faith in the wrong thing, elevating people over God and putting people on a pedestal they’re not meant to live on.

The truth is, people make terrible gods. And even the biggest blessings stop being blessings when you make them the center of your universe.

God created us to worship Him, and if we don’t put Him first, we’ll find substitutes. We’ll worship false idols like our family, our friends, our body, our job, our image, our money, our accomplishments, or some earthly trapping.

Dr. Tim Keller says, “You don’t get to decide to worship. Everyone worships something. The only choice you get is what to worship.”¹ We all get our priorities out of whack. We’ve all based our worth on something other than God and rooted our identity in something other than Christ.

Recently a mom emailed me after her son cheated on a test. She was heartbroken for obvious reasons—and because this cheating was out of character. As moms do, she blamed herself. She felt like she had failed her son and saw this decision as a reflection of her parenting.

So often we base our value on our loved ones’ decisions or our relationship with them. We gauge our self-worth based on results and absorb their failures as our failures. Of the many hats we wear, of the many support roles we play, our roles as moms feel most significant and high stakes.

To no surprise, motherhood is the most common platform on which we build our identity. When our children thrive, we feel great, and when they fail, we blame ourselves. We grieve and wonder where we went wrong.

It is undeniably true that we, as parents, influence our children’s choices. It is also true that our children choose their own path. They’re separate from us, and they have free will. The older they get, the less control we have, and even if we could parent perfectly, we’re not guaranteed results. Even Jesus, a perfect role model, had one disciple betray Him. Judas knew better, yet he went against everything that Jesus had taught him.

Thankfully, your worth doesn’t depend on the choices your children make or how well they perform. It isn’t tied to how desirable you are to your spouse, how many girls’ trips you get invited to, how popular you are, what you weigh, whether you can rock a bikini, how productive you’ve been lately, your Instagram likes, your salary, how many people you please, what your mother-in-law thinks of you, or what your ex-husband spews in a text.

Your core identity—the one that runs deeper than your identity as a mother, wife, sister, friend, daughter, colleague, boss, etc.—is that you are a child of God. He invites you into His family through the saving grace of Christ. When you accept this invitation, God works in you and through you by the power of the Holy Spirit. The same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is what God gives to those who believe in Christ.

You are worthy because God made you. He created you in His image and for a unique purpose. Nothing about you is a mistake because God doesn’t make mistakes. And when you base your identity on Christ and the sacrifice He made, you build your self-worth on a solid foundation. You gain a confidence that lasts because it is rooted in eternal life, not circumstances that may change overnight.

My friend Shannon had an epiphany during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. While praying in the garden of Gethsemane, she heard Jesus tell her, “I didn’t die to make you worthy. I died because you are worthy.” These words settled Shannon’s doubt about her inherent value. Jesus died for her, and now she lives for Him.

A. W. Tozer said, “As God is exalted to the right place in our lives, a thousand problems are solved all at once.”² Making God your number-one priority brings clarity and strength. It sets the stage for right-ordered living. It reduces the urge to worship people or chase after human approval. It keeps false idols off the pedestal and allows you to build a strong identity.

The secret to knowing your worth is to embrace God’s love for you. Even when you don’t like yourself, even when your life is a wreck, you are priceless to Him. Trust eternal truths, not short-lived opinions, when deciding what to believe. Your value comes from within, and as you unlock this mystery, it draws your heart closer to Him.

And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.

ROMANS 8:38 (NLT)

EMBRACE HEALTHY SELF-LOVE

In recent years, self-love and self-care have become major buzz words.

For some people, they’ve gained a negative connotation as they get used to justify an excessive focus on self. Under the guise of self-love or self-care, we can make excuses for any lifestyle or habit: from exercising three hours a day, to taking monthly vacations, to overindulging in life’s pleasures, to leaving our family or quitting our life because they no longer make us happy.

Practically anything counts as self-love these days, and when we exceed the limits of reason or moderation, we become a narcissistic culture fixated on self-gratification. We buy or pursue anything that makes us feel better, yet still leaves us empty because our pursuits are all ab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Know Your Worth: A Mother Needs to Feel Valued
• 2. Rest: A Mother Needs to Feel Restored
• 3. Build Uplifting Friendships: A Mother Needs to Feel Encouraged
• 4. Conquer Stress and Anxiety with Truth: A Mother Needs to Feel Empowered
• 5. Choose Joy: A Mother Needs to Feel Comforted
• 6. Quit the Negative Self-Talk: A Mother Needs to Feel Confident
• 7. Make Peace with Your Body: A Mother Needs to Feel Beautiful
• 8. Fight the Good Fight: A Mother Needs to Feel Capable
• 9. Embrace Your Purpose: A Mother Needs to Feel Important
• 10. Live in Hope: A Mother Needs to Feel Optimistic
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author