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A Positive Plan For Creating More Calm Less Stress
Busy. Hurried! FRAZZLED!!! A mom's life is anything but tranquil. With multiple responsibilities as caretaker, taxi driver, short-order cook, and domestic servant, what most women need in life is more calm-and less stress! More Calm, Less Stress provides that positive, biblically-based plan to help women realistically create an atmosphere of peace that she and her family so desperately need. The five delightful and doable action steps help mothers make their home a positive place to live. This is the first book in the Positive Plan series that will also include:
208 pages, Paperback
First published July 12, 2005
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August 20, 2023
As a disclaimer, I found this in a Little Free Library at random, and it had no indication whatsoever on the front or back that the book was meant specifically for moms. I am not a mom, or even a woman, so maybe something on the back or a subtitle that indicated that this is for mothers--stay-at-home mothers, by and large--might have been a good idea. Nothing in it seemed to make provisions for moms with jobs, and in this economy, most moms need some kind of a job to make ends meet, preferably something that isn't in the network marketing or MLM sector.
The book also doesn't mention that in order to get the most of its exercises, you need to have ready access to a Christian Bible. It was very "batteries not included" of them, really. If you're a mom who has a ton of stress in her life and probably not a lot of time for extra steps, do you REALLY want to have to go fishing for a Bible to cross-reference even if you do own one? Ladd and the publisher could've gone the extra step and just put the verses there at the end-of-chapter activity pages in full and given a frazzled Christian mom a helping hand here. Unless they were all meant to have memorized this 1000+ page book by the time they were settling down and starting families.
I'm kind of wondering if Ladd herself didn't memorize her own Bible. Despite having zero kids and zero religious affiliation, I read this the way it was meant to be read, with the book in one hand and the Bible in the other, and some of the end-of-chapter references were understandable and some of them were a bit of a stretch. She seems very fond of Psalms, so a lot of the meditations were falling back on thousand-year-old song lyrics to get you through your day. Not too far off from being in high school and scribbling passionate lyrics on your notebooks and then getting sent to the guidance office because a teacher took them out of context, really.
There was also a weird section that advised you pray for guidance if you signed your kid up for a dozen after-school activities and needed help knowing what to pare down, and you can definitely get a more direct answer by asking your kid whether she likes basketball or she's just doing it because you're afraid she'd be missing out. Some 12-odd chapters later, there's a more substantial passage about meeting your kids where they're at and keeping the line of communication open and I'm wondering how that first part managed to slip by. "Check in to determine which activities your children are genuinely passionate about" would have been good advice to get consistently, if I'd had children.
One of the devotional end-of-chapter prayer sessions also had you reference a part of Colossians that insisted wives stay subservient to their husbands and that slaves serve their masters happily. I don't know about you, but not all men are built for leadership, and not all women are built to serve men, and in a broad sense of the word, slavery is actually pretty morally reprehensible, even when you use it to refer to contemporary wage slaves in an economy that forces both parents to abandon their roles as caregivers and stick their children in daycare or they'll all wind up on the streets and starving.
Honestly, between this and the other self-help, life-simplification book I read this year (Loving the Space You're In), it's a no-brainer, Loving the Space You're In makes way fewer assumptions about who you are and where you're from, even if it's specifically just about making your life a little less stressful through keeping a cleaner home. You can look at the dust jacket and know what you're getting and don't have to go out and get a second book to understand all of its contents. I'm sure there are better faith-based ones, too, ones that don't force women already stretched to their limits to go put this book down and pick up a second book and disrupt the flow of prayer they're probably meant to get going. Ones that don't make you feel like a bad Christian if maybe you haven't memorized which exact Psalm Karol Ladd is referencing. As I was tempted to say to the woman interviewed somewhere in the middle who commented that her husband was like having a fourth child around the house, "You can DEFINITELY do better."
The book also doesn't mention that in order to get the most of its exercises, you need to have ready access to a Christian Bible. It was very "batteries not included" of them, really. If you're a mom who has a ton of stress in her life and probably not a lot of time for extra steps, do you REALLY want to have to go fishing for a Bible to cross-reference even if you do own one? Ladd and the publisher could've gone the extra step and just put the verses there at the end-of-chapter activity pages in full and given a frazzled Christian mom a helping hand here. Unless they were all meant to have memorized this 1000+ page book by the time they were settling down and starting families.
I'm kind of wondering if Ladd herself didn't memorize her own Bible. Despite having zero kids and zero religious affiliation, I read this the way it was meant to be read, with the book in one hand and the Bible in the other, and some of the end-of-chapter references were understandable and some of them were a bit of a stretch. She seems very fond of Psalms, so a lot of the meditations were falling back on thousand-year-old song lyrics to get you through your day. Not too far off from being in high school and scribbling passionate lyrics on your notebooks and then getting sent to the guidance office because a teacher took them out of context, really.
There was also a weird section that advised you pray for guidance if you signed your kid up for a dozen after-school activities and needed help knowing what to pare down, and you can definitely get a more direct answer by asking your kid whether she likes basketball or she's just doing it because you're afraid she'd be missing out. Some 12-odd chapters later, there's a more substantial passage about meeting your kids where they're at and keeping the line of communication open and I'm wondering how that first part managed to slip by. "Check in to determine which activities your children are genuinely passionate about" would have been good advice to get consistently, if I'd had children.
One of the devotional end-of-chapter prayer sessions also had you reference a part of Colossians that insisted wives stay subservient to their husbands and that slaves serve their masters happily. I don't know about you, but not all men are built for leadership, and not all women are built to serve men, and in a broad sense of the word, slavery is actually pretty morally reprehensible, even when you use it to refer to contemporary wage slaves in an economy that forces both parents to abandon their roles as caregivers and stick their children in daycare or they'll all wind up on the streets and starving.
Honestly, between this and the other self-help, life-simplification book I read this year (Loving the Space You're In), it's a no-brainer, Loving the Space You're In makes way fewer assumptions about who you are and where you're from, even if it's specifically just about making your life a little less stressful through keeping a cleaner home. You can look at the dust jacket and know what you're getting and don't have to go out and get a second book to understand all of its contents. I'm sure there are better faith-based ones, too, ones that don't force women already stretched to their limits to go put this book down and pick up a second book and disrupt the flow of prayer they're probably meant to get going. Ones that don't make you feel like a bad Christian if maybe you haven't memorized which exact Psalm Karol Ladd is referencing. As I was tempted to say to the woman interviewed somewhere in the middle who commented that her husband was like having a fourth child around the house, "You can DEFINITELY do better."
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