Melanie Shankle Quotes

“Sometimes the best families are the ones God builds using unexpected pieces of our hearts.”

— Melanie Shankle

“Real motherhood is different. It's better and it's messier and it's more complicated. It will break your heart and make you laugh harder than you ever imagined. You find yourself alternating between feeling like your friends talked you into some sort of pyramid scheme so you could share in their misery and thinking this is the most fulfilling thing you've ever done in your life.”

— Melanie Shankle

“God gives us these raw, little people, and we have to form them and mold them and teach them how to operate in society. And if we get a glimpse of all the ugliness that lies right beneath our own polished surface? Well, then, there's a humbling lesson too. It's those moments when I realize I have to extend grace to Caroline as she figures these things out by trial and error in the same way God lavishes me with mercy, even as I make the same mistakes over and over again.”

— Melanie Shankle

“When I look in his eyes, I don't see perfection. I don't see a love story that would necessarily be something people would watch on a big screen and dream about. I see someone who will fight for me and protect me and love me in spite of all the ways I am still a wreck. I see home. Wherever he is. That's my home.”

— Melanie Shankle

There are probably only a handful of times in our lives when someone who will change us forever walks in-when we find someone we can love with our whole hearts, who will challenge us and shape us and make us feel like the world is safer and brighter just because they are in it. A person who loves us for exactly who we are, yet teaches us to be better because of who they are and how they live their life.

— Melanie Shankle

“I watched her with the crab as she ignored all my admonitions that the poor crab just needed to be set free if he was to have any chance of surviving. And God showed up there on that beach to teach me a lesson. Nothing survives when it's being smothered. Life, real life, requires being free to move about in the great big ocean, not being cradled in little hot hands that will stifle independence and creativity. We can't keep our crabs (or our kids) in a bucket and expect them to go far in life.”

— Melanie Shankle

“I think it can be easy to settle for less than you deserve just because less is right in front of you and the best may still be unseen. But I guarantee there are many women in marriages who are so lonely that they long for their single days when at least they had the hope of finding someone who would understand them, love them, and care for them.”

— Melanie Shankle

And you know what I realize now? That we're all waiting on something, no matter where we are in life. It's the human condition.

— Melanie Shankle

“Not one thing we've done changes that we are his. That he created us and loves us with a love more fierce and loyal than any we will ever know. He isn't looking for perfection. He's looking for humble hearts that know we are nothing without his lavish grace.”

— Melanie Shankle

“Motherhood is the thing in a woman's life that catches her by total and complete surprise.”

— Melanie Shankle

“In a lot of ways home improvement is like marriage. It's not glamorous. It can take a lot of hard work and effort. There are days it feels like it might be easier to burn the whole thing to the ground and start all over again. Then you remember how much you love the house or your husband and you recommit yourself to what it takes to see the whole thing through. Even when it might involve paintbrushes and compromise and sanding and scraping all the rough edges. And when you look back on a tough patch a few months after the worst has passed, you don't remember all the hard work and the tears. You just have the satisfaction of knowing you've made something beautiful.”

— Melanie Shankle

“When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares. HENRI J. M. NOUWEN”

— Melanie Shankle

“And it made me realize that we often find our people at an early age. The ones who encourage us, love us, and share our weird desire to play with sliced dill pickles in the cafeteria and sing commercial jingles. The years may change our faces, our bodies, and our lives, but there are connections we make early on that remain part of who we are forever.”

— Melanie Shankle

“When I look back on the sixteen years Perry and I have been married, I can see the places where we've made each other better. There are parts of us etched into each other like the rings in the trunk of a tree. We've grown, we've changed, we've been forever marked. And ultimately, we are so much better together than either of us would be on our own.”

— Melanie Shankle

“Anne Lamott says in Traveling Mercies, I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools-friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty-and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they're enough.”

— Melanie Shankle

“But ultimately we attempted to find some middle ground because at the end of the day we love each other in spite of all our many and vast differences.”

— Melanie Shankle

“And it's a reminder that Mr. Right isn't out there. There's just Mr. Right-for-You. He may look totally different from what's right for your best friend. Your marriage is a unique being with as much of its own DNA as you and your husband bring to the table. I remember early on in our marriage, Perry and I were friends with a couple who did everything together, even grocery shopping. I thought something was wrong with us because we had so many separate interests. But that's just who we are. It's not wrong; it's different.”

— Melanie Shankle

“I believe there is no greater act of marital love or martyrdom than attending an event involving your spouse's family without your spouse in attendance.”

— Melanie Shankle

“As a new mom, your life changes overnight. Your priorities change, you forget to brush your teeth, you aren't sure how you're ever going to balance all your new responsibilities, and it's overwhelming. Not to mention that your body that used to be almost purely recreational has become much like a dairy cow but not as delicate and petite.”

— Melanie Shankle

“Friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow. AUTHOR UNKNOWN”

— Melanie Shankle

Friends are God's way of apologizing for your relatives.

— Melanie Shankle

“After sixteen years of being married, I can safely say that marriage tends to amplify whatever junk is in your life.”

— Melanie Shankle

“In short, I was like Ron Burgundy and in a glass case of emotion.”

— Melanie Shankle

“Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing. ELIZABETH GILBERT”

— Melanie Shankle

“Sometimes God brings relationships to an end as a way to move us along to where he has called us to go.”

— Melanie Shankle

“That's what I told Gulley that morning when she called me on her way to work, and she agreed. Her oldest son, Jackson, is also in junior high, and we agreed it's not for the faint of heart or the insecure. It's a new stage of parenting that is incredibly exhausting mentally, with all manner of absurd scenarios we couldn't have imagined back when we were parenting during the toddler years. Those years were more physically exhausting, and I think Gulley and I survived only because we had each other.”

— Melanie Shankle

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature. JANE AUSTEN”

— Melanie Shankle

“But my personal favorite words of wisdom came from Gulley during the last thirty minutes of the trip, when she broke up a backseat scuffle by declaring, 'When you lick the person sitting next to you, there's a good chance you're going to get punched.'
I believe the only reason that gem is missing from the book of Proverbs is because Solomon must never have traveled with three kids in the back of his chariot.”

— Melanie Shankle