Hope in Mommy Guilt

My first daughter came completely unexpectedly....  

When my husband and I discovered we were expecting it wasn't exactly planned, but we were excited.  Then reality hit.... nothing about what followed was normal!

Throughout my entire pregnancy I struggled with high blood pressure, stress, isolation and now as I look back on it, even depression.  

What I had been led to believe was one of the most amazing experiences in a woman's life, becoming a mother, is a period full of mixed emotions for me even four years later.  

Don't get me wrong, I love being Mommy to my two little world changers.  However, no matter how many articles, books and podcasts you devour on the topics of parenting and motherhood, I am not sure that anything prepares you for "Mommy guilt".  Mine started before my due date.

I was admitted to the hospital early in my third trimester and Myka was born nearly 2 months early.  

Enter Mommy guilt....  While in the moment I was thankful that she was alive and doing well even if that meant she was in the ICU, it didn't take long for Mommy guilt to hit.  As we were separated by the length of a hall and the restrictions of NICU for her and bedrest for me the realities of "I couldn't carry her full term", "I'd have to leave her at the hospital while I went home", "I can only visit once or twice a day" began to hit me.  

While our determined little girl, who was born with a check-list, made getting home to Mommy and Daddy a high priority and that phase of Mommy guilt was short lived, it was the introduction of a shadow self into my world of Motherhood.

Your story might not include C-sections, NICU and preemies, but each of us, who answer to the name "Mommy" know the feeling of guilt that we are not enough.  We can't get the ducks of our life in the same pond let alone in a row!  And we are being asked to care for these little humans?!

Somehow over the years, decades and centuries that mothers have existed we have created incredible and often unattainable standards for motherhood.  I have looked for it.  Nowhere in Scripture can I find that we as mothers are required to give our children 5 hugs, 3 books and a special song before they can go to bed (see Boss Baby for context).  As mothers we can believe that the traditions we start with one child are necessary when children 2, 3, 4 and 5 come along.  It's just not true!

I have been learning as a mom myself that we create complex rituals and routines for ourselves.  These become the ways that we assuage our guilt in the periods we need to care for ourselves.  

So my Mommy guilt story doesn't end with my oldest finally making it home.  My Mommy guilt story picks up again over the past few months.  In January, I finished my bachelors degree.  I am now in that fun phase of "between jobs".  Enter Mommy guilt.... My daughters go to daycare during the week.  I struggle with this every time someone asks me if I am a "stay at home mom".  I feel the guilt and shame hit me full force when I am asked about what I do and then am I a stay at home mom.  The simple answer is "Nope.  I am a new grad looking for a job".  So why do I feel less than enough?  

When did we decide that it was an ideal for mothers to stay at home?  Now don't get me wrong I have friends who are stay at home moms and they are amazing!  They take their kids on play dates, go check out all the cool things going on around town and have all the cute little Pinterest projects they do at home (my kids on the other hand think Pinterest is a cookbook!).  On the other hand though... I have friends who help others heal in their roles as Physical Therapist, Occupational Therapist and Nurse.  I have friends who are mothers that run their own business.  All of us are called to something different, even if we are mothers.  Our roles all look a little different.

A friend recently loaned me a book that reminded me exactly why my husband and I have chosen to keep our girls at their daycare.  The most powerful gift I, as a mother, can give my children is relieving them of the responsibility of being the center of our family.  I have two toddlers and they are both full of massive emotions!  These little tykes do not even have the ability to control their anger without guidance and yet so often we saddle them with the role of nucleus of the family.

The same idea goes for Mommy's though... One of the greatest gifts we can give our families is to not make ourselves the nucleus of their world.  None of us were made to be the center of the world.  Think about it.... In science class we learn about the center of the earth being hot.  Some sources estimate it around 6100 degrees Celsius.  So if we as moms make ourselves the center of family life... well... we make ourselves a hot mess, literally!

Over my life I have had a love-hate relationship with what we in faith circles infamously call "the Proverbs 31 woman".  She has been elevated to an ideal.  So much so that I have noticed it is not uncommon for men to think they need to "free" women from this burden.  Rather than freeing us from it I think we really need to take a closer look at her.  This woman was amazing!  Not in the way that we typically think of her as slaving over her family, providing for their every need.  She was amazing because she is our first model of what a passionate woman looks like.  

She was the first feminist... (vs 15) She provided for her female servants!

She was a servant leader (again vs 15)... She provided for her female servants!

She had her husband's confidence in a culture where women were inferior to men (vs 11).

She is a business woman, buying land and planting vineyards.

And I can't help, but think when I read that "her lamp does not go out at night", she networks and has others working when she is asleep!

So she is a business woman and has female servants... I think we tend to place ourselves in the context of this woman and her place in history while forgetting that we live in a different era.  This woman is very likely taking care of her female servants because they are helping take care of her children...  

When we just look at this woman in Proverbs 31 through the lens of a stay at home mom ideal then we are missing the freedom that she is bringing to us.  In the era during which Proverbs is being written this woman gives hope and inspiration to all of the women who feel inferior and less than enough.  The more I read her story the more I become convinced as a mom that her role was never intended to create an ideal.  It was intended to give hope and freedom to women.  She is in Scripture to remind us that we as mothers do not have to be the nucleus of our families to be loved, respected and honored.  We do not have to show up to life guilt ridden that someone with the gift of relating to and teaching children is spending the day with our children while we live out the gifting God has given us.  

I become more and more convinced that our children need our presence, our boundaries and our example to help them navigate the complexities of life.  They do not need to be the center of our worlds.  Nor do they need us as moms to move ourselves to the center of their worlds for them to thrive.

What I'm reading 

Making the Terrible Twos Terrific

Reflections on 2014

I find myself in a contemplative mood tonight.  I suppose it could be that it's the eve of the eve of a New Year.  It kind of makes one reflect on the events of the current year.  As I sit here the words of a song by Plumb come to mind...

"Standing on a road I didn't plan

Wondering how I got to where I am

I'm trying to hear that still small voice

I'm trying to hear above the noise"

It feels like that's been my life this year.  Struggling to hear above the noise of my doubts.  Struggling to hear the still small voice that is God when everyone around me is trying to advise as to what He is or might be saying about me.

I look back on 2014 and I'm nowhere near where I wanted to be.  I should be a semester into a Bachelor's in Biblical Studies.  I'm working the job that I thought for sure God was going to phase me out of this year.  Instead the job that I felt He wanted me in the most is gone.  And so I question, "How did this happen?  What did I hear wrong?  What's wrong with me that You changed the plan?"  

Then I think about all of the thought that went into picking out my word for the year.  To be honest I argued with God over my word.  It was weird.  Everyone else got to pick words like give, fight, love, etc.  Not me, God give me Pieces.  

Pieces....  Kind of what my year seems like.  It feels like the dreams from January are in pieces around me and most of them seem to be lost.  Pieces kind of indicates something is broken, right?  Who wants to go into the year with a word that hints of brokenness?

Of course God also gave me a really awesome song to go along with my word.

Still, it feels like my brokenness gets put on display for anyone to see.  Pieces means vulnerability.  It means that people all around me get to see the messiness of my life.  

As I reflect on the past year though I start to see the truth in the line that says...

"He knows how to make your pieces fit."

See the beauty of the word pieces means that I am broken, I am messy, I'm emotional and I've hurt a lot this year, but God has taken those pieces and is making a mosaic out of them.

A mosaic by definition is a picture or pattern produced by arranging together small colored pieces of hard material, such as stone, tile or glass.  In my case the material is the broken pieces of my hopes and dreams that when God steps in He knows exactly how to take the things that might not have quite worked out the way I had hoped and He makes them something beautiful all the same.  The even better part is that they become something far more beautiful than they would have been otherwise because God designed and redesigned the mosaic of my life.

When I'm in pieces that's when God's work shines through the brightest.  When I'm in pieces I'm not trying to hold myself together so people see the God I think they should see.  They see the God that is designing and redesigning me.  I suppose when I look at it through that lens the painful moments where I was being broken in some way have a new beauty and meaning.  

So..... What do you think God will do with Reckless Abandon for 2015?  Yep, technically it's two words, but it needed the adjective....

Oh, and I have a song for that too...

The Present Future

Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.                                     Jeremiah 33:3 (KJV)

You know it's funny how so caught up in life we can get that we never think to stop and actually think about how much God cares about our everyday existence.  I mean think about it He cares so much that while we are so busy trying to work our way through all of the "small" things in our life that while maybe they are rocking our world at the time we look back at them later and wonder why they were such a big deal at the time all that time He's looking at the bigger picture we cannot even begin to comprehend. 

Now I'm usually the type of person who while I like to think that I tend to look at the bigger picture, I've never really stopped to look at God's bigger picture when I'm in the middle of something.  It's not that I don't think about it, it's just that I'm so busy being consumed by what is going on around me that I can see that the idea of God's future that He's working toward can be like a fortune teller's prediction.  It's there, you think about it, but at the same time while you are so sure of your faith and belief it's not enough to shake you out of the rut you've fallen into of living for the future based on what you understand about today.  Now at this point I can already hear the gasps!  I compared God to a fortune teller?  How sacrilegious!!  But isn't that what we do?  We think about the future He has for us as this thing as shrouded in mystery as the intentionally vague predictions of a gypsy fortune teller.  We want what we classify as excitement so badly that we will settle for creating it out of something that can be exciting in it's own right if we just let God lead our future.

Just as recently as yesterday something made me stop to look at what most of us would see as the little coincidences of life and I'm still alternating between laughing and crying about it!  I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but I had one of those moments I like to refer to as my light bulb moments.  One of those moments in time where you come to a realization that the life God wants to give you and the future He has for you is so much easier to attain than we want to make it.  Honestly, admit it we are the ones that make things like becoming a missionary to deepest darkest Africa more exciting than going to work in small town America and challenging ourselves to see who we can impact today.  We are the ones that see glamor in being handicapped and achieving great things rather than being healthy and making an impact in the people we meet daily. 

We are blessed with so many things that we take for granted.  And yes, I do realize that is a phrase we hear trotted out on a regular basis to encourage involvement in a variety of areas including, but not limited to volunteering and religious involvement, but I'm not talking about the "normal" references such as health, family, etc.  I'm talking about the things that we even get into the future and "forget" about.  How many of us are guilty of just going through life and never realizing at the time that God has put the exact people in our lives for the exact time we need them?  How many times do we make things harder for ourselves by not utilizing the resources He gives us for a time such as this. 

So back to my light bulb moment.  As I set thinking about some of the recent things that have happened in my life and realized the unlikely areas I had received advice, support and prayers when I needed them the most it was almost overwhelming!   My pastor often says that it's amazing how we are able to trust God to save us and with our distant future, but we have such a hard time trusting Him with the present future.  It's so true.  We can trust Him with what we can't see, but we are always guilty (myself included) of trying to figure our way out of the present problems on our own.  Much as a toddler looks up and says "Mommy, I do myself" in much the same way we look at God and say, "Ok, you can step back, I have it under control, I can manage this one", but how often do we end up with a comedy of errors worthy of Abbott & Costello in the aftermath!

How different could it be if we took the resources and support that God sends into our lives and actually used them?  I'm not one to make New Years Resolutions, but this year while I'm not calling it a resolution exactly, one of my prayers was that I would learn to look at things in a different way than I have in the past.  That I would start to let God work more in the immediate future rather than the distant.  In doing that I have found that my entire view of life has changed!  I'm seeing the relationships He has sent into my life in an entirely different way and feel so overwhelmingly blessed sometimes all there is to do is laugh at how I never saw it before and cry that He thinks so much of me and my future that He takes the time to make sure my path crosses with those people that change your life and view on life completely and forever.