I love to talk to mothers. This past week I had a long conversation with on of those special women and out of it came this blog. This mother on the other side of the telephone told me very candidly towards the end of our talk, "Bethany, I just feel like I am failing as a mother." Yeah, I've been there.
It got me thinking, Why? Why is it that we as mothers, doing the most important job on earth, inevitably feel like we are drastically failing? I pondered the answer all week and came to this conclusion.
Because Motherhood is messy.
Its dirty, gritty, exhausting, ever changing and frustrating. Sure, its beautiful, amazing and life giving too, but when you are in the trenches, down in the poop, the vomit, the tears, the screams, the No's and the up all nights, there is nothing pretty about it. Let's face it, its just messy.
Motherhood can be summed up in Charles Dickens lesser known work, "The Great Unmet Expectation." Its true. One of the biggest factors to why we feel like failures is that we have set expectations that 99.9% of the time go unmet.
Think about this: you plan a trip, a vacation, a BREAK. You dream of sleeping in and letting somebody else help with the babies and what happens? You or your children get sick. Its nearly guaranteed. Not only did your dream vacay get messed up, but any mother knows when your kid is sick nobody sleeps. Bummer.
Or how about this scenario: You plan a day of errands. You've talked it up and army planned it out. You've got juice, snacks, toys, diapers, extra clothes and some sort of bribery. You get delayed when your toddler needs the potty. You leave 15 minutes behind and upon reaching your first of 5 stops discover you forgot your list. As you decide to wing it instead of backtrack, your infant screams those starving cries. So you huddle in the car and nurse trying to mentally remember what was on that list. You muddle through your first stop and make it to your second. At this point you have lost an hour and your army schedule is quickly unraveling. At the second stop your toddler pees in her pants because "she wanted to" and then grabs the one toy you were hoping she wouldn't see and begs you for it. You tell her no and discover quickly what its like to be the entertainment of an entire store. Upon witnessing your flailing screaming offspring on the floor you realize those 3 other errands are not getting done. Muscling your infant in the carseat with one arm and an immature frustrated toddler in the other, you exit the store and go as fast as possible back home. Its safe there. You put your children to bed and sit down on the couch only to see your forgotten list on the floor. You forgot 1/2 your items at stop number one and more than 1/2 of your errands went unfinished (I suppose we don't REALLY need toilet paper?). You're exhausted and contemplating taking up hermit living.....
Or how about the days you remember that other person in the house, your husband and the fact that you have not been intimate with him in who knows how long? You know he desperately needs you and admit that down (sometimes deep deep down), you need him to, but everything in you revolts at the thought. Not because you don't love him, but because your body has been sucked on, pulled on, jumped on, peed on and pooped on and all you want is to have your body be yours. Not to mention desperately wanting to catch a few hours of sleep before a child screams for you. How about the days you realize that your husband is just another "to do" (no pun intended) on your list, or the guilt you feel upon realizing that the man you once gave all of your body to only gets whats left....if he's lucky.
Welcome to the moment you feel like a failure. Talk about unmet expectations. Motherhood lives in this space. It dwells in the reality of all you wanted to do but couldn't. How do you let go? How do you feel confident when nothing worked like you expected it to?
I don't know, but here is what I am learning. Embrace the imperfect, expect the unexpected, plan to change plans. Recognize that you are going to be late, and you are going to forget something. Someone is going to judge your parenting style, some doctor will make you think twice about your choices. You'll burn dinner, forget dinner, buy the wrong juice, buy the right juice and forget it somewhere. You'll forget to wash laundry or shrink your favorite sweater when you try to finish one chore with a baby on the hip and a toddler screaming at you. You're gonna mess up. Your child will scream at you despite all your efforts, they will poop on your neighbor, embarrass you in a crowd, say something you didn't teach them and be disobedient at the worst times. You will be inconvenienced.....often. You will be dumbfounded at their naughtiness one minute and proud of their compassion the next. What else can I say? Motherhood is confusing and messy.
You are going to have days when all you want to do is pack your bags and leave and days when you will say out loud, "Why, WHY did I ever have children?" But those days don't make you a failure, they make you real. THEY MAKE YOU A MOTHER!
Someone told me once that motherhood fully reveals how much we need a Savior. I can say with complete confidence how true that little statement is. Instead of grading our success on some perfect version
of what should have happened or how our children should have behaved we need to embrace the imperfect, the real, the mess and reach for the Savior.
I'm glad motherhood is messy and imperfect, because I am both. I am even more grateful that in spite of this the Lord still called me to the task. He is perfectly sufficient for all of my imperfect.
When you are in the trenches and feel the spirit of failure hovering over you, remember who you are, admit you are imperfect, let go of your expectations, embrace the chaos and find your peace in the mess.
You haven't failed.
You are not a failure.
