When I became a Mom, I wanted to be the Perfect Mom and raise the Perfect Family.
I put my career as an attorney on hold and, dang it, I was going to raise kids who were scholars and saints.
I had a distorted view that perfect skill in mothering would lead to perfect children. If I used all the right discipline and used great communication skills and had the right homeschooling curriculum, the result – the product – would be great kids who would live great lives.
Instead, God wanted to teach me that if I could see and count on a guaranteed result, I didn’t need Him, or my faith. If it was all scripted out – the homeschool-success-formula – then I was the master of my universe. Clearly, I wasn’t.
Image Credit Ben White on Unsplash
Your plunge into the crucible of marriage and motherhood might occur suddenly, like a car accident, or may be gradual, like long-term illness or disability. In my process, I focused on my plight. I turned and churned things over in my mind, telling all my friends, making prayer requests, reading more advice books.
What I learned was that sometimes we make the perfect Christian family an idol. Sometimes that idol needs to be smashed.
As a younger mom, I had answers. I wrote books with answers. Then I got more questions. The principles I talk about in my books endure, but I am a different person. I am more battle weary, but also stronger, more realistic and more accepting.
In Proverbs 13:12, it says: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” (NIV) I was stuck in the hope deferred part with my perfect longings unfulfilled.
My faith in mothering and parenting skill was replaced by betrayal. What the heck happened? If this was a consumer transaction, I would want my money back.
Homeschooling is not a child guarantee
I looked at homeschooling as a child guarantee. If I invested my heart and soul into my kids and my marriage, I would be assured a bring future with a happy husband and flourishing kids.
When things didn’t turn out like that, I felt tremendous guilt, coupled with crippling disappointment. Did I make the wrong choices for my family? What had gone wrong with my devotion and hard work?
As moms, especially homeschool moms, our work is in the home. We serve our kids, our spouses, our houses even. But when is there time to develop our own selves? To attend to our issues and struggles? When things fall apart, who are we?
Not all of mothering and parenting is joyous. For every ecstasy at the first baby coo, there are hours on the floor picking up Cheerios and scrubbing dried jam.
That time under the table jolts us. We forget that there are 12 hours of the day and 12 hours of the night. But when that night time comes, we might panic.
We are caretakers
As THE MOM, I assumed responsibility for everything that happened in the home. If everything wasn’t rosy, of course it was my fault. When life was good, my then husband told me that home felt like a haven.
Somehow everyone else in the world and in the Bible has free will. But my kids were excluded from this human privilege because I was their mother. Their difficulties were my fault, or so I believed. Their subsequent bad choices were a judgment on me as a mother.
Discouragement and despair arrived. I had put my heart and soul into this mothering thing and my kids weren’t perfect and my home life was a mess. Had I wasted my time and my energy on family life?
We are fixers
As moms, we are fixers. We do what needs doing. We fix dinner a few million times. Fix relationships for our friends, fix our kids boo-boos, and minister to them when they experience puppy love broken hearts.
One day long ago, one of my kids broke a piece off a toy. She handed it to me and said, “Mommy. Fix it. Mommy fix everything.”
For a while in family life, fixing works. We are, at least on the surface, able to fix all that is wrong with others and with our family.
At some time, the fixing no longer works.
This is the crucible of marriage and motherhood.
For more on marriage and motherhood survival, check out my other posts:
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