On Motherhood, Wherein a Few Musings Leave the Nest

For some reason unknown to me, this summer I have more friends and co-workers expecting babies than has been true in all my years of parenthood. And while not all of these mothers have sought my advice, a surprising number have asked me to share my wisdom.

I admit, gentle reader, to no small amount of alarm in thinking that I have reached that silver-frosted age where people assume I have wisdom worth imparting on the topic of childrearing. I'm not so humble as to keep my opinion to myself about many other topics, but motherhood? Oh, honey, are you sure you want to hear from me?

This week, the child who made me a mother turned 16.

When I think about this statement, I feel as though I need to follow it up with a comment about how the second born made me a different kind of mother, the third; a third, and the fourth; again another. And then, honesty compels me to think about the one I never got to parent and how this one, too, formed me as mother.

Lest you get carried away thinking that surely approximately 48 years of parenting (16+13+10.5+8.5) should merit some level of mastery, let me disabuse you of that notion. Not only have I been yelled at for being a horrible mother (no, not by any child of mine), I would flunk motherhood based on the general tips for young mothers and hints for mothers of tweens and teens. (I haven't failed at how to parent adult children, but I've still got time.) Plus, I've got a full closet of mom-guilt that keeps me company on my worser days.

Keep this in mind, gentle reader, if any of you happen to be in that season of counting your existence in weeks and trimesters.

So now that I have established that I am not a pedestal-sitting guru dispensing parenting advice, I'm gathering here a few of the things I have recently shared:

1) Modern parenting bases a lot of things on fear. The tentacles of anxiety manage to get into the most diverse of spaces, surprising you like a too-smart octopus when you find it, once again, in a place you thought safe.

Beyond the more obvious lines of "if you do this, you will mess up your kids" and its pair, "if you don't do this, you will mess up your kids" fear can keep you snapping photos of every cuteness, shutting out relationships, and a long list of other things that if I mentioned by name I'd be mom-shamed and denounced by one place or another. 

So my advice is this: Try to keep tabs on your anxiety about how you are doing as a mother. Measure it up against what your actual desires and real circumstances are rather than what culture says or your fears are.

2) It can often seem that parents, especially new ones, are condescended to. A number of unhelpful interactions I had with medical professionals during the first tender months of motherhood still sting. It seemed that if I had been smarter, better informed, more capable, more established, or generally more, then I would not have needed to waste the time of people who had better things to do than engage with my need. 

Second guessing your requests for help is one thing when you are wanting medical care or not wanting to presume on the kindness of friends, it is altogether different when it's you and God. Often my motherhood prayers get tangled up with the shame of not being smart enough or adequately capable. If I can't even figure out whether my child's sniffles are from illness, allergies, or teething, then shame on me for expecting God to strike me with insight more reliable than WebMD, mind reading capacities to know whether the people we have plans with would prefer a slightly sniffly child over cancellations, and the details on a miracle cure that will clear up the sniffles before we even find both shoes.

We often buy the lie that maturity (in prayer or adulthood) means not sweating the small stuff. But in motherhood, our days are built of the very smallest of the small stuff. Ounces, grams, seconds, and fractions of an inch; number and frequency of the most basic of human functioning; microscopic attention to texture, nutrition, and the size of sliced grapes. If we think it shows us to be incompetent to pray about these very small things, then we lose the very details of our lives and can only offer up a shame-filled wail that we need rescuing.

So my advice is this: Remember God is not surprised that you are at a loss about motherhood. Your desperation and awareness of your inability is a place to meet the tenderness of Christ.

3) Comparison is a beast. Not just from one family to another, but from your expectations and your dreams, your memories and that one picture-perfect mom photoshoot compared to the realities of a Tuesday late afternoon.

So my advice is this: Remember God excels at doing a new thing. Don't confine your expectations of how he will answer your prayers to how he answered previously. Don't expect the story of how he will form you (or your children) more into Christ's likeness to be the same story as one you've heard before. Behold, he is doing a new thing.