Strong Moms

A few years ago, I was reading in my Bible about joy. It cometh in the morning, you know. Actually, I didn’t- know, I mean. I was wondering what joy felt like. I have certainly felt satisfaction and relief and fulfillment and a few other things that didn’t really seem to fit. I realized that I didn’t understand it. The closest I could come to identifying what joy was, happened when I had my babies, and there was a certain amount of relief mixed in with the wonder. I went to sleep after thinking about it and when I woke up the next morning, I felt really strange. I laid there in my bed, I wasn’t thinking about anything, I felt really good. I actually felt wonderful. It took me some time to figure out that what I was feeling was joy. It didn’t come after some accomplishment or as a result of something I received or anything.

I want to feel joy, I don’t want to feel pain or rejection or disappointment. I realized as I laid there that I had been trying to find that feeling by earning it. I had been trying to get that feeling by being good enough and then receiving approval from my spouse, my family, my friends. And I never succeeded at earning it. It came to me as a gift when I asked to know what joy feels like. Joy is not a feeling that we get when there is an absence of pain or rejection, that’s comfortable and we like it but it’s not enough. Perfectly happy is an oxymoron, a paradox. When I’m trying to find joy by being perfect so that my family, my spouse, the people I interact with treat me the way that I want and give me what I want, I’m setting myself up for bitter disappointment.

Firstly, there’s no such thing as consistent performance like that. Your spouse and family and friends aren’t really that great at knowing what you want and aren’t actually capable of giving it to you. You want a feeling of love and acceptance and they would probably like to give it to you if they had any idea how that is done. They might do it sometimes but in all likelihood they don’t very often.

Being perfectly acceptable to all people, all of the time is impossible. Who decided what is enough to be described as “perfect”? If you do something the way another person would have it done in every detail would that make them happy with you? If they were happy with you and your performance would they always give you what you want? How should you know what they define as perfect? If you were always at peak performance could you pull this off? Would you want to? Would your life be worth living if you were dedicated at all times to performing to another person’s standards?

You can’t make other people happy and you can’t force them to feel joy. If you were trying to earn joy by being perfect enough, I would suspect you would earn frustration instead. That frustration spills out onto other people and they are typically standing in the way of perfection anyway. Getting frustrated with them never makes them more cooperative, by the way.

Give your family and friends permission to be loved, even when they aren’t perfect. It seems strange to just give grace like that, just give without checking to see if they have earned it. It seems counterintuitive to give without performance based evaluation. It is a bit weird and kind of hard to do, but I think you will find that you can both ask for what you need and forgive when it isn’t given. You will likely find that you see and appreciate that an effort was made to show love to you also. The results aren’t always stellar and no one will pull it off with great consistency but giving permission to be loved while not performing perfectly will change something in the way that you feel. There is a book called “Real Love in Marriage” that explains it very well and I believe that the author first wrote a book called “Real Love” (that I have not yet read) that explains it very clearly. I’m not really comfortable with the math there, the giving without measure and without keeping track. I am a flawed person who wants it to be fair, after all. I have dabbled. I have had times I could give without counting and times I decided to not take offense when I needed and wasn’t on the receiving end of the giving. It’s not easy but maybe Joy is what we allow when we aren’t demanding.

When I feel the most need to pressure for others to love me, I need to look at my self and take back my decision making power. I can do the work for myself and allow other people to do what they want to do. I know we can decide to be where we want to be, doing what we want to be doing. It’s not controlling our circumstances so much as having self control. I choose hope for myself, for a better day and for joy in the morning.