Strong Moms

I looked up the definition of the word “evil”. One of the examples is this: “Having bad qualities of a natural kind”, another ” injurious”.

Oh dear, sometimes I am an evil mother. That could be the new black for “wicked stepmother”. Sometimes I have bad qualities of a natural kind. Sometimes I am unkind, impatient, see only the things my kids aren’t doing or only the things I asked them not to do and that they have done. In fact, my natural instincts are often bad.

Why is that?

Why is it so much work to do good and not so much work to do ill? I’m neither a doctor of psychology or philosophy so I’m really not about to be brilliant. But even if I am not Jordan Peterson, I have observed that I also have instincts to comfort and protect as well as manage and generally stifle my kids natural inclination to be little scientists and figure out how everything works by breaking it.

I have studied and thought quite a bit about what all of these things mean and how to make sense of my motherhood and find the deeper meanings that give this life as a mother some depth and purpose. This is about the best I can offer.

“You won’t be good enough”

You aren’t going to be good enough at mothering to make sure that your kid doesn’t suffer. He or she will suffer. You won’t stop that from happening. You might avoid making them suffer unnecessarily as a result of you beating them and I hope you will try hard for that. But suffer they will and suffer they must. Humans suffer mentally and emotionally as sometimes physically. Sometimes as a result of poor choices and sometimes those choices aren’t even their own. Suffering is on the menu, boys.

You aren’t going to be good enough to make your children feel loved all the time and you might even wonder some days if they felt loved at all. They may have days they don’t feel it at all. Did you have days like that as a kid? I had a sibling pass away and I vaguely remember thinking that nobody had time for me because they didn’t. It wasn’t that I was unloved so much as that I was living with heartbroken people who were sorting out their own grief. It’s okay, I suffered and felt unloved because that happens in this life. Would my parents have wanted to make me feel unloved? Not at all. But were they functioning well enough to see me in that moment? No, and I would probably not have had the bandwidth for that either. They weren’t good enough to prevent that.

I haven’t been a good enough mother to soothe all the hurts and kiss all the boo boos and I haven’t always listened well and sometimes I have been just plain mean and ornery with the people I live with and that I am supposed to love, the people that I want to love.

I play a musical instrument or two and I will tell you, I enjoy playing and I practice most every day and I am improving…… I am not good enough for Julliard. I am not good enough for Abrovinell Hall. I am not good enough for anyone but the local orchestra because they are made up of unpaid musicians and can’t afford to be picky. Also, they are kind and understanding and supportive of improving musicians. They have the vision that if they invite, those willing to invest the time with improve and the orchestra will have new life in the years to come. They have the long view and the big picture.

You will not be good enough to make the senior sports team of motherhood, not every day. You won’t very likely be mother of the year or free from critical comments or gazes on occasion. Good enough is subjective, elusive and hypothetical. Good enough for who? For you? For your mother or mother-in-law? Good enough for the next door neighbors, your kid’s school teacher or some other kid’s mother? How would you ever meet all of those expectations in the first place? How would you even know what they all are? Who decides what standard we are supposed to be meeting anyway?

I thought as a younger mom, that if I could just manage to always clean up the kitchen immediately after every meal and the sink and the counters were always cleared that I would be superstar mom and get a gold sticker in the game of life. I have done it. I am now almost always cleaned up after meals. Sometimes the counters are cleared. Some moms do this amazing feat and I didn’t ever know if I would be able to do it. My kids are getting older and I can send them to bed and clean up for while and they don’t appear over and over for drinks and snacks and one more story and one more kiss. I have reached the goal of cleaning up consistently and all I can think of are all the nights I felt too stressed out to read the kids a bedtime story and now they’re too old to want me to read to them aloud. They would rather read their own books. I am not feeling the gold sticker shine, the game of life is not the kind of game that makes you feel that luster of accomplishment. I leveled up and wish I had played a different game.

We didn’t come to be good “enough”. We aren’t going to perform all the time as well as we would like. We won’t always get it right and we won’t always feel the accomplishment that we crave in the various solutions to our own imperfections. We move the goal posts and we grow and we learn.

We came to learn and we came to love and God is the good and the love that we are looking for. We can love our families and our friends and our neighbors. We can act well, offer good and let our efforts be offered as they are. We can do and adjust and learn some more. Our lives are not a minimum balance we have to maintain in order to be enough. We have endless opportunity to serve someone and love someone. Let’s not measure and remeasure for “enough”. Let’s not retreat from the opportunities presented to us, but embrace them and let them be. “For my grace is sufficient for thee.”