A mother's day essay

Yes, in June. I too have a calendar

I work at a church so on Mother’s Day I rolled out of bed earlier than I would like, before the sun was awake,¹ and stumbled downstairs. I sleep hard and I’m always still sleepy when I get up so I go down the stairs with one shoulder against the wall to help my balance. I poured my coffee, read my Bible and prayed, fixed a plate of breakfast, and went back upstairs to change clothes and fix my hair.² 

Sunday morning is always massive extroverting.³ I prayed for people and with people. I talked to group leaders and church members. I worshipped beside my husband and some of our good friends. I sat in a meeting where we debated theology and what words were most appropriate for what we wanted to communicate. I answered questions and smiled at strangers and cracked jokes with people I knew. Then I walked to the van and texted my husband that I was leaving. He was ordering lunch for me because it was Mother’s Day. 

Being a mother is a strange experience. I love it with all my heart. I delight in my boys and I take the responsibility of mothering seriously. I pray for them and invest in them and build relationships with them and disciple them in the faith. Motherhood is a mystery. It’s not just the delight. It is full of experiences that I would not choose on their own. It is far more difficult than anything else I’ve ever done.⁴ Motherhood has prepared me for all the things that I do now, even in my job. Being a mother is a lot of work. It’s getting up earlier than I’d like and carrying burdens for other people and even spending time with people when I’d like to be alone. Motherhood has taught me the importance of boundaries and margin and sleep.

My request for Mother’s Day was that we all go on a bike ride. We love to bike together and we had not gone in a while because a couple of the bikes needed some repair work. I got home and my husband was working on a bike and one of my children was having a hard with our plans for the day versus what he hoped the day was going to be. Fixing the bikes ended up being more complicated and taking more time (and another trip to the store) than we had hoped. After a couple of hours of work and managing the emotions of not just myself but several of the boys, we loaded up the bikes and drove downtown. 

That very morning, a younger woman commented that I seemed to actually enjoy my kids and she wanted to know how that happened. Did I actually have fun when we did things together or did I just say that I did? It’s a great question and I took a moment before fumbling toward a response. When my kids were small I realized that if their behavior and attitudes determined if I was having a good day or not, I was going to have a miserable life. I couldn’t let them control if I had a good time or if the day was good or anything else about my interior experience. This doesn’t just apply to children, of course, but motherhood was the practice field for me. Learning this means that things don’t have to go perfectly for me to enjoy them or say that I have a good day. And it means that this couple of hours in my Mother’s Day was just a blip, a reminder that we live in this world and not in the world that is to come.

 We did go biking. We parked under the bridge and unloaded the bikes and then took off in my a straight line. I like to be able to see everyone (otherwise I worry that they are being kidnapped!) so Justin went in the front, then the boys in order of age, and then me. We don’t often bike in that order and it was hilarious to watch people’s reactions as they noticed and counted the boys when we passed.⁵ The ride was near perfection. The trails were covered by archways of green leaves. The breeze was cool. The sunlight filtered through the trees. The farthest point of the trail opens up and the river is wide and shallow. I always want to be in a kayak when I am biking back there.  My heart smiled—that’s not a weird metaphor, that’s what it feels like—as we biked the whole length of the trail and came back.

When we got back to town, we were going for ice cream but had to go directly past a restaurant. When we heard the music and smelled the food, we remembered how hungry we were and decided to have dinner first. The restaurant was a vibe; we hadn’t been for the whole dinner experience before. We let the boys watch SpongeBob on Justin’s phone while we waited on dinner and I realized we were “those” parents and somehow I didn’t even care. No one else knows our family story. No one else knows that we aren’t just being lazy or that we don’t use the phone as a babysitter. And it doesn’t matter that they don’t know. I no longer need them know.⁶

Motherhood is a lot like this. Motherhood is where the beautiful moments creep into the same day as temper tantrums and words from a kid that you’d like to remember forever are mingled with a day you sink onto the stairs after bedtime and wonder if everything you’re doing is all wrong. I’m far enough into it to realize that—for the most part—you can develop which part you want to remember. You can accept that joy and sorrow always mingle together. You can have all bad days because less than ideal things happen or you can practice delight, gratitude, naming the beautiful. Chasing tiny delights has rescued me in many low seasons of life. It’s realism we need, but a realism that goes both ways. We have to name the good and the bad.

I know people who claim to never have bad days for whatever reason: they’re alive, they get to make the day something, etc. This is no shade on them but I’ve had bad days that I couldn’t do anything about. The day Micah had a metabolic crisis and was in the hospital and they told us there was nothing they could do for him? That was a bad day. And while I might have kept a list of things I was grateful for and felt God’s presence, it was still a bad day. And I’ve had plenty of bad days since. But a day that’s not perfect, when my kids act like kids? That doesn’t make a bad day.⁷ 

Mother’s Day itself was motherhood, not the highest peaks and the lowest lows, but the majority of my days as a mom. It’s a lot of work that stretches me. It’s dealing with poor behavior and helping them past their fit or letting them feel their sadness. It’s really beautiful moments in which being alive is a stunning gift, a foretaste of what is to come.  Idealizing motherhood makes becoming a mom the most shocking things that’s ever happened. It does not look like fairytale, Instagram pictures. Degrading motherhood removes the possibility of wonder and splendor. Degrading motherhood is a posture that will poison your entire life. You’ll be miserable.

Motherhood is the microcosm of something much bigger. I can trace mutual lines from motherhood to every other part of my life. Motherhood is practice. We become a different person over time as we learn to do different things, be in the world a different way. And that is a gift, whatever our practice field looks like.⁸

1. If you thought, “the sun’s awake so I’m awake” from Frozen…well, me too.

2. This is my morning routine. I won’t be making a YouTube video about it.

3. Pray for all your introverted friends. We need it.

4. I want to add all sorts of nuance and footnotes through the whole things about how having a child with disabilities changes this but one essay can’t do everything. This is one specific look from one angle.

5. This counting happened so often when the boys were smaller. Three kids were fine to have, but once I got pregnant with the fourth, everyone felt a need to count and comment on my children.

6. Having a neurodivergent kid forces you to let go of some things and that is a gift.

7. Possibly a very exhausting one but I want to go to bed tired. There’s no saving that energy for something tomorrow.

8. It might not be motherhood (or fatherhood) for you. But there’s a practice field in your life.