As in years past, my favorite author, Ann Voskamp, always gets it right. Always communicates the sentiments I feel about motherhood. She knows what to do with the failures and mistakes and unbelievable joys that come with parenting. I cannot write like her - and so I am simply going to copy parts of her Mother's Day article. She writes it like I couldn't if I tried for a year, and yet I feel exactly the same.
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"Honestly, you don't have to know what you will do when the kids grow up, buy you a Mothers Day card while at the same time tell their friends, their therapist, and their kids that you got so much wrong.
You just have to know that you will humbly own it.
Because they aren't wrong.
It's true. You could have held them longer, held space for their pain, held their eyes, held them up in relentless prayers. You could have asked more honest questions and lingered longer, simply honoring them with listening space. You could have said yes and no - both at the right time.
Where you tried and fell short, they now trip and fall and have bruises to prove it.
Much dysfunction is actually a function of denying brokenness. The madness of this dysfunction ends now, ends with our OWNING IT! Yes, things were broken. And yet:
ALL THE BROKENNESS CAN BE THE TENDER BREAKING OPEN OF A SEED TO GROW BETTER. No matter your hidden regrets or their current age, you can tenderly own that you took some wrong turns and it's never too late to simply turn toward the Light.
Motherhood isn't about training your children to be good so they won't ever fall - it's about letting them see you fall in love every day with a good God. Simply put - the work of every parent is to give the best they know how now - and the work of every child is to forgive their parents the best they can now. Our work looks different from our children's, but we both have growing work to do.
I have lived through days - countless of them - that were unashamedly our actual dreams come true - and I have lived though honestly our very worst nightmares.
Rejections. Diagnosis. Constant meds. Self-harming. Mental health fractures - mine and theirs. Car accidents. Drop outs. More diagnosis. Sleepless nights. Pray pacing and soundless tears at 3am. More than once. Four miraculous kids has meant non-stop riding four roller coasters with all the wondrous, exhilarating heights - and heart dropping plunges.
But here's the HOPE:
Our nightmares end when we accept that where we are, can still be where dreams come true!
One thing you learn immediately as a mother is that you could wreck this tiny human being entrusted to your blatant inexperience.
Parenting 101:
Parent or child, we are no different. We are all wandering sheep, easily lured, who all need the rescue of the Shepherd . You will get things wrong, you and the kids will both make wrong turns. But God whispers "Beloved. All will be alright, all will be all redeemed, all will be all restored."
So, praying today that this BROKENNESS can be the tilling of the soil, and that new seeds can grow and as a family, we can admit the brokenness and dysfunction so that we can move forward with a new, beautiful garden. With new fruit. With even better relationships. Like a garden, it takes hard work, painful tilling and weed pulling, (opening up, talking through it all) and time. But with all that careful tending, we can grow a beautiful place of peace and rest and strength. And we will be all the better for the tilling and pruning. Only broken things can bring new life. Here's to new life.
