Mothering splits you open.
My youngest son, 26, just left for the airport. Not to go on an exotic trip, or back to a college dorm. He went home.
Calling New Mexico his home feels like sacrilege a little, if I’m honest. (nothing against NM, or their Christmas chili combo, #iykyk).
It feels that way because to me, my heart, is and always will be his home. And I know that may sound creepier than reading the ending to the beloved, albeit dysfunctional yet beloved children’s book, I’ll Love You Forever (speaking of sacrilege right?…but c’mon, read it again, and tell me the Mom in that book couldn’t use a few sessions of psychotherapy).
But seriously a mother always wants to see her heart as the place a child wants to return. Even when they have long passed the age where a child should be that attached to their mom, the longing of the mother for them to see her as home is still there. And when that separation first occurs it is very disorienting to a mothering heart. Insert images of dropping kids off at college, sending your baby to kindergarten, saying good bye at the end of the aisle, watching them throw a graduation cap or board a plane to God-knows-where, like I don’t know, New Mexico or something.
Mothering will indeed split you open.
It takes something you thought belonged to you because it began in you and it grew in you and you nourished it and loved it and comforted it and dreamed for it until it could dream for itself, and it takes that something and gives it life.
And to do that, you have to lose a part of yours. (ugh…why Lord, why?)
Like all things in creation, we re-create because we are meant to begat not hoard.
In order for life to go on, we have to birth something new and often that birth is the death of something else. (Like you mom…like you.)
Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.
John 12:24
A dear friend of mine just went through a very traumatic birth experience. She was literally torn open in order to save her life and that of her child.
Sometimes mothering quite literally, splits you open.
She left a piece of herself on the OR table. Her memories of his glorious birth will always be bittersweet, forever tinged with the trauma she has to reconcile. His life, like all children, came at the lavish expense of her own.
It costs your body, always in some way. From episiotomies to saggy boobs, from forever changed metabolisms to the number in the back of your jeans, from always peeing when you laugh to a lagging libido, your body will never be the same. (But she is always worthy of your kindness, and never your shame.)
It costs your mind. From exhausting worry to frustration you never, ever knew was possible to feel towards a three year old human, from being able to remember where you left your phone or whether or not you fed the baby or the dog, which incidentally you did five minutes ago, your mind is never the same. (But she is always worthy of your kindness, and never your shame.)
It costs your dreams. From working a career or an education around the task of mothering or having to put on hold that small business you had the best-business-plan-ever for, from that hobby you wanted to devote more time to, your dreams will have to either adjust or abdicate. (And the anger and shame and grief that can create deserves to be named and seen and grieved.
This is what real love does. It lavishly loses itself again and again and again in order to breathe life into another.
And that doesn’t always look like starch white night dresses, lying amidst pillow-packed Insta-worthy beds, gazing into the eyes of a babe, mother bedecked with serenity-saturated smiles.
It looks more like sheets that are beyond a washing cycle, a bed not made in weeks, hair matted in oil, tears streaming down a face, while sore breasts offer more life and more pieces of themselves so that once again life can go on.
And it’s breathtakingly unorthodox and against the grain of the tidy lives we try to live.
The stark reality is the disruptions of mothering don’t just offer life to another, they also offer life to the mother.
From this place of ache, of wonder, of stark reality, she can in her lowest moments, in the ashes of the fantasies she held of what life could be like for her as a mother, from there, right there, she can be resurrected.
Resurrecting from any death can be as painful as the dying.
Because we have to let go, again. We have to let go of what we wanted and reach for what we have. We have to let go of who we thought we would be and accept who we are. We have to let go of the horror that more moments of our life could turn into something we don’t want to endure and accept that even there, Jesus will be near, and it will be enough.
And it will be enough.
Mothering splits you open in a thousand different ways across the course of a lifetime, just like a kernel of wheat. When your fantasies and dreams of what this journey would look like fall to the ground and die, that’s not the end.
That death resurrects more seeds than you could ever plant.
If you did all the right things as a mother, if you said all the right words at the right time, if you helped your child achieve greatness and even to love the Lord with all their might and you packed perfectly nutritious lunches and threw magnificent birthday parties, if you knew when to help and when to wait and you never, ever let them down in any way and perfectly created all the best scenarios and outcomes, you would still never be able to create a life that would produce more seeds than a single, painful moment of motherhood relinquished in faith to God.
That death resurrects more seeds than you could ever plant.
Whether you are a mother physically or a mother spiritually, whether you mother or mentor, as a woman, you were designed in a unique way to bring forth life. And when you do, you lose pieces of yourself. And God honors your willingness to co-create with Him and sacrifice alongside Him, by filling the holes left behind with His Very Self.
And what that looks like is staggering beauty. A beauty hard won, not manufactured. A wisdom given regardless of age. A depth others want to swim in. A life that is rich, even in poor circumstances.
[For my determined purpose is] that I may know Him [that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving and recognizing and understanding the wonders of His Person more strongly and more clearly], and that I may in that same way come to know the power outflowing from His resurrection [which it exerts over believers], and that I may so share His sufferings as to be continually transformed [in spirit into His likeness even] to His death, [in the hope]
That if possible I may attain to the [spiritual and moral] resurrection [that lifts me] out from among the dead [even while in the body].
Phillipians 3:10-11 (AMPC)
I love even more how The Voice translation explains this more succinctly and more poetically.
“I want to know Him inside and out. I want to experience the power of His resurrection and join in His suffering, shaped by His death, so that I may arrive safely at the resurrection from the dead.”
Perhaps, mothering isn’t just about our dreams, or always the exhausting notion we have to get everything right, for heaven’s sake. Maybe it isn’t about half of what we think it’s about. Maybe, I wonder, could it mostly be about the invitation to allow our journey to be shaped and re-created by our little deaths along the way, so that even we can be resurrected into something more life-giving than we could ever create.
Perhaps, mothering is God’s way of helping a woman to change from glory to glory.
Could it be the catalyst we could never muster on our own? Could it be a catalyst greater than our willpower? Could it be a most dazzling crucible that melts away all the unnecessary unkindnesses we place upon ourselves, so that He can resurrect us time and time again more pure and more true and more real?
Mothering is not just joy. It is the amalgamation of joy and sorrow.
Until you allow both of these gifts to intermingle and intertwine and coexist, you will never truly know what it is to live. Ultimate living is holding joy in one hand, sorrow in the other, trusting that both can show you the Way.
Both will split you right open. Both will reveal a depth of Jesus you never plumbed.
And both will resurrect you, stronger and braver than you even knew you were designed to be.
Bravely take some time and list the losses of mothering others.
Place your hand over your heart and witness those losses because chances are you don’t have many people who will. Be That Witness for yourself.
Envision Jesus next to you and let Him witness with you. Listen for anything other than His Presence He might want you to know.
Know another mothering person who could use some encouragement? Be generous and share this post:
or share my work:
📷: KT Joy Photography | also my lovely DIL, Laura and her darling boy, my precious grandjoy, Declan.
So beautiful and hard, Amy. Thank you for capturing it and naming it so well.
So much truth... I was especially blessed by the reminder about holding joy in one hand and sorrow in the other. A new experience for me this past year and a half... and oh my, has it been growing. Thank you for sharing, Amy.