Parenting is hard, y’all. Like spin around 5 times fast and try to walk a straight line hard. Sometimes it feels impossible. But you stumble onto the floor, collect yourself and get up.
Luckily these little critters are really great at modeling forgiveness. Because I could probably come up with something to apologize to them for, well, daily. When I notice the anger or confusion in their eyes, I pull on my big girl panties and say, “I’m so sorry. Mommy lost my patience today, didn’t I?” They hug me and simply say, “It’s okay. I love you this big, Mommy.” Hashtag heart-melt.
These guys are my everything and it’s wild watching them blossom into opinionated, sentient beings. Who want a say in things. And who have wicked insight into the world.
The other day the littler one said, “I wish Jesus never died.”
To which I gave the pat answer, “But then he comes back to life.”
“Yes,” he replied, “At Christmas.”
This gave me pause. Followed by: yes, that’s right. Every Easter Jesus gets killed and then every Christmas he gets born again. My small child went on to point out that the typical nativity scene star looks eerily like the cross. (Am I the only one who’s never noticed this?)
Don’t believe the lie
But here’s the thing that happens when you’ve struggled with infertility. It tells you a big, fat lie: You aren’t meant to be a mother.
When you’re spinning in chaotic circles and making all the wrong parenting calls and disciplining exactly the wrong way and yelling, “Go to your room!,” the lie grows larger and louder.
Who told you you deserved children? Real, ordained, never-had-to-try-to-conceive-mothers handle these moments with grace. You are the opposite of grace.
And that’s when we mommas need to reach out to one another. To surround ourselves with other mothers and TELL OUR STORIES.
I want to know that you, too, think parenting is hard. That this is ALL NORMAL. And I want to know your strategies for getting up off that floor in the midst of the tantrum or the sass or the issue du jour.
So I’ll know infertility is really just this thing I went through years ago. It was never meant to define me. It never meant to predict my mothering capacity. And it doesn’t fill my moments now – my lovely, capable, joyous, rambunctious, challenging, delightful children do.
The lie doesn’t get to win. My children do.
Share your story below or on Facebook at MothersRest.