Mother's Day for the rest of us

When I was a teenager, the thought of having children frightened me. I didn't consider myself to be especially "maternal", in that I was never someone to clamber to hold someone's baby. While I thought babies were precious and lovely and would love to touch their tiny hands, I'd prefer to do so when someone else was holding them.

Because babies, in fact, frightened me.

They're so tiny, so helpless, they need so much. I saw them as a magnifying glass for my own selfishness and inadequacies, and it would be painful to have a mother watch me hold her baby and just know that I had no idea what I was doing.

But I fell pretty quickly and deeply in love with a man who I just knew would make a good father. The idea of having babies quickly accompanied my love for him, because it seemed so possible now! We could be a team!

And the rest is history, four children and just shy of one decade of marriage later.

Except it's not. I still struggle with the notion that I don't feel especially maternal.

Don't get me wrong, I am completely head-over-heels in love with my kids, and I will say without exaggeration that I adored them as babies. (Perhaps the missing key was that I would learn to love babies by having them myself.)

My difficulty, instead, is that it hasn't come naturally to me. I am no Earth Mother Goddess sitting on the floor eating tandem breastfeeding my infant and toddler. In fact, I often find myself failing in the basic requirements of my vocation.

I am someone who craves silence. I crave not being touched for extended periods of time. I daydream about "a room to myself," to borrow Virginia Woolf's phrase, in which to write the various books, fiction and non, that percolate in my imagination.

Despite this, God saw fit to give me, selfish me, four children in less than eight years.

Raising them has been the making of me. In that case, God knew exactly what He was doing.

I now know I am capable of surviving on less sleep, more mac and cheese leftovers and countless interruptions to my introverted thought process than teenaged me ever would have imagined possible.

I also know that the Earth Mother on the floor tandem breastfeeding isn't necessarily the image of motherhood I need to strive towards. Or even ought to.

The fact that I struggle isn't a sign that it's not my vocation. Rather within these challenges, and rising above them, that I find my calling and the most satisfying work I have or ever will do.

While being a mother has revealed a depth of selfishness in me that is dreadfully, terrifyingly humbling, it is also somewhat empowering in realizing that I am, in fact, pulling it off.

(And it also helps tremendously that those previous predictions about that guy I was smitten with have come to fruition: he really is a remarkable dad.)

So this morning when moms are greeted by sticky faces with homemade cards and feel so incredibly unworthy of the gratitude they receive from the children they know they have failed time and again, remember the words of St. Teresa of Avila.

"Remember that the more you struggle, 

the greater the proofs of love you will be giving to your God, and afterwards the more you will enjoy your Beloved in happiness and felicity without end." 

Happy Mother's Day.