IF YOU’VE BEEN TO A baby shower in the last year, or if you recently had your first child yourself, you’re probably acutely aware of how much of a radical change new motherhood is. You only have nine months to prepare for the most fundamental transformation you’ll ever experience.
You’re sure that the moment your child is born will rock you to your core, and it will, but maybe it will be different than you imagined.
The minute you come home from the hospital and start having to make decisions for yourself, while wading through mundanities like diapers and feeding, reality hits and you might feel like you’ve been cheated.
But while you’re busy taking care of another life, you might not have noticed that you’ve become another person in the process. One day, when you’ve finally gotten a little bit of sleep and you’ve found a routine, you might look in the mirror and wonder, “Who am I?”
You built a child; now you have to rebuild yourself. You’ve been transformed into a mother, and now you have to work to discover new ways to be fulfilled in that identity, even new ways to relate to your friends and your husband. People who have one, or even two kids, and feel like they’re drowning, look at bigger families and assume that parents of four or more must just be built differently.
I have four young kids myself, and I can tell you… yeah, we are, but it was the kids that built us this way. Parenthood is a continual journey of dying to self and transforming into the person God wants you to be, and the person your children need you to be.
Gradually over time, I’ve had to give up the habits and priorities that don’t fit into this life. They weren’t the parts that were making me holy anyway.
Motherhood is a radical self-gift. You’re forced to become unselfish really quickly, or your kids will highlight and reflect your flaws for you. It’s an underappreciated part of this vocation to marriage and parenthood, and it’s an incredible gift.
If I didn’t have my children pulling me in four different directions all day, I’d have no one to pull me out of my own selfish interests. I am a better person because of my children.
Every time we’ve been blessed with a new life, I’ve wondered how I could possibly handle it, but God never lets me down when I trust Him.
Transforming into the mother God is calling you to be takes trust and surrender to God’s will. He granted you this vocation. He sent each child in their own time. He will equip you for the challenges along the way. He’ll grow your humility through constant, tiny mortifications.
When people see me toting all four and say, “Wow, you have your hands full. How do you do it?” I usually, to be brief and quippy, reply, “I don’t know!” But that’s the answer. It’s a mystery. I ask God each day to teach me to trust Him and to grant me the virtues to be a better mom, and slowly, slowly, each day, He and my children are chipping away the rough edges of selfishness and anger that hold me back from being the mother I’m called to be.
You’re a completely different person now than you were before you had kids, and sometimes, when you look in the mirror, you might regret what you left behind. But can you trust that the person you’ve become is the person God was calling you to be, all along?