A Warm Cup of Grace for a Struggling Mother
Written By: Alicia Stickles
“Motherhood: a story about coffee getting cold.”
I’m not sure what wise woman came up with this but I know first hand that the narrative of a mother’s day can be determined by the number of times she has to warm up her coffee.
Generally, I find my days fall into two categories. There is the type of day that requires only one reheat and on a really good day I may even get to finish an entire cup! On this type of day, my little angel children make good choices, they play well together, and we make it through the morning scramble with zero tears. I get my “mommy-do’s” done, dinner on the table by six, and even squeeze in some fun family time. While a tiff or two may arise, on days like this, I am able to quickly extinguish these fires with a calm voice, strong boundaries, and proper choice language.
Then there is the other kind of day. The kind of day where it’s barely 10 o’clock and I have lost count of the number of times I have had to reheat my coffee, or even worse, lost my coffee all together. On these days a strong case can be made for gremlins invading my children as they sleep. From the moment they wake, they whine, fight, and tattle over the dumbest things from Xbox time to who gets the last of the Rice Krispies. If something can go wrong, it does. They say bad things happen in threes, but like Murphy’s Law on steroids, on days like this it seems the crises strike more at a rate of thirty times three. My patience wears thin, and I assure you my children rise up and call me something, but it sure isn’t blessed. Heap on the piles of Proverbs 31 mom guilt.
I knew motherhood was hard. I was ready for hard days. What I wasn’t ready for is how hard I would be on myself. When it comes to others, I consider myself to be the captain cheerleader of team grace. I am an encourager by nature and can shout cheers like, “Be kind to yourself; everyone falls short!” and “You are enough; God’s grace is sufficient.”
However, full disclosure, the reality is it is very hard for me to live in this grace place where I allow these truths to be real for me. I would love to say I practice what I preach, but on the bad 3-plus-coffee-reheat kinda days, I must admit, I beat this mother up something awful. I have no tolerance for her shortcomings. I hate the me that responds to my children’s maddening behavior with anything short of perfect patience and proper parenting tactics. My inner voice bathes me in shame and injects fear over how badly I am damaging and disappointing my kids.
I have three kids, and I can remember a couple weeks in to my three-child adventure, I was having one of the worst kind of these days. NOTHING was going right. I hadn’t slept, the boys were fighting over everything. I’m quite sure they were even inventing things to fight over. I was yelling, my youngest was fussy, and any time I tried to put him down he would scream as if I had cut off one of his toes.
By the time my husband walked through the doors from work that evening, no dinner ready I might add, he quickly picked up on the truth that his spent, exhausted wife was about to lose it and graciously took over the reigns with the two older ones while I retreated to our room for a semi-quiet moment with the baby where I just broke down crying.
Tears flowed not because this day was too hard. My tears were because I hated myself for not being able to handle it better.
In my pit of self-hatred and inadequacy, God reached down and pulled me out with a voicemail from an unknowing friend. Having no way of knowing, she had called to offer me some encouragement. Her words to me were so perfect as if God himself was speaking them to me.
She said, “Alicia, you can do this. You will have tough days where your kids will fall short and you will fail them, but that’s why it’s our job to point them to a Savior who won’t fail them and that’s Jesus.”
In an instant, the quietness of my bedroom became holy ground. I realized I was trying to be their Savior, instead of pointing them to THE SAVIOR. I think it’s a natural parental desire to not disappoint our children. However, to have such high standards of perfection and no tolerance for the truth of our imperfection is a gloomy and exhausting place to live. I still hate it when I’m not the perfect wife or the perfect mother. It’s a journey of acceptance that will take time.
A wise woman once told me, “I don’t need to teach my children to be perfect, I need to teach them to be human.”
I don’t need to teach them not to get angry and frustrated, I need to teach them how to handle that anger. They must learn from me how to forgive and how to humble themselves and ask for forgiveness when needed. They need to see me make mistakes, learn from them, and accept grace for myself. They need to see my dependence on the Lord and not myself for peace in life.
The danger in modeling perfection and not humanness is it can open that same door of shame and self-hatred for my children that I walk through every time I fail to accept the imperfections of my humanity. Far worse would be for my boys to come to a place where they thought God expected the same level of perfection, when in reality, God is more gentle and kind to my humanness than I am. Surprisingly, I think God expects us to fail more than we expect ourselves to. I’m trying to remember that and be a little kinder to myself these days.
So sweet mama, You can do this. You will have tough days where your kids fall short and you will fail them. Remember you are not called to be their savior but point them to their Savior Jesus who will never let them down.
Now, if only I could find my coffee…