When My Dreams Met Reality

Ever since I can remember, I always longed to be a mother. I love children. Growing up I spent much time babysitting children, and I volunteered as a leader at Vacation Bible School. I watched my nephews when they were little, and I frequently remember people telling me that I was going to be a great mommy one day.

It took us longer than we planned to get pregnant, but from the moment I found out there was a little life growing inside of me, I was thrilled. I was bubbling with anticipation, and I can remember talking to the baby in my tummy each day, telling him what fun he, Daddy and I were going to have. With a big grin, I would say to him how excited I was to one day hold him in my arms.

As my due date approached, I entered full swing into nesting, scrubbing the floor on my hands and knees, decorating his room, washing and folding all his clothes and stockpiling diapers. My due date came and went, and I became restless.

Finally, at 9 pm on a Tuesday evening, my first labor pain arrived. It was happening! I was finally going to hold my baby in my arms! After longer labor than I realized was possible, it was Thursday evening at 8 pm when my little boy was in my arms, and I fell in love.

My heart swelled up, my eyes teared up and I felt like I could burst. I didn’t realize I could feel this deeply toward someone I had just met, but it took my breath away that this little life in my arms was my baby boy. At last, I was finally a mommy. My lifelong dream became a reality at that moment, but the challenges of my new life were beginning.

From the start, things didn’t go as planned. After being awake for three days in labor, I was exhausted. The delivery took a toll on me. I was unable to get out of bed by myself for the first three days. I had difficulty walking during the first month. I needed help with my baby, but I knew as soon as I recovered and we arrived home, the beautiful bliss of being a mother could fully set in. I was right…almost.

I fell more in love each day with our baby boy, but I didn’t have much of a chance to recover. From the start, Matthew was a colicky baby. He would cry for no reason even when everything was right in his world (fed, clean diaper, burped, held). He wouldn’t sleep for more than ten minutes without someone holding him. I couldn’t sleep unless someone else was holding him, so those first months were a sleepless blur.

I was very blessed to have the help of family and friends so that I could catch a little sleep here and there, but I remember thinking “This is not how motherhood is supposed to be, I am supposed to be delighting in every moment with my baby, but instead I am so tired I just want to scream!”

Here I had dreamed of this moment my entire life, and instead of soaking in delight, I was questioning whether I was cut out for this parenting business. I remember telling God that He might have the wrong person for the job. I wasn’t sure I was cut out to be a mom, at least not the kind of mom I felt my baby boy deserved.

Nothing about parenting has gone the way I planned. In fact, many of us are unprepared for parenting because in our culture most families are small and often live far away from extended family. Few of us grew up in a large family where we were the older sibling learning to care for our newborn brother or sister much less having the example of our parents as they navigate the overwhelm of young children.

The reality of parenting a newborn, or multiple young children at once, is something foreign to most of us and the dreamy picture that many movies paint does not include the sleepless nights and postpartum emotions running rampant. Starting with a colicky baby who didn’t sleep who would scream for no reason left me helpless, feeling inadequate and, well, like a failure.

My son eventually grew out of waking every hour during the night, although we have moved on to ADD and hyperactivity, asthma, migraines with food allergies – which add new dimensions that I had not anticipated. Of course, there have been seasons that have gone smoothly.

Ironically, when our second child was born, this was one of those “calmer” seasons. Even though I had a newborn and a 21-month old at home, it was easier than it had been with only my first when he was a newborn. While Andrew still was not an “easy baby” – you know the kind you hear about from your friends who sleep 12 hours a night the week after they arrive home from the hospital – the transition from having one to two went better than I expected.

Matthew welcomed his younger brother and was kind to him. Thankfully, he never struggled with jealousy or insecurity over sharing his Daddy and me with a new little person. As they grew, both boys have enjoyed playing together and turned out to be great companions for each other (despite the many moments of brotherly teasing.)

Even in the seasons when things have gone relatively smoothly, I am discovering that being a mother means living in almost constant overwhelm. The baby needs to eat, and I need to start dinner, the house is a mess, the laundry basket transformed into a mountain taller than my washer and the sink is overflowing with dirty dishes. Or as the boys get older, I need a shower, the kids are hungry for breakfast, we are running late for school, I haven’t packed the picnic lunch I am supposed to bring for our playdate in the park this afternoon, the baby needs a clean diaper and the house is still in disarray.

There is always more to do than I can keep up with at any given time. I used to pride myself on my organization skills, my completed to-do lists and my ability to arrive early for every meeting. In this season of life, those seem to be things of the past.

With each season of life, the overwhelm is different. In fact, it often feels like we have finally figured out “this parenting thing” just as our children grow into a new development stage and change the rules on us, or life throws us a curve ball.

For us, one of our big curveballs has been when Chris injured his back a few years ago. At first, it seemed like a minor injury, but as time went on, he kept getting worse. Chris continued to decline so that a couple of hours of work a day left him in so much pain he had to lay down on ice packs the rest of the day, and his head was fuzzy with little sleep. During the worst of his suffering, he was not able to bend or lift, which meant I could not leave our two or four-year-old with him for any length of time because he was unable to care for them. It was a miserable time for me as well as for Chris, as he disliked feeling so debilitated and unable to play with his boys or help around the house.

At this point, I was parenting solo, while also trying to keep things going around the house as well as the Thrive ministry. Honestly, this felt like the perfect storm.

Solo parenting due to a disabled spouse or even an absent partner makes everything harder and requires extra grace with ourselves and useful tools to make it through the day and still be able to say, “I did the best I could today with the circumstances I was in, I don’t regret how I handled things.”

I don’t consider myself a perfect mom. In fact, the truth is there are no perfect moms. We all make mistakes. Every one of us encounters seasons where the load facing us is more than we can bear on our own. We all have days when we feel like failures, and we want to lock ourselves in a closet for some peace of mind and a bit of quiet.

When we are in the overwhelming seasons, it is easy to wish it away and tell yourself everything will be better when the situation goes away. The good news is that we do not have to wait for our circumstances to change to find joy in our lives.

We no longer have to regret how we acted or responded to someone. We can look back on these times and reflect with a sense of satisfaction that our actions indicated what was truly important to us even in the midst of more than we could handle.

My life has been transformed by the 19 brain-based relational skills we train through our events. These are the skills essential to navigating life and relationships based on the latest discoveries in brain science as well as what scripture says about how God created us. Many of these skills have been crucial to the survival of my sanity during these early years of parenting when life feels overwhelming.

My husband Chris and I are passionate about these skills that have so drastically changed our lives. It is a gift to train others to learn the skills and pass them on to others. I desire to share with you the tools that have carried me through the baby and preschool years with my sanity intact.

These skills can help you do more than survive those hard times but raise a thriving family in the midst of overwhelm. I know that when life is overwhelming, the last thing I would want to hear are details of how the brain works. Simply put, I wanted something to help me survive the craziness, now! I want to share with you the tools and solutions that can bring you peace – without bogging you down with too many details.

If you are interested in more information on the skills and how the brain works, I will use this blog to point you to additional resources where you can learn more.

 

This blog originally posted on November 13, 2016.