Storytelling

I went away this past weekend to be with my soul sisters and while I was there, I got to tell a story about motherhood in front of some of my favorite women in the world. Here is the story I told:

Tonight I wanted to share an epiphany that I recently had. If we’re friends and you’ve read my blog recently then you’ve already heard this but it was such a profound revelation to me that when I sat down to write this speech, I just kept coming back to it. I wrote a few different versions of this speech. I had so many ideas of what I wanted to say but none of them resonated like this one. So, last Sunday night I got out of bed at midnight and went to the computer.

I’ll speak about God a few times. As always, if God is not your thing, feel free to replace that with the Universe or whatever is most comfortable to you. I’ll also use the male pronoun just because it’s what I’m used to although when God speaks to me, it’s more the voice of a sassy black woman who calls me girlfriend.

Before I became a mother, I had all kinds of ideas about motherhood and what it would look like and how great I would be at it. I felt called to motherhood my entire life. I had this innate sense that motherhood was my purpose in life and because it was my purpose, I would be really good at it. I imagined I’d have all the answers, I’d always know what to do, and my child would never eat processed junk food because I knew better. Before I became a mother, I worked as a nanny for a family of academics. The mother was a Communication professor at Wake Forest and in the summers, she did research on the effects of TV and children; she even wrote a book about it. Because of her research, she didn’t allow her children to watch TV at all. I thought I wouldn’t either.

Fast forward four years and I know all of the songs on Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. 

 I thought that motherhood would look like joy and bliss every day and I would be the mother who went into her child’s bedroom at night just to watch her sleep because I was so in love and in awe of the person I was raising. And I do that but only because I am praising Jesus that she is finally asleep. I believed that my work experience with other people’s children inoculated me against first time momness.  In short, I was precious. And obnoxious. Bless my heart.

From the moment, I manufactured another person with nothing more than my own wits and uterus; nothing went as I had planned. I had a complicated birth and a baby with a severe lip tie that none of our doctors, nurses or lactation consultants caught in time to save our breastfeeding relationship. The shocking reality that motherhood was less joy and bliss and having all the answers and more like having my entire day dictated by a tiny person who communicated all of her emotions by caterwauling and pooping shattered my perfect and admittedly, limited perception of keeping another person alive.

A few weeks in, I found myself a sobbing mess most of the day every day. I called my OB one day and left a message on the nurses’ line. In between hiccupping sobs I said “I hate my husband, I can’t stop crying and sometimes I fantasize about killing him in his sleep.” Needless to say, it didn’t take long to get a return phone call and an appointment for that day. Those first few months of motherhood seemed to be a series of me finding myself in places I never imagined I’d go. That particular day ended with me finding myself at the pharmacy picking up my very own prescription of Zoloft. Thank God for Zoloft. Zoloft kept me out of the women’s state penitentiary.

During Fifi’s first year I was still stumbling through motherhood but in an effort to prove my worth and that I could actually do this and be good at it, I was hustling for my value by being the perfect organic, crunchy mama. I made everything from scratch, even Goldfish, as if Pepperidge Farm doesn’t have that shit down to a science. I practiced attachment parenting and believed that anyone who didn’t was raising an ax murderer. All of the problems and atrocities of the world could be traced back to a mama who sleep trained. Somehow I’d become even more obnoxious than before, which, in case you didn’t know, is a really astounding level of obnoxious.

My obnoxiousness was a cover for the aimlessness I felt inside. I was made to be a mother. I had believed that my entire life. And yet, it was nothing like I expected. This was not what I signed up for. Chasing perfection that didn’t exist left me utterly exhausted and empty.  It left me with a bottomless pit of doubt.  I had no idea who I was or who I was supposed to be. When I started telling the truth, I was amazed at the friendships formed over the chorus of “Me, too.” Being a part of a group of authentic women who were stumbling through motherhood just like I was became the softest landing place of my life. It became the most inspiring space in my life. Being in the trenches every day with y’all began to fill the bottomless pit of doubt one shovelful at a time. I discovered the joys of motherhood and even on the days that they were further between than the indignities, the transcendence of them was enough to sustain me. 

I found that most days I didn’t doubt my purpose as a mother though there was this nagging sense in my heart that perhaps it wasn’t the only thing I was called to do. I was able to stuff that feeling down until Fifi was about 2. It was around that time that the nagging feeling reached a fever pitch and the pit of doubt began to grow again. She was in preschool a few hours a week and I spent an inordinate amount of time aimlessly wandering the aisles of Target dreaming of a greater purpose. It was around this time that God was breaking through the static of my life. I was having a crisis of non-faith, I was having an identity crisis, and I was lost. Again.

 In a series of God orchestrated events, I once again found myself in places I never thought I would. I, a former evangelically raised Atheist, found myself in a Protestant social justice minded church. I, a middle class girl raised by elitist parents, found myself volunteering in a women’s homeless shelter on a downtown corner. These events mostly quieted the nagging voice that called me to a purpose greater than motherhood. I stuffed the voice into its box and promised that when my daughter was a bit older and didn’t need me as much, it could come out and tell me what to do. I believed that the voice that called me to motherhood and the voice that called me to social justice were opposing forces. They couldn’t possibly exist together.  I believed that to fight for justice meant being in the dark trenches every single day fighting the ghosts of evil with my soul bared wide open and I had no idea how to fit that in while Fifi was at preschool for 3 hours a day.

Until one day I heard God say that the hard work of rewriting histories and status quos looked a lot like motherhood. We all come with our own stories; our own pasts and sometimes they seem insurmountable. It wasn’t until I heard God telling me that my purposes didn’t have to be at odds that I realized that motherhood prepares us for extraordinary missions like worldwide poverty alleviation, ethical practices in food and clothing production and finding an end to human trafficking. We get up every day, promising to write joy, love and justice into the stories of our children. Every mother does this. It is what connects our hearts. Glennon Melton says that every person is a reflection of God’s heart and that God hasn’t stopped making people because He isn’t done telling us about Himself. I think God keeps making mothers because we get shit done. It took me almost four years to stop wandering around, lost in my own story, pondering ways to stay on top of the laundry and invent new recipes for chicken. It took me almost four years to realize that motherhood is not the antithesis to everything else I want to accomplish, but is instead preparing me for all of those things.

I’m going to close with the wisest words I’ve ever heard from Lisa Jo Baker:

“Here’s what I want you to hear. Especially you, if you’re wondering how life turned out like this, if you feel lost in your own story and looking for a way out.

 If you’re up to your eyeballs in kids and under the weather and desperate for the laundry to cut you some slack.

 If you’re gasping for breath and wrestling worries and bills and sweating the end of year report cards.

 If you can’t bear to come up with one more way to cook chicken.

 If you’re short on sleep and high on impatience.

 If you feel small or invisible or like you are slowly fading away.

 Can I just slip my shoes off, slide over in the chair beside you and tell you this: I believe God sees you. I believe God cheers you. I believe your work is holy ground and I am proud to stand here barefoot beside you.

Even on the days when no one knows what you did. Maybe most especially on those days. When there are no awards or headlines or standing ovations. I believe that the God who began this work in and through you will carry it, and you if necessary, across the finish line.”

Grace Upon Grace

I may have mentioned this a time or two but I love to be right. In addition to loving rightness, I also really love my feelings. The good feelings, the bad ones, the ugly ones. I am the proud owner of BIG feelings that I share with you whether you like them or not. It's okay if you don't. I like them enough for the both of us. I love my feelings so much that I allow them to dictate my entire life. This mostly works well for me because the good ones prompt empathy and the bad ones pass rather quickly. For me, at least. Sometimes the effects of things I said when I was all up in my big, bad feelings linger for longer than I actually felt them.

 I read on the internet somewhere, sometime, a blogger say "I've never taken a high road in my entire life."

 I was convinced she was talking about me.
 I, too, have never taken a high road in my entire life.

I am convinced that there's nothing to be had on the high road but a bunch of swallowed words and feelings put in boxes with lids taped shut. The high road is full of political correctness and people who use their turn signals because they are considerate of the other drivers on the high road and they all go the speed limit or below because the high road is littered with all of those taped boxes that must be avoided at all costs.

I have always preferred the low road where the signs prominently display the F bomb, the billboards are full of birds (and not the kind that chirp beautiful melodies in the morning), no one uses their turn signals because frankly, my dear, we don't give a damn. We speed through life hurling our feelings and our swear words out the window when the other drivers get in our way. Everyone drives like they're on the Autobahn because nobody is the boss of us, especially not those mother effing speed limit signs that try to tell us to slow down and consider what will happen when the jackass up ahead slams on brakes and there's no way to avoid the inferno. We'd rather sit around the flames and hurl more big feelings at the hapless bystanders-probably the ones from the high road who carry tools and nonsense to extinguish the fire of our rage.

Someone said to me once that she likes to roast marshmallows over the fires of her burning bridges and I almost snorted Coke (the brown liquid kind; the white powder is not my thing) through my nose. There have been very few sentences ever spoken that I have identified with more than that one. 

Somehow, despite my propensity for bad words, bad attitudes and bad feelings, nearly all of my close friends drive the speed limit on the high road and they only ever get down in the trenches when it's time to rescue me, which they surely pay the price for. 

To an outsider it would seem that they give me too much grace and none of it I deserve. And how could I blame a person for thinking they know that with certainty? I love to say what I think first and then filter it or apologize later. Only after I've given my big feelings a voice do I also give rational thinking a chance to be heard. But the reality is that we all get more grace than we deserve everyday. And thank God, literally, that we get that cup filled every single morning and it is enough to sustain us each and every day because I don't know of anyone who is pouring it out to herself. 

photo credit

We'd all do good to give ourselves grace abundantly but the reality is that this life is hard, whether you drive on the high road or the low road. We're all just trying to work out our feelings, whether we package them neatly or we hurl them in a wad out the window. There is plenty of litter to avoid on this road and there are plenty of times the birds that sing beautiful melodies in the morning relieve themselves on your windshield. It is our greatest gift that even after a day spent swerving around all of the litter and trying to see past all of the bird shit on the glass, every single morning, the windshield is wiped clean and a cleaning crew has picked up the trash so we can do it all over again. The greatest gift of our lives is that this angelic cleaning crew expects no thanks for doing their messy job, though perhaps the most incredible thank yous look like a little midday windshield cleaning of a fellow human. 

Maybe the most perceptible nod to the original Giver of Grace is when we follow His example and give it to the people who look like they deserve it the least. Maybe then, in the gifting of abundant, undeserved grace, we say to Jesus "Your blood and humiliation wasn't all for naught because I recognize the price you paid and I recognize that it won't cost me nearly as much to regift it to someone else." Some of the smartest women I know have already figured out these truths and they live them well. I have much to learn.