The ME God wants me to be! Part 1
“So what do you want to be when you grow up?” Grandpa Jim asked Hannah as she sipped a Coke and munched a cookie with her great grandparents a few days ago.
“Well,” she replied, “I would like to be a mom and maybe a writer.” Grandpa Jim nodded.
“But mostly” my six-year-old continued, “I just want to be whoever God wants me to be.”
Grandpa Jim’s eyes twinkled. And his broad wrinkled hand patted Hannah’s head. “That sounds like the best thing to be, Hannah,” came the 84-year-old voice of wisdom. “Definitely the best thing to be.”
From the corner of the small farm kitchen, I eavesdropped with envy. Oh, how I wish that I had always ambitioned to simply be the me God wants me to be. At the age of thirty-seven, I can honestly say that on most days, I am content with being me. But the journey to contentment hasn’t been an easy one.
From the moment I became a mom, I questioned my own identity. Motherhood stripped me of all the labels to which I had once clung; the easy-answer definitions of who I was and what I did.
No question would leave me more befuddled in my early years of motherhood than the casual conversation starter, So…. What do you do?
When I was teaching full time yet longing to be home with my son, I would answer, “I’m a teacher, but I’m a mom, too!” I constantly felt that I needed to justify my decision to work outside of the home and somehow prove that I was a wonderful mother as well. Ironically, when I resigned from the classroom and turned all my energies towards home, I would respond to that very same question with a weak, “Um, I’m a stay-at-home mom, but I used to be an English teacher…” Suddenly, I felt obligated to broadcast my college degree just in case anyone assumed I was staying home with my children merely because I lacked the skills to do anything else. While both responses revealed my personal insecurities, the question marks that punctuated my once positive self-image left me frustrated and confounded.
An honest journal entry captures the discontent that plagued me. On December 3, 2000, I wrote:
I miss doing a job that has more concrete rewards. I miss the stimulation of teaching, the students who made me smile, and the fun chats with my cohorts as we passed in the halls. At times I feel glad to be home, to have slowed my pace to focus on what really matters. I guess I just long for something different because I want to be seen as “significant” in the world’s eyes. This whole internal struggle is nuts! Just when I think I’ve settled it and I believe I’m finally content, something triggers the whole war again. When will I be able to just totally feel “right” right where I am?
After years of consistent feedback- college grade reports, employee evaluations, colleague encouragement- I felt lost without a reliable source by which to evaluate my contribution to motherhood. As an honest friend once confessed, “No one ever applauds me for changing a diaper!”
In the search for substantial evidence proving my worth as a mom, I came up rather shorthanded. I could pride myself in my housekeeping prowess for about five minutes before my freshly mopped floor boasted an orange juice spill or a muddy footprint. I could find satisfaction in knowing that I kept my children safe until my toddler slipped down the stairs and sported a shiny purple bruise on his forehead. I could revel in the thought that I filled my children’s day with love until my thread bare patience turned to angry words that sent my preschooler running out of the room in tears. I felt lost, as if I no longer really knew the face staring back at me in the mirror each morning. Who was she? And where had the confident and competent “me” who had come before her gone?
Some of my identity confusion was the result of a plummeting self image. Not only did I wonder who I was, but I also wondered if the “new me” had any value. Author and mother of five, Susan Alexander Yates, claims that a low self-image is common to young mothers, even to those who had been confident and secure before they had children. In her book And Then I Had Kids¬, she writes,
In a world where material success and progress have become indicators of self-worth, it is very difficult for mothers to have anything of value to point to at the end of each day. There doesn’t seem to have been major “progress” on anything important. Somehow bathing and dressing children don’t qualify as “important” in the way we see things. We have not achieved any measurable “success.” The children still fuss at nap time; they still spill everything; they continue to fight and even bite…Often the day seems like an endurance race- we just want to get through it. If we just had something to show for this fatigue, it might make a difference. But we don’t. And so we don’t feel very valuable to anyone. We simply feel tired, and our self-image sinks.
Oh, how I could relate to those words. Despite the smile plastered on my face and my impressive resume of “good mom activities,” I was living in a ruthless cycle of self-perceived failure and frustration. The more I tried to measure my own success as a parent, the less I enjoyed the privilege of being a mother. Now and then, I tried to prove my worth by doing the things the “old me” might have done in her pre-child days of life. I’d stay up past midnight just to clean the refrigerator, polish the floors or catch up on a scrapbook, but no matter how successful I felt as I climbed into bed at 2 A.M., the fatigue that followed the next day would reduce me to an inattentive and impatient mom. And the sense of failure would return. If I wasn’t super-mom, then who was I? The answer to that question was one God would teach me bit by bit over the years that followed.
Today’s Treasure: God chose you out of all the people on Earth as his cherished personal treasure. –Dt 14:1b
