A Love-Stretched Life: MotherhoodSample

The Boxes of Motherhood We Place Ourselves In

Proverbs 4:25 says, “look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you.” Sometimes we have our own idea of what that path ahead is supposed to look like at different ages and phases. Rather than concentrating on how things are “supposed” to look when we first put our trust in God, we may find that God is calling us to walk a path that may look similar—or different—for the children who enter our lives and us.

When I was young, I understood the title of mom meant raising and loving children. With age, maturity, and experience, I’ve realized that raising and loving our children is the general goal for all mothers. We easily divide ourselves into categories, making assumptions about a culture of motherhood based on one descriptor. However, no cookie-cutter shorthand assumptions can be made of any mom in any description, whether those descriptions are lifetime or seasonal.

Over the years as a mother, at one time or another, I’ve checked these descriptive boxes:

• biological
• foster
• adoptive
• special needs
• working
• stay-at-home
• home-school
• volunteer

Full disclosure: Though I volunteer for sports and classroom sign-ups, I am the mom who brings paper goods and juice boxes, and I don’t feel bad about it. Nothing to be impressed about here, folks!

That’s the thing. While honoring the uniqueness of the experiences that shape our motherhood and the commonality of striving to love our children well, we can get lost in a labyrinth of superficial categories. There’s no one-size-fits-all path, no automatic subculture of values assigned to each box. If we’re looking past one another into the assumed projection of what we think is true, we’ll miss the opportunity to encourage and uplift one another.

God, help me beyond any permanent or seasonal boxes that apply to my motherhood to embrace the specifics of what motherhood looks like for me today. Help me see other mothers and uplift and encourage them, knowing we have much more in common than the superficial boxes we may place ourselves in. May we be awestruck by the privilege of parenting our children today and recognize the myriad ways motherhood can look.