I have been a mother for seven years now and it has been an incredible journey so far. It has been a hard journey. It has been a rewarding journey. It has been a fun journey. It is a journey I am so glad to be on. I have made and continue to make a lot of mistakes on this journey.
It has been a journey that I have not enjoyed nearly as much as I could have.
Wait a minute, you have not enjoyed it? How is that possible? You have five children? Why would you have had that many if you did not enjoy it. These are all things you may be thinking right now.
They are things that I have thought about a lot over the years. It has taken me until the fifth child to FINALLY understand the answer to that.
Please understand – I LOVE my children. I love them more than life itself. Becoming a mother has given me just a little bit of insight into the enormity of the sacrifice God made in giving His son up for us, a tiny bit of insight into just how much He must love us to let His son die for me…. I would not let one of my children die for any of you. I know that sounds harsh but it is true. I would not choose that. And yet that is what God chose. THAT is how much He loves us.
Please understand I am enormously GRATEFUL for my children. They are a blessing from the Lord and I want each and every one of them. I want every one of them that may still come. I want a full quiver to aim and shoot out for the Lord.
Please understand that I LIKE my children. I truly like each one of them. It is so much fun to see how different each one of them is developing; I like to sit and talk with each of them, snuggle with them, share in their victories and commiserate in their defeats. They are mine and they are full of awesomeness.
But I have wondered, over the years, what exactly was missing. I could not quite put my finger on it. Then the other day I saw a picture that had the phrase “joy in the journey” on it and I knew.
There was no joy in the journey. I had fun, I had love but that river of joy that I knew should be the undercurrent to every day, to everything we did was missing.
So over the last couple of months, I was praying for joy. But it was still not there. Again, we had fun times and I AM HAPPY. But happy is not the same as true, deep, abiding joy. That deep, abiding joy was missing. And it was VERY important.
Then we started homeschooling last week. It is my third year to homeschool. My first year to homeschool two children. I was nervous about how it was going to flow but I thought surely it had to go better than last year when I was throwing up 10+ times a day while pregnant.
It was horrible. Awful. I spent three days in tears. I called Keith multiple times to tell him we need to put the children in school. I spoke and prayed with friends. I PRAYED A LOT. All the while the phrase “joy in the journey” kept floating through my head. The week ended better and I thought we were getting on track again.
Monday rolled around and there we were again. MISERABLE. Joy was not even an option; I just wanted to make it through the day. I wanted to get to a moment where I could just be done with my job…
And then it dawned on me. I finally understood what my problem was, the problem that had robbed me of that undercurrent of joy for the past seven years.
I looked at being a mother as a job. A job like any other job I had had in the years before I got married and had babies. But here is the thing. It is not a job. It is life. A job has a beginning and an end each day. There are breaks, vacations and lunches out. With a job you get a performance reviews periodically, when you do a good job, you get a raise. When you do not perform, you get fired. There is usually feedback and progress, tangible goals that can be reached within reasonable amounts of time. Even if you do not like your job, you still get the reward of a paycheck every couple of weeks to make it seem worthwhile.
For the first four years of motherhood, I arranged my life as if it were a job. I trained my children to wake up at 7am to start my day and I trained them to nap at 1pm to give me a break. I trained them to go to sleep at 7pm to end my day so “my life” could begin. Time with Keith, reading, blogging, watching TV – I got to do all the things that I wanted to do and as long as things went as I planned, things were good.
But here is the thing, motherhood is not a job, it is life. And things did not always go as planned. Cow’s protein intolerance, ear infections, strong willed natures, pneumonia, RSV, Atypical tuberculosis and the natural course of time which leads children to stop napping & go to bed later… it all started screwing up my job schedule. Suddenly I was working overtime. And there was no time and a half!
There was suddenly NO TIME FOR ME! And it dawned on me that THIS JOB SUCKS!
So Monday, as I was lying, curled in the fetal position on the couch crying, it dawned on me (for the first time in SEVEN YEARS – I have a very slow learning curve) motherhood is not a job – IT IS MY LIFE! My life. The life God gave me. The life He called us to. I want this life. And I am missing much of the joy in it because I am trying to manage it like a job.
I was too busy trying to make things run smoothly, on schedule. I was too busy trying to get everything done in the right order at the right time. I was too busy being selfish.
I remember, back when I was “learning how to be a mom” from parenting books before Bowden born, a book talked about the need for a schedule so that I could have that “needed me time”. I remember the COUNTLESS times other mothers, mentors, friends and everyone else (except my husband) talked about how important it is for mothers to have “free time”… mother’s day out…. a break… I allowed myself to be brainwashed into believing that this was true.
And it is a load of crap.
Now please here me, breaks are nice. Breaks are good. Everyone can use a break. But when we base our entire existence and “happiness” on that break, we are setting ourselves up for a lot of heartbreak. We are robbing ourselves of the joy in the journey because we are missing everything looking ahead to the break. I have spent seven years fighting with this. Seven years struggling with every moment that did not go on schedule. Struggling with frustration when the break did not come when it was “supposed to”, when the job did not end on time that evening. Pining away for some “me time”, looking at the clock and wondering when that break would come. Missing the joy in the journey.
Then suddenly, on Monday, God answered that prayer for me. He made very clear what the phrase “joy in the journey” meant. Stop working and start living. Enjoy every moment of each day with your children. Stop thinking of it as a job to work through each day and start living each day.
My hear is filled with sadness right now…We have had a lot of fun times, but … oh how much joy I have missed out on because I believed the lie that I needed “time for me”…. Because I believed that sacrificing my wants for part of the day was enough… thank goodness Jesus did not do “just enough”…
Joy in the journey means living ALL OUT, ALL THE TIME. The joy, true joy, comes from true and total sacrifice. True joy only comes when we put aside our endless, ceaseless wants that will never really satisfy and realize that the only thing that truly satiates and brings joy is utter surrender. It means riding on the current of sacrifice ALL THE TIME… it means live for the now – not the “when the kids go to nap…. Go to bed… we go out alone… vacation… weekend away” all those things are good but really, we should be living our lives as a holy and living sacrifice and that is not a job – it is life, the abundant life. My life. And I WANT IT.
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