Life, Faith, and Fiction: Everything is better in writing.
I found this box at a thrift store several months back. I loved it immediately but it has sat empty in this spot in my kitchen since then, waiting for its purpose. Then I finally made a decision for it a few days ago. Today, I came inside from the below-zero morning air and popped it open, smiling at its perfect fullness, and chose a cup of warmth to brew.
A little reminder that your real purposes are worth waiting for. They will bring joy and refresh your soul. Like a good cup of tea, perhaps.
One of the things my kids have taught me is to believe I’m worthy of admiration. For all the years I can recall, I’ve felt like a pretender whenever I received recognition, whether big or small. I felt like an impostor or a fraud as I thanked anyone for a compliment. I wondered how long it’d take for someone to figure out my actual abilities and charms, or lack thereof.
In their earliest years, children are blunt, honest creatures. This applies to the positive and negative alike, as there is no natural filter between their thoughts and their tongues. As much as this exposes us adults to harsh critiques and awkward commentaries from our little chatterboxes, it also pours over us the soul-saturating water of honest praise. Their compliments are pure. Their admiration is authentic. What else could be right but to accept the gifts of them? To BELIEVE them?
This lesson hasn’t squashed the voice that whispers I’m a pretender. Now there’s a contradictory voice though, and it sounds a lot like my children.
#parenthood #parenting #momlife #boymom #girlmom #mothersday #worthy #nofilter
Several days ago, I shared a photo on Facebook. Not a personal photo. Just a photo of some words that, on that morning especially, were relatable for me. It crossed my mind that it was likely relatable for others too, so I shared the photo and moved on.
Reactions and comments are still trickling in on that post, and it hasn’t yet left my mind. The text in the photo said this: “We expect women to work like they don’t have children and raise children as if they don’t work.”
I was already feeling this before my workday started on Monday. Although my son loves school and both of he and my daughter enjoy their babysitter, there is inevitably at least one day each week when one of them clings to me a little extra in the morning and expresses their wish that I could stay home from work with them that day. Also inevitably, that is among the hardest moments of my week. Monday morning happened to include that moment with my daughter.
I’m blessed with a good job. It is enjoyable, interesting work in a healthy environment with a solid team of people. I’m grateful for it and challenged by it daily. No matter what though, I am a mother. I am always first responsible to my family and then to everything else. So I work extremely hard to balance it all (again, a statement that so many of you can relate to, undoubtedly). Workdays, meetings, projects, schooldays, doctor appointments, drop-offs and pick-ups, mealtime and playtime and bedtime and everything in between. Balance is a constant goal.
On Monday afternoon, I had a brief meeting with my supervisor. A generous, flexible woman who knows the life of a working mother, I’ve been thankful for her understanding in this balancing act. Among other topics covered in this meeting though, she shared that someone in our office had voiced complaints about my comings and goings. This anonymous individual was bothered by what they felt were too many times I had to adapt my schedule to those school and sitter drop-offs and doctor appointments and sick kids and so on. While I was in no way reprimanded or told to stop adapting my schedule to those needs, I still can’t dismiss the disappointment that this is what someone thinks of the work I put in at my job. Whomever it is doesn’t necessarily know about the number of days in which I work through lunch, or the nine, ten, or eleven hours I put in when I’m working from home while simultaneously caring for my children. They don’t necessarily know why I arrived at 8:10 instead of 8:00, or why I had to work remotely from my home unexpectedly. They see what they see and form their opinion.
I’m going to be fully honest here. I want to look that person straight in the eye, possibly grabbing them by the collar, and say this: “I am doing the best I can do.” I want to inform them that I already know it will never be enough. Their input is not needed for me to know this.
The current trend in women’s self-help/self-esteem culture is summed up in one phrase:
I am enough.
It crops up in articles, books, and social media posts with head-spinning frequency. I’d even wager that the image I used above was designed to serve that message. Those words are the mantra of many tired, over-extended, trying-to-meet-all-expectations women, and they are a lie.
I am not enough. You are not enough.
If we ever want to stop striving until we break, we must admit this. If we want to quit the worldwide, olympic-level competition for Instagram-worthy perfection on the surface while we are unraveling when no one is looking, we must admit this.
I am not enough.
If I were enough for my children, they would not need their beloved father or their dear grandparents and extended family. If I were enough, I would not need my husband’s partnership and love. If I were enough, I would not need my teammates and managers at the office. If I were enough, I would not need my church community, my writing community, my health and fitness community, my neighbors, or even those most precious friends who know the real me. Above all, if I were enough, I would not need my Lord.
I am not enough.
Certainly, I can understand the intentions behind the popular message of being enough. It is answering the emptiness countless men and women carry inside of them. It is speaking to the ways we punish ourselves for not living up to our or others’ expectations. It is reminding us that our worth has been forgotten. I do understand. But believing you are enough doesn’t admit your inherent need for others. Believing you are enough doesn’t admit your need for the Divine.
I am not enough.
I cannot do it all. I literally cannot. I only have one body, one mind. I only have 24 hours in my day. I am only capable of being in one place at a time. Unlike God, I cannot be all things to all people. Admitting this is not a detriment to my self-esteem. It is an enlightened self-awareness. It fosters a great amount of freedom, clipping the binding ties of strife and disappointment.
I am not enough. I am a member of a marriage, of a family, of a friendship, a community, a church, a team for that very reason. While I will always work to be my best, I will not misguidedly carry the weight of striving to be enough. I am not enough and I am happier for knowing it.
Today, I’m taking a bit of inspiration from Burl Ives and The Little Engine That Could. While I drove my kids to the sitter’s this morning, we sang along to some classic tunes by the beloved children’s folk singer of decades that passed long before I took my first breath. The last song to play before I dropped off the kids and switched the radio to Dave Matthews was “The Little Engine That Could.”
“Just think you can, just think you can,
just have that understood
And very soon you’ll start to say,
I always knew I could.”
Those lines had my brain rolling along for a bit. Thoughts arose of confidence and self-doubt, of faith and discouragement, and the roles they play in achieving our goals.
The children’s diddy oversimplifies the concept, of course, but it does speak a nugget of truth: our mindsets drive our actions. There is only so far you can take yourself toward a goal you don’t believe you can achieve. On the flip-side of that coin, there are few forces that can defeat you when you believe you can succeed no matter what.
Confidence is born of faith. Faith in the abilities and passions God instilled in your unique self. Faith in your willingness to try. Faith in God’s promises to be your strength and wisdom. Faith in your destiny to make a unique, unrepeatable contribution to the lives of anyone within your reach.
If you know who you are in the eyes of God, if you know your Maker and therefore your makeup, it is not vanity to believe in yourself. Instead, it is foolhardy to doubt.
I don’t know about you, but there are few things that carry me forward with more joyful strength than the opportunities to look back and say, “I always knew I could.”
I sat beside my sister at the funeral of our dear friend’s mother. Our eyes fell on my sister’s young daughter. She sat contentedly in the lap of her grandmother, beside us in the same church pew.
My sister reached over and squeezed my hand, voicing no response. She didn’t need to reply. I knew. I knew the struggles she and I had navigated over the years. I knew what it took to eventually believe ourselves beautiful.
The funeral began with an old, familiar hymn, but the thought remained with me. As the priest blessed the family and friends filling the rows in the church, I couldn’t shake the question: are we more beautiful than we realize?
I’d encountered a lot of beauty in the past week. Easily overlooked beauty. Misconstrued beauty.
It was there to see in the face and hands of my best friend. Exhausted, no makeup, eyes not long dry from the most recent of many tears, she greeted me with a long hug when I arrived at the hospital where she and her family kept vigil with her dying mother. We sat at her mother’s bedside, talking in reserved voices that rose with emotion then quieted as her mother’s ragged breathing fluctuated. My, she was beautiful. The love in her eyes. The gentleness in her fingers as they grazed the blankets of the bed in front of her. The aching tenderness in her glances at her mom. My friend had spent years caring for her mother. Years of tending to her needs, housing her, shuttling her to appointments, encouraging her, upholding her dignity. Loving her.
Then there was her mother, Connie, who lied dying beside us. If my friend hadn’t let me into the room, I would not have known I was in the right place. She was unrecognizable, seemingly a shell of her former, spirited self. Seemingly. Except, if I kept my wits about me, I could see that she was still her whole self. She was still Connie, who battled cancer for all these years, never willing to give up. Through treatments and sickness and depression, through remissions and reoccurrences, she’d plodded onward. Yet, here she was. She wasn’t a woman defeated. She was a woman ready. She was a woman ready to leave. She’d done her work and fought her battles. Her readiness was as beautiful as it was heartbreaking.
So there I sat in the church pew, wondering over how many different ways we miss the beauty. Wondering why we can’t see it.
I want to see it. I want my spouse to see it. I want my children to see it. I want you to see it. This life, it’s so much more beautiful than we think. Its beauty is only surpassed by the people, by us. We are more, much more beautiful than we think we are.
Immediately, a voice spoke in my head, “Do not laugh.”
I had to close my mouth because that was the exact response I was about to make.
I looked my son in the eye, smiled, and said, “Thank you, peanut,” and put my comb away.
He remained at my side, waiting.
“Take a picture.”
The voice was there again. “Do not laugh.”
Don’t laugh at his admiration for you. Don’t dismiss the clarity with which he sees you; clarity that is fogged up in you by years of insecurities.
I didn’t laugh. Instead, I took the picture. He asked to see it. Satisfied, he gave me one more heart-stealing smile, then bounded away to see what his sister was up to elsewhere.
Honestly, I almost deleted the photo. What did I need it for? I saw the roundness of the belly where I’d love for it to be flatter; the softness of the arms where I wish they were toned. I saw the gray hairs I don’t pull out anymore. I saw the migraine behind my eyes, and the thick glasses because I didn’t feel like putting in my contacts when I could barely stand to have my eyes open in the daylight. I saw the awkward half-smile because selfies seem meant for younger, perkier people.
Why didn’t I delete the photo?
I didn’t delete it because of a hunch that every mom ever caught off guard by their child’s admiration could relate to the thoughts filling my head. I even had a feeling that the dads out there can relate to it all, perhaps when their children look at them with unwavering confidence in their strength and capabilities.
I didn’t delete the photo because, while the things I saw in it are real and true, the things my son sees are real and true as well.
I not only saved the photo, but decided to share it here because of Psalm 139:14, “I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; wonderful are your works, and my soul knows it well.”
Years aged.
Extra pounds carried.
Hair grayed and thinned.
Body tired.
Pains and illnesses endured.
Patience lost.
Voice raised.
Mistakes made.
Weaknesses experienced.
None of these eliminate the truth my child sees and accepts about me, or your child about you: that I am, and you are, “fearfully and wonderfully made.”
The next time you encounter that truth, whatever the source, don’t laugh it off. Don’t dismiss it or argue against it, mentally or aloud. Hear it. Be grateful for it. Let it sink in until you can say, “my soul knows it well.”
There’s this one song, this one single song, that does everything for me that I could possibly need when I listen to it. It holds me like a lullaby. It serenades me like a lover. It moves me like a great work of art. It makes me smile and makes me sigh.
Is it not an incredible privilege that we are designed to experience art in such a manner? And not only that we can comprehend the beauty and genius in art while it inspires emotional reactions and provokes new thoughts, but also that we are each unique in our experiences of it. The song I speak of may have little effect on you. The painting or symphony or film you love dearly, I may not like. The favorite novel, the beloved play, the incredible sculpture, or the enthralling music – they are not the same from one to another. We each have our own “songs” that hold ineffable power over us.
Oh, the glory of such variety in both artists and recipients of art.
When I listen to that song I am thankful we are made in the image of the original Artist. We are His finest work, His masterpieces. In turn then every piece of beauty and creativity that comes forth from humanity is an offshoot of His artistry. I hope there is a piece of art, a reflection of His artwork, that has reached you like this song has me. We are each greater for the “songs” that reach our hearts.
Carrie In Writing 