Motherhood. This is the singular venture of my life that sucked all of the self-confidence out of me. Every last nugget. When I went into the hospital I was excited to go in with the baby in my belly and roll out of that place with her in my arms. I was ready to conquer the world.
My confidence waned on the drive home. With my brand-new baby asleep in her car seat, I sat next to her and panicked. I had thoughts like “Is she breathing? Should she be sleeping? What if she gets hungry on the way home and we have to pull over and I have to do this nursing thing that I am horrible at?”
As all the worries crept in I began to feel completely unprepared for motherhood. Looking back, I was completely unprepared, and I am grateful now for the stress it put into my life. Without the panic, the anxiety, or the eventual postpartum depression, I would have handled it all in my own will and abilities. I would have done it on my own and would not have found a deeper relationship with the Lord.
God was the only stable source of wisdom, guidance, and grace I knew of and I catapulted myself to His feet once I finally realized I was in over my head. I would pray “Help me, Lord. I don’t want to let her down. Please help me to be the mom she needs.”
Every day I would pour out my heart, read my bible, and tend to my baby. Something wasn’t right in my world and I knew the only way to fix it was to draw closer to the one who designed it.
Enough
As I look back on this time, I realize that while I was praying for God to make me enough, He was showing me that I was already enough. I may not have resembled the seasoned mothers I compared myself to or the glamorous moms on Pinterest I longed to look like, but I had everything I needed in Christ to be the mom He called me to be.
Mamas, when you are up to your eyeballs in motherhood drama and you feel completely unequipped to manage it all, remember this, you are already the mom God wants you to be. The proof is the kiddo tugging at your leg, kissing your face, and flushing Legos down the toilet.
Surrender
Draw closer to the Lord each day and He will continue the work he began in you, Paul told us in Philippians 1:6 to be confident that “he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
When we surrender our wills and expectations for motherhood to His will, the pressure can then come off to allow grace to fill our hearts. Once we allow that unearned favor of God to permeate the hours and days, it gives God room to show up and shape our lives in a way that points it all back to Him.
With God, we are enough. Let go of those unmet expectations and rest in His daily provision of grace and guidance. You’ve got this!
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
2 Corinthians 12:9–10