By Janet Mylin, True Girl Lead Teacher
I was happily sitting in my seat at a church service. It was Mother’s Day and I had lots of emotions swirling around my head that year. You see, this was in my BEFORE phase of motherhood. Until the Holy Spirit set me free in my role as a mom, I was frantic about all of it.
“Am I doing enough?”
“Am I doing too much?”
“Am I driving my kids away?”
“Do they hate me?”
“Will they ever come back home after they grow up and start their own lives?”
“Do they think I’m crazy?”
“Am I discipling them well enough?”
“How do I make them do the right things instead of choosing the wrong things?”
“Why am I not consistently happy?”
“It’s all up to me and I can’t handle this pressure!”
So, yeah. It was my world and that’s the brain I had sitting there on Mother’s Day. But I was doing okay. The fragrance of my traditional Mother’s Day corsage was gently meeting me when I inhaled deeply and I whispered to myself, “I’m fine. This is fine. Everything’s fine.”
And then he said those nine words.
The speaker was honoring the moms of the world and said,
“Motherhood is the most important job in the world.”
I bristled and my husband must have felt it because he gently squeezed my hand. I was instantly filled with a wild mix of anger, guilt, heaviness and defeat. I wanted to stand up and say everything in my head:
“How can that be true? That doesn’t even make sense! I know it’s what everyone says but how can it be true?? So many women and girls are never going to be moms. What does that sentence say to them? And what about the men? Does that mean everything they do is always going to be less-than? Stop saying things like this! It’s not helping!”
I didn’t stand up and say all of that. I swallowed the lump in my throat and aggressively wrote it in my journal later.
Even though I was kind of a mess during that season of my life, I was onto something. A lot of moms are guilty of believing that lie and then they’re left with all of the other kind of guilt that comes along with it.
Listen. There are lots of innocuous lies moms believe. For instance:
- “I’ll put this pair of socks in the dryer and they both will come out.”
- “My son will not lick the handrail.”
- “I will have enough time to finish this project while my kid naps.”
- “All of my Tupperware containers will get reunited with their lids one day.”
But, boy oh boy, there are some lies that can steal all of our joy and contentment in motherhood if we continue to give them space to grow in our hearts and minds.
I love this little two verse story in Luke 11:27-28. To set the stage, Jesus was speaking to a group of people.
As he said these things, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!” But he said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!”
Did you catch that? A woman in the crowd was believing a lie about motherhood and Jesus stopped it. From what I can tell, He was trying to get people to believe what “the most important job in the world” actually is: To hear God’s word and obey it.
That story (and many others) became an anchor to me as I journeyed to wholeness and joy in motherhood. You can read more about that and start your own journey in my book Arrows Make Terrible Crowns.
I’d like to invite you to an important event. It could be a game-changer if you find yourself on the struggle bus when it comes to your role as a mom.
Dannah Gresh, author of Lies Girls Believe, and Erin Davis, author of Lies Boys Believe, are coming together for a one-night livestream workshop on February 13 at 7pm ET*(Registrants will recieve a recording of the event the next day). I’ll be there too, as we uncover and uproot 10 lies Christian moms believe. You can register for a gift of any amount HERE.
Dannah, Erin and I all believe you don’t need to just survive motherhood. You can absolutely thrive, and even FLOURISH as a mom. And we all know it takes uprooting lies and replacing them with God’s Truth in order to get there.
So. Are you ready? Want to do the work of stepping into abundance? Let’s do it together.
You are not alone,
(My kids are 16, 17 and 22 - two biological and one adopted from China when she was 9.)
