God Believes You Are a Capable Mother

Flashback: I’m twenty-one and in my first semester of teaching high school English. I show my mentor teacher my senior English roster, and she scrunches up her nose and takes a deep breath before telling me this is the most incomprehensible combination of students she’s ever seen. “If I had to pick twenty of the most difficult seniors from the two hundred or so we have at this school,” she said, “you’d have them all in this one room.”

Lovely.

These students were single moms and dads, drug addicts, criminals, and drop-outs who were returning to give education one more chance, and I was only a year or two older than many of them. But I came up with a plan:

• I made my classroom a casual environment.
• I didn’t require my students to raise their hands.
• My students sat wherever they wanted.
• My students did enough work in class that if they showed up, they’d pass.

When a college professor observed me in the classroom so I could pass my internship year, I breathed a sigh of relief. She confirmed my style. I had figured out a way to reach my students and make learning fun for kids who would never go to college. I was so proud. I had taken this room of struggling young adults and taught them something. Every single one graduated.

In the five years I worked as a teacher and coach, I faced many other challenges, including thirty-four students assigned to me in a room that sat twenty-four. Then I left teaching to tackle grant writing, and I became a military wife and moved ten times in twenty years. I learned the language while living in Turkey and even managed to navigate the dolmuş. I lived on an island in the middle of the Atlantic and waded through five straight months of rain. And even before all that, I played college basketball and managed to get nearly straight As while doing it.

And now here I am, a mom raising four children. How hard can that be? But I feel like I’m failing. My daily dilemmas include the following:

• How does laundry pile up so fast?
• Why is it so hard to keep Cheerios from multiplying in a car seat?
• Dishes! Dishes! Please just stop eating so there aren’t more dirty dishes.
• Why do kids bicker so much, and why is it impossible for me stop them?

How can four tiny people cause me to blow a gasket when a room with thirty-four students never did? How did I write grants and handle the stress of last-minute deadlines while being pulled in opposite directions by grown adults, but when four children I love with my whole being pull at me, I nearly fall apart?

How did life get so hard? Is it my age? Is it my choice of lifestyle? And why does everyone else seem to be doing life way better than me?

Here’s the mind-blowing answer: I don’t know.

I go to bed every evening thinking I’ll wake up in the morning with a strategy for no spilled milk or dirty diapers or temper tantrums in aisle four. But it never happens. I wake up with no major epiphanies for how to handle this life I’ve been given.

But here’s what I do know, and these are the facts I want to share with you today:

1. I know “Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him” (Psalm 127:3 NLT). As a mother of children who both came from my womb and the womb of another woman, I tell you it doesn’t matter how they came to you. They’ve been entrusted to you because God believed you were the best person to raise them and care for them.
2. I know God will give me peace. Isaiah 26:3 says, “You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you!” (NLT).
3. I know an eternal focus will bring these challenges into perspective. God is working in my life. He has designed these children for me. He thought I was capable of raising them. He has a plan. In Philippians 1:6, Paul said, “I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns” (NLT).
4. I know feeling guilty about everything I don’t get done in a given day doesn’t help, and that I have to remember that the little things are what matter to my children and my spouse. They also matter to God. We’re told in Luke 16:10 that “if you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones” (NLT).
5. I know everyone has their own crazy. It looks like we’re the only one struggling, but if we open up and share, we’ll see that we’re joined by many others who feel like they aren’t doing a good job either. Galatians 6:2 says, “Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ” (NLT).

As you do the best you can to be the best mother you can, remember that you’re not alone. God is with you, and I am with you. Tons of us are in the trenches with you.

God believes we are capable of mothering our children. Isn’t it time we believe him?

Wendi Kitsteiner is a former city girl now living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee with her husband and four young children. She is passionate about the causes of infertility, adoption, and keeping it real as a mom. You can follow her at flakymn.blogspot.com or becauseofisaac.org.

Photograph © Jurien Huggins, used with permission