Parenting, Unpictured

I remember what I was wearing the first time I held each of my children.

Not hospital gowns, for my kids didn’t come to me that way. With my oldest, I wore a black blouse with white stitching around the neck and arms. I had a short, angled bob with blonde highlights at the time. I had just applied lipstick when the nurse took my picture holding this new baby entrusted to my care. I’m smiling at the camera, but there are tears standing in my eyes. It had been a long wait. In the second picture, I’m wearing a gray and red striped shirt that tied at the waste. My hair hangs in shoulder-length, brown curls. The baby from the first picture leans over my shoulder to peer at his new brother. He is seven years old, his brother newly born. No one looks at the camera; we all look at the baby.

Like most mothers, I rocked my babies and wondered who they would become. I changed diapers and yawned through midnight feedings, I cleaned up baby food splatters and wrestled with the phenomenon that is the fitted crib sheet. I fix breakfast, pack lunches, and prepare dinners. I read books aloud curled up in a too-small bed with freshly bathed and jammied kids. I bandage skinned knees, sit in carpool lines, attempt to help with math homework, practice Scripture verses, pray, read the Bible aloud. I sit between my kids at church, helping one to sit still and the other to pay attention. I wash their clothes, listen to their stories, get frustrated with disobedience, and apologize for my impatience. In a lot of ways, this is exactly what I thought life would be like when I held them for the first time. I factored in the normalcy and hoped for the best life could possibly be for them. It could only include the best.

When you hold your children for the first time, you probably don’t think about their suffering. Unless you’ve had some kind of diagnosis from the start, you don’t think too much about what life will be like a decade from now. This baby in your arms is perfect. His life should be perfect, too. And you will strive to make it so.

I’m still wedged in the early-middle years of parenting. I could revisit this post ten years from now and probably say it all differently, but today, as I left yet another meeting at school with education professionals and therapists, I pondered again the sharp edge of helplessness that parents feel when their kids struggle. We didn’t picture this day when we held our kids the first time. We pictured potential. Neurosurgeons. Lawyers. Sports heroes. Firemen. Professors. World-changers. The world is their oyster, and there are a millions pearls to be had. These are my kids. They can do anything!

And then, you realize one day that your child struggles with this or that, or something shows up in the medical tests or on the report card. Or their personality isn’t what you counted on. Or they carry the struggles you had as a child and tried to shield them from. Maybe you watch your friends’ children excel in sports or academics or friendships and wonder if your child will ever catch up. Or maybe the best they can be is considerably different than what you envisioned that day of first pictures and unlimited potential.

What then?

I’ve prayed for so much wisdom over the past twelve years of my life. Wisdom to know if the fever was getting too high or if that cut was deep enough for stitches. I’ve lain awake at night and prayed to know how to handle this emotional struggle or that besetting sin, how to answer those hard questions or advise on these hurtful comments. Are we doing enough? Are we doing too much? Do they have what they need to become who they’ll become? My children are all at once the babies I used to hold and the adults I can’t quite picture. When they laugh, I see traces of their wet, infant smiles in faces that time is chiseling down into angles and planes of early manhood. I try to carry their struggles until they’re old enough to pick them up alone. It seems, though, that everything is too heavy for me. I’m not strong enough for this. And, as I learn my way through motherhood, it seems I wasn’t meant to be.

If my kids never struggled, I wonder what my prayer life would be like. I’ve prayed for their safety from day one, but as they’ve grown, so have my prayers. Worries pile up like grains of sand on a seashore; when one is washed away, a thousand take its place. I sift through them with prayer, panning for that peace that passes understanding, for wisdom that doesn’t rise and fall with every cresting wave. I try to rest on the anchor of God’s sovereignty. He has entrusted these children to this family for this time right now. None of this is accidental.

Motherhood pushes me to pray, really. Not to protect my kids from everything but to help them trust God through everything. I can’t shield them from pain or problems, from suffering or disappointments. I can put a band-aid on a skinned knee, but I can’t fix the ache of disappointment. I can pack a healthy lunch, but I can’t answer the hunger for happiness. Though I can offer everything I have in my stockpile of motherhood, I can’t give my kids everything they need. But I know who can.

The low places we walk with our kids are rarely factored in. Just look at our faces in those first photos. We didn’t see it coming. (And if you’re not there yet, you will be.) But here we pray and walk next to our children, teaching them to look to the God who faithfully loves and never changes. The realization that maybe they can’t do everything they set their mind to might be the grounds for learning what to do with adversity. Perhaps who God means for them to be is faithful. Just faithful. Perseverance is learned in adversity, in challenges we didn’t factor into our plans. We learn it as parents, and our children watch us. Our pain and our problems, those are the things God uses to teach us strength of character, humility, dependence upon His constancy. In weakness, we see how strong He is. We can keep pointing to our kids, highlighting the North Star of their potential future accomplishments. Or, we can acknowledge that life is sometimes hard but God is very strong.

Self-sufficiency isn’t the goal of my parenting anymore. But teaching, learning, showing, pointing to God’s sufficiency is. He is enough for our kids. Whatever path He takes them down, however fraught with challenges or lit with joy, He will be enough for them. And in their suffering or trials or disappointments, they may look and see that He is.

God will be enough for our kids. And in their suffering or trials or disappointments, they may look and see that He is. Share on X

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash