I’m over on my personal blog, Slightly Cosmopolitan but Profoundly Ordinary, talking today about buying cars, the passage of time, and taking kids to college. Somehow, all those things go together in my brain. 
I came across this picture of myself, a picture from 12 years ago. She’s young, isn’t she?
Fresh-faced, new to adulthood and newer still to marriage. I look at her and hardly believe I was old enough to do things like get married, rent houses, buy cars, file taxes, and build a life. But at the ripe age of 24, I was, and I did all those things.
I’d been teaching school for two years at this point – health education to middle schoolers and high schoolers (oh, the stories!) – and would teach for one more year before deciding it wasn’t for me. I loved the kids, but the politics and public school setting weren’t the best match for my ideals.
Kids weren’t yet in the picture, partly because I felt overwhelmed by the desire to pour myself into the 100 students I taught and adored, and partly because of the almighty dollar – or, rather, our lack of it. A rural public school teacher and lumber yard worker aren’t known for their affluence, and making ends meet with just two of us was a struggle. But I knew that someday soon I wanted to be a mom, and I knew what kind of a mom I wanted to be – patient, wise, stay-at-home, engaged, whimsical, and full of love.
Charming and picturesque, motherhood, I imagined, would be filled with long afternoons with stacks of books, healthy homemade meals, family traditions, cookies after school, large family gatherings, a strong partnership with my husband, family devotions after dinner, and so on.
Of course, being on that side of my parenting experience, I saw motherhood through rose-colored glasses. Much of the time, I knew that was the case, too, aware that I could never fully understand what my identity as a mother would be until I actually was a mother and let those experiences take shape. But my heart did have certain hopes and ideals, and in retrospect I think they were important (if not always realistic), and I looked forward with excitement to the opportunity to eventually become this woman.
Twelve years, two houses, three children, three miscarriages, infertility and depression later, I’m no longer the woman I was in the first picture. The topography of my life wound its way over hills and around bends I never anticipated. Looking at current pictures, I see things like glasses in place of the contact lenses that had become irritating to my drying eyes, extra pounds around my middle, small fountains of gray sprouting from my temples in increasing amounts after each birth. It’s easier to see the changes in my physical appearance, but the differences in my soul are perhaps more significant.
In this season of learning to love motherhood more, I started wondering about if my reality matched my expectations. More specifically, is the mother I am today the mother I expected to be while I was hoping and dreaming? I thought through some of the elements of my life versus my expectations. Here are some of my observations:
|| I’m more patient than I imagined being – not that I didn’t want to be patient, but patience didn’t tend to be a virtue in which I was rich during younger years. <Note to the universe: this is not a request to put said patience into use or test it in any way…>
|| I’m less consistent than I’d planned to be. In fact, Gabe has learned to work this to his advantage. I’m prone to forget things like consequences, especially if he’s really amiable after he gets in trouble. He had this all figured out for years before he told me!
|| I’m about as engaged as I hoped to be. During my days of deepest depression, I struggled to stay engaged with Gabe, but as that has ebbed, my capacity to engage has strengthened and I am in a much better place.
|| I’m much less comfortable handling issues of faith than I expected to be. I grew up as a pastor’s daughter whose family had a strong presence of faith in our day-to-day happenings. Talking and living my faith were second nature to me, like breathing. I’ve found that communicating to others about them (my children included), is much more complicated, and it surprises me to encounter uncertainty in this area.
|| I’m less creative and spontaneous than I imagined. Simply surviving the days sometimes takes all the energy I have, and creative adventures and learning opportunities take back seat to the basics, like eating, school dropoff, and changing diapers. I never realized how much the mundane can monopolize the mind’s capacity for creativity.
|| I’m not nearly as strong a homemaker as I wanted to be. I definitely underestimated how many times you can clean crumbs off a 16 square foot space of floor and still have grit remaining. Note: it’s a lot. Since I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, I figured the household stuff would come easily to me. Ha!
|| I’m more connected to my kids than I knew possible. I think I imagined parenting as putting one new box on the shelf, the shelf which contained the rest of my identity boxes – wife, teacher, writer, musician, runner, etc. I didn’t anticipate that motherhood isn’t just a box of its own; it sprinkles itself through the rest of the boxes, too, and none of them remain the same. While this was an adjustment at first, I love it now, one of those things I wouldn’t have picked on the front end but am infinitely glad to have experienced now.
|| I knew motherhood would be hard, but the reality of how complicated it is to raise another human being was lost on me until it actually happened. On the flip side, I used to count myself as on the fragile side, someone who probably couldn’t handle a lot of distress. Motherhood has taught me that I can handle exactly the amount of distress or pain I’m given, and when that seems to exceed what I can handle, I will find a new well of strength so I can survive.
I’ll be back tomorrow to talk about what I want to do with this information. In the meantime, before you had children, what kind of mother did you want to be?
This post is part of a 31-day series called 31 Days to Loving Motherhood More. You can read the other posts in the series by clicking here.
