The Friends of Motherhood

From Stacy T at www.keeperofthehome.org

Motherhood isn’t easy.  There are many ways to describe motherhood - joyful, challenging, unique, consuming, wonderful, exhausting, humbling, rewarding - but easy isn’t one of them.
As mothers, our greatest privileges and our greatest joys in life also happen to be some of our greatest challenges.

There are things we can do to help make the job of motherhood easier and more joyful.
Those things are like friends in that they lighten our burden and make our journey more joyful.  They are the friends of motherhood.  They can make our responsibilities easier, although not necessarily easy.  Just like our friends in real life, the friends of motherhood help us along, lift us up and encourage us to continue trying.

And on the contrary, there are also things we do that make our mothering more difficult and challenging; those things are our foes. (And we will address this in Part II another day.)

So what are the friends and foes of motherhood?

First, we'll talk about the friends.  The friends of motherhood are patience, forgiveness and confidence.

Patience

“Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself.”  - Saint Francis de Sales

No doubt about it, motherhood takes patience!  The patience to wait for your three year old to put his shoes on by himself.  The patience to clean up the floor underneath the highchair... for the fifth time that day.  That all takes patience and the more patient we can be, the easier our days will be. 

I often find that the same situation can be exhausting or amusing depending on my attitude.  Often, whatever has happened to try my patience will only be made worse by the display of impatience, and, most of the time, being patient will better the situation.  Patience really is key to the happiness and peace in our homes. 

And just as important is the the need to be patient with ourselves. It’s far too easy to beat ourselves up, criticizing and judging ourselves for our shortcomings, weaknesses and mistakes.  But if we can be patient with ourselves and continue trying, we’ll be far better in the long run, and so will our children.

Forgiveness

"Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude."  - Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you stop to think about it, a mother is constantly forgiving, forgiving her children for misbehaving or acting out.  It seems so common that we may not even recognize it as forgiveness.  But it is.  Forgiveness allows love to flow and to be felt by our children even during times of discipline.

Forgiveness builds a bond of trust between a mother and her children.  Over time, our children will learn that our love is constant and is not contingent upon their behavior.  This will help them to be honest with us and be more open to communication about potential problems or decisions they might be facing.  Forgiveness also frees us from the burden of anger and the distracting desire for a retaliative type of discipline.

Similar to patience, we also need to forgive ourselves.  Just like our children, we will often make mistakes, and we need to forgive ourselves and move forward with confidence.

Confidence

“Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.” - Peter T. McIntyre

The friendlier you can get with confidence as a mother, the better off you’ll be.  Confidence in motherhood is difficult.  It’s easy to feel less-confident then we should.

We all need to trust, however, that God gave us the children he gave us for a reason, and be confident that through prayer and effort, we can raise them as they need to be raised and mother them in the way that they need to be mothered.

Confidence does not mean that you discount all others’ thoughts and suggestions, valuing only your own.  Confidence in motherhood is the understanding that you are capable of raising your children the way they should be raised, taking ideas from all valuable sources and putting them to your use in the best ways for your children.  Confidence is the ability to give consideration to any thought or suggestion, whether yours or another’s, and be confident in your ability to evaluate the idea.

Confidence should not be shaken by mistakes.  Learning does not take place without mistakes, and a confident mother knows that, with every little stumble she is increasingly capable.