A privilege I stare in the face everyday is being home with my children. It is one of the most tangibly answered prayers of my youth. Staying home everyday to spend most all of my time tending to my home and children, even homeschooling them, is so different than anything I’ve ever seen up close or experienced.
I wanted this so badly, and it’s not only a blessing that constantly reminds me of Gods incredible faithfulness, its also been a lonely road without a map, it’s proven wildly unsynchronized with my first nervous system, and sometimes it feels so unfamiliar that it’s viscerally surreal.
I grew up in the homes of overwhelmed daycare providers, neighborhood friends and relatives. My mother worked full weeks and long hours late into the evenings, often into overtime. She was a single parent without a village. With herself and three children to care for, there was not an alternative to the way our lives had to function. She was just away— in more ways than one, as survival mode encapsulated her and thus the home we shared.
My loneliness in childhood was agonizing. Worse than that, I was left to create a survival mode of my own early on—as I went from small child to young woman, severely unguided and practically unprotected. My childhood environment was a place I was leaping out of my skin to escape once I was old enough to navigate the world independently, even if just technically.
In my well-adapted solitary nature, I often went back and forth on if I wanted to have children at all. But one thing I knew was, I absolutely dreaded the idea of repeating my childhood experience onto children of my own, and rooted in that –the fear of inadvertently having children with someone who would eventually leave us to fend for ourselves; or worse, stick around in whatever capacity, but have no genuine sense of responsibility and connection towards us.
My motherhood journey didn’t begin “at home” right away. I have spent more years as a “working mom,” than I have as a “stay at home mom”–who very much still works, but now in an entrepreneurial capacity. I don’t know if it’s unreasonable to say, but some days, okay, a lot of days— I still feel new at this homemaker thing.
In early adulthood, I worked all the time–like my mother, to survive on my own. I had to constantly be doing something to feel like I had a sense of self-security to live. This is an impulse I confess I still battle, but it was locked on autopilot and overdrive in my early 20s. Two jobs and up to 70 hour, brim to brim full working weeks was the norm. It was all I knew how to do. The first time I ever slowed down was in my first postpartum season after having my first child.
During postpartum, I battled feeling exhausted, yet restless. Totally consumed, yet useless. I was back at work after 2 months. The money I had saved to cover my own “maternity leave,” had dried up, and I admit— I think I was relieved to go back to a traditional job where expectations were clear, practical, and set within a time frame. I could control if I were satisfactory with these tasks. Plus, the light adult conversation and free coffee kept me just engaged enough to move through each day. Drowning in postpartum depression, I don’t know how I got through that time, but I did. I am adept to survive. But was one of the heaviest life transitions and seasons I’ve known— into motherhood to begin with.
Due to financial necessity, I continued to work and quickly went back to a full time schedule, and was soon bound to more responsibility and higher demands. I didn’t enjoy the idea of increased time and pressure away at work, but in a practical sense, I was in my lane. My contribution was without question, and it was what I knew how to do. Still, I longed and prayed a for day to come that I could ultimately leave my job, be home with my child, and finally learn how to slow down and experience life in closeness with one another. Raise them myself, never miss a special moment, and make my presence their home base. Apart from my brief maternity leave, I didn’t know what this kind of life felt like, especially through the lens of good mental health. But I absolutely yearned to know.
While working, I often came home exhausted and grouchy to meet an exhausted and grouchy partner, both empty-stomached, both too worn out to cook, and both shuffling through a messy house we were too drained to catch up with. I felt endless guilt permeating from every angle of my personal life. I kept thinking, “if I were home I would have all this taken care of because I would finally have the time.” (Ignorance is bliss.)
I had this ideal in my mind of homemaking: stay at home mothers from sitcom television shows–never a hair out of place, made up and dressed prim and proper, whisking around their immaculate kitchen or dabbling in their pristine gardens, kissing the top of their children’s heads as they gracefully set the steaming, fresh blueberry muffins on the crumbless dining table. For the most part, we still have these idealized, stereotypical depictions of motherhood, and still I don’t really see women who look like me or mom-like-me in this space, whether that’s in mainstream television or popular social media content. If this is all you see, like it was all I saw, to represent staying at home with children, let alone motherhood in general--you’re going in blind.
With further reflection, I realized how my mother didn’t have a nurturing or close relationship with her mother, neither emotionally or by proximity growing up. This resulted in me not having any relationship with my maternal grandmother. Never considering I was missing anything, I didn’t think to ask questions or give it a second thought. Only now I realize just how impactful our generational experiences are. Infact, they have the power to shape the both present and future reality almost completely, especially when gone unrealized and unnoticed.
I believe the intent to love and nurture our children is inherent, but perhaps our initial approach to express and exercise this is greatly inherited.
Some of us are luckier than others in these familial defaults, and as a child that spent a lot of time in homes other than my own, that is something I always noticed. The ease and comfortability of closeness, the eagerness and tightness and frequency of hugs. Sharing prized possessions and daily debriefs. Checking in when someone is hidden away or unlike themselves. Vulnerable conversations that relieve tension and restore trust. Offering encouragement when it’s needed. Offering to help without being asked. Working together. Smiles in passing and kindness as a baseline. Gentleness, accountability and forgiveness. Clean, comfortable environments. Routines and stability.
Maybe your mother could keep up with the sitcom mom. Maybe she was even better. Maybe that kind of motherhood is as far away as fantasy to your family line. We don’t get to choose the hand–or home–we are dealt growing up, but there comes a time when we gain awareness of all we have come to hold, and we begin to take ownership over the sifting that falls from us into our children’s hands and ultimately into our family’s future beyond.
Ironically, when I realized all I had come to hold, it was more of an empty-handed feeling. Empty handed in daily structure and homemaking skills, empty handed in patience and the capacity for constant chatter, uninhibited emotional outbursts and physical touch, and empty handed in any sense of fulfillment or personal satisfaction in recurrent, invisible domestic tasks.
Empty handed for the blueprint for a kind of intimate and involved motherhood I desperately desired to experience.
At times I grieve for what I didn’t get to experience in my childhood from or with my mother. Now as an adult and a mother myself, I intimately relate to the intentions and struggles she had to impossibly balance. I see where she sprinted with all her might to carry her baton further, despite her circumstances. We get to enjoy a closer relationship now that life has landed us both in other places, and we can relate woman to woman. Thankfully, unlike my experience, my children know and feel loved by their maternal grandmother. Together, we continue to move further from a past story and into a new one. It brings me so much happiness to see my children enjoy a connection with their grandmother that I couldn’t.
It’s hard to go first.
I believe a lot of us in the Gen X & millennial generation and younger are cycle breakers—and the burden runs heavy and deep to overturn an entirety of behaviors and patterns that are quite literally all you knew.
For me, survival mode is not just a reflex that activates in emergencies, it’s a default. It’s a hardwiring I’ve spent years and years now trying to escape, overturn and reprogram. The very mechanisms that helped me move through my adolescence safely now hinder my adulthood, my adult relationships, and motherhood experience.
And I had my first child at the tender age of 22, so the realization and the repair process had to start at the same time. The stakes were already too high when I caught on.
It is wonderful that more and more women my age and younger are taking their time and building families with more intentionality–and I encourage them to not only take this time for child-free adventures, vacations and career-building, but also to search their hearts and histories for these quiet inheritances. Nothing truly prepares you for the way children will send your past crashing right back into and through you.
It has been such an ongoing journey— building myself into a person and mother I have never met. It takes so much humility for me to admit that I still sometimes struggle in what I always assumed would come as naturally as breathing. We get “How To Make Sourdough,” and “How To Sleep Train,” left and right, but this intimate and critical vein of motherhood goes so unvoiced, unassumed and un-discussed.
To acknowledge these struggles, especially as a contrast to the polished ideal and ease of motherhood we have always been shown, can make you feel defective–but in actuality, it shows how conscious you are and how deeply you care. Being reflective at all is further than many have gone. The heart to change the story and the courage to face the challenge daily shows exceptional strength.
Because my intentions often reach beyond my capacity, and human strength and skill set inevitably falls short–I have learned to lean on the Lord in motherhood. I bring my weaknesses before God, asking Him to partner with me to perfect His strength in the places I feel too unpracticed, too overstimulated, and too brittle to be the mother I want to be.
Some days, it makes all the difference to remember I am not in this alone, and the Lord wants the best for these beautiful boys as much as I do, with an even fiercer desire to love, protect, and nurture who and all they were created to be–that’s the exhale I need to break apart days that blur together. That is the peace I need to pace myself in all there is to do. That’s the comfort I need to raise children in the world we live in. And that is the grace I need to walk out the honor of going first.
Of all the things I felt empty-handed in when it came to motherhood, I have found the treasure of God’s grace.
Katrisha Rose 
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