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THE MOM THEY NEED

by Katie Blackburn

Not long ago I found myself in a blissful state of motherhood. I was enjoying trips to Target with one seven-month-old in tow, watching her play contentedly, cooing and giggling along with her as she started to find her own voice. I was putting her to bed and not hearing from her again for ten to twelve hours most nights, and making her real baby food for breakfast when she woke up. We had our routines, the special ways that only the two of us could communicate, and for a moment, I sure thought we had it down, the whole mother-daughter thing. We would be best friends forever, no doubt about it.

But everyone warned me it would change.

Other moms loved to tell me stories like, “Ryan has been biting at preschool,” or “Anna threw her whole body down in line at the grocery store when I said no to the Tic Tacs,” or my favorite, “If you think two-year-olds are hard, just wait for three. Someone should have named it the terrible threes.”

Hmmm. It must be tough, I thought in response to these stories, with no actual empathy in my mind. Because in my case, parenting my not-yet-walking daughter was, dare I say, easy. She didn’t speak, she didn’t move much, and she slept all night long. I actually remember thinking, Come on, people! How hard can this be?

Never, ever ask that question.

Because everything did change. One day at a time, easy stopped being a thing around here.

I noticed the strong sense of independence in my daughter right around her first birthday. While many other little girls her age seemed compliant, shy, and calm, mine was not any of those things. She knew what she wanted, and by sixteen months old she was saying, “By self!” as a disclaimer to every demand.

And then there was “the playdate”—a day that will live in infamy. We were at a dear friend’s home, whose daughter is only three weeks older than mine. We settled in with a cup of coffee and sent the kids, the two girls and one older brother, to the other room to play. Less than ten minutes into our conversation, I heard crying, followed quickly by a report from the older brother in the room: “Mom, Harper hit Evelyn!”

“Oh gosh, I’m so sorry! Let me go talk to her!” I unfolded my legs, set my coffee on the end table, and quickly ran into the other room to investigate.

“Harper, did you hit Evelyn? Harper, we don’t hit people. Please give her back that toy.”

I returned to my cozy corner on the couch, reoriented myself to our conversation, and again, within minutes, there was more yelling, more reporting, more reproofing of my daughter. After the fourth time I got up, we decided to move into the room with the kids.

But that only forced me to see what the five-year-old big brother had been reporting all along: my daughter was acting terrible. She was stealing toys, hitting her friend, and had no regard for the correction her momma was trying to give her. It was the first time I felt actual embarrassment as a mother, the first time I felt ashamed, and the first time I desperately wanted someone to show me the empathy that I hadn’t given to others. We left our friend’s home after less than an hour, my daughter convulsing in anger because I ripped the fairy wings out of her hand as we left, and my head hanging in shame at what had just happened.

Do I have a bad child? Does my friend think I have a bad child? Am I a bad mom? Does my friend think I am a bad mom? Is everything just always going to be BAD?

A similar pattern of punishment hung around our home for months: my daughter behaved badly, I got angry. She responded with more bad behavior; I responded with more anger. It was day after day of tantrum, time-out, lecture, tantrum, time-out, lecture, and a weary set of parents wondering what we had actually signed up for. Something I could not name was just not working. I sought advice from friends, got pep talks from mentors, read all the books, and regularly started praying for help. Because the truth was—I never thought it would be so hard to be a mom.

A sweet mentor texted me one morning and gave me the beautiful gift of asking how she could pray for me. Through tears I responded, telling her how timely her request was, how being a mom was nothing like I thought it would be when I registered for those soft pink crib sheets. And then I asked her to pray for wisdom for me, because I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do something that would break up the pattern of tantrum to time-out that we were living in. But I had no idea what that something was.

Then she said this: “Katie, God gave me a feisty daughter too. And I remember the hardest part of her little years was that, sometimes, I had to become a mom I didn’t want to be. Hang in there, though, because you are the mom she needs.”

A mom I didn’t want to be. But the mom she needs.

Those became life-changing words for me.

Slowly, change started to happen in our home, but it was mostly a change in me. I began to see motherhood as a much bigger narrative than the idyllic stories I’d told myself.

Being the mom my baby girl needed sometimes meant forty-five minutes of me repeatedly walking from the top of the stairs to the time-out spot at the bottom, putting my hand on the back of an angry and inconsolable little girl, reminding her that I am still there and that I still love her like crazy. Sometimes it meant leaving playdates, while other times it meant canceling them altogether. And still other times, it meant asking for forgiveness from a three-year-old, because I was the one who had thrown a fit.

None of these things was on my mind as I felt her precious baby kicks in my belly. One hardly imagines the emotional holes motherhood can pull us into while we are decorating the nursery. But as I started to let go of the fairy tale I thought motherhood would be, I stepped into the story God was really writing, and grew into the mom my daughter needed.

I liked the real version of motherhood better than the fairy tale anyway, because the real version was forcing me to be smaller so God could get bigger. And isn’t that what He intended all along?

We’ve added two more babies to our family since my mentor gave me that good advice, but her words have only become truer. Each precious child has challenged me to let go of the vision of the mom I wanted to be so I could be the mom my kids need.

The longer we parent, the better we get at this role change. It’s not just about learning to discipline well; it’s about learning that love is made real when it is tested, in the times we have to be someone we never thought we would be. When our daughter experiences something hard, when our son has trouble learning, when the doctor comes into the room with a diagnosis, when our children make decisions we taught them for years not to make . . . in those moments when the story is not reading how we always wanted it to, that’s when we have to remember that we are still the right person for the role. Because with every step of this motherhood journey, through prayer and patience and learning to trust our own intuition, we can be the mommas our kids need.