What No One Tells You About Being a Mom

When the doctor placed our son into my arms no one told me how deeply I would love him. Or maybe they did and I just couldn’t comprehend.

JP and I were completely smitten. The memory of our conversation during our drive home from the hospital makes us laugh.

“Can you believe how fast these people are driving?”

“What’s wrong with them? They are positively unsafe. Complete lunatics.”

I’m sure JP didn’t drive over 35 miles an hour, so careful was he with our precious newborn cargo.

I felt the same, deep love twice more in my life—the day Kylie was born, and then Ashton.

No one told me how much that love would grow, day after day, year after year, despite days that made me question my sanity, or filled me with the kind of bone-deep worry only a mother can experience, or sometimes made me want to run away.

No one told me how deep motherhood made you feel.

No one told me about the often difficult transition that begins in a young woman who’s used to caring only for herself and now must care for another human being.

Every day.

No one told me fighting selfishness would be hard and I would have days I longed for a slice of peace and solitude. No one told me sometimes I would get more frustrated and angry than I ever had in my pre-children days. No one told me I would have to confront ugliness in myself that never had occasion to rise to the surface before.

No one told me sometimes I would feel like a failure.

No one told me having children would slow me down in ways that occasionally frustrated me, but usually caused me to pause long enough to enjoy things I previously missed. Slow walks. Favorite books. Bedtime snuggles. Lots of stopping to pick up dropped pacifiers or tie shoes.

No one told me that I would come to relish the slowness once the business crept in.

No one told me how many miles I’d put on my SUV. No one told me how often I would squeeze in errands between soccer practices, orthodontist visits and football games. No one told me how much fun shopping for prom dresses would be. Or, on occasion, how frustrating. No one told me sitting on a bathroom floor, teaching my daughters the finer points of applying makeup, could be a holy place of communion, where happy memories were made. No one told me the teenage years could actually be really fun.

No one told me how much my kids would teach me to laugh. No one told me the noises made by tiny people, then big people, would come to be so sweet. No one told me my favorite sound would be my children’s laughter. Even now. Especially now.

No one told me that in trying to forge their character, my own character would be forged. No one told me that their neediness would make me aware of my own. No one told me that my children would teach me more about life than any college professor ever could. No one told me grace and forgiveness would become real because they found a place to be fleshed out in our home, rather than simply talked about at church.

No one told me how being a parent would deepen my dependence on God.

No one told me their hurts would be my hurts and their happiness, my joy. No one told me how fiercely I’d want to protect them from anyone or anything that would cause them pain. No one told me how hard it would be to let experience be their teacher and sometimes I would need to remain on the sideline, even when everything in me wanted to play the role of Mother Bear. No one told me how much they would actually listen to what their dad and I said, even when we thought they weren’t listening.

No one told me how deeply they would pattern their own values after ours.

No one told me in the beginning it would seem odd to have a child with me. All. The. Time. No one told me eventually it would seem odd not to.

No one told me I would one day notice a mom stopped next to me at a red light and the sight of her teenage daughter sitting in the seat beside her would fill me with a sad envy because my passenger seat was empty.

No one told me it’s just as hard to send a child off to college after their first Christmas break or say good-bye after parent’s weekend, as it is when you set up their dorm room in the fall.

No one told me how much I would like them as well as love them. No one told me the tiny, fragile infants placed in my arms would one day grow up to be my most favorite people. No one told me how well they would turn out and how proud they would make their dad and me.

Back then, all we could do was try our best, love our best and pray our best.

No one told me because no one really could. Only life, lived one day at a time, teaches you these things.

No one told me by giving them life I would find my own.

No one told me how deeply I could love.

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