Confessions of an Imperfect Mom: God's Path to Less Guilt and More Grace

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1

The Mountain Range in Your Backyard

Acknowledging Guiltmore

My children have an impatient, quirky, hardworking, verbose, affectionate, opinionated, forgiving, occasionally cranky, and ever-so-slightly neurotic mom who loves them madly. A neurotic mother who over the gamut of her mothering experience (twenty-two years, five months, twenty-eight days, seven hours, seventeen minutes, and sixteen seconds) has often belabored the minutiae of mothering life.² Trust me—no trivial detail has escaped the proclivities of my maternal angst.

It officially started in January 1988 as I pored over pregnancy and medical reference books, hoping to discern if the formation of my first child had in any manner been compromised due to my consuming celebratory glasses (yes, plural) of Asti Spumante approximately six hours prior to her, um…rather unexpected conception. (We shall always consider Kristen to be our honeymoon souvenir gift.)

A few weeks afterward (it seems), I was slathering coconut butter on my ever-expanding belly and courageously attempting to swallow prenatal vitamins roughly the size of a man’s big toe each morning before eating breakfast and leaving for work.

I was absolutely determined to do everything right with my pregnancy and as a mother.

That’s why I began the first of many conversations with my baby when she approximated the size and shape of a small lima bean. An article in Perfect Mother magazine had convinced me that any hope of a successful nurturing of the mother-child bond depended on the baby’s ability to hear and recognize my voice. Hence my daily conversational ramblings.

I talked and talked and talked. Actually, I haven’t stopped talking since.

And she was an excellent listener—back then.

Yes, I was determined to do everything right. I cut back—way back—on my daily consumption of Pepsi, refused to walk (or breathe) within a hundred-yard radius of a cat litter box, and carefully measured the width between slats before settling on a beautiful, safe cherrywood crib. In addition, having read The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, I began preparing those womanly mammary glands for active duty. (It involved sandpaper and sure-grip pliers—we’ll leave it at that.)

I read other books as well. Magazines too—a lot of them. Over the course of nine months I purchased, borrowed, and inhaled reams of written material. What information I couldn’t find there, I asked of other mothers.

Was it normal for hair to grow exponentially on one’s belly while pregnant?

Could the baby sense when I was worried, fearful, or enjoying sex? (The possibility of the latter really freaked me out.)

Should I have a water birth, sit on a birthing stool, or strap my legs into stirrups?

Was it bad to want as many pain-numbing drugs as possible—during the seventh month of pregnancy?

Would the fact that I never qualified for National Honor Society hold my child back intellectually?

In light of said academic reality, should I purchase the Baby Einstein encyclopedia set with annotated appendixes for the low cost of $15,397.22—a mere $6.89 less than my entire teaching salary for the year, but sure to guarantee that lima-bean baby would qualify for the ranks of MENSA?

Were ankles roughly the size of Babar the elephant’s a positive or negative indicator regarding pregnancy weight gain?

What I’ve Done Right

I kept my family together and taught my children the value of honoring a commitment.

—Janice, age 41

And how would I ever be able to determine when I was in real labor? (Okay, I was slightly neurotic and altogether clueless!)

I had the minutiae of anticipatory maternal neurosis down to a science. By the second trimester I had considered (obsessed over) the following:

Would I be able to interpret my baby’s cries?

Would I bump her head into the doorknob while carrying her in my arms?

Would my milk come in?

And more troublesome still—upon careful examination and comparison of two-dimensional breast-feeding diagrams with actual breasts (mine)—how on earth were my now monstrous-sized mammary attachments going to fit within the minuscule circumference of a newborn baby’s mouth?

These were the things that kept me up at night! As well as the even more basic worries that haunted me throughout those early months.

What if my baby didn’t like me?

What if I didn’t like her?

What if I did it all wrong?

A View of Guiltmore

And that, of course, was just the beginning. It was my first glimpse of the mountainous terrain that looms over every mother’s life. My first view of the familiar and foreboding range of peaks I’ve come to call Guiltmore National Park.

You won’t be able to locate Guiltmore on a Rand McNally travel atlas. Nor will a list of websites appear after you enter certain keywords in Google. But it’s there—this mountainous range of regret, second-guessing, and doubt that can only be seen, observed, trekked, and experienced from a mother’s backyard.

It’s a familiar sight where most of us live. And it still looms for me, even though my lima-bean baby is now in adulthood with her brothers close behind her. And many days I still find myself trekking the rocky slopes of Guiltmore, pondering questions that range from the mundane to the momentous:

• Was this cavity the result of too many juice boxes when he was little?

• Should we have let her quit piano?

• Was I wrong not to have purchased him drums sooner?

• Did going to public school (instead of the very expensive Christian school or continued homeschooling) hurt our children’s chances for college?

• Did all our moves make our children flighty and insecure?

• Do my children have temper tantrums now because I had anger problems when they were growing up?

• Because I let them sleep late on summer mornings (so I could get some writing done), did they struggle with laziness?

Ever found yourself there?

Questioning everything you do as a mother?

Doubting every choice you’ve made?

Second-guessing past actions?

Agonizing over possible future mistakes?

Beating yourself up over the kind of parent you’ve turned out to be?

Well, just as one can’t have Oreos without a glass of cold milk or even dare to imagine Mary Kate without Ashley, some things just go together. And all too often—let’s say most often, shall we?—motherhood is accompanied by the nagging, sometimes debilitating emotion of guilt, with that tired trio of regret, doubt, and second-guessing thrown in for good measure.

It Comes with the Territory

Guilt seems bundled within our XX chromosome mothering genes. And some of that guilt is good. Really. Like physical pain, it serves a purpose: It alerts us that we have done something wrong.

But as you’ve no doubt discovered, mothering guilt can also be a big problem. A looming, mountain-sized problem that clenches our stomachs, robs us of sleep, erodes our peace, and poisons our relationships. How can we ever live as God intended when we’re always huddled in the looming shadows of Guiltmore?

Read over the first paragraphs of this chapter, for goodness’ sake. It is guilt that keeps panicked mothers up at night, guilt that hinders our decision making and undermines our confidence, guilt that has us feeling defeated before we ever dilate past four centimeters.

And guilt is a widespread phenomenon. In fact, if you enter the keywords motherhood and guilt into Google, you’ll find about 125,000 direct leads to books, magazine articles, websites, blogs, and message boards that all address the topic. I’ve found through my own less-than-Gallup-style polling that the subject of guilt and mothering is second in interest (and angst) only to anger and motherhood.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. As the high priestess of all reformed angry mothers—my particular Guiltmore has volcanic origins—I know all too well the caustic cycle of uncontrolled anger, regrettable fallout, and guilt. Not to mention guilt that comes from simple carelessness. And guilt that comes from factors beyond my control. And guilt that I manufacture in my own worried mind. It’s because the slopes of Guiltmore are so familiar to me that I am attempting to add one more voice to an already busy conversation.

What I’ve Done Right

Going to my son’s room prior to sleep and having a conversation about his day. It is our special time to talk.

—Cheryl, age 44

So here you have it—my own Guiltmore travelogue. It’s my account of how I managed to move beyond guilt toward grace and why I think you can get there too. Acknowledging the presence of guilt is simply the first (and key) step in climbing our way past the many regrets, doubts, and shoulda-coulda-woulda realities of being a mother.

But note that I used the phrase climbing past rather than forever conquering or utter annihilation of guilt.

You see, for more than two decades—ever since those lima-bean days—I have awoken to equal parts mothering mayhem and mothering bliss. And there hasn’t been a day go by in which something wasn’t said, or done, or thought, or forgotten, or screamed, or denied, or remembered, and held hostage by guilt.

Not one day.

I suppose the vast majority of guilty issues were miniscule, seemingly insignificant matters—it pains my head even to attempt to name them. But they were there—those irritating, unsettling, restless feelings of messing up, of not doing and getting everything right. And there are the larger-than-life guilt packages made up of the shamefully painful mistakes and errors in my mothering that I will not even speak aloud.

I have come to believe that I will never be completely rid of guilt as a mother, and I think that’s true for you too. I consider guilt, with all its intrinsic ties to maternal life and love, to be a vast, take-your-breath-away, geographical landscape that will sit squarely in my backyard until the day I die. (Comforting thought, eh?) That’s why I make no promises of conquer your guilt or break free forever and ever within the pages of this book. I am so over thinking I can do the impossible—and then feeling even more guilty when I cannot.

Yes, guilt will always be part of the mothering landscape.

But pay attention because this is important: It doesn’t have to dominate your landscape. It doesn’t have to ruin your life, or spoil your fun, or rob you of peace of mind. More important, it doesn’t have to erode your confidence and cripple your effectiveness as a mother and a human being.

Instead of hunkering down under Guiltmore’s shadow, you can learn to scale her slopes and move on to where you were really meant to live—on the sunny plains of grace and confidence. And from there—take it from me—the view is really terrific.

But you can’t get there by yourself. (Oh, I suppose you could try, but it’s far safer and enjoyable to travel with someone else.) Guiltmore’s peaks are too slippery and too treacherous to be navigated alone. They are fraught with danger, and only a trained guide who has traversed their crags of guilt and terrain of mistakes (real and imagined) can lead you safely to those promised vistas of grace and confidence.

You need, in fact, the expert guidance of a sherpa, someone to prepare the way toward the place where you can enjoy loving your children more and dealing with guilt less and less.

I am that sherpa, ladies!

Yes, me. And don’t think I don’t know what an unlikely candidate I am for the job. I’m the sherpa who took a writing retreat a few years ago to the mountainous peaks of the Colorado Rockies. Let’s just say I went, I saw, and was totally uninspired. (Not that there’s anything wrong with the Rockies, mind you; I’m just the type to draw my inspiration while sunning on the shores of a white-sand beach, that’s all.)

Nevertheless, I’m volunteering for the job.

I will trek ahead and scout for danger and scenic views.

I’ll keep an eye out for the hidden crevasses that can swallow a guilt-ridden mother whole.

I’ll keep careful watch over threatening mothering conditions that can pile up and trigger an avalanche of despair.

And I’ll stay with you until the very end. Of that you can be sure.

All that’s left is for you to firmly tighten the knotted rope of motherhood that joins us, grab a pick or two to help you break up some encrustations of false guilt, and prepare to loosen anything and everything that holds you back on the pathway toward grace. Together we’re going to scale Guiltmore’s peaks and rid ourselves of useless guilt that keeps us from more confident and joyful—yes, joyful!—mothering.

2

A Base-Camp Confession

Lots of Stuff I’ve Felt Guilty About, For, or Over

All right, raise your hand if you totally skipped What We’ve Done Right and turned to this chapter instead.

Come on…I know you’re out there.

It’s time for confession and a little turning from your wicked reading ways. So let’s have every head down, every eye closed—no one looking around—as you raise those guilty hands, ladies. Okay, I see that hand. Yes, thank you…I see that one as well. How about you in the balcony?…Yes, yes, thank you for your honesty. Is there anyone else, anyone else who would say, Yes, Julie, I disregarded your introduction and skipped here first? Ah, one more. Thank you, ladies. There are hands waving all around…

Now, how did I know you were out there?

Pretty simple, really. You did exactly what I would have done.

I’d consider two factors if purchasing a book about motherhood and guilt. First I’d wonder whether the author is an actual living, breathing mother of children. That may seem obvious, but you and I both know there are people out there in the world of books and public speaking who are doling out all sorts of advice and wisdom on subjects they are not qualified to speak on.

I once attended a workshop titled How to Have a Debt-Free Marriage. The room was packed with financial losers like me, and we were eager to hear the answer to our problems. The speaker was introduced, and as she made her way to the lectern I heard audible gasps all around me. I gasped too, when I realized a 13-year-old girl was making her way to the microphone. Well, okay, she may have been 18. But she sure looked a lot like the babysitter I’d just paid $195 to watch my three kids while I attended the