Today’s reading in our Advent devotional is one of my favorites. God’s mercy in the midst of the curse is astounding. So often, we look to the gospel proclaimed in Genesis 3:15 and see the next verses only through the lens of judgment. But when we do that, we miss the reality that God’s restrained judgment in 3:16-19 are what make it possible for him to keep his promise. The promised seed can and will come in spite of pain in childbearing, and in spite of the new difficulty to sustain life in a fallen world. God restores his wayward children to himself through the promise of redemption, and he restores them to each other through his promise of sustaining, common grace.
Browsing category: Confronting Narratives
That Pain You Feel Is Real {On The Myth of Maternal Instinct & Learning to Ask For Help}
My first epidural only half worked. One side of my body was marked by a numbness that should have meant a blissful labor, if it would only have extended to the other half. Instead, the pain was concentrated on my right side, sending me awkwardly writhing with every contraction. The nurse watched me with confusion and then rolled her eyes. “It just needs a few minutes. You won’t feel anything,” she said as she left the room.
It wasn’t the first moment I felt foolish during my first labor and delivery. Perhaps it was the result of my own shame and insecurity as a 22-year old single mom, but I was certain the nurses left my room and giggled over my stupid questions. I wondered if they debated whether or not this baby should go home with me. I obviously sounded like an idiot, and I certainly looked terrified.
Thankfully, I wasn’t alone. My mom and oldest sister faithfully stayed by my bedside until my daughter made her dramatic entrance into the world in the middle of the night. But despite their endless support, I still felt alone in so many ways. It seemed there was this body of knowledge I was supposed to already possess, like there was a manual I was supposed to have downloaded at birth. Doesn’t “maternal instinct” imply women possess this inherent ability to labor and deliver and mother? And yet, as those labor pains persisted, my only instinct was to run, except that the partial numbness kept me anchored to my bed.
My sister watched my face contort with the latest contraction. I had taken to biting my tongue, closing my eyes, and trying to hide the pain I wasn’t supposed to be feeling. This would be the first of many such experiences—of trying to ignore the pain and pretending everything was okay. After bringing my daughter home, it would take me days of feeling miserable before I returned to the doctor to discover I had an infection. “Don’t you feel terrible?” the doctor asked me. “What took you so long to come in?” If I wasn’t delirious from fever and sleep deprivation, I might have laughed. I just assumed this is what motherhood felt like.
“You shouldn’t feel anything,” my sister said. “Something’s wrong.” She marched out to get the nurse. My big sister, the advocate. I’m not sure if I felt relieved or annoyed at the time, thinking I could handle it; wishing the pain would stop. As I reflect on the memory now I see a metaphor ripe for the picking. How much of motherhood is just wishing someone would say, “That pain you feel? It’s real. I’ll go get help.”
I can’t remember how many more times they tried the epidural, but I never achieved that promised blissful state. Only tingly legs and concentrated pain as they flopped me from one side to the other, shoving oxygen in my face and watching my baby’s heart rate with concern. No one ever told me what was wrong; they just told me to push.
I think the assurance of “maternal instinct” is one of the biggest lies we tell each other.
Of course it depends on what we mean. If we’re talking about the newfound terror that accompanies our inauguration into motherhood, then I suppose I might concede there’s a shared maternal experience. Teacher and journalist Elizabeth Stone writes, “Making a decision to have a child…it is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body,” and, really, is there anything more terrifying? Never before having children did it occur to me that I might get out of my bed in the middle of the night to hover over a bassinet because I was suddenly plagued by an irrational fear that my baby might no longer be breathing.
Or perhaps I can get on board with a maternal instinct that acknowledges you’re suddenly more like a Mama Bear than you ever thought possible. That sudden protective rage that has mothers prying open the mouths of mountain lions or lifting cars off their children? I might not have believed said stories prior to motherhood, but now I don’t doubt they’re true.
Maybe we can say there’s some truth to the idea of maternal instinct––the thing that happens when you hold that vulnerable little being in your arms and realize they completely and utterly depend on you. That changes a person, though we have to acknowledge that there are a variety of factors that make even these “natural” feelings of love and bonding difficult to forge.
But journalist Jessica Valenti writes that we’re living in the age of the “expert mom.” And that means, “Maternal instinct isn’t just about mom love any more. It’s a built-in expectation that truly loving and committed mothers are the absolute authority on everything having to do with their children––down to the very last dirty diaper.”
When I was pregnant with Hadley, so many well-meaning people told me, “Don’t worry. God gave you this baby. You’ll know just what to do.” And I believed them. I clung to their confidence and tried to make it my own. Until I held that slimy, squishy baby in my arms and realized: I had no idea what to do.
The problem with the idea of maternal instinct is that it reinforces the lie that tells us we can do this on our own. You have everything you need! we assure ourselves and each other. But what about when we don’t?
One of those early weeks of motherhood, Hadley and I sat in the bedroom we shared in my parents’ house. She screamed, I bounced. She screamed more, I nursed. She screamed, I cried, and bounced some more. At one point, I lay my screaming baby down on my bed and crumbled to the floor. I didn’t know what to do. I was exhausted and helpless and felt so alone. I stared at the door, willing my mom to hear our cries, but she kept sleeping. Hadley and I persevered that night, just the two of us. Still awake in the early morning, I brought out my baby (who, admittedly, I didn’t particularly care for at that moment) as soon as I heard my mom. She extended her arms, eager to take her grandbaby, and I dissolved into sobs. I felt so much shame––shame that I couldn’t figure out what my baby needed, shame that I resented her so, shame that I was such a failure of a mother.
My mom held Hadley and hugged me and said the most important words I could have heard in that moment. Not, “You’ve got this, Kendra. She’s your baby. You’ll know just what to do.”
No, she said: “Why didn’t you ask for help?”
I’ve been thinking about that season of my life lately. It feels like a lifetime ago, and sometimes I wonder how we made it through. But then I remember–Oh! My mom. And my dad. And my brother and sisters. And, eventually, a church. God built a village around Hadley and I.
Hadley is nearing 13, and while I wish I could say I feel like an old pro at this motherhood game, I’m more confident than ever that maternal instinct is a lie. Every day I feel like I’m fumbling through parenthood blindfolded and with my right hand tied behind my back. I stare at these miniature humans and feel simultaneous delight and terror. I still wonder how on earth I can be trusted to keep them alive.
I still don’t know what to do, but I’ve learned to ask for help.
I’ve learned it’s not maternal instinct that will get me and my children through these tumultuous years, it’s God’s abundant grace in the form of his people. He has placed me in a family that stretches far beyond these walls, and there’s no reason I have to figure out this mothering thing alone.
(And just in case you need to hear it: neither do you.)
Between the World and Me {some reflections}
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates* was the first book I finished in 2018. This wasn’t a light read, and I’ll no doubt be processing it for a long time. But here are some reflections:
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I was twelve when my family moved from small-town North Dakota to Prince George’s County, Maryland. Tucked safely inside the wired gates of Andrews Air Force Base, the world kept out was foreign and scary, with rumors of bullet-proof glass on drive-thru windows, and warnings about locking your doors and avoiding eye contact. I remember first arriving in Maryland, driving through Baltimore, looking out my window at the colorful faces walking around outside and thinking, we’re not in Kansas any more. It was an observation without judgment. I’d only seen a handful of African Americans in person up to that point. There was a beauty and mystery to this unfamiliar. An excitement that began to overshadow my teenage angst over moving. The realization that we’d moved somewhere with culture and diversity and different stories to learn. I loved it, even if I feared it a little.
In eight grade, I went to Andrew Jackson Middle School, a magnet school in PG County. I hated homeschooling and was a miserable student; my parents sent me to public school that year at my insistence, while keeping the rest of my siblings home. I was one of three white kids in my class. The other “white kids” being a girl from Taiwan and another who was Middle Eastern. We were friends, these three outsiders. Eventually I found my place in choir among my African American classmates. When Christmas carols came along and I auditioned for a solo, they saw me for the first time. “White girl can sing!”
I was the white girl. It was how my classmates saw me, and my teachers. I doubt many of them knew my name. They didn’t need to.
I realize now that even my experience as a minority was anchored in privilege. My teachers treated me with respect. They expected that I would be smart and well-behaved. To be fair, I was. But other classmates were too, only they’d get a sideways glance. I was never met with accusation or withheld from opportunity.
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Coates describes being pulled over by the PG County police:
At that point in American history, no police department fired its guns more than that of Prince George’s County…I replayed all of this sitting there in my car, in their clutches…these officers had my body, could do with that body whatever they pleased, and should I live to explain what they had done with it, this complaint would mean nothing.
I, too, know what it’s like to be pulled over by the PG County police. But it didn’t occur to me to fear for my life. I feared my father’s wrath, of course, so my sister and I batted our eyelashes and she talked her way out of a speeding ticket. We had a reason to be pulled over and walked away unscathed. Because we were young girls? Because we were white? It didn’t occur to me to question.
I write this knowing that there are ways to talk about race that are appropriate and informed, and knowing that I don’t know what they are. This was just my experience, those few months where I felt what it was like to be the minority, where I felt keenly aware of my whiteness, where I began to wonder what it all meant.
I related a little to Coates’s fear for his son, to his feeling of being an inadequate protector. He speaks of the vulnerability of the black body, and as a woman I can relate at least in the smallest terms. I’m not raising a black male but I am raising daughters in a world where their bodies are seen as free for the taking. In a world where I say #metoo and know the fear of vulnerability, of lack of agency.
But he also made me question how I ought to raise my son, and my daughters for that matter. What do we do with this inherent privilege? How do we love well? Fight for justice? Acknowledge the sins of our history, even knowing we may have had nothing to do with it? How do we root out these cultural constructs that allow oppression to flourish? How do we admit the ways we’ve been complicit?
And how do we do so without reinforcing the problems?
When I was a case manager for New Americans, I learned very quickly the privilege I had by simply speaking English without an accent. My clients would be on the verge of eviction, but if I called and spoke to the landlord, I might be able to negotiate more time. If I called the employer, they might get an interview. If I met with the teacher, their child might get better services. This both enraged and empowered me. I saw the ways I could help but also felt disgusted that I would play into such a hateful system. Yet I knew confronting the racism would only harm my clients. So I would smile and be kind and respectful and my clients would have another week to get the rent together. All the while it kept us in two different classes. Did I use my privilege well or did it just go to my head?
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Coates urges his son to struggle, just as those of us who think we’re white need to learn to struggle so we can face this Dream we’ve conjured for ourselves. The Dream is a myth, and while I think I know that, I also see myself living in it. I wonder if I’m passing it along to my children. I wonder what it looks like to struggle myself and to keep from passing along complacency and ignorance. All I can hope is that in asking the questions, I’m moving in the right direction. That’s Coates’s method and what I admired most about the book – the more he learned, the less sure he became. Questions only lead to more questions – that’s the essence of his struggle and the one he passes onto his son – and to me, too.
what it means to be brave
“Brave,” by Sara Bareilles is our favorite song right now. We turn it up loud and sing it at the top of our lungs, and when it’s done they shout, “Again!” and I comply because I love it, too.
I started a blog post on courage on June 6, 2015. I didn’t get beyond the title, but it had become a word I was clinging to, one I desperately wanted to define not just in words but in life. In the midst of trying to figure out why I was hiding and what it meant to be free, that word beckoned me like an open door. I’ve defined it so many ways in my short 30 years: It takes courage to be the new girl. To jump off of cliffs and to travel alone across the world. To follow my dreams. To leave home. To speak on behalf of the oppressed. To be an activist.
It takes courage to come home. To raise a child alone. To start a business.
It takes courage to give it all up. To entrust your imperfect, sinful self to someone imperfect and sinful. To build a life together filled with life and death, chaos and calm.
I considered myself pretty courageous.
But suddenly that courage felt shallow as I looked in the mirror, unsure of who I’d become. Somewhere along the way I stopped talking. Stopped writing. Stopped being the things I always thought made me me. I tiptoed around my life, unsure of my place, my purpose, even my perspective on much of anything.
Then I discovered people who wrote about courage. Their definitions drew me back to the life I used to know, to the parts of me that felt free to explore and adventure and risk and speak up without caring what anyone else thought.
But that courage lost its appeal. Because now I have people and responsibilities and a life and I can’t just leave it all behind and start something new. Not just can’t–I don’t want to. That wouldn’t be me any more.
I know in Christian circles we mock the elusive search for self so I’ve hid in the background afraid to admit the truth: I’m not sure who I am.
We mock because we know Disney mostly gets the answer wrong. “Finding myself” is less like Cinderella and more like Finding Nemo. I’m not finding the princess inside of me that was always there, I’m just on a journey that feels like it’s never going to end, only to realize that it’s the sum of the journey that equals me.
“Me” is ever-changing, praise God, because this work that He’s begun is only the beginning. But how am I to live in the meantime? Embracing the image of God in me while knowing how marred it is? Embracing that which makes me me while knowing that life is not some play acted out in which I’m the main character. The story is not ultimately about me.
This is where courage comes in, and why I’ve been stuck here for awhile. I knew how to be courageous in a different life, but that’s not the courage required of me today. And as I’ve made my own definition, I’ve started to wonder if this had been my definition all along, what difference that might have made.
I’m headed on a new adventure: one I have dreamt of since I was a child and yet which feels incredibly foreign to me. I’m packing up my camera and computer, my love for Scripture and for teaching and for oppressed women and I’m heading halfway across the world. And I am terrified. Only, not for the reasons you might think. I’m not scared of terrorism or persecution or death. I’m ready for death. Give me Jesus.
I’m scared it will be wonderful.
I’m scared I will remember my dreams. That I will rediscover those parts of me that I’ve buried. That suddenly I will rediscover the world behind a camera lens, and I will overflow with words describing the beauty and fear and the lives of people made in the image of God. That I will remember the excitement and the exhaustion of travel and adventure.
Somewhere over the last few years, my fears have gotten louder. I don’t want to feel afraid, so I choose not to feel. But Brene Brown says you can’t numb one feeling without numbing all of them. If I refuse to feel fear or sadness or rejection or pain, I also refuse to feel joy, excitement, intimacy, connection.
It turns out, courage means feeling them all. Courage means inviting Jesus into the pain and uncertainty and possibility of disappointment. Courage means knowing Jesus makes me okay whether I am accepted or rejected, in Nepal or Fargo, writing books or wiping noses.
Maybe this trip is the culmination of all of these months of wrestling with my fears. It’s the opportunity to be courageous, not by traveling across the world, but by coming home again. It’s the opportunity to bravely allow these pieces of myself to re-enter the scene. To welcome them gently and not run from them, but also to see that they are not what they used to be. Freedom to be myself does not mean reclaiming some foreign self I used to be.
Because Jesus makes beautiful things out of the dust.
I am the sum of the journey. These years have not been wasted but fruitful. The wilderness is where dependence grows; the hidden years are the ones marked by deepening roots. The fruit is yet to be seen. This trip is just one stop along the way. I can’t anticipate what it means for the journey and the uncertainty is terrifying. And, usually, if I can’t figure it out, I choose to put it away.
But today I pray for grace to lean into the uncertainty. To trust that the God who places me in the wilderness is the one who gives the growth.
To trust that the God who gives trips across the world is also the one who gives babies who keep us close to home.
To trust that the God who made me to love culture and color and people and beauty and words has not made a mistake in placing me where I am.
Courage looks like facing my fears. Not by following my dreams, but by holding them with open hands. Not by bravely living before others, but by standing confidently coram Deo–before God’s face–resting in His grace lavished upon me not because I am brave, but because in Christ, I am His.
