I thought I would be a really great mom.
I mean that in the most unsettling way possible.
I would know what to say at the right moments. Make things look okay when they weren’t. Have the voice, the patient one, the measured one, the one that said I’m not rattled by this even when I absolutely was.
I would have the routine, the backup plan for the routine, and a pretty convincing performance of a woman who had it together.
And then I had kids who could see right through me.
Here’s something nobody puts on a Mother’s Day card: kids whose brains work differently are the most ruthless authenticity detectors on the planet.
They cannot be managed. Not really. You can develop strategies and systems and scripts and they might work. But only for a while and only in some conditions. But the second you try to perform your way through a hard moment with them, they know.
They feel it before you finish the sentence. The shift in your energy when you’re saying the right words but thinking something else entirely. The way your patience sounds different when it’s real versus when it’s practiced. The very particular way you go quiet when you don’t actually know what to do.
I am very sensitive to chaos; noise, clutter, chaos. At any given moment, our house is all of them, and never siloed off. I’ll practice every strategy I’ve ever learned in books, therapy and from “wise motherly advice,” but every time, never fails, I either go into breakdown myself or completely run silent.
My kids don’t just need a mother who loves them. They need a mother who is actually there. And I’m not talking about the curated or capable version. I’m talking about the real one. The one who sometimes sits on the bathroom floor and doesn’t have an answer. The one who has had to grieve the parenting experience she imagined so she could fully show up for the one she actually has.
That is not a comfortable thing to become.
There’s a particular loneliness to mothering kids with different needs. And I want to say that plainly, because I think we don’t say it enough.
It’s not a loneliness that means you love them less. In fact, to know me is to know that I love them straight down to my bones in a breathtaking, honest way.
It’s not even a loneliness that means you’d change them. Changing them would mean that I wouldn’t fully get to experience the best parts of them.
It’s the loneliness of navigating something most people around you aren’t navigating, of smiling through comments that reveal how little someone understands, of celebrating milestones that don’t show up on any standard timeline, of holding so much joy and so much grief in the same hands at the same time and not really having a word for that.
It’s the loneliness of loving someone whose world is wired incredibly differently than yours. And choosing, again and again, to follow them into that world instead of reworking who they are foundationally and pulling them out of it.
That choice has cost me things. The mom I thought I’d be. The easy version of this. My health. A lot of energy I didn’t know I was spending performing rather than connecting.
And it has given me things I don’t have language for yet.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God makes everything beautiful in its time.
I used to read that as comfort for hard seasons. A promise that things would eventually get easier, smoother, more like the plan. But I’ve come to understand it differently. I don’t think it’s a promise about ease. I think it’s a promise about depth.
My kids are not on my timeline. Hell I’m not even on my timeline. They are not on a standard one either. They are their own beautiful beings. And watching them move through the world on that timeline, at their own pace, in their own way, has slowly dismantled every artificial deadline I had for them. And for me.
I’m not the mom I thought I’d be. I’m something more honest than that.
That didn’t happen despite them. It happened because of them. Because they refused to let me get away with the performance. Because they needed something realer than what I’d prepared, and in reaching for it, I finally found it.
So this Mother’s Day, I don’t want the roses and the brunch and the caption that makes it look like I’ve arrived somewhere.
Because the truth is that I haven’t.
I’m simply standing in the middle of all of it…the hard, the holy, the floor-sitting moments, the breakthroughs that looked nothing like I imagined.
Acknowledging what this has made me.
Not a warrior or an inspiration. Not a mom who has it figured out.
Just a real one. Finally.
And I think that might be the most beautiful thing my kids have ever given me.
Happy Mother’s Day to every mom who’s been exposed, undone, rebuilt, and still showing up. Especially you.
p.s. I started writing about all the middle stuff….money, identity, motherhood, work, faith, reinvention, and exiting the bare minimum. In case you want to read, HERE you go.
Xox,
SKH
2 Responses
Oh this is so truthful and honest. There is no book on raising kids. Like you said listen, watch, love them through every difficult, precious stage! God made us all different but yet unique, special and lovable!
Thank you, Sherrye – Happy Mother’s Day!