Recently, I’ve been feeling tired and like I’m not enough. So, I asked God. Lord, am I enough? And the answer was—no (thanks, God), but you can be excellent in your position. The point is that no one is enough by himself or herself. We weren’t meant to be.
Imagine if Cam Newton, the Cam Newton who has broken records almost every time he stepped on the field, went up against the Denver Broncos all by himself. He’s an MVP. He is the only person to throw for 400 yards in his first NFL game. He has actually thrown for 4,000 yards in a single season. Cam even ran for 14 touchdowns in one season. Yet, on his own, he would still not be enough to beat the Broncos. Or, imagine if Peyton Manning—a five-time MVP—went up against the Panthers by himself. Who do you think would win?
Sometimes it feels like we are up against an entire NFL team. The good news? We are not alone on our side of the field. We are meant to work together with others. When I see moms, I see most valuable players walking around, carrying their babies on their hips. She’s the MVP of an all-star parenting team!
Yet, why do we feel ashamed that we can’t do it all by ourselves?
It would be like a quarterback saying, why can’t I just run in all touchdowns? Why do I have to pass the ball?
Because we are up against life’s difficulties. We are facing the flu, financial setbacks, and team members quitting. Children who won’t get with the program. One-year-olds who are not feeling like eating solid food today. Other women who judge us or are jealous of us. Folks who don’t understand or who don’t care. And that’s just today.
To be honest about the fact that we need each other is hard. Who wants to need anyone else? But our kids deserve for us to parent from a network-mentality, not a lone-wolf one.
When my parents chose to live close to their parents after having a second kid, a woman condescendingly told them, “No one helped me when I had little kids.” My mom later found out that the poor woman sent her daughter to her grandparents out in the country while the mom went to work. But “no one helped her” in the city, I guess. Just in the country. For five years.
We feel grateful for those who help us because we know it takes a NFL team to raise a family. We can think of parenting as a team sport and strive to be the best parent we can be, an MVP not (just) by default but by choice. I read a book this summer called The Conscious Parent. The take-away for me was that you have to be the kind of person you are asking your child to be. If I don’t want her to hit, don’t spank her. If I don’t want her to eat a snack after dinner, don’t eat a snack after dinner. If I don’t want her to watch TV on Sunday, don’t watch TV on Sunday. If I don’t want him to use certain words, watch my language. If I want her to ask for help when she needs it, I have to ask for help. Basically, I have to work on myself so that I can model the behavior I want from my children. If I want them to control themselves, I have to continue to learn how to tame the beast inside me.
Which I think is what the Church teaches. Controlling myself often takes prayer and patience, and who has the patience to pray? Good parents, apparently. We model the kind of behavior that we want in our children, and to be good, we spend time reading and talking to God. And when we strive to be good and fail, we have more understanding toward our children. When we confess our own shortcomings to God and see how we’ve missed the mark and yet sense how much God still loves us, we can be inspired to be more patient and understanding with our children. At the same time, we maintain certain expectations just like God does of us. He doesn’t give up on us just because we fail. He wants us to try again. Similarly, I can’t excuse certain behaviors just because they are still persisting in my children despite my best efforts. I cannot give up. I have to be consistent. And I have to ask for help from my elders. I may be a three-time MVP (a mom of three), but that just means I have three times the responsibility in front of God for my children. Yes, of course they will stand in judgment for their own choices, but so will I. Not in front of condescending moms (who cares about their opinion anyway?), but in front of a loving God who wants me to keep trying. To be excellent. And so I will take the time now to pray. And when I awake, I will take the time to pray again. Because I’m only human, I’m not enough on my own, and I need God and my community so that I can be excellent in my position—Mama.