It’s 8:30 pm and Sophie’s still wide awake.  I am cleaning up her crib which is covered with vomit from another failed attempt at “sleep training”.  Michael is holding and comforting her while I rip the soiled bedding off and use my adrenaline-pumped strength to hoist the mattress out and cover it with a new mattress pad and sheet.  It is the fifth or sixth time I have tried the “controlled crying” method to help Sophie learn to put herself to sleep, but because of her acid reflux, even five minutes of crying results in a big mess.  I am beside myself with anger, frustration, and guilt.  I storm out of the room and order Michael to put her to sleep.  I sob as I put her laundry in the washer and clean her bottles.  I am at an all-time low in this business of motherhood.  I can’t think of a time when I have been more desperate.  If I were to receive a grade in motherhood, I am sure I would get an “F”.  I ask myself, “Can I really do this?  How do people with more than one child cope?”  I have always wanted to have children, but I didn’t know it would be as difficult as this when I signed on for bringing a baby into the world.  I try hard each day to take good care of Sophie and to help her grow healthy and strong, to help her know how much she is loved. 

But over these last 9 months, I have made so many mistakes and have lost my patience so many times.  The love that I feel for Sophie runs indescribably deep, and yet I fear that as a mother, I am a failure.

Having been raised in an intensely fundamentalist Christian home and church, I was taught to do my best in all things “for the glory of God”.  I took this quite literally, and as a result, have become a perfectionist in my personal and professional life.  As a high school history teacher, I stayed up until 3 or 4 a.m. working on lesson plans or grading papers.  I have served in a number of leadership roles in my previous churches and have been on the boards of community non-profits.  My “Protestant work ethic” has led me to complete 23 years of schooling, including a doctorate in education policy.  My ultimate goal is to use what I know to address social justice issues in schools – to solve the inequities in the quality of teaching available to poor minority kids in public schools.  However, these successes and achievements have sometimes been a stumbling block for my relationship with God.  For much of my youth and early adulthood, my pride and self-righteousness prevented me from truly experiencing God’s love.  God’s love was something to be earned, rather than a gift freely given to the undeserving sinner.  This led to burnout and a crooked view of God.

As I have grown into adulthood, however, God has allowed me to experience failure and dark, helpless situations.  In particular, it took several failed relationships and many lonely years before God led me to my true love and partner, Michael, whom I married at the late age of 33.  Through my teenage years and my 20s, I had a troubled relationship with my parents.  Estranged relationships within my family that seemed insurmountable left me feeling helpless and hopeless.  However, it has been in these moments of failure and desperation that God drew me closer to him and saved me from myself.  Today, as I struggle to learn how to be a good mom, I know that God is calling on me to lean on him, to let go of my pride and perfectionism.  When I break down and let myself accept my fallibility and imperfections, I can sense God’s grace holding me up, embracing me.  God’s perfect and unconditional love helps me to forgive myself.  I know that I will never be a perfect mom, and that I will probably make many more shameful mistakes in my journey as a parent.  But I have to trust that Sophie is in God’s good hands, and that in spite of my mistakes, she will be just fine.

Lately, as I have experienced the challenges of being a new mom (and a working mom), God has begun to tug at my heart in new ways.  I began to worry about the young teen moms in our community who don’t have a spouse, the maturity, a source of income, or the familial resources to help them through the challenges of motherhood.  I want to do more to support ministries like New Creation Home in East Palo Alto and to share my resources with those who really need it.  My heart also ached for a coworker whose husband of 12 years unexpectedly filed for divorce, causing her and her young son unspeakable grief.  Though we are not close, I felt that I should comfort her in some way and told her that I was praying for her and her son, which she appreciated. 

I pray for God’s love to be revealed to her and her family and that she will be able to experience healing in her life.

These are some ways that I experience God in my life – through moments of failure and desperation, and through the tugs at my heart when I see others in need of God’s love. I hope that my life can be a testament of God’s love and grace and that I can be an instrument through whom others might come to experience that perfect love.