Selected Excerpts

The Myth of the Perfect Mother

By Carla Barnhill

The Worth of a Mother

Being a mother is an exhilarating experience, one that brings life to corners of our hearts we didn’t know were there—author Susan Cheever says it’s like walking into the sunlight after living our whole lives by starlight. But deep inside, women with children also know that motherhood comes with a tremendous cost. I don’t just mean the lack of sleep or the lack of alone time. I’m talking about the unending burden of a role that has been both undervalued and overly romanticized by our culture.

Christian women in particular grow up being taught that motherhood will somehow complete us, that in motherhood, we will find the culmination of all our hopes and dreams. We hear countless sermons on the family and how what we do as parents will indelibly shape the faith of our children. We read the stacks of parenting books that reduce raising children to a simple formula of prayer, Bible study, and firm discipline.

As a result, women come to believe their ultimate worth is found in motherhood, not in their relationship with God. They come to believe that their real contribution to the world is to raise perfect children, not to explore their gifts in the context of the greater community. It’s this false perception that leads women to struggle with the incongruity between who God created them to be and who the church tells them they should be. This mentality is the natural outgrowth of what I call the cult of the family.

“Successful” Motherhood

When I say there exists a cultlike mentality in the evangelical world, I’m suggesting that our churches have elevated the family to a position of importance that is out of synch with the call of the gospel. We have been led to believe that the family is more important than the broader community, that protecting our children from the evils of secular culture is more important than bringing God’s love into that culture. We have been allowed to barricade ourselves from being salt and light to the world by hiding behind what’s “best for our children.”

For women, those messages translate directly to expectations about our role in building families that model Christian ideals. We’ve been brainwashed into believing that there is an ideal model of the Christian family and therefore an ideal model of Christian motherhood. We believe that the Bible somehow mandates a certain style of parenting, a certain set of behaviors for all mothers everywhere.

However, much of what we assign to our ideal of the Christian mother echoes the cultural model that has developed in the United States over the past two centuries.The inbreeding of the secular assumptions about motherhood and the religious understanding of the family has created a mind-set that pulls Christian women away from the heart of the gospel and instead binds us up with a restrictive set of expectations about who we are, what we’re here for, and how God can use us in the world.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Christian ideals of motherhood—that we be loving and patient and kind. They are perfectly noble and certainly worth aspiring to. What’s troublesome about this view is that it bases a woman’s worth on her success as a mother, not on her value as a child of God. And it’s nearly impossible to define “successful” motherhood.

In reality, few women feel even remotely successful as mothers. The real toll of motherhood often blindsides women who grow up believing that becoming a mother will be the greatest thing ever to happen to them. Instead of floating along in a sea of motherly bliss, many of us find ourselves conflicted, depressed, guilt-ridden, lonely, even suicidal. Sadly, when those feelings begin to creep in, the last place many of us feel comfortable talking about them is in our churches.

The Profanity of Perfection

The idea that it’s possible to be a “perfect” Christian mother is not only damaging to women who are desperately trying to do right by their children; it’s also a perversion of our basic Christian belief in the saving power of Jesus. It’s incredibly arrogant for us to believe that our human action is necessary for God to act in the lives of our children.

The Bible makes it quite clear that each of us is a unique creation of God (Psalm 139). Any mother who has brought home a baby who cries all the time or won’t sleep or who refuses to take a bottle can tell you that even newborns have a personality all their own. Any mother of a prodigal can tell you that our children will make their own choices no matter how hard we worked to instill God’s truth in them. Naturally, I believe that we parents have a little something to do with how our children turn out, but I also believe it’s blasphemous to think God’s ability to touch the hearts of my children is somehow dependent on my skill as a parent.

The Personal Side of Depression

Many people suffer from what I call “high-functioning” depression, which is similar to high-functioning alcoholism. These people might look perfectly fine on the outside, but there are serious problems within. I am one of them.

For several years, I haven’t felt quite right. I used to be a confident, outgoing, fun-loving gal, but as I moved into my late twenties, I began to get exhausted by people, I lost confidence in my ability to develop friendships, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I attributed these feelings to not having a fulfilling job, or living too far away from friends and family, or needing some time to myself.

Yet even after I found a fantastic job, moved to a wonderful neighborhood in the same state as my parents and many dear friends, and made more time for solitude, I still felt this lingering dullness in my life, as if I was living in a haze that kept me from feeling connected to the world. While researching this book, I came to believe I was suffering from a long-term bout of depression. I saw a psychologist who confirmed my self-diagnosis. I now go to biweekly counseling with a Christian therapist and take an antidepressant every day. I still have work to do, but I can tell I’m feeling a whole lot better.

I’m not getting all confessional on you so you’ll feel sorry for me. Rather, I’m letting you in on my big secret because I think my experience reflects that of a great many women. If you met me, you’d never guess I’m depressed. I smile. I laugh. I get out of bed every morning to care for my children. My house is reasonably clean. While today I happen to look like an unkempt mom complete with sweatshirt and ponytail, most days I try to put a little effort into my appearance or at least wear pants that don’t involve elastic. I don’t sit around crying in my darkened room or leave my children unattended while I sleep away the afternoon. Even my husband has had a hard time believing I’m depressed because I don’t fit the typical image of a depressed person.

There are lots of moms just like me who go through their days with the veneer of having their act together while inside they know they are barely managing to get through till bedtime. Sadly, many of these women don’t realize that the numbness they feel might be indicative of a real illness that will only get worse if left untreated.

The Fear of Failure

A terrible cycle starts when a woman feels worn out and needs a break but is told that her need is less important than her child’s need for her time and attention. Not only does that mother continue on past the point where her body and mind are asking for rest, she feels like a bad mother for even wanting that rest.

Granted, Andrea Yates, the 37-year old woman who drowned her five children one at a time, had a mental illness that impacted her ability to reason clearly, but even before she moved into a psychotic state, she resisted the help she knew she needed because it would have made her look like a bad mother. After Yates’s first suicide attempt, a mental health professional asked her what it was that was stressful in her life. Yates replied, “The kids. Trying to train them up right, being so young. It’s a big responsibility and I don’t want to fail.” For Yates, and too many other mothers, being a good mother means doing everything right, all the time, all alone. To ask for help, to admit to being worn down by motherhood and yearn for respite, to have prayed for God’s strength and wisdom and still feel inadequate, is the ultimate sign of failure.

The Stay-At-Home Mission

If anything, we put too much emphasis on creating a perfect home complete with handmade centerpieces and memory books filled with theme stickers and cropped pictures of the kids at the beach. There is tremendous pressure to prove to the world that we are capable of caring for our families if only to show the secular culture that this is the life that comes from living obediently. To fail at this is to fail at God’s plan.

Stay-at-home motherhood truly is a mission, one into which not all of us are led. Those who are need constant support and opportunities for respite. Yes, there are many deeply fulfilling moments in the life of a stay-at-home mom; sitting across from my newly minted kindergartener is one I will never forget. But our days are often tedious, harrowing, and intensely frustrating. What we need from the church is not a set of unreasonable expectations but encouragement and prayer that God will keep giving us endless reserves of patience, compassion, wisdom, and love. We need other adults in our lives who are willing to listen when we need to vent, who will take the kids at the drop of a hat, and who will occasionally ask our opinion on something other than potty training. We need to know that we are free to listen to God’s voice and follow his leading—whether that is into our homes or into an office. We need to know that our efforts at parenting well are covered by God’s rich grace and that, whether we stay at home or head to work, it is God, and God alone, who will fill our children with all that they need to love and serve in his name.

The Giftedness of Women

I find that many Christian working mothers feel an intense need to justify their situation because they assume they’re going to be criticized if they don’t have a “good” excuse for working. It’s as though financial need is the only legitimate reason for a person to leave her children during the day. To admit that we like working, that we could give it up but choose not to, is to open ourselves up to charges of selfishness, greed, and misplaced values. For some women, the desire to work outside the home might very well come from these places, but I don’t know any of those women.

There’s this image of the ambitious, driven businesswoman who doesn’t care what happens to her kids as long as she’s successful at work, but I have truly never met her. Another part of the working mother picture that doesn’t get talked about much is the role of giftedness in the life of a working mom. Christian women often work outside the home because we believe we have gifts that God can use in the world. I want to be very clear. I know full well that God doesn’t need me to do anything. I also know full well that God is using me in the lives of my children and that God didn’t make a mistake by bringing Emily and Isaac into my life. I don’t think motherhood is a waste of my gifts. I don’t think there’s something “better” than being a mother (although there are days . . .).

The Bible is clear that God gifts women in the same ways in which he gifts men (the biblical lists of gifts never specify gender) and that the Great Commission was given to all Christians, not just men or those women who happened to be childless. I fully believe that I am just as called as anyone else to do what I can to bless the world in the name of Christ. I don’t find any biblical free pass that excuses me from sharing God’s love with the world simply because I have children. In fact, it seems to me that when God puts me in a position where my God-given gifts and passions and abilities can impact the lives of a few hundred thousand people and makes it possible for me to still be a faithful parent, the Christian thing to do is to make the most of that opportunity.

I’m not suggesting that God wants all women to work any more than I think God wants all women to stay home. But I am convinced that the primary call on the lives of all Christians is to live faithfully in every realm in which God places us. I am equally convinced that if God sends us down a path and we continue to seek his guidance and wisdom as we walk down that path, he will make sure that our children won’t suffer because of it.

The Evangelical Superwoman

Working mothers are often criticized for trying to do too much, for falling prey to the secular feminist ideal of the superwoman who does it all in an effort to feel good about herself. Ironically, it’s the evangelical version of Superwoman that often gets used as an example of who a Christian woman ought to be.

The Proverbs 31 woman has been invoked on both sides of the working mother conversation. Some evangelicals point out that the “work” she does is domestic in nature and therefore an example of the kind of life to which every Christian woman should aspire. However, the more convincing understanding of the “Wife of Noble Character” comes from the editors of the Quest study Bible who suggest that this passage is not a biography of one ideal woman but a picture of all the options that exist for godly women.

The Bible editors note that, “this passage shows that a godly woman can find fulfillment in her home, in the community, and in a career. This passage does not limit a woman’s role to any one of these areas. Nor does it create unrealistic expectations for women, calling them to do everything in all of these areas. Some women will focus more on one of these aspects than on the others. Rather than presenting an impossible dream, this epilogue to Proverbs lays out some of the possible opportunities for women who are married and have children. The wife of noble character puts wisdom into the fabric of her life.”

And really, isn’t that what the church ought to require of us as women—that we make our decisions based on the wisdom inherent in God’s leading rather than on the pressure of culture, even Christian culture? When we are allowed to listen to God, to follow the passions that God has placed in us, when we are given the tools to make wise, godly choices about our lives, it is entirely possible that God will bless and honor us with the kind of influence wielded by the Proverbs 31 ideal. The Proverbs 31 woman provides a model of what a Christian woman can do and be when she is given permission to follow God.

The Practice of Mothering

I spent last Friday night at a memorial service for three little boys, a set of triplets born at twenty weeks gestation and alive for only an hour. The boys’ bodies had been cremated, and their parents carried the boys’ ashes in three tiny enamel jars. Early in the service, these heartbroken parents set the jars on the altar, then took their seats in the front pew. But a few minutes later the mother stood up, walked to the altar, grabbed the three jars, and went back to her seat. Every other mother in the room understood why. She needed to hold her babies.

Motherhood isn’t about the work involved in raising children. It isn’t a set of tasks or expectations. My friend would never take her sons to the playground or help them with their homework, but she is a mother. She would never read them a Bible story or monitor their television viewing, but she is a Christian mother. She claims that name not because of the work she did, but because her heart has been filled with love for her three little boys, and she will never be the same.

In some ways, it’s impossible to create a model of motherhood. Mothering, after all, is a relationship, not a job, and relationships never fall into neat categories. So rather than present a vision of motherhood that does little more than rewrite the job description a bit, I’d like to suggest that we stop thinking of motherhood as something we do, or even as something we are, and instead envision motherhood as a practice through which we ourselves are formed.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre introduced the idea of practices as the framework for a system of ethics and moral philosophy in his book After Virtue. His basic premise is that living an ethical life involves acquiring a particular kind of character or set of virtues. We acquire virtue through certain practices—activities we participate in that have a standard of excellence, and through which we have a positive impact on the larger community.

We participate in all kinds of practices that form us, even if we’re not always aware of them. Playing the piano, taking pictures, making soup—these are practices that shape us. In order to do them well, we have to do them over and over, getting better at them each time. As we do them, we develop certain virtues that are necessary for doing the practice well.

The practices of faith work the same way. We believe that prayer, service, discipleship, meditation, fellowship, and worship are essential to our spiritual development because we recognize that as we do these things, we discover more about life with God. As we experience God at work in us, we find our faith growing deeper. And as our faith grows deeper, we seek out new ways to experience God at work in us.

The practice of motherhood starts even before our children are born. Pregnant women give up drinking Diet Coke or using Advil in order to protect their unborn children, acts that take self-control and sacrificial love. Women who go through the years-long process of adopting a child develop extraordinary patience. If a child has special needs, that mother will have to have virtues such as compassion and resiliency. It takes selflessness to wake up every three hours for months on end to feed a hungry newborn. It takes patience to dress a toddler. It takes humility to apologize when you’ve lost your temper with a five-year-old. The more we use the virtues necessary to be good mothers, the more those virtues become part of our character. And what is the Christian life if not an ongoing process of striving to develop the character of Christ?

Relationships in Mothering

For us to reframe motherhood as a practice, we have to get rid of some basic evangelical assumptions about motherhood, namely that it’s solely about raising godly kids. We need to recognize that God uses parenting to form us, to shape our character, to move us toward being more like Christ. Our relationships with our children change us indelibly. Certainly we are an important factor in their spiritual formation, but they are just as important in ours.

We also need to let go of the notion that the results of our parenting—i.e. perfect children—are the best test of our success as mothers. If that were true, God would be a failure as a parent. I mean, look at the state of God’s children! Of course, we understand that (1) it is our sinful nature, not God’s parenting, that leads us down destructive paths and (2) our relationship with God is based on far more than our ability to be obedient and follow God’s commands. Yet we think of human parenting in “if/then” terms—if I do everything right, then my kids will turn out okay.

Once these assumptions are put away, we can more easily get our heads around the idea of motherhood as one of the ways God grows us as people. If I do say so myself, the concept of the practice of motherhood makes a whole lot more sense than thinking of it as a job, a role, a calling, or any other kind of stagnant entity. A mother’s relationship with her children is beyond comprehension. It is filled with mystery and wonder and richness. It is a reflection of the two complex and wonderful creations who make up the relationship. It is never stagnant.

The church has focused on the work of motherhood rather than the relationship between a mother and her children, which in turn prevents women from truly releasing themselves to the profound depth of their connection to their children. Thinking of motherhood in terms of relationships in process, rather than results, is much more in keeping with the heart of the gospel, which, according to Jesus, is all about relationships: God’s relationship with us (“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”), and our relationship with others (“Love your neighbor as yourself” Luke 10:27).

I truly believe that the cult of the family grew, in part, out of a desire to give others a sense that their work in raising children mattered, that they had been given a holy and noble calling. But that intent gradually went awry, stripping the beauty and holiness out of motherhood and replacing it with false expectations and a fear of failure. If we want to reclaim motherhood as something worth pouring ourselves into, something that is touched by God, we have to have a theology of motherhood in which God is still present in the life of the mother.

Mentoring for Moms

Mentoring and other mom-to-mom connections are only possible if we are willing to be transparent about our experiences as mothers. Nearly every woman in my survey said she was surprised by the harsh realities of motherhood, that she never knew how hard—or how rewarding—it would be.

And yet I don’t think it’s entirely possible for women who don’t have children to understand what it feels like to be a mother, even if all the moms tell the truth about the ups and downs of raising children. The solution, then, is for us to be prepared with a safety net of acceptance, support, and honest empathy when the disillusionment kicks in. We need to pay attention to new moms and be on the lookout for the glazed “what-on-earth-is-happening-to-me” expression that comes with a lack of sleep and an excess of crying (from both baby and mama).

We need to be honest about our struggles and let other mothers know that they aren’t alone in their sense of incompetence, their fears that they are messing up, their occasional dislike of their children. We need to help each other see God in the midst of our mothering, to guide each other down the paths God leads us on, even when our paths are different. We need to show each other how to live motherhood as a practice.

How God Sees Mothers

In the contemporary church, the ways in which motherhood impacts women have been shoved aside. Instead, motherhood has become all about raising children, about doing what’s best for our kids. Even the more recent calls for women to take better care of themselves spiritually and emotionally are couched in terms of refueling us so we can continue to give to our children; it’s good for us because it’s good for them.

Think of yourself from God’s perspective for a moment. In spiritual terms, you are still a child. You are not yet a complete creation with nothing left to learn; you are still in the process of being formed. Certainly the church would never suggest that once we have children we women are somehow done growing, or ought to take a break from our own spiritual growth for the eighteen plus years we’re raising kids. But in making the way we raise our children the primary focus of motherhood, the church has taken the work God can and will do in mothers out of the picture.

Understanding motherhood as a practice allows us to move toward a place where the family is a vital and sacred part of our life with God but not an essential element of faith. We can indeed be whole people without ever becoming parents—the Bible is full of saints who never raised a child. And yet in our parenting, we must allow God to work in us and through us, not only because it’s good for our children but because it’s good for us. When we live motherhood as a practice, we open ourselves to God’s power to form us and grow us into the people we are created to be.

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From The Myth of the Perfect Mother by Carla Barnhill, Baker Publishing House, September 2004