Mom Guilt

Laura Booz: Hi there. You’re listening to Expect Something Beautiful with Laura Booz. 

Hey, if you’re a regular listener of this podcast, would you do me a favor and send this episode or another one of your favorite episodes to a friend who hasn’t listened to Expect Something Beautiful yet?

I am praying that each listener is reminded through the story and through the Scripture that God is with them, and that His Word is so very relevant to their day-to-day lives. 

The reason this podcast is called Expect Something Beautiful, is because you truly can expect God to show up in your everyday moments, even those moments where your heart is burdened with guilt. And if you’re a mom, with mom guilt. 

Well, this story begins where most mom guilt stories begin, for me anyway. I was laying in bed fully awake staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t fall asleep. There I was in our familiar house, while our thirteen-year-old daughter was settling into her dorm room three hours away in Center City, Philadelphia. That day we had dropped her off for a five-week-long ballet intensive. We had met her R.A.; we put the sheets on her bed and organized her little shower caddy. We met her roommates, took pictures, and then we said goodbye. 

But now that we were back home, I felt a pit in my stomach like I can’t even describe. I felt so guilty. 

The whole thing was my idea in the first place. I looked at my daughter and I could see that she was such a beautiful dancer and already a budding choreographer. We were daydreaming about the possibility of her joining a professional Christian ballet company one day. I thought that this may be the next step in that direction. 

Besides, I wanted her to enter her teen years with an adventure. You know? Like some inspiration to fill her sails. I knew she would meet dancers and choreographers and instructors from around the world. 

She’d be living in the big city and see that there was more to life than corn fields and chickens. And of course, the program was safe and well organized and well supervised. So, after weeks of prayer, my husband and I and my daughter decided to move forward with it. We all felt good about it.

Ugh . . . that first night home without her. I laid there wondering, What was I thinking? She had never been away from home like this before. What if she needed help? It would take me three hours to get to her. She felt so far away. 

Oh, my thoughts were stirring. I was anxious; I was worried, and I don’t think I slept a moment that night. 

Well, as it turns out she was a light there. The R.A.s, the teachers, even the chef in the dining hall loved her. But she was miserable. She didn’t know a soul. She was dancing eight hours a day, and dealing with culture shock. She was homesick, anxious, and lonely. And remember, she was only thirteen years old. 

Every day for those five weeks, my husband and I prayed for her. In the evenings, she would huddle in her bunk bed and call us and cry and just tell us how sad she was. So, we agonized over whether we should bring her home early or encourage her to complete the challenge. I will never forget the day when we found our seats for the final performance, and watched our tenacious daughter keep going until the final curtsey. 

She came home from the ballet intensive very thin and very tired. From all of the stress, she actually developed a gray streak in her beautiful auburn hair. We call it her honest streak from the movie Frozen. 

Not long after, she stopped dancing all together, because it had lost its joy. 

When we talk about it now, all these years later, we can see that we all learned from the experience. My daughter became stronger and more lovely, but I wonder if I misunderstood the Lord’s leading. I mean, did I push too much? Did I ruin a good thing? I may never know; parenting is complicated like that. 

But I find comfort in this story about when Jesus was twelve. Mary and Joseph took Him to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of the Passover. On the return trip to Nazareth, Mary and Joseph realized that Jesus wasn’t with them. They had already traveled for a full day. Can you imagine? Not just three hours, but a full day away from their son, maybe more. 

So, they began a frantic search. Eventually, they returned to Jerusalem and found Him in the temple sitting amongst the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And Luke 2 says, “all who heard Him were astounded at His understanding and His answers.” 

Mary, His mother, was beside herself with astonishment and distress until her twelve-year-old Son turned to her and said, “Why were you searching for me? Didn’t you know that it was necessary for me to be in my Father’s house?” And the Scriptures say after that Jesus returned home to Nazareth with them, “He grew in wisdom and favor and stature.” 

And the next sentence is, “His mother kept all these things in her heart.” Another translation says that Mary “treasured these things in her heart.” I’m sitting here wondering, Why didn’t she lay awake at night with a pit in her stomach? How could she have felt anything other than a burden of guilt? Why didn’t she wish that she had been more attentive? Wiser? More responsible? What was there to treasure?

Well, maybe she was treasuring the delight of finding her precious twelve-year-old Son? I can only imagine how she wrapped her arms around Him and wanted to get a good meal in His stomach and a safe place for Him to sleep. 

Or maybe she was treasuring the fact that she found her Son in the temple in conversation with spiritual leaders, astounding them with His understanding of Scripture. She must have felt so proud of Him. 

Or maybe Mary was treasuring the new-found reality that clearly it wasn’t her job to set her Son up for success. It was God’s. In fact, God would work through a major parenting oversight to open the door of opportunity for her Son to live out God’s will for His life. 

Or maybe, and I think this is it, Mary was thinking about how Jesus had said the temple was His Father’s house. Perhaps this was the first time Mary heard Jesus, Himself, acknowledge His true identity. Right here, Jesus is saying, “I am the Son of God.” 

Seems like Mary didn’t have time for mom guilt, because she was too busy treasuring this child, who was the perfect Son of God for her sake, for my sake, for your sake, and for our children’s sake too. 

You know, Jesus understood His identity perfectly, so our children could find their identity in Him. Jesus gives spiritual gifts to our children and teaches them to use those gifts for His glory. Somehow, consistently working through our limited stumbling efforts as moms. 

For every doubt and question that we have and that our children have about their identity, their calling, their purpose, their future, Jesus holds the answer. He welcomes each child to share in His righteousness and to become God’s child too. 

John 1 says, “To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (vv. 12–13).

And you better believe that God will take such good care of His children. 

Whenever I’m reflecting on my decision to send my daughter to that ballet intensive, or whenever I feel mom guilt, or guilt of any type, I have to bring these truths to mind. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but guilt often floods in with the phrase “I should.” I should do better, or I should have, I should have done better. 

But by trusting in Jesus, you and I can replace that phrase “I should” or “I should have” with “I am.” When we feel that burden of mom guilt, or we feel that pit in our stomach, guilt of any type, we can say, “I am a child of God. I am redeemed. I am God’s workmanship, created by Him to do good works that He has prepared ahead of time for me to walk in. This includes motherhood, or any other aspect of my calling. And if He has prepared these good works for me, He will help me along—step by step. 

I guess you could say these truths are like choreography for my spirit. It’s like I show up for rehearsal, burdened by motherhood doubts and guilt, but as I think about these truths and choose to believe them, I find myself able to lift my head again, lift my arms again, and worship God for who He is.

One thing that helps me in that moment of feeling the burden of guilt is to pause and ask God why I’m feeling it. Sometimes I confuse guilt with conviction, and God uses that moment to get my attention about a sin that I can confess, repent of, and apologize for. He shows me how I can make things right again. He also works through those moments to show me how I can grow. Maybe I can improve, I can learn something, do some research, reach out to a friend for help or accountability. 

But of course, many times we feel the burden of guilt over things that we cannot control. It’s important for us to recognize that it’s a burden that we can only carry through prayer. 

Once I can see that for myself, I can open my hands and surrender and trust the God who’s very capable to carry it for me. And to perhaps do something miraculous that I simply hadn’t seen coming. 

Every moment of guilt is an invitation to draw near to God, to turn our ear to Him, and to listen to what He has for us that day. What I love about this is it takes this vague emotional burden and turns it into a saturated step that we can take in the right direction. 

I think every woman knows what it’s like to feel inadequate, no matter what role we’ve been called to. But I also know this, when we surrender everything to the Lord and let Him work through us, one woman can make a difference. 

Expect Something Beautiful is produced by Revive Our Hearts, and that’s the ministry theme this month, “one woman can make a difference.” When you support the ministry of any size, we’d like to send you a booklet with ten stories of women who trusted God to make a difference through their lives. The booklet is called (Un)Remarkable. The “un” is in parenthesis showing we’re all unremarkable on our own, but God can do remarkable things through us. 

You’ll be encouraged to read these ten stories of women used by God. And one woman can make a difference to help keep this podcast going. When you support Revive Our Hearts your gift helps keep podcasts like Expect Something Beautiful going. When you donate any amount, we’ll send you the booklet (Un)Remarkable as our way of saying “thanks.”

Visit ReviveOurHearts.com to make your donation and get your copy of (Un)Remarkable. That’s ReviveOurHearts.com.

As a woman, a wife, a mom, I usually feel pretty unremarkable, but I have seen God do remarkable things. I write about those things at my personal blog, LauraBooz.com, and in my new book which is called, Expect Something Beautiful: Finding God’s Good Gifts in Motherhood. I hope you’ll check it out. 

Expect Something Beautiful is a production of Revive Our Hearts calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.