They Say One Gets Tired as a Mom

My mom tells me that little Leilani cried her first six months of life and then began to crawl and the crying ceased. She said I just wanted to go places and my baby body inhibited me. Since learning what hands and knees were good for, going places and doing things has been standard operating procedure for me. Energy in abundance and curiosity has enlivened me.

And it’s been fun—The read books when one wants, stay up late, travel the world, spend money without thinking, talk to friends whenever, carefree, self-centered, child to adult type of fun.

Now the fun is different, because I am a wife and mother. Getting married and having Felicity are the two best things that ever happened in my life, but with those wonderful happenings, I discovered burden bearing in a way never previously experienced.

Marriage is said to be sanctifying. The same can be said for motherhood, because in these two experiences an overwhelming desire for the good of one’s husband and daughter becomes concomitant to one’s own wellbeing. And the burden of their desires, needs, hopes and wants ties itself to your soul.

Perhaps mothers are tired because they try to hold the unholdable burdens of the persons they love best. Experiencing looking at my husband or my daughter and wanting to give them everything they possibly could desire if it was in my power brings a whole new meaning to “cast your cares upon me.” Suddenly, my cares are no longer within my direct power to change, because my cares are intertwined with independent persons. Unmarried Leilani definitely had some self-deception in her belief in her ability to direct her own course. Now my need for dependence is realized more fully in my awareness of my lack of power and I realize I cannot create within myself the ability to “run and not grow weary.”

“My burden is light,” are the words in the New Testament. It is in here in marriage and motherhood that I have discovered my own insufficiencies and my need to take the heaviness, the weariness of what I can’t do for my daughter and my husband and say, “You must do it God, because I can’t.”

“But they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength;

they shall mount up with wings like eagles;

they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”