Dear Mama Who Feels Mediocre

A lovely reader emailed me and when I got to this part I about choked laughing/trying not to cry since it had been a hard day and I wanted to send everyone to bed at four in the afternoon.

I’ve read that you say you don’t have it all together, and no one really does, but have you always excelled in homemaking or meal planning or time management? Or, if you don’t mind, what’s an example or “outline” of ways you’ve grown a lot in an area that you felt you weren’t successful in? 

It feels like pretty much everything I do is mediocre when I desperately want to be confident, poised, and capable in life.

Dear Mama Who Feels Mediocre,

We never arrive. I know it’s easy to say and harder to believe. Anytime I think I get a handle on something, I move on to something else. Once I do that a few times, I drop the ball on that first thing and have to start all over there again. But not as quite back as far as I was at the beginning. I’ve learned a little better. It’s easier to swing back in the routine. The more and more I do that, the more I realize that life is a cycle and I’ll constantly be throwing the balls back up into the juggle.

Living the Christian life is choosing to wrestle. All of this goes against our natural tendencies. There’s not a “go back to bed and hope you wake up feeling better” button. What does “feeling better” even mean? Is it just blind luck? If I’m a lucky, it will be a good day? I don’t want to wait on my feelings so I push through the hard. I pray for others when I want to wallow in self-pity. I get up off the couch and do the next thing when I’d rather just sit and feel miserable about how rough my day has been or how awful my kids are acting or how “bad I feel.”

The work is never done. There are pages and pages of things that need to be done around here- that technically I should be doing- and I’m not. Because I can’t do them and love my family well. It’s more important that hearts are nurtured than that cleaning schedules are followed.

Heart over actions always. Fall in love with Jesus and if some days all you do is wrestle with yourself and not as much laundry gets folded but you didn’t quit, then it’s a win. Love people and do the work around that. It’s who you are, not what you’re doing. Otherwise the whole thing falls apart when you aren’t able to accomplish tasks. If it’s all about the systems and the productivity then it stops when you get sick, have a baby, break your ankle. But you can be a lovely Christian woman even if you can’t do.

That’s round two of growing up. First, you learn how to make yourself do the right things. Then you relearn what the right things are.

Be willing to work toward slow results. You live in a microwave world but you don’t have a microwave heart. It takes time to make speaking truth over your life the default. It takes time to learn to respond with God’s love instead of your own hurts. You have to labor for something you might not see for years and do the work faithfully anyway, trusting that it’s accomplishing more than it seems. You see results over the past decade, not the past day.

Log out of Facebook for a few hours (multiple times a day) for productivity and looking your kids in the face and helping your heart. Stop watching Netflix and go to bed. Decide to fold the laundry, mop the floors. Use your quiet voice when you want to yell. Do what you don’t want to. Set up systems that help you on good days and the bad days but don’t let them rule your life. Don’t define yourself by your emotions; let truth be bigger than your feelings.

Honor where you are in the process. You might have just started. You might be at square one; don’t look at people who’ve been doing this for ten years to condemn yourself. Look at them for ideas and then embrace what you’re learning. Refuse to wallow in self-pity; do the work where you are. Pick one small thing to work on and after you’re doing that add something new. Celebrate the small. It’s the one pound you lose every week that adds up to the 50 lost in a year.

Accept that there will be days that feel like failures. There will also be great days when you could conquer the world. Enjoy those- relish the feelings- but don’t depend on the feelings.

All the systems and checked-off items in the world won’t make you confident or poised. You can be just as insecure in a clean house as you can be drowning in dirty dishes. Knowing who Jesus made you to be and seeking to serve Him every day will bring confidence. Even if some weeks you don’t follow your meal plan.

Choose Jesus every morning. Do the work when it doesn’t seem to matter- read your Bible, sweep the floor, correct the misbehavior. Recognize that there are hard seasons (moving, new babies, marriage problems, etc) and that everything will feel doubly like a battle in them. Stay the course. Don’t quit.

You may never feel like you’re doing any better but I promise you are. Every day you choose to wrestle and fight you’re getting better. You can’t go by feelings. Just obey- day after day after day.

Love,

Another mama who feels mediocre