Of Mess and Moxie

by Jen Hatmaker

  Someone dear to me was abused at a fragile age. The details unspeakable, the situation unfathomable. Without question, that abuse had the capacity to permanently wound. I sat this person down, mustered up every bit of authority I’d ever claimed in Jesus, and said, “This is not who you are. This happened to you, but it does not define you. You are not broken. You are not ruined. You are not destined to a lifetime of sexual dysfunction. You will become the exact person God intended all along, and you will be stronger in these fragile places than you were before it happened. This is a part of your story, not the end of it, and you will overcome. Not only that; you will thrive. If God is truly the strongest where we are the weakest, then He will win in this place.”

  You are far more than your worst day, your worst experience, your worst season, dear one. You are more than the sorriest decision you ever made. You are more than the darkest sorrow you’ve endured. Your name is not Ruined. It is not Helpless. It is not Victim. It is not Irresponsible. History is replete with overcomers who stood up after impossible circumstances and walked in freedom. You are not an anemic victim destined to a life of regret. Not only are you capable, you have full permission to move forward in strength and health.

  And if you are prepared for a new, fresh season but others refuse to let you grow into it, sister, shake the dust from your feet and move on anyway. You may need to live a new story before others are willing to bless it. Let them see you laugh again, come back to life, dream new dreams, embrace healing. It can be difficult to envision a new start but impossible to deny one. This is your work. No one can do it for you. God created us to triumph; we are made in the image of Jesus, who has overcome the world. We are never defeated, not even when all evidence appears to the contrary. If you are still breathing, there is always tomorrow, and it can always be new.

  You don’t have to be who you were.

  Maybe it isn’t a matter of conquering struggle but simply growing forward in new ways. Sometimes these nuanced shifts are even harder to navigate because they aren’t born of pain or loss, which are easier to quantify. Perhaps God is seeding you with new vision, new ideas, different perspectives, or even enormous adjustments. It could be that you have changed your mind or changed your position. Maybe that thing you loved has run its course. Something doesn’t have to be bad to be over. That season has possibly given you everything it has to offer; it shaped and developed you, it stretched and inspired you. You’ve deeply incorporated its lasting values, and it has been true to you and of you. But now it’s time to move forward to something new, different, surprising, or risky. You might not necessarily be leaving one thing but running toward something else. G. K. Chesterton wrote: “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”2 Change means you’re alive, my friend.

  Perhaps you are the one resisting change, imagining your best days are behind you. Maybe the narrative in your head sounds like: I used to be braver, I used to be thinner, I used to be needed, I used to love my career, I used to have a happy marriage, I used to love my body, my season, my life. The days ahead can never compare with the days behind. It could be that you didn’t ask for the change you face: you didn’t sign up for your husband’s affair, getting fired, a child’s illness, infertility, mental illness. Since you didn’t initiate or want this change, it feels like a deal breaker, a joy stealer, and you’re tempted to throw in the towel. Girl, no. Just NAH.

  We can retain irreplaceable lessons and core values from every season. We are not entirely rebranded with each new season; we simply build the next layer. Throughout transitions, we embody permanent virtues and become deeply shaped, and as a testament to our design, we are capable of preserving the best of each season while rejecting the worst. The human heart is shockingly resilient.

  By choice or by force, people grow and evolve, which can be incredibly healthy but not always met with approval. We usually like others, and sometimes even ourselves, to remain the same, treading the familiar paths, the ones we know, the ones we’re used to. Change makes us nervous in general. It is so tempting to interpret new as an indictment against the old, but that is an incomplete story.

  Two thoughts: It is incredibly tempting to disparage people who didn’t “change” with us. I have criticized the words of others when the same words came out of my own mouth just two years earlier, which is incredibly un-self-aware. Human insecurity wants everyone right where we are, in the same head space at the same time. We want to progress (and digress) at a comparable rate: Everyone be into this thing I’m into! Except when I’m not. Then everyone be cool.

  We need to get better at permission and grace. What is right for us may not be right for everyone, and we don’t have to burn down the house simply because we’ve moved our things out. Other good folks probably still live there, and until one minute ago, we did too. We can bless the honorable parts of that house and express sincere gratitude for what we learned under its roof. It is unwise and shortsighted to isolate the remaining inhabitants, because there is a lot of life left, and as it turns out, we are all still neighbors.

  Second, it is also human nature to disparage people when they move into a new season. Whether shifting forward or “being left,” the impulse to discredit remains. I get it. We like our people to stay in the house.

  My family worked steadily for six years to relocate collectively to Austin. Brandon and I moved here first, then one sister, then my parents, then the in-laws, then everyone else. Every last extended family member was finally in the same city, and we were living the dream. The family compound! We did it! So when my sister Lindsay announced she was quitting her office job and moving to NYC to go to culinary school, we all freaked out and heaped discouragement on her decision:

  What?!

  It’s too expensive!

  You have nowhere to live!

  It’s a concrete jungle!

  Why would you leave Austin?

  You already have a college degree!

  Go to culinary school here!

  After a few weeks of this opposition, she finally sat us down and explained how lonely and unsupported she felt and how our disapproval was crushing.

  Record scratch.

  The thing was, we really just wanted her to stay in our house. That was the root of our cynicism. It was a simple matter of feeling left behind. Without considering the impact of our criticism, our aim was to keep the house intact. But it is shortsighted to isolate people who move to a new house, because that neighbor thing is sturdier than we think. A healthy community includes a lot of homes. This move was right and good and healthy for my sister, and we ultimately sent her off with our blessings.

  You do not have to be who you were, who you have been. If you have a dream brewing, I hope to throw light all over it. If you encounter a new idea or perspective, I hope you feel free enough to consider it. If you need to bury an old label, girl, here is a shovel. You can care about new things and new people and new beginnings, and until you are dead in the ground, you are not stuck. If you move with the blessing of your people, marvelous. But even if you don’t, this is your one life, and fear, approval, and self-preservation are terrible reasons to stay silent, stay put, stay sidelined.

  You are not pigeonholed into a brand; that is not the way God works. He is on the move, which means, if we are paying attention, we are on the move with Him. It’s so exciting! Possibility and adventure and love and life await us all. These are the calling cards of the kingdom, and they are ours. There is literally nothing we cannot consider, no new season we cannot embrace.

  We still retain the rights to every important thing we learned along the way; those layers count and make up the whole of who we are. We have important memories from every house—some painful, some instructive, some delightful, some necessary. But how thrilling to realize that even now God is designing a new blueprint, tailor-made, and His creativity extends to the very trajectory of our lives.

  Onward, sisters.

  There is no way to be a perf
ect mother, and a million ways to be a good one.1

  — JILL CHURCHILL

  CHAPTER 2

  MOMS, WE’RE FINE

  Except for a year or two in my parenting tenure, I’ve always been a working mom. Sometimes part time, sometimes from home, sometimes full time, but always working. With five kids, this means putting my head down and handling it while they are at school. Which also means I am not a weekly volunteer in their classrooms or the teacher workroom or any of that biz, because, as I have to remind my kids constantly, I have a job. This technicality never seems to connect with my spawn:

  CHILD: Can you bring me Chick-fil-A for lunch?

  ME: No, son, I’m working.

  CHILD: Doing what? What do you even do?

  ME: OH MY GOSH.

  So I prioritize the special stuff: parties, field trips, programs, and award assemblies. However, while I’m pretty decent at getting the dates right, the details often turn into white noise. If I assimilate the date, the starting time, and the entry fee, that feels like a mothering win. This is the best I can do. (“I’m so sorry, but I cannot make the class banner for the parade. Why not? Oh, because I don’t want to.”)

  Anyway, when Sydney was in fourth grade, she had a field trip to . . . something somewhere. Listen, I am good at other things. I knew driving parents had to follow the buses pulling out at 8:30 a.m. Great. I showed up to the school parking lot with all the other moms and two or three SAHDs and proceeded to return phone calls in the car, which all my girlfriends and colleagues know is the only time I talk on the phone. (Leave me a message and be prepared to never hear from me again, or perhaps possibly next Friday when I’m driving to the airport. But probably never.)

  Two buses pulled out, and I got in line behind the other cars and put my mind on autopilot as we headed south down I-35. Three phone calls later, I started thinking, Good night! Where are we going? What was this field trip? Something about government? Or maybe astronomy? I pulled alongside the buses just to make sure I hadn’t lost the caravan, but sure enough, our school name was emblazoned on the side.

  After an hour and a half, we pulled into the San Antonio Zoo, which I surely didn’t remember as a pertinent detail. I parked, sauntered over to the buses, and watched the entire fifth grade contingency pile out. Which was delightful. For fifth graders. But my kid was in fourth, and I had inadvertently followed the wrong bus—not to the correct destination ten minutes from school, but to another city.

  I will not type out the curses I screamed, as they are unbecoming even to a trucker, but I sped eighty miles an hour to the correct location after despertexting (desperate texting) my girlfriend something that sounded like, “Where the *&#@! are you guys??” I missed the entire movie (Ah! A movie! About whales! At the IMAX!) and finally caught up with the fourth graders at the after-picnic in the park. Helpfully, I’d also promised my friend Becky to be the surrogate field trip mom for her daughter, since Becky couldn’t go.

  So I found my two forlorn charges eating their sad sandwiches, motherless, worried that I had either wrecked or run off to Mexico. While my fellow elementary school moms were sprawled on the ground, guffawing about my driving six zip codes away, Sydney said, “Mom, me and Makenna were like the orphaned baby whales in the movie.”

  Jesus, be a fence.

  Motherhood often feels like a game of guilt management; sometimes the guilt is overwhelming and debilitating, sometimes just a low simmer, but it always feels right there. There is never any shortage of fuel to feed the beast, so the whole mechanism is constantly nourished to administer shame and a general feeling of incompetency. Add our carefully curated social media world, which not only affects our sense of success and failure but also furnishes our children with an unprecedented brand of expectations, and boom: we are the generation that does more for our kids than ever in history yet feels the guiltiest. Virtually every one of my friends provides more than they had growing up, and still the mantra we buy into is not enough, not enough, not enough.

  Meanwhile, if we developed the chops to tune out the ordinary complaints of children, we’d see mostly happy kids, loved and nurtured, cared for and treasured. At what point parents began accepting the disgruntlements of seventh graders as a factual State of the Union, I’m not sure, but just because they whine and fuss, or beg and plead, or even experience an actual parent letdown doesn’t mean we are ruining our families and doing everything wrong. We’ve lost the ability to flex, to shrug off missteps, to say I’m sorry and move on, to prioritize the big picture while lending grace to the subplots.

  My youngest asked me this week to eat lunch with her at school, and with every workday spoken for and then some, I couldn’t and told her so. After conjuring the most pitiful eyes in history and sulking around the living room for half an hour, she walked up to me and said, like a martyr, “It’s all right, Mom. I forgive you.”

  No. Nope. No, ma’am. Forgiveness is offered to someone who has wronged you, not a mother who has a job during your 11:10 a.m. lunch slot at Buda Elementary School. My work is not a sin against you, Child of Sorrow. Most moms on the entire earth work, in fact. I refused to sink into a shame spiral because I didn’t grant my snowflake’s particular wish, especially since we spend most of every day in the same house together.

  A few years ago, that would have sent me to the prayer closet, wringing my hands yet again at how often I wound my children. I might have let that seep into my thoughts, poisoning my hope for their healthy childhoods and our future relationships. I may have immediately compiled a list of all the moms who would drop everything, rearrange an entire day to make it happen—the ones who already eat at school twice a week. I would have made up a whole story about how neglected she felt, just a piteous, tearful, walking tragedy, and she would write an essay on feeling unloved, and her teacher would read it to her colleagues and they would lament how disappointing it was when a working mom picked her career over her child.

  Instead I said, “Sorry, kid. Have a great day. See you at 2:45.”

  And shocker: she was fine.

  You guys, the kids are fine. We are fine. We need to sturdy up a bit. The definition of great parenting is not a mother who engineers every waking moment around the whims of her kids. It is not a mom who drops all else to cater to them. It is not a parent who never, for example, throws a wooden spoon against the wall or hides in her car eating crackers while her kids search everywhere for her. It doesn’t include only the ones who never missed a single event or suffered an epic, catastrophic Mom Meltdown. That family doesn’t even exist.

  We are not playing a zero-sum game here as we raise children for twenty-five years or more. As loath as I am to compare parenting to politics (forgive me, dear ones), it’s not unlike how candidates win delegates at the state level during primaries. Although it varies between parties and states, most candidates win delegates proportionally. So if they receive 65 percent of the votes, they get at least 65 percent of that state’s delegates, moving them that much closer to victory. In some cases, if a competing candidate fails to receive a minimum percentage of votes in a particular state, he forfeits all his delegates to the winning front-runner, so if he only pulled 10 percent and the minimum threshold was 15, the leading candidate receives those delegates, too, and that 10 percent simply disappears from the losing candidate’s numbers.

  Stick with me: the hopefuls slog this out state by state, town hall meeting by town hall meeting, over months and miles and losing sweat and blood, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but no one state makes the entire call; it is a cumulative total of more wins than losses until they’ve secured the majority.

  Mamas, if we are winning roughly 80 percent of the votes, if the majority poll involves laughter and nurture, attention and grace, presence and patience, we are winning. After all, in some cases, anything less than 20 percent falls off the map entirely; it doesn’t even register as counting. We may lose dramatically in, say, a certain season or specific disaster. We may rack up some negative numbers fo
r a spell or lose ground during the preschool years or that one horrible junior year. But victory isn’t compromised by individual losses; it is the result of slogging it out season by season, conversation by conversation, over months and miles of sweat and blood, and the cumulative total of more wins than losses secures the role, anchors the majority, makes the history books.

  As I mentioned in For the Love, my goal as a mom is to be mostly good. I may hover around 70 or 80 percent success with a 20 or 30 percent failure rate, but, if that’s enough to win the White House, it’s enough to win any house. Somehow, miraculously, the whole ends up being greater than its parts, and I know this because I’m a historian who now assesses my own childhood through the 80 percent window. Frankly, the other 20 percent is either recalled with grace and laughter or forgotten altogether, forfeiting its delegates to the winning side, having failed to meet the minimum threshold to seriously count.

  And lest you are tempted to prop up my childhood as some ideal prototype, I want you to know how wonderful but regular it actually was, hitting practically none of the benchmarks of “attentive parenting” these days.

  Well, we were a middle-class family who didn’t have extra anything. My parents pawned all their jewelry in 1982 so we could have Christmas presents; I don’t remember my mom (or any mom) at a single field trip or class party; we moved to four different states during my childhood (including a move in precarious eighth grade); we never flew on an airplane or took a single fancy vacation; we had crappy cars that broke down once a week; my mom went back to college when we were in elementary, middle, and high school, so we ate sandwiches for two years; all of us had in-school suspension at least once; and two of us racked up zero credits the first semester of college (unless “partying” has since become a course selection). To this day, we struggle to nurture sick spouses and children because our mom was like, Are you bleeding? Is your fever over 103? Did you puke more than once? No? Go to school.