One of the things that only experience can teach you, only time living and going through life stuff will help you understand is this: We can really grow and change and be made better by things that break our hearts. And in finding that, as my dear nana would tell me, “There’s no way but through.”
The story that I’m about to share with you happened a little over five years ago so I wasn’t a brand new mom when it happened. I had experienced mom guilt in different ways over the years, but this one unlike any of the other experiences I’ve had with it. This one absolutely wrecked me.
I sat down when this experience was still very fresh and very raw, and I began to journal and process it. I didn’t wanna wait until months or years later, when my wounds had had time to heal, and I had maybe forgotten how hard it was, and how heart wrenching it felt.
Here is what I journaled:
Mother’s Day. 2018.
I’ve been looking at photos of my Mother’s Days past these last few days. I remember each one of them – when I picked out the kids’ clothes, and hoping I’d have time to get ready myself so we could catch a photo together. Sometimes I had a newborn in my arms or a squirmy toddler on my lap. I scanned the images as my babies turned into big kids in a flash and I’ve thankfully, gratefully come to a place where I don’t long to go back to those days, but I cherish the memories in each photo.
I am a mom. I am unspeakably grateful.
This Mother’s Day was different than every one before it. This Mother’s Day crushed me.
I don’t want to tell this story. But any writer will tell you that when the story is trapped inside of you, sometimes the only way to freedom is to let it loose. I need to let this one out. I am writing not from the end where this story has a ribbon wrapped around it, but from a place where my heart is still raw and the wounds are fresh. Sometimes, most of the time I might argue, this is the best place to write from.
The week before Mother’s Day, we went to the beach. This is the ONE week a year we deliberately unplug, set our phones and computers and devices aside, stay off social media which is GLORIOUSLY soul-refreshing, and soak up family time together. We begin planning six months in advance and the anticipation of lazy days by the ocean and late night card games and sun-kissed faces falling asleep to the sound of crashing waves fills my mama heart to the brim.
The week at the beach started rainy and colder, so we put together a two-thousand piece puzzle and ate all day and played mini-golf in sweatshirts and made the best of it. Mid-week, the sun broke through and it stayed – bringing warmth to our faces and sand between our toes and lunch by the pool. We were in and out of the water together, digging sand holes and judging cannonball contests and my son Whit murdered his paper Flat Stanley who’d come along as part of a school project by burying him in a sand hole and decapitating him upon retrieval. The kids showered off in the outdoor showers before dinner each of those days and we all collapsed into bed late at night – bellies full, swimsuits drying on balcony ledges, hearts full.
I had wrapped my girl’s hair in two buns earlier in the week and as she played all day and was exhausted by the time we settled in for the night, I decided I’d wait til we got home to untwist and untangle them and fully wash and comb through her hair.
We returned home on Saturday afternoon and she and I headed upstairs to give her a warm bubble bath, take out her buns, and comb out her hair before church the next morning. I put her in the bath, tried to remove the elastic bands holding her hair in place, and they wouldn’t budge. I soon realized that her hair was matted against her head in two rock hard, twisted balls of hair that normally hung past her waist – twisted, tangled – two impossible webs of her beautiful, long hair that had never been cut even ONCE – the hair that still held her baby curls at the bottom.
It was 7pm. I set her up on our bed and began trying to separate her hair. I worked on it for three hours until she could no longer hold her head up from exhaustion. At 10pm, I laid her down in her bed, kissed her rosy cheek, and fell into my bed and sobbed.
Gut-wrenching sobs. What had I done?
The next morning, Mother’s Day, I awoke and hoped that a new morning would bring fresh perspective and her hair would come apart and comb out and we’d head to church. I sat my girl on my bed again, with new information from Google on how to untangle and loosen the two twisted, mangled balls of hair before me, and began to work on it again. Tears streamed down my face as I realized after three more hours that I was going to miss church completely. Jason went without me and dropped off our boys, came home with a coffee in hand for me – one small shred of comfort to what was becoming a full on crisis in my heart – and then he returned to church without me. He had to tell our dear friends that we couldn’t make it to their house for lunch with them that day – which we’d had planned for weeks. I sat on our bed with tears that would not cease and watched him walk out the door – trying to decide how to tell him to handle the inevitable question:
Where’s Sarah?
She’s sick.
She’s not feeling well.
She’s tired.
Lies.
She’s working on Holly’s hair because she let it go and she’s an awful mother.
Ahhhh. There’s the truth. Finally. Now everyone will know the truth about me. I’m a farce. A fake.
I began to panic and a rush of terrifying anxiety came over me. I had been working on her hair – trying to separate it into something that could possibly begin to be brushed or combed out – for SIX HOURS. I had coconut oil, olive oil, vegetable oil and conditioners and sprays that Jason had run around and purchased at my request that morning. After SIX HOURS of my girl sitting in front of me, her holding back tears from all the pulling, tugging and desperate attempts to untangle it and me sobbing non-stop, her hair hardly looked any different than when we started the night before.
I wiped the oil off of my fingers enough to text a friend. Will you come sit with me tonight when you’re finished celebrating Mother’s Day?
I texted my wizard of a hairdresser, who is more than that to me – a treasured friend: Here is what I’ve done. Do you know what I might be able to do?
This is when my friends began to show up. They didn’t just show up, THEY STORMED IN.
I started getting texts:
How is it going? I saw Jason. What can I do? How can I help you?
I know what you are battling. It’s lies. All of it is lies. You are a GOOD mother.
I am on my way. My plans changed today. I’m coming with coffee and we’ll fix it.
Thirty minutes later, a friend arrived and she sat next to me and coated her hands in oil and began working on my girl’s hair alongside of me. My hairdresser (AB), a mama herself, left her lunch, and busted through my front door that afternoon with understanding tears and a bag of tools to help fix the mess I’d made.
Every Mother’s Day before, I had sent out texts to my friends and my sisters and responded to theirs. I posted a photo of my babies and how proud and grateful I am to be their mama. This Mother’s Day, the messages kept dinging on my phone and my hands were coated in oil and I was sobbing uncontrollably and couldn’t respond to any of them.
No photo. No celebration.
I wept all day. My girl would turn around and see me crying – three of us yanking on her hair, pulling, tugging, trying to untwist the absolute untwistable and she never once complained. She would turn around and see me crying and put her tiny hands on my cheeks and kiss me and press her cheek against mine and turn back around for more of the same torture she’d been enduring for hours on hours.
At 7pm that night, we called it quits. FIFTEEN hours of working on her hair, and it looked only slightly different than it had the night before. None of it had come loose. I hadn’t seen my sons all day because they spent the afternoon at the pool with their Dad at my request – because I couldn’t handle them seeing me in the condition I was in. They came home at 7pm, saw me, and our house fell silent. They all stared at me – blankly. I looked and felt like death. A helpless, relentless feeling of shame and guilt had fallen hard on me and darkness was closing in.
But, it’s just hair, Sarah.
Here is the interesting thing about those of us that have experienced childhood trauma. It can rear its ugly head at any point at such seemingly small things and before you know what’s happening, a scab has been ripped off to reveal a gaping wound underneath. This is where I was. I was bleeding. The guilt and shame were crushing me.
Here was my beloved girl – wearing on her head the same neglect I’d felt as a child.
This is what guilt and and shame do. They never bust in, announcing their arrival, wielding a visible weapon to destroy us. They come in with past hurt, cutting into deep wounds and releasing their fury where and when we least expect it. Their intent we cannot immediately dissect because they don’t directly accuse us. They, like their author, ask questions. Just like they did to God’s very first children in the garden of Eden:
Did God really say…?
And to me on Mother’s Day…
How could you let this happen?
Look at her, do you see her wearing your neglect?
Do you think she’ll ever forget?
What will your friends think?
I collapsed into bed after putting my girl in hers and I sobbed. Gut-wrenching pain. My boys would creak the door to my room open, lay a handmade card or note on my dresser and I’d see but their shadows and then they’d close the door again. What it must’ve been like for them to see me like that.
Accusations flew around the room as if attached to the spinning ceiling fan:
Will they ever forget what you’ve done to their sister?
I sobbed all night long. I would sleep for an hour and wake to this horrible feeling and then remember what I’d done. And I’d start sobbing again.
I woke at 6am the next morning, still crying nonstop and one of my close friends arrived at 7:30am without even asking me, with kindness behind her eyes, my favorite coffee, and to take my boys to school. She only said three words to me that morning:
God sees you.
She took off work to be there for me all day – whatever I needed. AB opened her salon that day – the day it’s closed and her day off, and told me to bring my girl in at 9am. It would be just the three of us.
We drove to the salon and all day long, AB blasted Bethany Dillon’s soul-stirring music overhead and she began to work on my girl’s hair.
We were the only ones in the salon because good mothers make appointments on days when the salon is open.
Good mothers don’t need emergency hair salon visits.
Good mothers don’t do this.
I knew at that point that we would lose most of my girl’s beautiful hair and both me and AB cried together at the loss and grief I was feeling, but we hoped to keep enough that we wouldn’t have to basically buzz her head.
I texted my husband: “What if she gets bullied in Kindergarten because she has a boy haircut?”
He immediately responded: “I’m not answering that question because I know that’s not you talking.”
The lies? The internal lies we believe are full of death and sorrow, devoid of life, and they are POWERFUL.
At 6pm, AB finished. My girl had endured with inexplicable strength and patience EIGHT more hours that day in a chair as AB calmly, patiently, and methodically made cuts into the webs of hair attached to her head and worked out tangles and more cuts and more tangles and because of AB’s persistence and sheer will, she saved an amazing amount of my girl’s hair. Enough for a short bob.
My girl lost 24 inches of hair that had been growing since she was in my womb. I lost her baby curls. Remnants of her baby-ness strewn in rope-like, matted, tangled strands on the floor. It felt like a death. A loss that was cutting me deep and a goodbye I wasn’t ready for.
We never want to surrender our idols, do we?
It was never about hair. The gut-wrenching sobs came because every Mom has this easy-access door to guilt. We have HEAPS of expectations we carry around – real, from actual words we’ve heard spoken to us; or imagined, fashioned from years of innuendo and assumptions. They come from our own mothers and the way they did things and we want their approval – even if we don’t see them or have relationships with them as adults. MOUNDS of internal expectations come from watching other moms and social media and knowing we’ll never measure up because we all play the comparison game and we don’t wanna be the failure mom who doesn’t have her crap together. They come from fake ideas of perfection on Instagram accounts and what we perceive to be the “right” way to do things. They come from trauma. They come from walking this world in bodies that were not meant to carry the weight of guilt and shame.
A mom’s heart is a ripe playground for guilt to romp around. It doesn’t need to be a physical presence to crush us. Shame will simply take a seat and look on as we crush ourselves.
This is why and when we need each other. A friend stopped by with a bag full of new girly hair clips and bows before we ever got home from the salon. Another drove over that night with a bottle of sparkling wine and a Yeti full of orange juice, looked into my tear-stained face and served me up a mimosa – the one I’d missed the day before on Mother’s Day when my bed held me and my girl and the ashes of my heart that had been scorched by the burning fire of lies and crushing guilt
They started asking questions. This time though, questions filled with truth and light – the antidote for the lie-filled questions I’d been hearing for days.
Did God really say you’re His beloved daughter? YES, He did.
Did God really say that there is NOTHING that can separate you from His love? YES, He did.
Did God really say He will fight for you and that he put His spirit within you? YES, He did.
We didn’t get my girl’s hair free.
Instead, my girl’s hair is helping me break free from lies that are buried deep inside of me:
That somehow her long hair defined her. That’s what I’d been taught and told.
And that the lack of it somehow defines me. That’s what I believed about me.
That little girls should have long hair and ONLY long hair, and that women wear their femininity, or lack of it on their heads not in their hearts – lies I didn’t realize were buried deep down in me from hearing them 35 years ago.
These lies buried deep in us that come bleeding out when heart crises hit is why we need people who are FOR us and willing to do the hard things with us and speak truth to us. Friends who come over with coffee and hair tools and shoulders offered up as a means of grace and carry us through when we cannot see our own way through.
They come on Mother’s Day with tools and hands covered in oil or when we’ve miscarried or are in the throes of postpartum depression or are childless or single and deeply sad or have lost a baby and they weep with us over the death of our dreams. We claim TOGETHER that the lies we believe about ourselves are NOT true with to-go coffee with plastic lids and mimosas from Yeti cups and fingers dipped into bowls of olive oil while tears fall fresh into our laps.
When we have friends, when we ARE friends like this, we defy the lies with what is TRUE and phone calls filled with hope and WE SHOW UP and we declare that Jesus DIED for ALL of it. We help each other break free from shame and guilt and we run together HARD after Jesus, knowing that in his arms we will find the only identity we ever need and the only love that won’t ever let us go.
I sat on that bed and all I could see was my girl sitting in front of me wearing my neglect, shame and guilt on her head.
I am seeing past that now. God NEVER leaves us in the valley of the shadow of death. He didn’t stay on the cross. He blew the door off the tomb and gave us in his resurrected body the key to our own resurrected lives.
This is what redemption looks like.
This is chains of childhood trauma broken and laid fallen on the ground.
This is my new girl. Never defined by her outward appearance, but with strength and dignity, a cherished and adored child of God.
This is my Holly.
That was the end of what I journaled. She was so precious and she loved her new haircut but y’all, I was battered. I was in there fighting for my life – me against all these lies I was believing and I emerged looking like I’d come out of a cage match with Rocky Balboa.
Why did I want to share this with you today? Because every mom, every one of us, has that easy access door to guilt. Because we love our kids so much and we all make mistakes and we all do things that if nothing else, unintentionally hurt our kids, or cause them to have to go through things because of our decisions or mistakes. We are often so afraid to let others in or know when we’re carrying mom guilt because it feels like the answer might be to just hold it in and no one will know. That if we just internally wrestle with it, we’ll be able to figure it out. But that just doesn’t work. We cannot talk ourselves out of it for years on years, over and over, because that’s how much it comes for us as moms. We need to be free to acknowledge it, recognize it, and make our way forward.
There is something VERY different about what is real and what is true. BOTH are so important and there is space for both. What is REAL here in my story is what happened to my girl’s hair and I was feeling guilt and shame and absolutely gut-punched with what was happening in front of me. And from my own decisions. That was SO real.
But what is true? What remained true through all of it – through the oil on my hands and my hot tears that fell onto my lap with my baby in front of me? Is that I’m a beloved child of God and he looks on me with so much love and I am his girl and there isn’t anything I can do that will separate me from his love. Ever. No matter what.
The weight of mom guilt and the tears and our internal wrestling – there really is only one answer for any of it. And that’s that Jesus died for it all.When we put our trust in him, all of our mistakes and all of our failures, all of our guilt and all of our shame died with him when he died on the cross. And in trusting in him, we can then live in freedom, and when we wrestle with mom guilt and shreds of our hearts lay strewn on the ground like 24 inches of lost hair because of our mistakes, we can emerge, battered and bruised from the heartache of it all, but we emerge with Hope.
That’s ultimately what I wanted to share with you today, through my own heartache and sorrow and my experience on Mother’s Day in 2018. And because if there was another answer, another way to deal with mom guilt that would squash it and banish it, I’d tell you. But there’s no convincing, no self-talk, no way out of mom guilt. Dismissing it or talking it out or ignoring it will never work. It will stay there. Hanging around and waiting for the next time you least expect it.
There’s no way but through. And the only way through is Jesus.
When I first shared this story back in May 2018 with friends and family, the response blew me away. And almost every response I got was from a mom. ‘I get it. I feel you. I know this feeling and I can feel the weight of your words.” Because we all get it, because we all feel guilt for ONE million different reasons and I want to share this story with you today, my story, because I am not this perfect mom who’s gone before you and am now sharing with you all the ways to be perfect or to do things perfectly. I have wept over my mistakes.
I have wept over the sorrow that comes from seeing my kids hurting because of me.
But I am a mom who rests in and clings to God’s grace for me. I have to. Because I need it. Because I need to lavish it on my kids, too. I WANT to lavish it on my kids and I don’t want them to EVER see me as a perfect mom who never makes mistakes and to see themselves as kids who are always messing up. They would never believe that about me anyway because they see me everyday, messing up and needing forgiveness and grace.
I WANT to have kids who look at me and see that I am flawed, and that I make mistakes, and that we are all on the same road through – broken people who need a Savior and that I run to Jesus with all of it, and that I rest securely, held tight, forever seen and known by his love and forgiveness and grace every single day. And that I run to them – willing to admit my mistakes and model for them what it looks like to be good and regular pursuers of forgiveness.
You can listen to more of my thoughts on Episode 6 of the No Way But Through podcast.
Listen here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-way-but-through/id1705318134?i=1000630013773