mud, motherhood and meaning

These…these are most of my children. Of course, this photo was taken well over eighteen months ago and the baby isn’t in it. I mean, she wasn’t going to be walking anywhere three weeks after her birth.

The people in this photo have shaped in. We have grown together. We have learned together, cried together, laughed, screamed and fought all together. These people have shaped me more in my adulthood than my parents did in my childhood.

And, my hope is that we will have better, more well adjusted young adults than I was. I hope my healing through their childhood isn’t too damaging to them and they can see the immense amount of work that I have put in to really changing the “family cycle.”

The goal is to break the chains, all of them. Will I manage to break every single one? Maybe. Maybe not.

But, I do know that I am equipping my children with tools to cut their own damn chains, too.

“Never underestimate a cycle breaker. They looked at generations of trauma and said, “It ends with me.”

They didn’t just survive the fire. They walked back in and put it out.”

When my first daughter was born, I was twenty-two years old. I was married at twenty because I was in a bit of a hurry to have kids and get my life started. Yes, I admit it. Not my smartest move. I mean, I did know I wanted a family and kids. I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career nor did I have any real long term plans. Being a mom was my goal.

My second daughter was born two years later, and four months after her birth, I asked for a divorce….on my birthday. I had no plan. I had no savings. I had barely enough money to pay the bills. While I worked full-time, my dad was my babysitter. He adored spending his days with those girls. Cancer snuck in and changed that, but we will get more into that another time.

Our lives changed very quickly. In early December 2011, I asked for a divorce and the dynamics within our household were forever different. This was both a blessing and a curse. I still believe I one-thousand percent made the absolute best decision for not only myself, but my girls as well.

Their lives changed much more than mine did. For that, I was not totally prepared. I assumed if we could co-parent and agree on the major things that everything else would sort of fall into place. Newsflash! People change. Situations change. Circumstances change. The girls were jostled from place to place, back and forth, to grandparents, eventually to daycare, and around people that they probably should not have ever met.

Mistakes were made along the way. By all parties involved. I almost said none of us did our best, but maybe we did. Maybe we did everything we could given the resources and maturity we had at the time. Maybe we did do the best we could with what we had to work with. Did we grow along the way? Hell yes. Thank you, Jesus!

Ok, do not mistake that to mean we changed quickly. We did not. Not on either side. Speaking for myself, the last six years have been truly eye-opening. I wish I had always been this version of myself as a parent. I tell my oldest daughter quite often that she got the very worst version of all of her parents. And, I am sorry for that. I am hopeful, however, that as she grows into adulthood, we will become friends and really understand each other in a different way. She is, also, the one I push to pursue counseling because her early years were not easy. Her teen years have not been easy either.

Ok…fast forward..

As I mentioned before, I met my current husband at work. We had worked together for four years prior to the divorce. We continued to work together until I became a stay at home mom in 2016. Clearly, there was dating and adventures and concerts and all the things. We didn’t like just jump into marriage. We spent a lot of time with the girls. We did “family things.”

In 2014, we were married. I was eleven weeks pregnant. Yes, we knew that was a possibility. However, we did not think it would be so quick! The spring of 2015 brought us another baby girl. The fall of 2016 brought us yet another! And, then we planned to be done. Four girls was a lot of girls to be raising. Especially for someone like me. I was struggling, but refused to let anyone know that.

Coming from a home of dysfunction, yelling, lack of resources (money), and loaded with drama did not prepare to be able to temper my own nervous system. I have lived in a state of fight or flight for my entire life. I just learned that in the last few years. Looking back, I can see it. I was short fused. I was happy, then mad, then crying for being mad. Blaming my kids for setting me off, or blaming them for just being kids and doing the normal kid things.

I hold myself to a high standard, too. I knew as a mom with no real income that I should be doing as much as humanly possible every single day. Cooking, cleaning, yard work, gardening, raising animals, upkeep around the house/property, activities for the kids, homework, laundry…everything. I picked up toys numerous times a day. Did I have to? No. However, the clutter everywhere made me feel even more out of control. Nap time was the time of day that I got done whatever things outside that I could. I love being outside. Nature is healing. But, between toddlers and school age kids, there was not enough time in the day to do all the things. (Realistically, this thought just reminded me that with three girls, I was still working full-time. We were not spending any time with our kids. Up at 5AM, to daycare before school, daycare after school, picked up at 5PM…we had a few hours a night. It was awful.)

Just when we thought life couldn’t get any crazier, we decided to try again for a boy. Why? Well, my best friend was having a boy and I was emotional about it. I was happy for her and so sad that I would never experience the love of a son. I made that phone call on a drive home and we decided to consider one more try. Summer of 2018, our son was born. He handled the chaos and loudness of all four girls SUPER well. He rarely cried. He needed one bottle at 1AM. He could sleep through all their shenanigans.

Four months later, my dad died. He barely got to meet our boy. His first grandson. Ok, that is complicated, too. His first grandson from his last three kids. I am telling you–my life is so messed up.

Through each pregnancy and with every added child, I have grown. I have done the most growth since our tiniest girl came in the fall of 2024. Quite the age gap, I know. I have really taken the time to slow down. Just pause. Breathe a little more. Not expect so much. I still expect a lot, but I, also, do not get overly excited about every detail these days. The in-between years held a lot of growth for me as well. So many things happened between 2018 and 2024. Do not worry, we will dive into all of them along the way. This is going to be quite the journey.

The growth has come in the quiet moments. The moments when no one is watching. The moments of sobbing on the shower floor, crying out for help to God, or the universe, or the ancestors….whoever. Being in the thick of it, hitting your knees and just asking for help, or begging for forgiveness for not quite being your best, those are the moments that break chains. We may not realize it in those moments. And, the silence can feel like nothingness. No answers. No clear voice telling us which way to go. Doing this work is hard and scary and never-ending. This work is, most importantly, life altering. We will change their world. They will each, in turn, change the world around them.

Maybe our children will go on to be nurses, doctors, mental health specialists, mechanics, farmers, scientists, models, musicians, politicians. Or, maybe they will be exceptional parents. Maybe they will do both.

Our job, our most valuable job in this life, is to equip our children to go into adulthood as capable, dependable, honest, nurturing, caring, loving, hardworking, trustworthy beings. That is a major assignment that we have been gifted.

I am finally at a point where I do believe each moment is a gift. They are not always the fun, hurry up and open the box, shred the paper type of gifts that we would like. But, there are gifts of knowledge, learning, growth, patience, and change, too. Seeing the difference you can make by becoming the best version of yourself is a gift.

Realizing you were more valuable as a child, and that we, too, deserved more or better from our parents, that is a gift. It removes the shame and guilt of what we were given to hold. We were handed wounds that were not our own. We were handed trauma that was not ours to hold. Our parents didn’t learn to heal themselves, but we will. We are.

I am still over here growing with all six of these kids. And, to be honest, I would continue expanding our family because I believe we are doing this right. We are not doing it right every second of every day, but we are trying. We are doing our best in each moment based on the resources we have available to us, and the knowledge we hold now. Also, we love babies over here. We just do.