The Necessary Failure of the Good Mother
There’s a honeymoon period when foster children come to live with you. You’re on your best behavior as a parent; they’re on their best behavior as kids. Then one day, familiarity or a challenging situation or too much vulnerability kicks that false harmony to the curb.
That’s when the real relationship begins.
The honeymoon period was about a month long when our first foster daughter came to live with us. If I supervised homework, she would crumble under the perceived pressure. If I served certain foods, she would lose her appetite. If I became impatient or frustrated, it triggered disassociation.
After some close watching, I recognized that she reacted that way to me and not to my husband. Chris could help her with all kinds of hard situations and triggering tasks; she would handle it mostly alright. But if I stepped in, all bets were off. My foster daughter feared “Mom” specifically, not “Parent.”
It was crushing. I’ve always been the primary caregiver for my kids. I’m the at-home parent. I’m the comforter, breakfast-maker, daily read-aloud-er. I’m the good mother. But I was helpless to fix the wounds done to her image of “Mom.”
She reacted strongest to me laying on the couch.
At first, I didn’t connect her overt fear to my inaction. But when a sinus infection knocked me down for a couple of days, and she spent most of that time in a high state of terror, needing all of the coping strategies we’d learned in therapy, I realized: she’s afraid of what happens when “Mom” doesn’t function.
She had learned that when “Mom” lays down, anything is possible. When “Mom” fails, bad things happen.
She needed to learn that “Mom” could also mean trustworthy. “Mom” could also mean gentle. “Mom” could respect her healthy boundaries. “Mom” could be a person who safely asked for reconnection after she got frustrated.
I had to sit with my foster daughter during homework time, knowing my presence would make it take three times longer, so that I could show her that she could trust “Mom.” I had to teach her to clean up a mess, knowing that she might reach for a dissociative strategy, so she would see that “Mom” gently participates in household chores. I had to show her my disappointment when she misbehaved so she could experience that “Mom” gives purposeful consequences which redirected her without humiliation or physical aggression.
Every single day, for months, I gauged how often and how far to trigger her and then helped her engage with her coping strategies in order to literally retrain her brain’s definition of “Mother.” In order to show her who “Mom” could be, I had to fail and stay present with her as she processed that failure.
When I got a cold, I had to lay there, blowing my nose, and drinking hot tea. I had to show my daughter that her family would still meet her needs, even if “Mom” failed to stay well. When “Mom” fails, it turns out, the family receives the opportunity to step in and meet her needs. Her failure is a gift.
In Lent of 2023, I spent a lot of time on the couch, failing. Adenomyosis, an unhealthy overgrowth in my uterine muscle, wrecked my hormones, leaving me so exhausted that I actually did struggle to see straight sometimes. My symptoms made it impossible to get through the day.
I was nowhere close to the mother I want to be. I don’t mean that I wasn’t the mother I aspire to be. I flat out failed every day to get basic things done.
I had to decrease my workload for most of 2023. I had to ask for help. I had to accept help, even from strangers, for the good of my family. The failure of my individual mothering allowed my family to experience the mothering of our entire community.
As much as I pleaded with God during last year’s Lent to take this suffering from me, I saw the good that came from my failure and not just the motherly outpouring of our friends. Every day, my family carried the load. They shouldered my cross alongside me. And as much as I wanted that cross to disappear, I rejoiced to witness the dignity with which my children carried it, especially the daughter who once feared “Mom” at rest.
My failure to stay well led that once-terrified foster daughter, now adopted, to witness illness without alarm, trusting that even in the challenge “all shall be well,” as Julian of Norwich famously states. All my little failures, all the colds and awkward reconnections and cleaned-up messes, helped teach my daughter to trust that we can carry our crosses together as a family.
Illness clarified for me that I would always fail. My mothering would always achieve less than I want for my children. Jesus is the only person to ever walk this earth without the necessity of failure. And, somehow, mysteriously and miraculously, He chose failure to free me from mine. He frees us all.
The person my children really need is Jesus. The only person who will fill the hole in them and in me and in you is Jesus. We will always fail. He never will.
As I cleaned the kitchen the other day, I listened to a podcast episode about the development of resilience in childhood. The host asserted that, in a typical family, the good mother must necessarily fail in her task in order for the child to thrive.
I had two thoughts simultaneously. The first was, “Dang, if that isn’t true.” The second was, “I wish I had understood that a decade ago.”
How often I once kicked myself for failing to cultivate the perfect life for my children. For my lack of skills (or desire) in crafting the perfect school lunch. For my last-minute approach to finding outfits for family portraits (if I remembered to schedule them at all). For not protecting them or teaching them everything they needed to know so that they behaved perfectly in every situation, never getting hurt or hurting others, never doing poorly on a task, never losing or if they really had to lose then losing so graciously that it seemed like winning.
Instead of my desired perfection, I have shown my children the cross of my failures, which I can only hope I embrace sufficiently to teach them that its wood is our only hope.
Readings for the Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion (Year B) on the USCCB Website