Whole 01: Who Are You, Really? Finding What You Lost in Motherhood Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Emily Jensen: We think this is a common experience in motherhood, but I know that after I became a mom—especially after having multiple kids—one day, I woke up and realized I didn't feel like myself anymore. There were so many things that were in my life pre-kids that were no longer in my life in the same way post-kids. Did you have that experience?
Laura Wifler: Yes. I think it was maybe a little different for me. I feel like—I don't recall any even season of waking up to the fact that I had somehow lost myself to motherhood in a season. But I certainly would say now, with the years of looking back, that those were many years—being a young mom with young children at home—where I lost a lot of things, and I felt like I did lose my identity and I had to regain it. I remember a lot of that was in disposable time—having decisions about where my time goes and how it's spent, and interruptions became a new thing for me.
Certainly, I think, young motherhood brought in a new type of mental capacity for me. Whereas I used to be able to do a lot more, I felt like my world got much smaller, and, in a weird way, I think there was also a loss of kindness to myself. Because for the first time, especially in young motherhood, I started to see a lot of my failures. We all talk about how motherhood is sanctifying, and it brings out some of those things that have been probably hidden over the years. I would say that, as I look back, I can see how there was just a loss of generosity or kindness to myself that I didn't really realize was happening, but it happened.
Emily: Yes. It seems like—making a major generalization here—this is a common feeling that moms have. You're going about your life. You have maybe a career that you like, your schedule is in order, you've got a little bit of a workout routine down, you've got certain clothes that you like to wear, you have places you like to go with your friends, maybe you travel with your spouse—whatever that looks like. Then children change things. All of this, I think, can lead to a feeling of loss. There can be a sense, after having children, like, “Oh, I've lost maybe a level of health or being able to take care of my body that I once had,” or, like you said, “My mental load has really increased, and now I don't feel like I have the mental clarity or the problem-solving skills that I had before.”
It even changes our marriage relationships and those dynamics. Maybe we feel like we lose a little bit of a certain connection that we had with our spouse or an energy and an intimacy in our relationship. Even, I think, there can be this sense that we have to only focus on essential things, and there's no more time or capacity to do something that's just for fun, just to enjoy—that seems like it's outside of the scope of what our children need in that very moment. That's probably why a lot of moms talk about survival mode. Do you remember ever being in survival mode?
Laura: I mean, am I still in it a little bit? [Laughter] Yes, certain days, seasons. Survival mode is such a common thing, or we say we're in the trenches. That's another common mom phrase. It just means like, hey, we can't think ahead. That is one of the biggest things I remember feeling—like, “I have lost my ability to plan ahead and think ahead.” At times, I had capacity to do it in a sense of literal time, but my brain was mush and it's like, “You just can't do it.” It's like—
Emily: —All you can do is react to what's coming at you instead of being able to be a little bit more proactive and plan and strategize about things. It feels like “I am in this battle right now, and I need to stay focused and get this person food and find this person’s shoes and deal with this text message or phone call that's been pinging at me that I'm avoiding.” Sometimes I think, when we've been living in that for a long period of time, there is just a sense that we're disoriented.
I think, when we're living our lives so fixated from one moment to the next moment to the next moment, and we're not able to zoom back and think about “Why does all of this matter, and how is this affecting me, and is this the way that I want to be living my life?”—when we don't have that moment to zoom back out, all of it can start to feel very repetitive and meaningless and frustrating. It leads to this feeling that we want to be talking about during this series of having lost ourselves.
Laura: Yes. We titled the series Whole because there was this element, I think, that, Em, you and I went through over the past handful of years where we felt like, “Oh, we are whole people; we are not just only moms.” But that is what happens—your whole world orbits around your role as a mom, which is good. It's God-designed. It's such a wonderful gift from God. But you're right—we can wake up and feel like a shadow of our former selves, and we can feel like—and I think that sometimes a mom will experience this the moment she has a baby.
Some moms are listening to this and they're like, "I just had my first baby," or "I'm pregnant and I don't know who I am." Other moms—it can take many, many years to wake up to that realization. I think no matter where someone is, listening in to this, reality is: at some point, you're going to feel like this, even if maybe you're not experiencing it now. And it's also okay if you're experiencing it with just one child.
Emily: Yes. It does seem like, with motherhood, we're prone to two ditches, and maybe especially in the Christian world, these are some things that we see. One is that we can get so focused on motherhood after becoming a mom that, like you were saying, our children—our home becomes like the sun that we orbit around. It's almost like—God is out there. He's like a moon. We see him out of the corner of our eye all the time. We know that our faith exists and that we want to worship him, but in terms of our functional lives and the way that we orient our hearts and we spend our time, it can feel like we are totally and completely and wholly locked into who we are as a mom and what that means for our lives.
Then, on the other side of that ditch and the other extreme that we can go to, is almost protectively holding motherhood at an arm's length out of fear of what it's going to take from us and clinging tightly to the things that we feel like we need, we deserve, we have to have in order to be the kind of woman that we want to be. Then, any time we feel like our kids or our family are maybe taking a little bit too much from us or we're not able to have the things that we desire in life, we can get a little bit angsty.
There are those two sides that I think—all of us probably, at different times in our motherhood and different ways, have fallen into one or more of those ditches, maybe even in the same day. We really want to take a series to explore what it looks like to think of ourselves as Christian women who are following the Lord, who are whole in him, who are finding our identity in him and recognizing that he is really the one who we orient our whole lives around, not our motherhood.
Laura: Yes, for sure. I think that it took me a long time to really realize—I think in the 9—no, not 1990s. Early 2000s. Golly, when did I become a mom? Not until like 2013. Okay, fast forward many years from Laura's original timeline. When I first had my children, it was very common and popular to say, “Motherhood is your highest calling.” That was everywhere. I think that it took me a long time to somewhat unpack that and understand that no, actually, motherhood is a calling that I've been entrusted with. It is a very high calling, but it is not the highest. My highest calling is, as a Christian woman, following God.
I think that that can help adjust—when we understand that to be whole, to be fully understanding our identity, we have to understand that we are Christ followers first, above all else. That will really change your paradigm for how your priorities look, for how you consider things, for the importance that you give your role as a mom and your role in work or other spheres and spaces that you're in. It does come back so often to that question of identity: “Where are you putting your hope in?” Is it in your ability to do everything—to work and be mom and make home-cooked meals and do all those things? Is it to just be mom—like, everything's sacrificed at the altar of motherhood? Or is it where you say, "No, I'm going to follow Christ first," and recognize that this is a—"juggling act” is not the right word. And I don't like “balancing act” in motherhood.
I can't quite think of the right word, but there's a give and a take in our roles in different seasons. Our primary identity can't rest in our comforts, and it can't rest in our role of motherhood. It has to rest in Christ. I know there's this thing that's been going around on Instagram—and I think it's been on motherhood blogs for years and years—where they talk about flamingos. Have you heard this before?
Emily: When I saw it for the first time, I was like, "What?" It's pretty crazy.
Laura: I know. It is really wild. I love science and how it plays into the parallels that we find in our lives. With flamingos, if you guys haven't heard this—perhaps you have—but when they become a parent—so this happens to male and female flamingos. Primarily, though, we compare it to motherhood. When they become a parent, they often lose their pink color because they are giving so much of themselves—of their nutrients, of their protection, of their safety and warmth—to their little chick. There's probably another word for a flamingo baby. I don't know.
Emily: I was going to call them egglings, and I'm like—
Laura: Is that what it is?
Emily: No. [Laughter]. Just that word popped into my mind.
Laura: Egglings. I like it. I'm going to go with chick for today's purposes. We need to look that up—what's a flamingo baby called? They're giving so much to their babies that they lose their pink color, which is so iconic; it’s what you feel like defines the flamingo. What often goes hand in hand with this in the motherhood sphere is that they say, "Don't let motherhood take your pink." What I think is interesting is that it's actually like, no, motherhood must take your pink. Nature is proving that through the flamingo—that that is what is required in order to raise these little chicks. Yet, eventually, over time, the mom and dad flamingo get their pink color back.
I think the hope and the promise is that, at some point, we're going to come back around out of motherhood—you come up for this big, deep breath of air, and we actually discover, “Oh, no, we are still whole women with whole interests—with whole needs and desires and wants.” Actually, motherhood does not have to dominate those or take that forever, but for a time, I think, it is right and appropriate that motherhood takes a lot from us.
Emily and I are speaking from the other side of this and hoping to give moms— whoever is listening—encouragement if perhaps your pink is very faded or if you are in the area where we are and you're rediscovering what it looks like to be—whole motherhood or whole personhood—just to give you encouragement. That's what we want to talk about.
Emily: Yes. Today, we're going to just dive in a little bit on this thought of loss. We've already talked a little bit about some of the things that we tend to lose when we become moms, but I think when we look scripturally, we very clearly see that not all loss is bad in the Christian life. First of all, children—just like what you were saying—absolutely need us to lay down things and sacrifice so that they can have what they need—so that they can thrive and grow. That's going to impact our lives and that's a good thing. It's God-designed.
We don't have a record of this, obviously, pre-fall, but even Eve's life would have been impacted by giving birth to a child. Even pre-fall, there would have been ripple effects, and there would have been changes in the way that she could go about her day. I think that's just a normal, good, God-designed thing. We see it in nature; you see it in flamingos.
Then, when we are thinking in terms of a spiritual parallel for the Christian life, God absolutely says that sacrifice and losing ourselves and laying down our life is a sign of great love. There are so many Scriptures that we could quote on this, but obviously, Jesus is our greatest example of this. He says in John 15:13 that "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." And that's ultimately what he does. He emptied himself. He took the form of a servant. He was born in the likeness of men, and he died on a cross for our sins. He lost his life so that we could live. This is the Savior that we follow; obviously, we're going to be called to lose some things.
Laura: Yes, and the other piece of that, though, is that not all loss is permanent. I think we often think, especially when we enter into motherhood and we start to perhaps grieve who we felt like we once were, that that loss is permanent and that loss is bad. I appreciated the encouragement that you shared—that not all loss is bad. Then, not all loss is permanent. Sometimes we lose things and we let go of things that God never gives back—that does happen—but other times, it's just for a season.
In many cases in motherhood, those initial losses are more temporary. We can come out of those survival mode years, and there is a season where they aren't taking so much physically from us and that we can have a little bit of space. Maybe they're able to read books and watch shows or just do some things without being completely attached to you. Then we can start to think about, “Well, what is my role as a mom, yes, but also as a wife, as a coworker, as a neighbor, as an aunt?”
Again, we just want to reiterate: we know that all moms are in different places, and so our hope with this series is that you're going to find one or two practical things from every episode that you can apply and do in small ways. For some of you, you may feel like, “Whoa, I can really make a big change here, and I really want to practice this new thing as part of this Whole series.”
Emily: Yes. Just even thinking back to Jesus—because sometimes we experience things in life and it feels very clear and obvious, but then we've got to go back to Scripture and say, "Is this model really there? Is this really what God's Word teaches?" We think even looking at the life of Christ shows this really interesting picture—that Jesus had an incredibly specific mission. We can summarize it in one sentence: he came, God as man, to live a perfect life on our behalf, to die on our behalf, to be raised from the dead, to have victory over death, and—
Laura: You could even say, “He came to save us from our sins.”
Emily: Yes, there you go.
Laura: Just super simple.
Emily: There's his mission. Yet, it wasn't like every single thing that he did clearly connected to that mission in his time on earth. It did connect; we're going to get there. But he also went to weddings and parties, and he also had friendships and relationships, and he also was trained as a carpenter, and he also spent time with friends and family, and he also spent time alone in God's creation. We can assume that, probably, sometimes he sang and he played. We know that he learned and he told stories.
It's interesting because—I think that connects with motherhood a little bit because every single thing that Jesus did ultimately was in submission to his Father's will, and it was exactly what he should have been doing, and he did everything perfectly. Yet, some of it—if we were being super, I don't know, linear or literal in our thinking, we would go, "Well, how does going to a wedding connect with his mission to live a perfect life and die on the cross and be raised to save us from our sins?" Yet, it does. Anyway, so there's something really interesting there.
Laura: Yes. I think we have a tendency to want to compartmentalize, like: this is going to advance my motherhood. This is going to advance my career. This is going to advance my relationships and friendships. Yet, Jesus's life shows us that there aren’t all these divisions and that all of them are playing together in order for us to do what our mission is here on earth, which is to go and make disciples—to spread the gospel: the Good News.
It's so great because in motherhood, we talk a lot about—and Em and I say this all the time—the disciples are in your home and they're in stocking pajama feet and all that kind of stuff. That's so true, but also—there are far more other ways that we can make disciples. As moms, it's not that we put that on hold. We're able to do both. That's something that—I think we can often just be like, "Well, it's only my children right now." It's like—it is your children. It absolutely is your children. That should be a comfort to us. It's a good reminder, but sometimes, it might even get overused to a point where then we're like, "Well, we're not going to really look outside the four walls of our home."
But Jesus shows us that, actually, no, we need to live as whole people, and we can have impact in different spheres and know that that is actually helping to make disciples of the little children in our home. That as we talk to the neighbor, that as we go to our coworker, that as we have a job potentially, or whatever it is—all of those things contribute to the way that we are carrying out our mission on earth, and it's impacting the little disciples we have.
Emily: Going back to that orbit—I think, as we're making disciples, what we're doing is showing our children, hey, mom has lost her life for Christ. Her whole focus—the person that she orbits everything around is the Lord and that's who she's taking her cues from.
Laura: Not the children. [Laughter]
Emily: Not the children. It's really interesting because Jesus actually talks about this a little bit. There is this scene where he's standing next to his family and somebody is saying, "Hey, that's your mother over there," and whatnot. Then he's like, "No. Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother." Essentially, what he's telling that person there is not “I don't care about my mom or my brothers,” but what he's saying is, “There's an order here. There's a priority. My ultimate eternal family is spiritual.”
There's also a moment where a man is saying, "Hey, Jesus, I want to come follow you, but I need to go bury my father first," and Jesus rebukes him and is in essence like, "Let the dead bury their own dead." It's a weird exchange, but if you read about that a little bit more and think about it in the context that was going on there, he was in essence saying, "Hey, don't use cultural traditions and norms and things that you feel are a priority to you to delay following me and losing everything." Jesus is showing us that there is no part of our lives that we can hold back. In fact, there's this really sort of offensive-to-our-ears statement that Jesus says. He says, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple" [Luke 14:26]. I think for us as moms—
Laura: Yes, it's hard.
Emily: —that is a little bit of a cringe. What do you mean hate my husband—my children? All those different things. Of course, Jesus is not literally saying hate your family, but what he's doing is showing a comparison. This whole story happens in the context of where he's talking about a man who starts to build a house, and he's like, “The man counts the cost of the house before he gets started so that he doesn't get halfway through and then decide to quit when he realizes how much it's going to take.” Jesus is saying, “No, you’ve got to be willing to give up everything to follow me. I have to be the whole center of your life. There is nothing that you can cling to that you want. Not even your children, not even your husband, not even your mom and dad, not even your brothers and sisters.” That's really, really challenging to us, but that is what he says.
Laura: That is a hard call. It is some intense words, but it's also, in some ways, so freeing. Because, as you were saying that, I kept thinking of all these stories that I hear of husbands failing, children failing, parents who have their identities wrapped up in their children. It is utterly devastating. It's devastating no matter what, but it's a whole different ball game when that has been your orbit and they are your salvation.
I think sometimes as moms, we can operate like that—that our children's success, their kindness, their politeness, their behaviors are what is going to define us or call us good or bad as a mom. It's going to tell us if we're successful or not. Ultimately, as you noted with Christ, he's saying, “No, it is all about me. It is all about following me—wholly, completely, freely.” At the end of the day, it's not about the work that we do—the effort that we put in—because we know that sometimes doesn't work out even with the best of efforts, the best of intentions.
There is an element of us losing ourselves—not to motherhood but losing ourselves to Christ in order to become whole. That is what this series is about. If we have not pounded it home enough on this episode, we want to talk about “What does it look like to lose ourselves to God?”
Emily: In this series, we're going to also be thinking about the whole counsel of God—all the gifts that he's given us, all the different things that he has called us to do. We're going to be exploring topics like awe—being amazed at what he's created. We're going to talk about what it means to start taking risks again as moms or forgiving others in areas where maybe we've been hurt. We're going to be talking about some of the things you mentioned in the beginning—being kind to ourselves, having dignity in our lives as women. We're going to talk about learning new things—
Laura: —Friendship, creating, yes.
Emily: —enjoying stories. We're going to be digging into a lot of things on a motherhood podcast that don't feel like they're super clearly motherhood related, but we really, really believe that, as we are whole women who follow God and we enjoy all of the different gifts and blessings that he's given us and we add all of that into our lives, it is going to overflow into our motherhood.
Laura: Yes. Let's go.
Emily: Let's go.
