I was invited to do a podcast recently with Bonnie Landry, a Catholic speaker and writer. It was such an enjoyable and wide-ranging conversation! We set out to talk about homebirth and homeschooling but we really touched on a lot of different motherhood things.
As a mother of 7 a few decades older than me, she has a lot more wisdom to share than I do, but during the interview she asked me about a concept I’ve written on here and there: surrender. She said, “What do you think it means, exactly, to surrender to motherhood? And what’s the difference between surrendering and giving up, because I think sometimes this can get blurred in our minds as moms.”
(It was a great conversation, I’m tellin’ ya!)
I gave my best answer in the moment, but I keep thinking about it. It’s really central, I think, to thriving as a modern mother. (She agrees and said she’s also talked extensively about it.) But it’s kind of a vague phrase, and maybe even one that could be easily misunderstood. So in this post, I’d like to share a bit more about it. Come along with me as I try to parse this out in my own brain!
It’s not a battle
When she asked me what the difference is between surrender and giving up, I said immediately that I don’t think it has anything to do with giving up. But upon further reflection, I want to talk about that a bit more.
One definition of surrender means to “cease resistance to an enemy;” another is “to accept defeat.” With this in mind, one conception of the phrase “surrender to motherhood” would assume motherhood and whole womanhood to be at odds. It’s you versus your children. Surrender then means giving up the battle.
This, I think, reflects a very insidious idea in our culture: that if something is good for your kids, that means it’s bad for you, the mother. And vice versa: if something is good for you, it’s bad for your kids. There are no win/win solutions in this narrative: motherhood is the enemy of fully actualized womanhood. I see this either/or mentality in the U.S. abortion rhetoric—where the “pro-life” side is team baby and the “pro-choice” side is team mother—and in many other places, too.
It seems to me this is the unconscious framework most of us hold. It’s a battle: woman versus motherhood. Good mothers give up and let motherhood win. (And strong, empowered women don’t.)
“I don’t want to lose myself in motherhood”
About a year ago I wrote an Instagram post1 about a common phrase you hear modern women say: “I don’t want to lose myself in motherhood.”
I created the three images above and wrote this for a caption:
What does it say about our culture's view of motherhood that people commonly say they don't want to "lose themselves" in it but never say they don't want to lose themselves in any other demanding life reality?
I'm still coming to conclusions on the idea of self-sacrifice in motherhood (it's complicated, I think), but if there’s anything we should be okay with losing ourselves in, it seems like it should be motherhood. People lose touch with themselves in office jobs all the time and "I don't want to lose myself in my career" is still not a thing you hear. So we're fine with losing ourselves in our jobs but not in the raising up of the next generation?
And also, what if losing ourselves in motherhood is a thing that's supposed to happen? Not to be cliché but I was volunteering in my kindergartener's classroom yesterday and they have a jar of caterpillars. What if the caterpillars were like, "I don't want to lose myself." What if they weren't willing to turn into sludge (yes that's what actually happens inside their little cocoons)?
Let's be at least open to "losing ourselves" in motherhood, yeah? That’s where I’m at, at least.
I think this phrase illustrates the “me vs. motherhood” dynamic in our consciousness. (Lose, after all, is a synonym for surrender.) It seems like women are in effect saying: I know that motherhood means it’s me or the kids, and *I* for one won’t be like those cringe-y mothers who give up and let their kids win.
The widespread use of this phrase also implies a few other things, I think, that are relevant. First, it betrays a cultural sense that motherhood isn’t something worthy or important. People lose themselves all the time in things like careers or sports, but you literally never hear anyone saying “I don’t want to lose myself in my career.” How strange, then, that we make a point of saying this about motherhood. How telling of the low status motherhood has in our culture.
This phrase also assumes that it’s good or aspirational to stay the same as a woman pre-motherhood and post-motherhood. Becoming a mother is actually an archetypal change in a woman’s life, a reality we in our modern world seem to be out of touch with. It’s literally a new phase of womanhood, and it should be treated as such: something we all recognize as an important and good and beautiful thing, for women and also for the health of society as a whole. And we can’t make this transition if we’re not willing to “lose” who we are.
Surrender is letting motherhood teach you
I asked a question here and on Instagram recently, something that just popped into my brain one morning as I cleaned up the breakfast dishes. It was “Finish this sentence. Motherhood cured me of my obsession with…”
Here are the responses, some very specific and minute, some profoundly not.
Motherhood cured me of my obsession with
Independence
Invulnerability (refusing to ask for help/care/company)
Being concerned about what other people think
Replacing furniture for purely aesthetic reasons
Solitude
Always having a perfect plan in place
Makeup and fashion
My body looking a certain way (versus what my body can do)
My physical appearance / being a “hot girl”
Success as making a lot of money and garnering admiration from bosses and colleagues
Working as my identity
Perfection (This answer was said many times in different ways)
Weed / drugs
Being on time
Social media
Comfort
Control (Also said many times.)
Mine? Productivity and achievement. I lived for so long experiencing my worth as how amazing I was at this thing or that thing, how intentional I could be with my life, how creative or passionate I was in a project I was working on. Motherhood has shown me, in so many ways, that my value as a human being is inherent. It isn’t—and it never was—based on my performance.
Do any of these things seem at odds with a woman’s well-being? It’s laughable, right? For so many, becoming a mother has helped them LEVEL UP like nothing ever has.
But you have to be willing to be a student of motherhood.
This is where foundation of this concept of surrendering to motherhood lies, I think: choosing to see motherhood not as an enemy, but as an ally. Not as something oppressive in our lives, something that holds us back from reaching our highest potential, but as the total opposite. Something for us.
Surrendering to motherhood involves a deliberate choice to see motherhood with a countercultural lens. As something amazing and powerful. Something wise and wild. Something that has the capacity to improve our lives and ourselves beyond our biggest dreams—if we trust it, if we let it.
How can we surrender?
Bonnie went on to ask about how mothers can go about this surrendering business. We joked about the main way being having multiple children, but I elaborated a bit. “It’s a posture of openness,” I said. “Of open hands.” By that I mean not holding too tightly to anything and instead, being open to new ways of thinking and doing and being.
Back in February, in a little post about things that are stirring my soul or brain lately, I wrote about one specific way I’ve surrendered to motherhood recently:
Surrender is probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned in motherhood: to stop fighting the realities of what is being asked of me and instead—to borrow from the mainstream feminists—to lean into it. Hopefully this isn’t TMI but here we go anyway… one way I’ve been surrendering to motherhood lately is taking showers with Rosie (my 2.5yo). Previously I’d lament that I’ve “barely had time to shower” (a real thing; IYKYK) and be annoyed about it. In addition to feeling gross, I saw showers as time to myself to think and be alone, and I couldn’t (wouldn’t) see it any other way. Recently I thought, I’m gonna just try to bring Rosie in with me… and turns out that she loves it. We both do. I get clean, we laugh and hang out together, and I don’t feel annoyed. It’s been great! Do I miss my alone showers? Sure. Am I happy to be showering more often and having fun with my little gal at the same time? Yep. Showers alone will return. For now, this works. Surrender to the season, baby.
This is an example of a small moment of surrender, but it illustrates what I mean when I say it. Surrendering to motherhood just means softening and opening to what is—caring for the beautiful souls in front of you—and saying ok. How can I figure this out? What can I learn here?
There’s one more thing that came to me as I reflected on Bonnie’s question “What’s the difference between surrender and giving up?” No, surrender isn’t about giving up if giving up means it’s a battle between you and motherhood and only one can come out the winner. But another way to answer that, one far more eloquent than anything I could have thought of in the moment, might be this:
Surrendering to motherhood absolutely is about giving up. It’s about giving up plans and control. It’s about giving up the story in your head about the way things should or need to be. It’s about giving up your opinions when faced with new information. It’s about giving up your ego and former way of life in service of a new mission and purpose.
I don’t know about you, but that kind of giving up sounds pretty good.
How does the phrase land for you? What would you add? What is one way, big or small, that you’ve surrendered to motherhood?
P.S. You can find my podcast with Bonnie right here. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you decide to give it a listen!
I’ve been paying attention to the cultural conversation around motherhood for years, and I’m telling you, women everywhere are starting to see through the B.S. they’ve been sold about motherhood as oppression. A few posts I’ve read just in the last week that you might enjoy if you enjoyed this one:
Instagram is where I can write and share in small bits and pieces according to my life stage, which is “mother of three young children.” I’m @radical.homemaker!
There was a season when I was a nobody. I left a big career to care for my mom with cancer, met my husband, married, and then.., my mom died, I could not get pregnant, and I did not work for the first 2 years of our marriage. I was an outsider in the womens events at church not being a mom, not much to offer at gatherings of my work friends as not part of the group anymore.
what I learned is labels are lazy, surrender is where God does a lot for us, and it changed me forever. Stopped evaluating people, opinions, and choices and just lived for a season as available for whatever came. When my daughter came along, when the career took off years later, I still carried a sense that I was just me. and God was good.
Still wrestling with a few of these things. I did lose myself in motherhood...I was stripped of everything I might have been "proud" of beforehand and given a job and role that is (as you mentioned) very low status in our culture. Moreover, I have never been good at (or very interested in) any of the domestic arts, so it has been a steep learning curve. (And being good at the domestic stuff is basically equated with virtue in my conservative Christian subculture.) But it was in the very circumstance of losing myself that I found God again in a more powerful way and realized that my life had been on a selfish trajectory that would have ended in a more dramatic and costly loss of self than the one I experienced. I feel like my "self" is slowly being recovered-much the same as it was before--but in many ways very different. So this new "self" has a mom bod. But, frankly, I think she's a better (less selfish) person. Like I said, still wrestling with it.