How I Get Through the Hard Seasons

Tears rolled down my face, as my chest heaved. I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath and that the very weight of the world was on my shoulders. My emotions were out control. Exhaustion mingled with responsibility, and parenting was full of guilt too. I called my mom and said, “I can’t do this. How do I do this?”

You see, sickness had taken over our household for over two weeks. It had wreaked havoc from one of my babies, to the next, and finally on to me. I hadn’t slept, I had barely eaten. A shower? Forget it.

I was in the throes of motherhood—at its very hardest. And I found myself resenting it.

Somewhere in the middle of all of the coughs and the sneezes, and the days spent cooped up inside of our home, I kept thinking: why ME? Why was I the one with the sick babies? Why not another mom, another child, another family? Resentment had silently crept in, and made me feel terribly isolated.

That’s the thing about motherhood, sometimes—the isolation. It makes you feel as if what you are experiencing in that exact moment, no one else in the history of motherhood has ever experienced before.

These thoughts can trap you, and trick you, and make you feel as if you are a failure. At life. At being a mom. At being a wife. And that’s how I felt. I began blaming myself, feeling incompetent.

How could I not be a good enough mom to keep my babies healthy? How could I not value my self-care enough to keep myself healthy? How am I possibly supposed to take care of anyone else, when I can’t even take care of me?

And as the tears got bigger, and my cries got harder, my mom spoke to me from the other end of  the line, “Kammi, go outside. Take a deep breath. Calm down.”

So I did. Then, what she said to me next resonated with me all the way to the core of who I am as a mom, a wife, a believer, and a woman. She said: “Honey, this season too shall pass. It is just a season. Seasons come, and seasons go. You can do this, because you are doing it.”

Life does happen in seasons, and you know what? Those seasons are fleeting.

Like the changing of the warmth of summer into the crisp of fall, the seasons of motherhood are momentary—the good and the bad. The easy and the challenging.

As mamas, we cling to these moments because inside of us, somewhere, we know that our days are made up in the matter of moments. Singular, brief, fleeting, and beautiful moments.

The isolation we feel is quickly erased when our babies smile and giggle. When they wrap their chubby little arms around our necks as we bend down to tuck them in goodnight.

When we look into their little faces and their sweet, sweet eyes, and we know, without a shadow of a doubt, that we wouldn’t trade any of our hard for any of anyone else’s good.

That we are exactly where we are meant to be, in that exact and specific moment. In that exact and specific season.

But without the tough seasons, would we truly recognize the gift of those happy seasons?

Those weary seasons are gifts to us too, in a way: they are gifts that make us stronger, that shape us, and if we let them, that help us grow in gratitude. And in love. And in all of the things that make motherhood so wonderful and so unbearably good.

As this season passed for my family, I came to see that the croups, colds, and stomach flu aren’t so terrible in the whole season of life. That health is a beautiful, precious thing and we are truly blessed to see each new day.

That even when I am weary, and tired, and “burdened,” this season too shall pass; and that this beautiful life is filled daily with overall health and happiness.

And that I can do it. Because I am doing it.

So, if you are in a weary season, mama, a season that seems to have you craving more rest than anything else—know that you are  n o t alone. Don’t let that resentment creep in, because other mamas do go through this too.

Know that this will pass, and hopefully quickly. And afterwards you will think, how did I make it through?

But you did. And you will. And you are stronger because of it.