Long time no see, friends! Once again, life has taken precedence over writing, and,as usual, I have disappeared from the blogging world. Here’s a quick update: My baby is no longer a baby, my marriage is still awesome, and i still haven’t figured out this whole mom ordeal:) Work in progress, right?
There we were, moments after rocking, singing to, shushing, and finally laying down a sick child- side by side, blankets over our heads, one eye open, holding our breath in anticipation of that one sound no parent wants to hear at 12:30 AM – crying. It’s rare these days, really. In general, our boy sleeps like a champ now that he’s approaching the toddler years. The nights of waking every two hours, listening to the creaking of the floor boards as I bounce and bounce..and bounce are almost a distant memory. Almost. But let’s be honest, here. Whether your child is one week or one year old, the moment you hear it, that pitiful whimper, it all comes rushing back. And as I laid there in bed, half asleep, half listening for my on-call mommy pager to go off, I thought to myself,
Is this really my calling? I’m so bad at this. My child is sick and I’m frustrated with him. What the hell is wrong with me? Who thought I was the person for this job?
I’ve always struggled with calling. Throughout my life, i’ve never truly felt that sense of being where i’m supposed to be. It’s drilled into us. Even at a young age, one of the first questions adults ask a child is, for all intents and purposes, about calling. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” You make it to high school, and once again, you’re asked a similar question. “What are you going to major in?” Then in college, it becomes more explicit; “what is your calling?” We take quizzes about it, we write essays on it, we pray about it. We spend a good chunk of our lives in search of it. It’s the white whale.
Our world is so obsessed with calling that it has, in effect, morphed it into something it was never intended to be. If a person is unhappy in his or her career (parenthood included), or even if one’s life, at the moment, is just plain hard, others start to question, “maybe this just isn’t your calling…” as if finding one’s calling is synonymous with abundant happiness and ease. We’ve bought into the belief that toil, self-doubt, and defeat are sure road signs indicative of a dead end. We’ve come to accept that if only we were walking in God’s ordained path, our lives would be rid of tribulation. Calling has become a destination, a fixed state of being that once reached, requires no work.
There’s an article making its way around the web that is the fruit of this ideology. A mother from the UK states fairly bluntly that she regrets having children, and that “like parasites” they stole some of the best years of her life. She raised them, and even expresses love for them, but she has no qualms about stating her annoyance with their existence. She “wasn’t wired for mothering.” It wasn’t her calling. Because it was was hard, because it was all give and no take, she concludes that she was unfit for the job. The exact same conclusion that I arrived at in bed that night.
The problem with this outlook, though, is that we’re failing to realize that calling, despite what we have been taught, is not about arriving at some place of nirvana where the effects of sin are null and void. No, calling is riddled with sin, and you can bet that you’ll battle it every day. You’ll see it in others, and you’ll see it in yourself, lying in bed, resentful towards a one year old. It’s hard, selfless, work, and to be honest, none of us fit the bill. But if we keep searching for a calling that meets society’s standards, if we keep chasing the white whale, we’ll miss the fact that maybe we’re already there. Maybe the struggle is the sign that, yep, your calling is here, and by the way, it’s crying for you on the baby monitor.
spitupandspaghetti 