“You just make it all look so easy.” 

I’d turned when I overheard the words directed toward a young mother, with wailing baby straddled on her hip, chubby fingers clinging to her neck, and the young mom had darted forward to try to catch the hand of her blurring-dash of a toddler. 

She’d smiled thinly and I read her eyes: 

Pretend something’s easy and you undermine what a feat it actually is.

Mother’s Day is hard, because mothering is unbelievably hard, and the real hard work of mothering is to keep staying soft. 

Her and I both know what day is  there on the calendar the end of this week and the reality is: 

Mother’s Day is hard, because mothering is unbelievably hard, and the real hard work of mothering is to stay soft. 

Stay soft when the baby is squalling and flailing and you’re at your frazzled wits end.

Stay soft when you’re bleary-eyed with relentless sleepless nights and some kid is pounding your leg like a drum, beating you to get their shoes, their juice, their Dr. Seuss, and get it all 5 minutes ago. Stay soft when some bickering, some rant, some temper tantrum is making it all hard to think.  

Stay soft when the tween rolls his eyes and slams the door on your directions mid-sentence. 

Stay soft when you’ve pried behind a kid’s story and found some bloated, stinking lie. Stay soft when things grow hard and cold with apathy or silence.

From the moment the uterine walls of a mother grow hard with contractions, a mother’s real holy work in the world is to keep staying soft.

Wooden Hands- The Keeping Company
Wooden Hands and Cross – The Keeping Company

Pretend something’s easy and you undermine what a feat it actually is.

One of the most profound truths I’ve held on to as I’ve mothered 7 children, is this one image that my midwife loaned me and I wrote down in my own labor and delivery journal before the birth of our sixth child: 

Through every wave of contractions, your uterus will grow as hard as basketball —- but just breathe – and imagine that you have a hole in your sock, there at your big toe, so just let go and imagine all the air of that basketball quietly singing out of that hole – so you can just stay surrendered and soft.

Translate:

Don’t fight the waves, don’t let the labor of mothering make you tense, don’t let the work of mothering tighten you with harshness when they’re all scrapping, don’t let the way of mothering make you hard when all kinds of things get hard…. 

Just breathe…. Just let go of what comes… Just stay soft. 

Because hadn’t I experienced it how many times by babe number 6: With every labor, I had this counter-productive tendency to brace myself hard through the contractions. If contractions came hard?  I’d prove I had the mettle to be harder, steelier, stronger. I’d overcome the strength of the hard contractions by being ever tougher and harder still.  

But growing harder ultimately slowed labor down and made the exhausting marathon of labor even longer – even more painful.

My gentle midwife assured a better way through: Just breathe, just  keep imagining the contractions that are hardening your uterine walls are doing exactly what they need to do, that they are doing a good, delivering work; don’t brace hard against them as they are doing the birthing work  – but let those hard contractions just come and let them pass over you, pass through you, and, yes, you just let all the air of that hardening basketball seep out and away… 

So when I faced round #6 of labor and all the waves of contractions tightened excruciatingly hard to birth our sixth child, I purposed to keep that one image in mind.

It’s not hard to let yourself grow hard, but it takes far greater strength to stay soft. 

It turns out: You have to really stay focused to really stay soft. 

It’s not hard to let yourself grow hard, but it takes far greater strength to stay soft. 

Ultimately: You have to stay in community to stay soft.

Because mothering is unbelievably  hard, because it’s unbelievably easy for a mother to let her heart grow hard, a heart has to stay beating close to all kind of other hearts to stay soft.

I may have read all the books, written out my plan in my labor and delivery journal, even experienced five prior childbirths – but I needed my midwife, my husband, to stay close, to stay coaching me, to help me stay focused through every hard contraction: 

Don’t brace yourself hard against whatever hard comes: just breathe… just let go… just stay soft…. 

A mother’s labor and delivery never ends and you never stop having to remember to breathe.

Wooden Cross- The Keeping Company

A mother’s labor and delivery never ends and you never stop having to remember to breathe. 

What if, just as a woman labors and delivers a babe with the help of a midwife, every woman had a midmother to labor with her through the hard seasons, to help her stay soft and ultimately deliver her as a mother? 

Midwife, in Old English, literally means, “with – woman,” (mid literally means “with”… and wife actually just meant “woman”) … every midwife is a with-woman, who stays with the woman giving birth. 

What if every mother had a midmother, a “with-mother”, to stay with her as she stays laboring for decades, for a lifetime, a midmother through every hard season, breathing with her, showing her how to stay soft, so she delivers into the sanctified and cruciform mother her Father meant her to be. 

What if we all belonged to a fellowship of mothers, to help make it through all the hardships of mothering?

 When I went to a pastor in the midst of a flattening mothering failure, that shepherd of souls nodded and gently said, “You need to meet Debbie.” 

What if we all belonged to a fellowship of mothers, to help make it through all the hardships of mothering?

For years, Debbie ended up midmothering me with early morning texts and late night prayers to preach gospel courage to my soul, and I couldn’t believe when I opened the the box she’d mailed across the miles: she knit me a soft white prayer shawl to tenderly wrap round myself in the early morning dark as I prayed for each of our children. 

What all mothers need are midmothers to pray with her, and for her, and to keep wrapping her in the love of her Abba Father whose lovingkind heart keeps a mother’s heart soft. 

More than half a dozen years ago now, I’d stood under a 2 am star-studded sky and turned to ask a mother what our next parenting season looked like, and her eyes didn’t leave that diamond-shimmering sky and she spoke a word:

 “We are going to do exactly what we’ve always done: we won’t ever make an idol out of our children and we will keep loving them like Jesus, because we will never stop following Jesus who is Love Himself.” 

And then when I went quiet with mothering ache this winter, she was the one who called an emergency meeting of six other midmothers, for us all get on the phone, and they were a circle of safe for me to come unpack my tender mama heart. 

What all mothers need are midmothers to deliver us from the lie that we haven’t laboured hard enough, or good enough, or been enough. 

Wooden Hands- The Keeping Company
Wooden Cross- The Keeping Company

 “We won’t ever make an idol out of our children & we will keep loving them like Jesus, because we won’t stop following Jesus who is Love Himself.” 

And as I sat on a midmother’s front porch under blankets this past weekend talking till nearly midnight with one of my oldest friends who’s known me since we were teen girls — since before we ever swayed fussing swaddled newborns together at the back of the church — who’s called me in the middle of the night when her own mothering heart could hardly breathe through the hard, and who’s held me on my own front porch when I’ve been bent over, bawling through my own mother-laboring, and I turned to her this weekend with all this brimming, grateful love:  

What every mother needs is a faithful midmother to coach her through the painful contractions of being birthed into a tender family story that’s harder in ways one would never have expected, but is actually delivering one deeper into the heart of Father God.

What mothers need through all kinds of hardship is far more fellowship, with no more comparison but far more co-operation, with no more hurtful stereotyping, and far more honest championing. 

After supper dishes are washed up and the day’s chores done, late the other night I call my own Mother, the woman who not only labored and delivered me more than a few moons ago, but who has become my own long suffering midmother, who has stayed with me long after I was last heavy with-child, to keep listening and coaching me through the endless labor and delivery of a mother  – just breathe, just let go, just stay soft. And I can hear it in her voice when she softly tells me for the millionth time that she loves me: 

There is no genuine way to make mothering look easy because it is genuinely hard, but there is a way for us together to find the greater strength to keep staying soft. 

“Thank you, Mom – for all the ways you’ve mid-mothered me through years of my own labor and delivery into even more joy as a mom,” I whisper it … and re-commit to thanking a midmother, being a midmother, raising up more midmothers, because what gives us invincible strength as mothers — is to stay in a community with mothers.

Because what mothers need through all kinds of hardship is far more fellowship, with no more comparison but far more co-operation, with no more harmful stereotyping and far more honest championing. 

You can see it in your mother’s hands, when you touch them, when you hold her hand in yours — this luminous softening…. how everywhere, after all these years, she is softening into this luminous love.

It’s a strange and sacred paradox, and what all the real work of mothering is, as we just keep breathing through the laboring and keep letting go:

The softer you stay, the more strength you have to do the hardest things.


How… can you find a way for your broken heart to heal and stay soft?

How do you find a way of being — when even being is hard?

How do you find a way forward… when so much of your heart wants to go back to a better time before?

The practical tool to begin true life-transformation for a different way of life start here:

WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You Always Dreamed Of