What is the Purpose of Motherhood?

What is the purpose of motherhood? What does it mean to be a mom?

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That’s probably something you wrestle with as a butterfly mom because it identifies who you are and you haven’t solidified that yet.

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It’s easy to be convinced or pressured into thinking motherhood is only making homemade meals (and cookies!), keeping your kids busy in many different activities, or having some type of slave-to-your-child mentality where you are constantly tending to their desires and you don’t tend to your other relationships.

I think especially new moms (moms with kids under 5) can feel the pressure of this. There are so many messages out there it’s quite easy to get confused. Then on top of all of that, you have your own goals you want to fulfill. Perhaps things you missed out on as a kid, you feel determined to be that for your own children. That was me for a long time, and honestly y’all, it still is.

I didn’t go into motherhood with any plan.

I mean, no forethought about how it would go or what the purpose of motherhood was going to look like.

Between teenage drama, entering the Internet-age, college, boyfriends and creating a career track for myself, I just never thought deeply about truly what was involved in motherhood. I knew I wanted children and to eventually stay home with them but that’s where the idea ended. I didn’t have younger siblings or cousins. I didn’t babysit before I was married. I didn’t have any revealing exposure for children under 5. I simply had no grounding for the practicality of motherhood.

I looked up and suddenly was a mom, and in the back of my head, things started to surface about what I wanted, what I lacked, and what I was going to make sure my kids had that I didn’t.

Motherhood has a way of

making you review your life and what life means. So instead of just winging it at life I started to see a purpose to not just my life as a part of theirs, but a purpose to the life I had before they came around. Strangely, just the fact that I had kids created in me a spark of something more. I was becoming someone that I hadn’t been before and, I dare say, could not have become without kids.

When you become a mother you are really becoming someone else.
That’s the part that no one really says out loud.

This has to happen.

We can’t continue to operate as a one-man (or woman) show. Women hold together the relational bonds of life. We create the framework for life; all the moving and shaking in the world would not happen without us. As a mother you give life through childbirth. However, you aren’t just a vessel, a bus that empties out at the destination of childbirth and babyhood. Rather you are a garden, full of blossoms and growth. This garden is where you nurture those that are growing there – your children.

Don’t let the pressure around you control what you think being a mother has to be. God created you as a woman on purpose to show strength through grace, comfort and beauty. The purpose of motherhood is truly is becoming less focused on ourselves and instead, we are growing more like Jesus – loving sacrificially and teaching these little ones to do the same thing.

So when the reality hits that you are that person who hears everything and has eyes in the back of her head, know that you don’t have to be the image of mom you have in your head. You don’t have to be your own mother, your own grandmother or that tv character mother.

Motherhood isn’t just cookies, hugs and carpooling. Motherhood is purposeful, ultimately to change the world with sacrifical love.