I hate Valentine’s Day. Earlier in our relationship, when my husband would tell me it was a made-up holiday, this used to annoy me, “how unromantic” I would think. Now, I am in complete agreement. This is because what Valentine’s Day does not bring in jewelry, it makes up for by highlighting in spades my lack of organization as a parent. Did I know this date, when we would have to prepare 40 valentines for our kids’ classmates, was coming? Yes. Did I read the emails from teachers with the classmate name lists and instructions on bringing in emptied rectangular tissue boxes that will be sent home full of 1% of the remaining rainforest worth of meaningless gestures? I skimmed it. Did I block all information in said skimmed emails from my memory until the 11th hour because it is always way more stressful than I remember? 100%.

So, really, it is my fault that at 9 pm, I was alone in my kitchen, which looked like a Crayola factory explosion, with a randomly half-eaten bell pepper my son munched on like an apple (this did make me feel slightly better about my parenting) on the counter adding glitter pen original artwork in Jackson Pollock fashion and despair to finish the valentines for dozens of pre-k & 4th graders. I accept that. I also accept that at 3 pm, when I asked my daughter if she wanted me to pick up pre-made Valentine’s that came with equally numbered Blow-Pops instead of making handmade construction paper originals, I should not have presented that as an option. Earlier in the process, I spilled my Diet Coke on her first batch of cards. While we both tried not to panic, I consoled her with the same thing I tell myself when I spill Diet Coke on anything, including my pants today in the car line: “Don’t worry – it dries like water” (this remains a mystery, but also continues to justify pretending it is water instead of actually drinking water). Days like this remind me of the difference between the mother I thought I would be and the mother I am. As a kid, I imagined being a fantastic, organized homeschooling mother of 4-12 children who would make bread and never want a job outside the house. If you know me, I know you are now laughing. I decided to avoid several vocations that would require years of additional school earlier in my life because I “knew” I would want to be a stay-at-home mom. How little I knew of myself…

I will now insert the anxiety-fueled disclaimer: I love my kids. I pray to God my kids die well after me and that I live to be 1000. I like spending time with them. They are cool, empathetic, smart, incredibly talented (not that it matters), and kind humans. Nor do I think women who are stay-at-home moms are lame. I just wrestle with feeling deep shame and existential angst when I am around them. This is why I avoid most Women’s bible studies as they often seem to be full of unnaturally beautiful women, still thin despite their 17 natural childbirths, who wear homemade geometric-shaped clothes in earth tones that somehow look designer while raising (& educating) a small army on solely their husband’s income. I get why the woman at the well in John 4 decided to skip the water hole hang with the village homeschooling ladies. Women are hard. We are most hard on ourselves.

I was on Instagram the other day, wasting hours of productive time looking at reels, and I saw this post by a woman who represents all the traits of wife & mother I thought I would grow up to be: @brookandbramblefarm. Her post set to music from the 2005 Pride & Prejudice remake had a caption that read “When you grow up loving…” over images of 90’s romanticized female/domestic cultural references, including scenes from Anne of Green Gables, Hobbit life in the Shire, Felicity dolls, Beatrix Potter and Colonial Williamsburg that transitioned to the caption “You make your home into this…” followed by images from her house full of so much quaint domestic bliss and charm it would make Joanna Gaines feel like a failure. I kept waiting for a funny punch line. Nope. Joke’s on me. I remember growing up LOVING all that stuff and pretending to – I am not making this up – churn butter and live on the prairie. I would play for hours pretending I was the mother to Felicity & Kirsten, along with 20 other American Girl doll children, where we were snowed in during a blizzard, and I had to keep us alive with my basic homesteading skills and a deep commitment to churned butter. In reality, had God made a huge mistake and allowed me to be born during Pioneer days when actual homesteading skills were required, I would have probably rolled into the line of an oncoming wagon wheel and sacrificially done my family a favor by removing a useless mouth to feed. While I thought I was going to be @brookandbramblefarm instead, I am the mom who purposefully wears mirrored Ray-Bans so no one can see I slept in my makeup and therefore have raccoon eyes to go with my black Diet Coke-soaked leggings at 8 am during school drop-off, skips breakfast, and eats Taco Bell for lunch and resents when my husband asks me the perfectly reasonable question, “What’s the plan for dinner?” I HAVE NO IDEA. I ate Taco Bell for lunch. Clearly, I was not thinking ahead.

Some of these false expectations about the mom I would be are my own mother’s fault (I am a therapist, so I can’t help but blame the parents) for being a fantastic stay-at-home mom. She was engaged and creative. She would throw amazing tea parties for my girlfriends with homemade cheese straws and scones. While she sometimes took advantage of the homeschool schedule by hitting up a lot of garden nurseries during regular school hours, she was a great homemaker and mother. Growing up, I didn’t know any moms who worked outside of financial necessity. So, as you can imagine, three months after quitting my dream job at HSUS to stay home with my oldest and feeling like I would lose my mind if I had to recite (notice I said recite, not read, as it was utterly memorized), Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? I felt a lot of shame. This is not how “good moms” are supposed to feel. I cherished the years with my kids as babies, but I needed an outlet, and my skillset did not lend itself to finding that in excelling in full-time homemaking.

It has been a long journey to get to a place where I can accept that I am a good mom. I am just not the mom I thought I would be. Over the years, I pieced together a strange little balance where I worked in different phases, part-time up to full-time jobs that let me work from home, at night or between naps, or sometimes by toting my laptop to the zoo. I am grateful that I have been able to grow into the woman God made me be vs. the one I thought I should be. The “should’s” are always tricky. There are some things that this statement does apply to, like paying taxes or drinking water (although I still debate the legitimacy of that one). But often, when we find ourselves as women saying things like “I should be raising organic laying hens and maintaining sourdough bread starter,” there is an element of shame & denial of truth present. Now, we need people to tend to organic laying hens and bread, but you and I may not be the ones God has called to do it. There are many jobs and needs in the world that deserve our attention. I don’t have hens, but I do have a lot of parakeets, and while the neighborhood does not seek after their tiny elven-sized eggs for frittatas, they are all little birds that need homes, and I take care of them. I use the money I make from my job to buy the organic eggs from my friend Krystal, a Ph.D. with a nanny and the most present and engaged mother I know. Her house is the weekend hang zone for the kids on the street. It is a beautiful picture of family life. It looks different than my home. Our homes look different from the lady @brookandbramblefarm. It’s okay. We know kids thrive with parents present and engaged, but there are a zillion ways to follow through on that.

So my Valentine to you, dear reader, is the encouragement to lean into discovering who God made you to be, not who you think you should be. When you find yourself inner eye-rolling or wanting to crawl into a hole and hide around someone who looks different than you, get curious about that. Maybe you are holding yourself to a standard that isn’t the correct metric. Jesus met the woman who felt like an outcast, and then He went into the village and met the women who seemed to have it together. Both equally needed Him. He loved them equally. He loves us where we are and wants to walk with us to discover who He made us to be for His glory. I hope this frees you up to celebrate others who do their thing beautifully so you admire their contribution and get on with what God made you uniquely designed to do beautifully. There is plenty of room at the table for all of us.