How NOT to Be Disappointed this Mother's Day

I heard it all over Facebook and Twitter and in phone calls last year. The disappointment.

The flowers that didn’t come, the cards that were forgotten, the breakfast that was a disaster and that you had to clean up while everyone else was watching football.

The house that wasn’t quiet or clean or tidied up. The getting to sleep in that didn’t happen, the nap that evaporated into a toddler’s meltdown, the meal that someone else didn’t prepare. The laundry that wasn’t folded for you. The kids that didn’t call, the sermon that wasn’t about mothers, the grand kids who didn’t visit.

I heard it again and again in so many different, disappointed, let down ways – how this one day can’t possibly live up to what it means to mother.

How 24 hours can’t possibly hold the measure of a lifetime of laying oneself low for the loving and raising and wrangling of tiny humans.

Why do we think it will? I ask myself this every year after the inevitable disappointment.

But we do. We expect.

We expect so big and so hard and with so much pre-programming that we don’t know how to turn the expectations off. We expect and the expecting is high and impossible until it blossoms into full blown entitlement.

And entitlement? Entitlement is a very slippery thing.

Entitlement believes that we know best, deserve the best, and resents the rest who don’t deliver.

Entitlement takes the sacrifice of motherhood and spins it in dizzying, disorienting circles.

Motherhood bends. Entitlement demands.

Motherhood serves. Entitlement stomps its foot.

Motherhood delights. Entitlement keeps lists.

Motherhood laughs. Entitlement whines.

Motherhood celebrates. Entitlement sulks.

Motherhood forgets itself in favor of remembering her dimple, his fastest mile, their mouths all ringed around with chocolate.

Entitlement tastes bitterness in every bite of a day that doesn’t go as planned.

And the grand irony of a day devoted to remembering mothers is that it can make me forget how content I am in this skin. Because I am not the sum total of breakfast in bed or empty dishwashers. I am not defined by how tidy the playroom is or who remembered to make me a thoughtful card.

What I believe, what I’ve learned, what I’ve earned through all those sleepless nights, all those miles of carpet walked, all those parent-teacher conferences and cold meals and ruined clothes is that the gift of motherhood, the art of this beautiful, terribly holy work is to find a way through to forgetting myself in favor of someone else.

The holy of motherhood is how it teaches me to lose myself, to let go of Lisa-Jo and surrender myself in an act of rebirth that only a God who wants to help me uncurl my desperate white knuckles from around what I think I’m entitled to could envision.

It’s been a hard battle to hold onto my contentment. In this small, rental house with these sometimes drive-me-crazy kids.

So this year, this year I want to be prepared. I want to take Mother’s Day into my own hands and make it magical in unexpected ways.

Because I’m learning. Slowly, stubbornly learning that we fight the fear of missing out by remembering that it’s in bending the knee to serve that we are most satisfied.

So this year, this is my plan to make sure I don’t miss out on the joy of Mother’s Day.

Lisa-Jo Baker is the bestselling author of Surprised by Motherhood: Everything I Never Expected About Being a Mom, her writings on motherhood are syndicated from New Zealand to New York and you can catch up with her daily chaos at LisaJoBaker.com.