Marriage and motherhood have been the greatest joys of my life. But they’ve also been a source of great suffering.
Married twenty-plus years, my husband and I are the devoted parents of four unique and beloved children. We attended Mass weekly; we sat down to dinner together every night, bowing our heads and giving thanks. We played card games and took family vacations. But none of us was prepared for how destructive the teenage years would be, nor for how the family structure would be under attack from within.
As someone with a type-A personality, creating order is natural for me. Tasks like going through the kids’ dressers to weed out outgrown clothes and restocking it with hand-me-downs brings me a sense of peace. I also have the trait of being highly motivated, which results in a “can-do” attitude. Take any means necessary to get to a resolution.
However, four years into raising teenagers, the family dynamics had grown chaotic and complicated. Hurtful words and accusations from all sides weakened my parenting self-esteem. The harder I tried to make things right, the more devastating the outcome. Forward, left, and right, I kept hitting walls.
I used to believe parents were in charge of their kids. When I’d see a kid misbehaving in public or showing disrespect to their parent, I’d look at the parent and think, “Poor sucker”. But now I was that poor sucker.
Therapists were hired, then fired, and new therapists found. Pediatricians consulted. Long phone calls on hold with insurance companies to determine coverage. Psychiatrists, testing. Consultations on ways to get a handle on what seemed to be an endless unraveling of my once-strong family. I needed to talk about it, find support, commiserate. The strong united front my husband and I had always enjoyed fractured. I couldn’t read the expression on his face during family blow-ups. I noticed him growing quieter.
Months turned into years and I kept praying and believing this was only a phase and the end would come soon. One issue would get resolved but nine more would erupt. Emotional outbursts escalated. Friends told me to be patient. One extended family member cast blame for letting it get so far out of hand. “You’re the parent. You’re in control.” Others just hugged me and said they’d keep praying.
I hired a specialist and paid $280 for a two-hour consultation for her to tell me I could fix this by removing all technology, crawling into bed with my child, and holding them like I had when they were an infant. She didn’t know my children. If I tried this, it would be like falling in a hole with a tiger.
I started growing skeptical of so-called parenting experts. Books, podcasts, speakers…they failed to address our specific situations, and they didn’t know my kids’ personalities. Perhaps more significant, it seemed those experts overly focused on the kids and not on how to heal the family system. Also, this one not-small thing: personal growth and insight comes with age, and most teenagers are not capable of that level of maturity – not just practically but biologically. One of the foundations to the therapeutic model is that therapy is not effective if the patient is not willing to change.
This would be a waiting game.
One of the hardest trials involved Mass attendance. Arguments ricocheted off the living room walls that displayed family portraits and pictures of the Holy Family. As a deeply spiritual person, I tried hard to listen to their positions, so contrary to what they’d been raised to believe. I pleaded emotionally. When that failed, I’d turned the emotions way down and try an intellectual argument, since proof for the existence of God can be found outside of Church (see Aquinas’s “Five Ways”). I tried every way I knew to fix the cracks before they could threaten the integrity of the foundation we all stood on. But by this point, more damage had been done than I alone could repair.
I recalled how earnest I was as a teenager to find my own way with these ontological questions, but my arguments were the inverse. I had not been raised in a believing family and was seeking answers to questions that no one around me could answer. One of my primary goals when I became a mother was to provide my children with the spiritual foundation I’d lacked. Faith and the call to the highest good was my most precious gift; I wanted them to receive that gift, but I couldn’t accept it for them.
As a means to cope with the stress and heartache, I started spending more time outdoors. It gave me space to regroup and get my bearings on what was happening at home. I took long walks; I hiked in the woods. I visited nearby monasteries for silent retreats. I talked to God. I knew my suffering could be redemptive, as it had been for so many of the saints, but I couldn’t stop making myself the victim of it. Perhaps more dangerously, I had slipped into an abyss where I wasn’t sure I believed things at home would get better. Where had my hope gone?
I was not suffering well. I was wallowing.
I blamed myself, then I blamed the children. I blamed my husband. It was a vicious cycle of finger-pointing.
Years ago, my grandmother gave me a holy card. On the card was an image of St. Jude and beneath it, his title: Patron Saint of Lost Causes. What or who were the “lost causes”? Nothing is impossible with God, but I wasn’t living as if I truly believed that. The problem was, I couldn’t see how God was fixing this.
In a moment I believe was infused by the Spirit, I had the clarity to see how my thoughts and actions revolved around the idea of what I could or couldn’t do. I acted as though success relied on me, but it didn’t. It relied on Him.
Enter humility.
At first, humility is….well, humiliating. While we’re inclined to lash back when criticized, it was time to examine if there any truth to what was said. I didn’t want to hear how my emotional responses were making things worse. I didn’t want to see that as parents, my husband and I weren’t always consistent. I remember the moment I confessed to my husband that yes, I had handled some things immaturely. I felt so free letting go of my self-righteousness! All this fighting and discord was a painful, refining fire.
Coming to terms with our own limits has a way of clearing out room for something else. I’d begun spending more time with someone else: Jesus. My relationship with Him deepened in direct proportion to surrendering to Him the outcome.
I began attending weekly Adoration and it was during those hours, month after month, when the ground beneath me began a seismic shift. The sanctuary provided the same peace and silence I found when alone in the wilderness. Except in Church, I had the sensory benefit of the cool holy water drying on my forehead, the pain in my lower back as I knelt, the sight of the exposed host-my beloved Lord!-and the smell of the candle wax melting.
At first, I brought religious books or Scripture to occupy my holy hour, but after a view visits, I stopped picking them up. I felt God’s peace most profoundly when staring at the flame of the candle that burned next to the tabernacle. Isaiah says of the Lord:
A bruised reed He will not break And a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish; He will faithfully bring forth justice.
Just typing those words brings fresh tears to my eyes. More than believing He would fix this, which I didn’t sense He was guaranteeing, He was communicating a message far more important. That He was seeing me.
He was present during the arguments. Our pain was His pain. He saw my tears. He heard my cries. In Adoration, in some mystical way, He was holding me. While I stared at that candle flame, shifting with the circulating air, His Sacred Heart and my suffering heart were beating together. Peace and silence were bringing my feet back to earth after floating at the end of a long kite string, legs flailing, trying to shout down to the kite holder that I was tired of holding on.
During this season, I had a dream that Jesus was my spouse and we were on a vacation at some tropical resort. At a meal, the waiter offered Him a cup of something to drink and He took it, but when I reached for my own, the waiter said it wasn’t for me. When I awoke, I was preoccupied by how real it felt to be with Him. Days passed before I realized I may be overlooking the dream’s deeper meaning. He could drink from the cup, but I was not yet ready.
In the Gospel of Matthew, the mother of the sons of Zebedee asks if her sons can sit on the right and left of Jesus. Jesus then turns and asks them, “Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?” (v. 20:22).
Only He could drink from the cup, suffer, and save us. I cannot drink from that cup. I cannot save myself or anyone else.
When I was powerless, at the end of my own strength, face-down in the dirt, this is when Jesus became my best friend.
Because of the age spread of our kids, we will have multiple teenagers in the house for another decade. God hasn’t fixed the problems in our family, but small changes in the right direction are moving us into better space, one centimeter at a time. My mother’s heart is less lonely in my suffering because Jesus walks next to me. The Blessed Mother comes and reminds me that her Immaculate Heart has a sword thrust through its center, but also contains the flame of the Holy Spirit and a bouquet of flowers surrounding it. Who but Mary knows better what it is like to watch a family suffer? The fire, the pain, and the purpose.
I choose to believe God will make a way, even if I may not be part of the way-making. I sometimes even feel strong enough to hope that our relationships will fully mend and that trust and compassion will be restored.
But if that is not the outcome, I pray, Lord, let me find a way to be okay with an alternative ending. This ending may involve someone else fixing what I can’t. It may mean an even longer period of waiting for the wounds to heal. It may mean what I imagined my family would look like is something I need to let go of in order to accept what it actually looks like.
I am learning the most difficult lesson of my life. Children grow up, they have their own hearts and minds, and they have the freedom to decide to stay or go. God forbid this happen, but it is in their own agency even to choose to leave behind the love of their parents, for a season or for good—a thought this mother’s heart can barely consider. Our children also have the freedom to return, no matter how much time has passed, because regardless of the family challenges and strife, they know they are loved unconditionally.
The people we let come behind the ribcage of our oh-so-tender hearts will disappoint us. Our growth in holiness comes when we find a way to keep loving them in the disappointment and rejection. I believe Jesus is the only one who makes this possible.
From the Book of Tobit, we read, “It has not turned out as I expected, but you have dealt with [me] according to your great mercy” (8:16). Spiritual maturity is making peace with the former and having gratitude for the latter.
God will not leave me in a place of desolation, dust blowing in my eyes, mouth full of sand. The scariest step is deciding to hope when I don’t feel it. And coming to terms with that new life may look like.
Recently I’ve taken my Bible into Adoration again. Verses will sometimes come crashing down on me, reminding me that my best Friend is nearby. Crashing may not be a word associated with praying, but so often my prayer time will yield massive insights that hit the shore of my spirit like a massive wave. My yearnings for God manifest in physical ways, such as vocally pleading with Him, crying tears of desperate longing, or laying prostrate on the ground in utter humility.
I still sometimes slip under the covers at night, my heart aching for what has not yet been healed, but I am not alone because I call on the name of Jesus and repeat His name as a mantra until I feel better.
Playing praise music is another way Jesus binds my wounds. Songs like “Litany of Trust” by Thomas Muglia or “Surrounded” by Upperroom give words to the state of my interior world and I imagine Jesus resting his open palms against my open palms.
Recently this verse came up during prayer:
He led you through the vast and dreadful wilderness, that thirsty and waterless land (Deut 8:15a).
Yes! He is leading me through a desolate landscape. He knows whose name I cry out, who gets full access to my mind and heart. He does. I am letting myself be led.
Dr. Miravalle, one of my theology professors at Franciscan University, once said during a lecture, “At the end of our lives, we’ll be asked two questions: How much did you love? How well did you suffer? These two indicators become the ultimate thermometers that advance us in the spiritual life.”
I think about his statement a lot. The saints looked for opportunities to suffer — to detach — to more actively participate in the great work of redemption. A large part of me finds gratitude for the challenges in my family; for what other reason would I ever rely on Jesus so desperately?
Lately the Lord has been whispering the word “patience” to me. Be patient with those you love so fiercely. Be patient for those who aren’t as perfect as you want them to be. Be patient because I am so patient with you.
The cross is heavy for all of us. Circumstances haven’t changed, but one thing has. The Savior of the universe chose to let me find Him in the deepest recesses of my heart, crawling across a desert, and, even after seeing me in all my failings, He remains there. Which is much more than I deserve.