Why are the Women Fading?

It's 3:45 a.m. and you have been lying awake for almost an hour, plagued by self-doubt and anxiety. It begins with your son's dropping grades at school, and how he is losing his confidence. This rabbit trails to your daughter's heart, and the defiance that leaves you exhausted. You blame yourself and how you are failing to reach her. The clock keeps ticking and you move on to other stressors: you don't call your parents enough, your siblings are far away, you have an inbox that never empties.

Two restless hours pass and the sun is rising and you have given up on the thought of going back to sleep. The sleep deprivation migraine kicks in, and you stumble out of bed a few minutes later to get your kids ready for school. You are a spent, hollow version of yourself and you make a mental note to not go to bed without a Tylenol PM or Benadryl ever again.

This routine is painfully familiar for many women.

Different topics include a baby that won't sleep, a toddler that won't stop screaming, a husband that works too late, a friend that doesn't call back, parents that are sick, the uncertain futures of our kids, our financial stability, and on and on it goes.

Are we grieving our lives because they don't look the way we imagined they would when we headed off to college?

Could it be that we put pressure on our children's potential because we realize we aren't living up to our own?

Have we faded by surrendering every moment of our days to the cultivation of everyone else...but ourselves?

A recent study released in USA Today reported,

"Use of antidepressant drugs has soared nearly 400% since 1988, making the medication the most frequently used by people ages 18-44. Women are 2.5 times more likely to take antidepressants than men and 23 percent of women aged 40 to 59 take antidepressants, more than in any other age/sex group."

Almost 1 in 4. That's devastating. What's even more telling, is that this study finds that most don't seek counseling to discover the roots of their pain and emptiness. These high functioning women simply don't have time for therapy.

We are all susceptible. We tell ourselves a quick fix will do just fine. Whatever pills can keep our head above water, allow us to keep making lunches, paying the bills, getting through sex, carpooling, working out, pursuing that career and so on will just have to do. We don't want to be the crazy lady at the bus stop. We think to ourselves, "Just give me the meds that she's having. I'll be fine."

Recently, a friend confessed through tears that she is struggling with deep bitterness. Her life doesn't look the way she imagined it would. She couldn't reconcile how her life-looking so successful on the surface-could disguise the aching void that brings her tears the moment she lets herself feel any deeper.

What is most alarming is that many women don't see past their manicured lives, a grasping for society's definition of being "put together". We have pretty ways to mask it, don't we? We use all kinds of retail therapies and beauty products. We have homes to furnish and decorate, then re-decorate once we tire. We have styles to keep up with, parties to throw and attend, and a rigorous pace to maintain. While these things are all delightful and beautiful and worth celebrating, the danger comes when we use them to conceal a desperate identity crisis.

So we compromise. We say, this life I lead ought to be enough. I ought to be content being a mother. The dreams I had in my youth were simply that-dreams. Let it go. And we push down any hope when we see it flair up. The desire for change uncovers that which we are most terrified of-failure.

These women are brightly shining stars fading away behind the shadow of everyone they care for. They are a little worse for wear. Their light is dimmer than it used to be, unable to dream beyond their current reality. So they medicate, and numb out.

This narrative seems to play out in a couple of different ways.

First, some women uncover their talents and life purpose before they have kids and then shelve it while raising them. They've experienced a sense of fulfillment in living their calling but believe they must set their pursuits aside to raise the children. They've bought into the belief that their calling and child-rearing are disparate parts, unable to co-exist. Instead of fighting to figure out the balance, they give up and stuff their dreams away.

Other women never identify their life purpose before having children. The label of "motherhood" sets in and can unknowingly become the excuse to stop cultivating their unique talents and dreams. Instead, they place their quest for significance on the lives of their children (as we see played out on Facebook each day). But this suffocating pressure is too much for any teenager to bear, much less a 5 year old.

In either case, this displacement of a mother's purpose (beyond child-rearing) becomes a huge loss to our communities. If women aren't empowered to cultivate their uniqueness, we all suffer the loss of beauty, creativity and resourcefulness they were meant to contribute to the world.

Can we imagine a mother chasing the dreams that stir her heart and simultaneously raise her children?

What if husbands saw it as their responsibility to cultivate the unique gifting in the lives of their wives?

How could our communities of faith support this type of lifestyle?

Next time your mind is racing at 3:45 a.m., redirect the stress of play-dates and meal-planning to imagine who God's created you to be. Reflect on the moments where you felt fully alive. In time you may discover a hope reborn.

This is where the journey begins.

 

5 Comments »

1. Yes, yes, YES!  How many different ways can I say YES???

   What miracles are we missing out on from women that are too tired and stressed to tap their unique gifts and creativity that God has given them?

   Why do we think ‘be fruitful and multiply’ only extends to a small part of a woman’s whole life?  For the average woman, she will have children in her home for 25ish years (unless you have boomerang adult children, lol). 

   The average woman lives to her late 70s.  Is she only fruitful and multiplies for a third of her life?

   I believe God’s vision for His daughters is so much bigger than that.  We have spiritual children and creations that we are meant to nurture and develop.  We can be fruitful and multiple until our body hits the death bed.

   I used to have those middle of the night crazies.  They were awful.  My mind wound wind tighter and tighter, and then my heart would rev up and pound and then I would feel sick from stress, to do lists and worry.

   A couple of things helped me.

   First, I realized that living a high stress, caffeinated and carb filled lifestyle fueled anxiety and insomnia. 

   Then, I realized that when you have several children and try and push a high-octane career, you do things to your neuro-endocrine system, and your hormones get jiggy.  They take a nose dive, and unbalanced hormones can also lead to anxiety and insomnia.  Who knew.

   Third, I realized that I was an angry mommy when I did not cultivate the things that made my heart sing.  So I clawed open some space for me time, because when momma ain’t happy, daddy doesn’t get sex and the kids get Wookie mommy.  And she is not a very nice person to be around.

   My husband is awesome.  He gets this and was proactive in making this space for me. 

   What could our faith communities do?

   Hmmm…well….one cool thing would be free child care during the day at the church - utilize those Sunday school rooms that are sitting empty during the week.  That way, no one’s house gets trashed.  If money is an issue, then form a co-op, where mommies can sign up to staff a couple of hours in the asylum and in return, they get coupons to use the childcare when they need it. 

   Just an idea - there is really nothing new under the sun.

   As you can tell I’m a little passionate about this…thanks for reading down to the bottom of my ridunculously long comment!

   Comment by Sarah - Nov 15, 2011 @ 07:43 AM

2. What about women who don’t feel the pull of motherhood?  I am 30, married almost 10 years to my high school sweet heart whom I love dearly.  I am still struggling to find myself.  My friends are all having babies, and telling me it’s the thing that you need to do to make your life complete.  I don’t feel that.
   How do I pursue a career and a life when so much of society sees me as defective for not wanting or having kids ‘before it’s too late?’
   Women are struggling to find a place, as their roles evolve, regardless of what role or roles they choose for themselves.  There’s no easy answer, it will all be different for different people. 
   I’m grateful for my husband’s support.  The problem has never been his lack of support, it’s been my lack of knowing what I need or how to ask for it!  That is the education I am working on for myself.

   Comment by Melissa Tolson - Nov 15, 2011 @ 12:50 PM

3. Thank you for writing this; very well said. I have found that as a woman leader, sometimes I am not considered for certain “jobs” because I am a mother. Very frustrating.  They just assume I’m too busy to do it. So, I think this issue needs to be addressed on both sides; not expecting more than what is possible, but also calling more mothers out of the shadows, and giving them more options.

   Comment by Jaimie - Nov 15, 2011 @ 02:41 PM

4. I agree that this is a huge problem for a lot of women. I think there’s another side to this story though and I’ve seen it in my own wife’s life.

   First, I want to let you know that my wife is brilliant. She graduated from High School at 16 and graduated Valedictorian in a class of about 400. She went to college and graduated with a 4.0. She went into ministry and did awesome things. Yet she was miserable. Why? At some point she realized that she was chasing after all the things she thought were supposed to make her happy. She was trying to find fulfillment in what she could accomplish. The world told her that in order for her to be a great woman she had to go out there and accomplish as much as she could with her life and by accomplishing I mean being a professional in some sense.

   After years of doing this she had a mental breakdown. She figured out that what she was chasing after would never make her happy. She walked away from it all to spend more time at home, raise children, and to support me in ministry.

   I totally agree, many women are not allowed to live to their full potential. For many of them they are unfulfilled because they are stay at home moms and should be doing something more. I also think though that many women are pushed to try and do more with their lives when it’s better for them not too. Considering very few young mothers are stay at home moms these days I tend to believe that there are more that are unfulfilled trying to chase the professional dream than there are those that are unfulfilled at home. I concede that I may be wrong on this though.

   I just wish this article was more balanced and showed the other side to the story. My fear is that many women who are stay at home moms or only work part time so that they can be at home more will see this and feel guilty for not “living to their potential” when maybe they are right where they need to be.

   Comment by Irving - Nov 16, 2011 @ 07:23 AM

5. Thanks so much to each of you for your perspectives!

   When we place our identity on chasing things: whether it be an amazing career, well-behaved children, a beautiful home, or how we look…we run the rat race of striving. This eventually leads to varying degrees of breakdown, because we will always find someone more ‘successful’ to compare ourselves to.

   When breakdown happens, if we are fortunate we finally give up. The giving up says ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ In this moment, we face the thing we were most afraid of. Failure. And yet in that dark moment, He rescues us and delivers us from the way things were.

   In the freedom that follows, we begin to discover what HE created for us. It is often very different than the thing we were running hard after on our own. We uncover the talents he knit together for us in our mothers womb. We uncover how our life has been weaving our story from our earliest memories.

   THAT discovery is the journey many of us are on. It is beautiful and scary yet somehow we are comfortable with the unknown. God is a good and gracious Father.  His plans are exceedingly and abundantly above anything we could ever ask or think…so we trust that.

   Comment by Rebekah Lyons - Nov 21, 2011 @ 07:32 PM

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