How to Learn Your Lesson When You're Not Enough

Am I a good mom? Am I a good colleague? Am I good at listening? Am I good enough?

The doubts that bombard a woman are sometimes different than those that afflict a man.

While women today may face different challenges or experience new empowerment, our bodies and psyches continue to grapple with the ageless, dawn-of-time reality: either producing the potential for new life or creating a new life that takes hold in our bodies and begins to grow. We then contend with how this new life inherently creates a new role for us – the tension of our earthbound mothering instincts explode in the face of flying work demands and other responsibilities we have in our communities.

The other day, my 18-year-old daughter told me quite matter-of-factly that she didn’t grow up feeling like she could talk with me about things. I was stunned. She simply went on to explain that both her parents were always so busy, or stressed, it seemed to her: busy with work and overwhelmed by the responsibilities of living in a foreign country – sometimes frustrated with relational demands and cyclic traumas – and other times just plain angry with one another. Bottomline, she just didn’t feel like she could come to us and talk about things.

She finished her memory and reflection by saying, she doesn’t feel that way anymore. She explained that now, she feels more free to talk with either one of us, but she simply has never developed that habit so it’s not her go-to when she really needs to talk. Then she walked out of the room and left me with a whole lot of feelings and things to think about.

It’s one thing to intellectually assent to the fact that we do all have blind spots. It boosts our sense of self-awareness to claim this. But it’s something quite different, even humiliating, to suddenly see – in a flash – one of our blind spots so clearly. It can feel like a bit of undoing who you thought you were or how you thought you were doing. Someone else’s perception of you may not perfectly reflect the truth, but for that other person it is the truth of how they experienced you.

My daughter did go on to explain that this busyness that made her feel we were inaccessible began to change when we came to the U.S. We took a year of sabbatical, living in small-town Wisconsin near my husband’s father. That’s when things began to change.

And this is true. In a new context we didn’t have the same responsibilities and relationships; or any actually. We had more down time. And with that time, we had the opportunity to unpack and evaluate our experiences of living and working and raising a family for 14 years in Kazakhstan.

But even as we move on from the worst of that trauma of transitioning to life in the U.S., the biggest lesson we have learned is to pay attention, to not be too quick to dismiss a memory or a remark, but instead to pause. We can’t go back and re-do anything, but we can let it inform what we make happen today and in the future.

It takes time to cultivate and nurture new habits so that they become unconsciously natural. As I commit to be available, accessible, through practice and experience, this is what I am doing. I am learning never to underestimate the importance of being available and accessible, and I see our daughter taking advantage of that. A new habit.

I’m learning that no matter our good intentions or our level of self-awareness, we miss things along the way and in this, others miss receiving things from us what they needed to get. This conversation with my daughter was as prosaic as it was profound. I was not enough for my girl. I will not be enough for those I love. As a woman who is a wife, mother, daughter, sister, colleague.

Humbled, I pray for myself. To accept the truth with grace and move forward seeing things a new way. I pray for her. To know the One who is enough – He not only meets each need but also gives her the desires of her heart.