I was talking to my sister the other day, and she told me her teenage daughters (the two older of her four children) had both been crying the previous day after school.
One was upset over friend problems. The other was upset over algebra problems. My sister said she’d helped them through as much as she could, offering understanding and sympathy and suggestions for going forward. (For the record, she said she did not and could not offer help on the algebra beyond, “Can you ask your teacher before school tomorrow?”)
Later that night, when my brother-in-law got home, he commented that my sister looked tired. (I assume he meant “more tired than usual.”) She told him, “It’s been a really hard day here.” After she filled him in on the backstory, he said, “I just talked to both girls, and I wouldn’t have known anything was wrong.”
Then he said something pretty profound: “That’s because you took their burdens on yourself.”
Oh, mama, isn’t this what we do as moms? We lift loads off our children’s minds and hearts, and, by the grace, we do it so well so much of the time and our children trust us so completely that they can then, in many cases, be freed of those weights and go on with no indication to someone looking from the outside in that there ever was a burden in the first place.
This is our high calling and privilege, and usually we are only too glad if we can, in fact, take a burden on ourselves and lighten the load for our children. It is not always possible or even always a good idea, but when it is possible and when it does good and not harm, we want to do it.
And yet what lightens our children can weigh on us. What lifts them can push us down. What energizes them can fatigue us. What refuels them can drain us.
We keep adding to this load and stoop over more and more until we are barely trudging along. If we don’t do something to lighten our load, we eventually fall over.
