on resilience in motherhood

or: (re)learning how to pray

This piece ended up going in a completely different direction to the one I had originally planned, and I have felt a bit hesitant to publish it, because who am I to be writing about prayer or the spiritual life? In the end I decided to share it despite my misgivings. I hope it is useful to you.

One of my neighbours came round for a cup of tea last week. Her second child was born a few weeks ago. Her eldest isn’t quite two years old, so I asked her how she was finding the adjustment to having two under two, and she confessed that she feels like she “lacks resilience” and “isn’t doing as well as others”. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something along the lines of “I think all mothers feel like that”, and “everything is hard when you’re doing it for the first time”. When she told me how she thought I was doing so well with my own two, I laughed and told her how just the day before I’d had to call my husband home early from work because I had reached the end of my tether, and how the week before he’d taken our older daughter away to visit his parents for most of the week because I absolutely was not coping and needed a few days to catch up on some work and have a reset.

Tired Mother by Charles W. Howe

I’ve been thinking about our conversation, and in particular about how my friend concluded that she must lack resilience because, in her own judgement, she isn’t “doing as well” as others, or, perhaps, as well as she had expected herself to be doing. In other words, that if she was more resilient, she wouldn’t be finding motherhood so hard.

The earliest known usage of the noun resilience is in the 1620s, in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon. It is derived from the Latin verb resilire, which means “to jump back” or “to recoil”. The Latin verb is made up of two parts, the prefix re-, which means “back, again”, and the verb salire, which means “to leap, spring”. Both the modern definition, and the Latin root, contain the idea of adjusting to, or recovering from, difficulties or challenges.

The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands”¹

Building resilience is a process. It isn’t something some people are born with and others aren’t. The process by which we become more resilient is through dealing with challenges and difficulties. The hard times when we feel like we aren’t doing so well as others, when we feel in over our heads, when we wonder if we are up to the task at hand, these are the times when resilience is built.

Let’s consider another area of life in which resilience is prized: physical fitness. In the context of fitness, resilience is understood as the ability to recover, withstand, and grow in the face of challenges and stressors. Athletes seek to develop not just physical, but mental resilience as. How do they do this? By undergoing training that is progressively more difficult and strenuous. In this way they build resilience and increase their capacity for handling physical and mental difficulties. I really like the athletic metaphor for motherhood, and often use it when I need to give myself a pep talk.