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.

Tour du Mont Blanc, 2017

I’m not much of an athlete myself, but I have done a lot of hiking over the years. One summer my mum, myself, and several of my siblings did a 10 day hike through the Alps called the Tour du Mont Blanc. I had not really trained for this hike in any meaningful way, and embarked on it with the arrogance and confidence of a 25 year old. I well remember the burning feeling in my legs on the second day when slogging up what felt like an interminably long and steep ascent. My mum had given us some theoretical “average altitude per day” calculation, so when we got to the top of the pass we thought we were done for that day. Imagine our horror when we found out that our route actually took us back down into the valley, and straight up an even higher pass on the other side. All I will say, is that it felt like willpower alone that got me up that mountain. The first few days I ached all over, and every step was a struggle. But I kept going, and by the end of the trip I was stronger and more resilient, physically and mentally. If I had abandoned the trip because it was hard and painful, I would have missed out, not just on the incredible views and scenery, but on the opportunity to grow.

Motherhood is a little like this. Building capacity as a mother requires work, and it often feels difficult and uncomfortable. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong, or that you are inadequate. It means you’re human. The initial learning curve for most of us is steep. My first foray into motherhood was difficult, and I felt like I was floundering. I wrote my first Substack article about how difficult I found the process of becoming a mother. As a first time mum, pretty much everything felt intimidating and scary. It took me months to build up the confidence to take my baby to the supermarket on my own, I had a panic attack when my husband stopped working from home and returned to the office, and if he needed to travel for work I would beg my mum to come and stay with me. I felt out of my depth constantly, and I didn’t like it. I do think I had some form of undiagnosed postpartum anxiety, but pretty much every single mother I have spoken to attests to how overwhelming, challenging, and disorienting they found motherhood at the beginning.

I remember looking at mothers who had multiple children, who seemed to be far more relaxed and less stressed than I was with my one baby, and thinking “how on earth do they manage”. I couldn’t fathom how anyone could possibly take two, let alone three children, swimming on their own, or manage to do bedtime for multiple children, or find time to fit in exercise or hobbies. By contrast, after my second daughter was born, I remember taking her to the supermarket at maybe two weeks old and thinking how enjoyable it was. My husband is away with work this week and it’s been absolutely fine, bedtime was chaotic and took forever but eventually everyone went to sleep in the correct beds. I took both girls swimming on my own last week and actually enjoyed it. I regularly do all kinds of things that I would once have found impossibly daunting with barely a second thought. When I tell people who don’t have children that having two kids feels easier than having one, they usually don’t believe me, but it’s true nonetheless.

In some ways life is harder now, and I certainly have more to do, but I am finding it easier. Why? There are probably multiple reasons, but one of them is that I have grown in resilience and in my capacity to manage. This was not an instantaneous process, in fact it was an arduous one. My motherhood muscles have been strengthened through repeated use. I don’t think this would have happened if I hadn’t had to deal with situations that I found challenging or stressful.

I do not mean to sound dismissive of the challenges mothers face, nor to suggest that anyone struggling with motherhood just needs to tough it out and get on with it, because “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. There is nuance needed here. It is vital that mothers, especially new mothers, are given the support they need. It is normal to need support as a new mother, and not a sign that you are failing or incapable. So often that support is lacking, or is inadequate, and women and their babies suffer greatly because of this. But I think we need to hold this in tension with the reality that an element of struggle and difficulty is probably necessary for most (or all?) of us in order for us to increase our capacity as mothers. Sometimes a mother might be so weakened or overwhelmed that she needs a great deal of support, for a long time, but the long term goal must surely always be to help her increase in strength, capacity, and confidence.

In my own experience it was the feeling of isolation that was most crushing during my first postpartum. To quote from a piece I wrote a few months ago:

I remember those early postpartum days as a desperately lonely time. I was so afraid of everything, plagued by intrusive thoughts that made me question my sanity. Afraid I would drop my baby, afraid I would suffocate her by falling asleep whilst breastfeeding, afraid I would put her down for a nap and that she wouldn’t wake up. But most of all, I was afraid of being alone with my fears.

I was able to call on the support of my mum, who mothered me as I in turn mothered my baby. Just as my newborn baby craved my presence, so I craved the presence of my own mother, to soothe and calm and support.

My two very different postpartum experiences have often led me to wonder what makes the difference between challenges that build resilience and strength, and challenges that overwhelm our capacity to cope. Why did the difficulties of my first postpartum feel like suffering, yet the difficulties of my second felt like an opportunity to grow? Was it just bad luck with my first? A happy accident with my second? Is it inevitable that one’s first initiation into motherhood will be overwhelming, or are there ways we can ease the transition?

I don’t have neat answers to these questions, but they are important ones. I had originally planned to write a list here of how to build resilience as a mother, loosely based on the “7 Cs” of resilience: competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping and control. That list might be a helpful one, but someone else will have to write it. I was going to talk about how I got better at not comparing myself to other mothers, and learnt to trust my own instincts and abilities. Both true, but not the whole truth.

The truth, if I am being completely honest, the one thing that has most enabled me to grow in resilience as a mother has been this: relearning how to pray, and actively seeking the assistance of Divine Grace to overcome the challenges I face.

image via Unsplash

I began praying before I really believed anyone would answer. I was raised in a Christian family, but by the time I became a mother it had been years since I had regularly attended church or actively practised my faith. Prayer was something that I thought of as a quaint ritual with no real meaning or power. At first, before I would pray for myself, I would ask my Catholic-convert mother to pray and ask Our Lady to intercede for me. These prayers of my mother seemed to get answered with a speed that was almost alarming.² My husband and I had an in-joke for several months that if we really needed something all we had to do was get my mum to pray to Mary about it. We made light of it, but secretly I was disturbed. I sensed that I couldn’t continue indefinitely to ask for the prayers of Our Lady whilst refusing to acknowledge the truth She pointed towards.

I carried a set of rosary beads in the pocket of my jeans for months before I actually prayed the Rosary, but eventually I began praying myself. At first these prayers were born mostly of desperation, when I didn’t know what else to do or who else to turn to. In some ways I treated Our Lady like a kind of heavenly vending machine. It was still a one way relationship where I was trying to maximise the amount of help I could receive whilst maintaining as much independence and freedom as possible. Yet even these selfish and half-hearted prayers were remarkably effective. And, despite my having no intention of this happening, I began to change. It seemed that the mere act of asking for assistance from someone who I only half believed in was doing me good. Slowly, prayer became a more regular part of my life. Then it began to sort of seep out of me.

“I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me.”

C.S. Lewis

Praying slowly released me from the pressure I felt to be a perfect mother. It allowed me to acknowledge that my unspoken fear, that I wasn’t strong enough or good enough to be the mother I ought, was actually true, but that was ok, because I was no longer relying solely on my own strength or abilities. “Grant me the strength to make it to the end of the day, or just to the end of this tantrum” I would plead. I began to find that in situations in which I would previously have crumbled under the pressures of motherhood, and spiralled downwards into anxiety, frustration and depression, I was able to surrender control and somehow keep going. I realised that the work of caring for my children and creating a home was holy work, not because I am holy, but because God is, and this was the work He called me to do with Him. Paradoxically, I gained a renewed sense of the importance of striving for virtue and excellence as a mother when I began to understand that this was not a task I had to do on my own. As a brand new mother I had craved the presence of my mother, but when I began praying I realised I could live my life blessed with the presence of Christ and His Holy Mother.

So maybe the “7 Cs of Resilience” don’t totally miss the mark after all. Through prayer I was connected to Divine love and learnt to surrender control. I found the strength to cope with difficulties and have been granted grace to grow in competence and moral character. This has increased my confidence and allowed me to effectively contribute in a way that I believe is of eternal significance.

As always, I’d love to hear your perspectives and experiences. What do you think makes the difference between experiencing the ‘ordinary trials’ of motherhood as suffering vs experiencing a similar situation as an opportunity to grow? Let me know in the comments!

1. https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience

2. The first instance I can remember is when I had been in labour with my first daughter for over 24 hours and the OB was threatening me with a c-section due to ‘failure to progress’. I messaged my mum and she replied with “I’ve asked Mary to intercede for you” and lo and behold, within an hour I was fully dilated and able to birth my daughter without surgery. A couple of months later I lost one of the diamonds from my engagement ring. The ring was one that had originally belonged to my late maternal grandmother, and it held a lot of sentimental value for my mother as well as me. After searching everywhere I had given the diamond up for lost, and uttered a prayer to Our Lady out of sheer desperation. I almost immediately felt a pull to check the chest of drawers where I stored my clothes. I opened the bottom drawer and there was the diamond.