What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

I live in a world where everybody has a mother, and yet it seems as though anybody who is somebody with a choice has no desire to be a mother. Some girls, perhaps, are born with a natural aversion to the role, but most girls grow into their loathing, pressured by outside influences and a world screaming into their ears, saying that motherhood is petty and trifling.

I was almost that girl.

Before I hit my teens, I had no other desire than to grow up and be a mommy—just like my mommy! But with age comes self-awareness, and I suddenly began to realize that when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, “Mommy” was not an acceptable answer.

“Oh, of course, honey,” they would say, “but what do you really want to be—besides that?”

There had to be a besides that? I contemplated the conundrum for awhile, and finally concluded that I would pick something else I loved in addition to motherhood. So for the next several years, my pat answer was, “A beautician.” If I felt especially brave, mommyhood might get tacked on…or it might not. It all really depended on who I was talking to and how I thought they would perceive my ambitions. I went through this so much, that I really began to believe that motherhood just might be last on my priority list. I would do everything else that needed doing in the world, and settle down in my middle age, perhaps to have 1 or 2.5 children.

However, God showed my family and I verses such as Psalms 128:1, 2: “Blessed is every one who fears the LORD, who walks in His ways. When you eat the labor of your hands, you shall be happy, and it shall be well with you.” Isn’t happiness the ultimate search of so many people, as they flit from one thing to another like bees on a quest for nectar? As my parents and I talked, I knew what God’s way was for me, and although a beautician is a respectable job by all means, it was not to be a part of my life. The moment I realized that God’s way for me was to be a Proverbs 31 woman (“Who can find a virtuous woman? For her worth is far above rubies….She watches over the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many daughters have done well, but you excel them all.’ Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing, but a woman who fears the LORD, she shall be praised [Proverbs 31:10, 27-30].”), was the moment I became free. The moment I submitted myself to God’s expectation for my life and threw away the world’s expectations was the moment I gained purpose for my life. And the moment I embraced motherhood as the greatest calling in the world for a woman, was the moment I truly became happy.

Now, when someone asks me what I’m doing and what I plan to do (apparently some people are under the false impression that I’m all grown up, because I don’t get the “what-will-you-do-when-you-grow-up” question like I used to), I might give them a taste of my current life—teaching music, playing music, distance Bible college, and family. But I always suck in my stomach just a little and proudly give them a taste of my future life—a wife and mother.

My life right now is in preparation for my life to come. My life right now is not some sort of purgatory or waiting period for a gloriousness to come, though—it is full, purposeful, and happy. I have no desire to leave home and go off to school for four years and tens of thousands of dollars, because I know that I will come out with not one more scrap of training towards my profession of choice. So I remain at home—learning far more in mind, body, and soul than I ever could at some university—and training for the life God has shown for me.

“[Margaret] had met brilliant women, rich women, courted women—but where among them was one whose face had ever shone as her mother’s shone today? The overdressed, idle dowagers; the matrons with their too-gay frocks, their too-full days, their too-rich food; the girls, all crudeness, artifice, all scheming openly for their own advantage—where among them all was happiness?...And suddenly theories and speculation ended, and she knew. She knew that faithful, self-forgetting service and the love that spends itself over and over, only to be renewed again and again, are the secret to happiness. For another world, perhaps leisure and beauty and luxury—but in this one, ‘whosoever loses his life shall gain it.’ Margaret knew now that her mother was not only the truest, the finest, the most generous woman she had ever known, but the happiest as well.”

Picture Credit

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Quotation taken from: Norris, Kathleen. Mother. Vision Forum, San Antonio, 2006.