Lately, All of My Journaling Has Turned Into Prayer

Katie Lyke | Austin Motherhood Photographer

I have boxes—plural—in my closet filled with old journals. Stacks and stacks of composition books going all the way back to high school. My journals have gotten fancier over the years, but the mental pouring out has mostly remained the same.

Although it still astounds me when I go back and read some of those old entries just how intensely I felt things back then. The friendships. The boys. The drama. The deeply important problems that probably lasted all of three days but filled page after page. I have always had a lot of feelings, and apparently I have always needed somewhere to put them.

But lately, I have noticed that almost all of my journaling has turned into prayer.

Now, when I have a brief moment to sit down in the evening, after everyone is finally in bed and I have made it through all of the things that need to happen before I can actually be “done” for the day, I have a choice: I can let myself fall into the abyss that comes with numbing myself with the endless phone scroll or just one more episode, or I can take a few moments to do something that actually helps quiet my brain down, and put pen to paper.

And almost every time I do, no matter what I originally sit down to write about, it eventually becomes me crying out to God.

Help me be a better mother.

Help me be more patient. More calm. Less easily overwhelmed by the noise and the mess and the constant needing.

Help me be the version of myself I’m suppsed to be.

Help me fulfill whatever calling You have placed on my life. Help my business be successful. Help me achieve whatever creative purpose I am supposed to achieve. Help me use the gifts You have given me instead of wasting them because I am distracted or afraid or too tired to figure out what to do with them.

Help me not waste this beautiful, precious life.

I am always asking for help becoming the person I think I should be. The mother I want to be. The wife I want to be. The photographer and writer and business owner I want to be. The version of myself who is patient and present and purposeful and somehow is also able to keep a clean house and cook balanced meals and dust the baseboards.

But when I was writing last night, I had this realization that I think I have probably understood in some form before, but needed to be reminded of again:

I will never be all of those things—on purpose.

I will always struggle—on purpose.

I will never be enough on my own, and that is not evidence that I am doing life wrong. It is part of God’s design, because it continually points me back to Him. It reminds me, over and over again, that I need Him. That I cannot “grow into” a person who no longer needs grace.

I know you may believe something completely different than I do, and that's okay. But this is where I find myself right now—coming back to God again and again with all the ways I wish I were doing better, and beginning to understand that maybe He isn't waiting for me to finally get it all right. And I kept thinking that maybe there is another mother feeling the weight of all the ways she wishes she were doing better this week, too.

Summer is coming to an end, and I feel like this particular time of year always comes with a confusing amount of emotion for mothers. We are simultaneously craving the return of routine and a chance to breathe after the chaos of having everyone home, while also being constantly reminded by the internet that they’re only this young once and that we only get eighteen summers.

So we want school to start, but we also feel guilty for wanting school to start.

We are ready for structure, but we are sad that another season is ending.

We are exhausted from the noise and the snacks and the camps and the figuring out what everyone is going to do all day, but then we see a friend sending her child off to college and realize that the whole dynamic of her family is changing. The ordinary version of life she has known for eighteen years is shifting into something new, whether she is ready or not.

And suddenly we wonder whether we appreciated any of it enough.

Did I make summer magical enough? Was I present enough? Did we spend enough time together? Did I wish too much of it away? Should I have been more fun, more patient, less distracted, more grateful?

There it is again: the belief that if I could just try hard enough, I might finally become enough.

But I am not going to become a mother who never loses her patience, never needs a break, never looks forward to bedtime, and never feels two completely opposite things at the exact same time. I am not going to become a person who is able to hold the full weight of how precious this life is every single minute she is living it, especially when the baby is shrieking while throwing my wallet in the dog water and Home Alone 4 (don’t ask) is blaring in the background. I do not think any of us can.

Maybe we were never supposed to.

Maybe the point is not to finally get so good at motherhood that we no longer need help. Maybe it is to keep coming back—to God, to grace, to forgiveness, to the next morning and the next opportunity to try again.

I do not have anything especially polished or groundbreaking to offer here. This is not a list of ways to be more present before school starts or a reminder to soak up every second. Honestly, I think mothers already have enough reminders that time is passing. We know. We feel it all the time.

I just want you to know that if you are tired and grateful, relieved and heartbroken, ready for routine and already missing the summer that is not even quite over yet, you are not doing it wrong.

You are a person trying to carry the enormous beauty and weight of loving people through a life that keeps changing.

And you were never meant to carry all of it alone.