Our two oldest children are getting married within two months of each other this year, so I am officially entering a different stage of motherhood. This time of transition has given me an opportunity to reflect on my journey of learning how to mother our seven beautiful blessings from God. If I could go back in time and give myself some advice, it would be this: You don’t need to be an expert on everything. God’s grace will help you to be the mom they need.
I married the love of my life Bob Lesnefsky at the chapel at Franciscan University the night after he finished his last final in December of 1999. As I got pregnant on our honeymoon and had baby after baby (three under three!), I felt like I quickly became a professional on all things infant and toddler related.
Just when I thought I had it all figured out, our oldest turned thirteen and decided she didn’t like me anymore. I’ll never forget taking a picture of her friends and her as they were about to go to a movie on her birthday. All the other girls were smiling at me as I saw our daughter barely moving her mouth beyond a scowl and rolling her eyes. By that point I knew how to deal with many things, but a teenager giving me an attitude? What did I know about that? Now that she is twenty-four and we have made it through those moody years, we look back on that picture and laugh. But the crisis of feeling in over my head was real, and as each of our children went through their own unique growing pains, it only deepened. I ordered books on parenting. I listened to podcasts and poured over Catholic women’s Instagram and YouTube accounts.
As any of you moms of older children can relate, the problems started to become like the amusement park game “whack a mole.” “Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems” was the proverbial statement that best captured my experience. There was our second teen sneaking out of the house to go to parties. Our third teen who left for college and stopped going to Mass. Our fourth child was diagnosed with ADHD. All the resources that I looked to helped. Yet I started to feel like the Lord was calling me to trust in my natural ability as their mother more than my desperate search for how to feel like an expert again.
The hardest time we had with our children started three years ago, when a move to a new house triggered our sixth child’s anxiety disorder. It broke my heart to watch our happy nine-year-old girl start to have nightly panic attacks and such severe OCD that she stopped eating. We brought her to different types of therapy and specialists. We started her on medication and adjusted her diet. All of this helped, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I had been enough for her this wouldn’t have happened. I really believed that because I didn’t have my doctorate in anxiety or mood disorders, I wasn’t able to be the mom my daughter needed. A turning point came when I went to meet with our daughter’s counselor. I was crying as I told her that I wished I had a degree in psychology so I could help her more. The counselor looked at me sweetly and responded, “Kate, you are her mom. You love her. That is helping her more than any degree ever could.” This comforted my heart so deeply. Through her gentle words, I started to realize that the Lord isn’t expecting me to be adept at every problem life throws our way. As moms, we are daily given more than we thought we could handle as we strive to raise our children in this broken world. But Jesus is with us! He is the expert on all things, especially love. He helps us to be all that we need to be for our children. In any areas of expertise we may lack, he brings beautiful people like our daughter’s counselor to help.
My spiritual director recently taught me this simple prayer to say when I am feeling overwhelmed, “Jesus, I can’t do this on my own. I need you to help me.” I now turn to this prayer when I don’t have the answers. I have also developed a devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows. She understands my mother’s heart and can be there for our children even when I can’t. I am learning to trust that, just like St. Paul, Jesus’ power is made perfect in my weaknesses as a mother. Through this power I am enough for our children, expert or not.