The Parent I Thought I’d Be—and the One I Became

GUEST WRITER: AMY LAMBERT

There’s been a lot of parenting discourse circulating on the internet lately. From those who are filling their quiver with little Christian arrow children to those who espouse all of the reasons having children is, at best, irresponsible and, at worst, misery-inducing. People’s opinions about the place of parenting and procreating in our society run the gamut. 

I recently read a comment on Substack from someone accusing those who are more progressive of not speaking up in the conversation about having and raising children and promoting family life. They argued that “the right” holds a monopoly within conversations on this topic and “the left” has gone silent. Maybe you’ve seen the discourse. Maybe, like me, you grew up in churches where children played a very specific role—to be obedient to all in authority over them, from their parents to the pastor and everyone in between—and you’re hesitant to engage in public discourse on the topic for several reasons. Like seemingly every other topic on the internet, child rearing and family life have become polarized.

What I Thought Motherhood Would Be

Growing up, I knew two things for sure: I wanted to get married young and have a lot of kids. I consistently replied to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with, “A cheerleader and a mom.” This thrilled the adults in my church to no end. My answer to that question evolved over time—a professional soccer player, a teacher, an English professor—but one thing remained the same: I wanted children more than anything, and I knew I could figure out the rest as I went.

I grew up in two Southern Baptist churches, one from birth to age thirteen, and the second from age thirteen until I graduated from high school. I then attended Dallas Baptist University. School had become pretty important to me by the time I left for college, but the lure of moving away, meeting and marrying a Godly man (preferably a pastor), and eventually becoming a mother was strong enough to send me packing to a highly religious college setting rather than a more highly esteemed academic institution. I had it all figured out; I just needed to get the ball rolling on the rest of my life.

But that’s not what happened. A few months before leaving for college, I reconnected with a guy—my now husband, a friend from middle school—and began to spend more time with him. Long story short, we eventually ended up at the same college, got married at twenty-one, both went to graduate school, and found ourselves expecting our first baby when we were twenty-four and twenty-five. I felt like I had waited forever, my whole life, really, for this moment when I could step into my role as a mother. I knew my real life was just beginning.

What Motherhood Actually Became

That was twelve years ago. I write to you now as a mother of two boys, ages eleven and seven. I didn’t have five kids as I had originally planned, and I have a full-time job “outside of the home.” I have been diagnosed with anxiety, which flared intensely in the postpartum period after both of my boys’ births. I have deconstructed and am currently reconstructing my understanding of faith. My husband is a pastor, but he’s not the Southern Baptist boy I married—he now pastors a Post-Evangelical church in Austin, Texas, where we are surrounded by people who are hanging on to Jesus despite a lot of questions and church hurt.

Despite the differences between my view here and what I expected, I truly love being a mom. It’s hard, though. It’s so loud. My kids have a lot of feelings, and they like to throw balls at each other (and sometimes miss and hit me). They don’t seem to care much about the things I care about, like closing their mouths when they chew, not swinging their metal water bottles into the walls as they walk through the house, and wearing nice(r) clothes to church rather than their typical athletic wear.

I thought I would be raising kids whose purpose was to make me look good. They would listen to me, especially in public. They would wear matching khaki shorts and fix their hair for church. They would memorize bible verses and never talk back to me. What I got was two actual human beings with their own preferences and motivations and varying degrees of interest in God, church, and the Bible. 

And while it hasn’t been what I expected, I know that it’s better. So many of us are deconstructing and reconstructing while in the throes of parenthood, trying to manage our own experiences, expectations, and triggers while attempting to present our children with a God who truly is loving, inclusive, and kind. The faith I had before I became a mother no longer stands—it has evolved into something so much more beautiful, secure, and mine.

What I’ve Learned Since Becoming a Parent

Please do not hear me saying that I am a more complete person or a better Christian because I had children. That is simply untrue. God does not prefer that women are mothers or that people are parents. I am not more valuable to God or to society because I am a parent. What I am hoping to convey here is that I once believed I would be more valuable to the church and to God if I became a mother. Because of that wrong belief, becoming a mom has shown me who God truly is and who I am in relation to God’s unconditional love. I had a romanticized, unrealistic, unhealthy view of motherhood that, thank God, no longer holds. And I thank my kids (in part) for that.

Here’s what I’ve learned since becoming a mother:

Our children are wonderfully made—and so are we

No matter how much we want to chart a path for our kids, they come into this world with their own preferences, predispositions, and personalities. I grew up hearing a lot about the traits God preferred, especially in girls and women: quiet, submissive, agreeable, pretty, gentle, and deferential. I am still sorting through how I am naturally wired versus how I learned to behave in the Southern Baptist church, not just as a female, but also as a kid. Some believe our kids have limitations because of their ages, or women have limitations due to their gender. But when the church villainizes, gender-izes, or age-izes certain personality traits or dispositions, the body of Christ suffers. 

God gifts us all in different ways, independent of our age, gender, or any other category we fit into. Just like it is unhelpful to say that women can’t show strong leadership qualities or that men shouldn’t be sensitive, it is similarly harmful to say that kids can’t have strong opinions or things to teach the adults in their lives. If we want to show them that they are valuable to God, we have to value them, both at home and in the church. Not that we don’t correct or guide them, but we should do so from a state of unconditional love rather than fear or need for control. This is the foundation for their belief in an inclusive, loving God, and, I believe, our greatest task as parents and church leaders.

Our children’s relationships with God and the church are their own

One of my kids is really interested in church, theology, and God. The other? Not so much. One wants to pray with us before bedtime, and the other does not. But they are both kind, compassionate, observant, inclusive kids. They both care deeply about the people around them. We don’t show preference for one over the other based on their interest (or lack thereof) in things concerning faith, God, and church. We don’t assign moral value to their interests or the way their brains are wired.

When my oldest was very young, I read a quote that has stuck with me, and I try to apply it in all of my conversations with both of my boys:

Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.

Catherine M. Wallace

So when my son tells me, “I’m not sure if I believe in that,” we talk about it. Even if I am surprised or concerned by what he says, I try to remain neutral and curious. We remind him that God’s love for him is not dependent on what he believes. We share what we wonder about or have difficulty understanding and believing, as well as historical understandings and various interpretations of scripture. We encourage honesty without shame and emphasize that people have different opinions—and that we love him so very much, whether or not he believes in or agrees with any particular topic. Most importantly, my husband and I try to keep the conversation open and ongoing. 

To be very honest, I don’t know how this will pan out. This kind of openness was not modeled for us, and many of the adults I used to know and trust have decided that what we now believe (or don’t believe) is a threat to their belief systems. They have cut us off entirely. I often grieve the loss of these relationships, but I know that if I have to choose relationship or control with my children—and I believe that we do have to choose—I am choosing relationship. I have chosen to emphasize connection over obedience because this is what I see modeled by Jesus in scripture. Connection begets change, not the other way around. 

Love liberates. It doesn’t bind.

Maya Angelou

I have “love liberates” tattooed on my left ribcage, near my heart, to remind me that my anxiety for my kids is not their problem, it’s mine. I want them to feel the full liberation that life in Christ brings, not my stress about whether or not they present in ways that make others think more highly of me. I want them to feel safe and able to bring their full selves to me, without fear of condemnation or shame, just as we all can with God. 

The church should value and serve everyone equally

God does not show preference, and neither should we.

Mother’s Day is a big deal in the Southern Baptist Church. In the church where I spent my teenage years, each Mother’s Day brought the same ritual: the pastor would ask all of the women with children to stand. He then said, “Stay standing if you have more than one child.” Most women remained standing. “Stay standing if you have more than three children.” More sat down. This game would continue until, every single year, the same woman, a mother of eleven children, would remain standing, while the entire congregation applauded, and someone handed her a cheap bouquet of flowers.

I am now horrified by this practice and the way it must have made women in the congregation feel: women who didn’t or couldn’t have children, who had lost children, who wanted more children, who didn’t want children, and who felt less-than for whatever complicated feelings they felt related to motherhood and being a woman in a conservative church. This memory helps me understand, though, why becoming a mother seemed like the highest calling I aspired to. It also informs how I respond to current messaging about the role of women in the church and the world at large. What is rewarded is repeated, and the men of my church were sending a very clear message: you will be highly esteemed here if you become a mother, and the more kids you have, the more worthy you are to God and to us. 

Hopefully, this overt preference for mothers, and mothers of multiple children, has not been quite so blatant in the churches you’ve been in. Still, the idea persists, pernicious and insidious, in so many of our churches. We see it in the way women with children are prioritized in women’s ministry, with much of the messaging focusing on women’s roles as mothers. We spy it in the limited small group and Sunday School offerings for single moms, unmarried women, and widows, while most of the programming caters to moms, married women, married couples, young families, empty nesters, etc. We suspect that married women have more opportunities for leadership positions and platforming within the church. We wonder if unmarried and/or childless women are quietly seen as a problem to be dealt with rather than equal members in a church body meant to serve and include everyone. 

A More Liberating Vision of Faith and Family

The same goes for children. They are not just the church of the future; they are the church of today. If we don’t do a good job at capturing their attention and imagination, at loving them and introducing them to a loving God, they won’t be the church of the future anyway—they will leave like the hundreds of thousands of people who simply can no longer abide by the inequality they see in the church. Jesus had a lot to say about how people treat kids, and whether we have kids or not, we need to follow his lead. Here’s just one example:

He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.”

Mark 9:36–37

No matter what the church believes on any given topic, it should serve the needs of everyone within its walls: young and old, men and women, and those who do not fit neatly into those categories, those with children and those without, the able bodied and disabled, those who give, those who can’t, and those who need additional support. I am not suggesting that we need separate ministries or groups for each of these categories. Rather, I’m proposing that everyone feels welcome regardless of their defining characteristics. We are all part of one body: the church. If God doesn’t show favoritism, neither should we. If God welcomes everyone, so should we. 

As I’ve learned more about God’s truly unconditional love for me, I’ve become a more supportive friend, a more forgiving spouse, a more attentive neighbor, and a more accepting parent. My kids didn’t make these things happen, but birthing them helped me to see the toxic thinking that so many of our churches promote. This cannot be the case. We are all equal in the eyes of God, no matter our age, gender, socioeconomic status, citizenship, or anything else about us, and the church’s job is to reflect this truth. 

Thank you to each of you working to realize this reality in your local church bodies. We are all better for it.

Amy Lambert

Guest Contributor

Amy Lambert is a writer and pediatric speech-language pathologist. By day, Amy serves kids and families within the public schools of Texas, but her dream has always been to write. Amy writes for two Substack publications: The Book Splurge and Public Theology. She and her husband, Zach, live together with their children in Austin, Texas. Amy is currently working on her first novel.