If I'm No Longer a Mother the Way I Thought I'd Be… Who am I?

I’m going to say it…

Christian moms - we made motherhood an idol.

Nobody meant to. It happened slowly. In the way we built our identities around them. The way we measured our worth by their grades, their friend groups, their phone calls home and their success. The way our peace rose and fell with their moods.

We put them on a pedestal.

We put motherhood on a pedestal.

And then estrangement walked in and knocked the whole thing over.

Let me be clear before I go any further: I am not writing this from a pedestal of my own. I am in this. Right now. Working through it in real time.

This experience became an unraveling of who I thought I was..

“If I’m no longer a mother in the way I thought I would be… who am I?”

“If it doesn’t look how I expected… now what?”

How do I realign my life - my worth, my purpose, my future - back to something that actually honors God? Because if I’m being honest, the version of motherhood I had built in my head wasn’t honoring Him. It was honoring an outcome. A picture. A version of me and my family on the outside that felt socially acceptable.

Take that away, and who am I?

That’s the question.

I sat at the feet of Jesus broken. Gutted. Rejected in the most personal, most vulnerable way a person can be rejected. And I asked Him - really asked Him - “ What now?”

He didn’t flinch.

He just started, gently, picking up the broken pieces of me. He didn’t put them back the way they were. He put them back better. More whole than I have ever been in my entire life.

Here is what I’m learning…

Our kids were never supposed to make us whole.

That spot wasn’t theirs. That spot was Jesus’. And we gave it away. We handed it over to flawed humans - humans who were never built to carry the weight of being our worth.

Your worth was never supposed to live in your child’s approval.

It was always supposed to live in God.

The estrangement didn’t take your worth. It just showed you where you’d been storing it.

That’s why we unraveled when they left.

Okay but Nicole. My calling was to be a mom.

You still are one.

Your calling isn’t done unless God told you it was done. And let me say the quiet part out loud:

Your kids don’t get the say.

Your child’s silence doesn’t revoke your calling. Your child’s anger doesn’t revoke your calling. The fact that motherhood doesn’t look how you pictured it doesn’t revoke your calling.

So why are we going to waste what God wants to use?

I am not a biblical scholar. I am not qualified in the way the world counts qualified. But I am called. And Scripture says that's exactly how God works - He chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; the weak things to shame the strong. (1 Corinthians 1:27). I’m going to keep talking. And I’m going to ask you what I had to ask myself:

What is God trying to show you in this season?

Because nothing is wasted with Him.

Hear me - nothing is wasted with Him.

Not the tears. Not the silence. Not the version of yourself you thought you were going to be. Not the years that feel like they were stolen.

God actually speaks directly to that last one. "I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten." (Joel 2:25) The stolen years. He sees them. He's not done with them.

Now. Before you spiral. Let me read your mind.

You’re thinking you don’t understand. No one understands. The church will judge me. My friends are already judging me. I failed.

Friend. Sister.

The Bible is full of broken families.

Joseph's brothers sold him. Sold him. And years later - after the pit and the prison and all of it - Joseph looked at them and said you intended to harm me, but God intended it for good. (Genesis 50:20) That is not a tidy story. That is a gutted, years-long, nobody-saw-it-coming redemption. And God wrote every chapter of it.

The Bible is full of people who made terrible, dumb, selfish, generational-curse-level choices and God still called them. Still used them. Still wrote them into the story.

So when Satan is over here whispering you failed, you’re washed up, no one will understand, you must be a horrible person - Jesus is over here saying show me where it says that?? Let me show you instead.

Then He hands you a Bible full of broken people that He still used.

Estrangement is a defining season.

It reshapes you. That part is not optional.

How it reshapes you… that part is up to you.

Will you stay sad, bitter, and angry? Or will you let the Lord work? Let Him rebuild? Let Him walk out His calling on your life even when it doesn’t look like what you expected?

You don’t get to skip the reshaping.

You do get to choose the shape.

xoxo-Standing with you between hope and heartbreak,

Nicole