I might sound like a bad mother, but I have a confession to make: I love my son, I delight in my son, and I would literally lay my life down for my son. However, I do not feel called to be a mom.
I came to this realization years before I ever gave birth, back when a friend of mine announced she was pregnant. Although her pregnancy was planned and wanted, she was also freaked out. She wondered how the baby would disrupt her life and if she was ready. She had none of the feelings that pregnant women are “supposed” to have—the joyful excitement and the glowing face. But as I observed her I felt oddly comforted; I knew I would feel exactly the same way.
I have always wanted to have kids, but, as I began to notice other women expressing their own “callings” to motherhood, I hesitated to use that word for myself. For me, motherhood was more of a desire than it was a calling. It was a good desire, a God-given one. But a calling? I wasn’t so sure.
Over the years I have reflected on why motherhood does not feel like a calling to me, when it does to so many women. I heard author Rebekah Lyons describe calling as the place “where your talents and burdens collide,” and this definition shed some light on one factor: I am not a kid person.
It’s not that I dislike children or that I don’t know what to do with them. But I am not passionate about children. I never enjoyed babysitting or wanted to work in the church nursery. I had neither talents nor burdens for children, so that might explain the lack of “calling” toward full-time kid-raising.
But there’s another reason I didn’t name my motherly desire a calling, and it has to do with our use of the word itself. Sometimes I wonder if “calling” has become a catchall term, stripped of its true meaning. Many of us use “calling” when what we really mean is job, life season, or basic Christian obedience.
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SOURCE: Christianity Today
Sharon Hodde Miller
BCNN1 WP 