There you sit. With a crying baby and a grumpy toddler and a kitchen full of dishes and a heart full of lonely.
You scroll aimlessly and wonder why they‘ve all got it all together. In this great big world full of people, you’re the only one, it seems, who shakes her head at night wishing. Wishing the house was cleaner or the toys were fewer or the voice was a bit less strained or the dinner was a little healthier. Or perhaps your house is spotless and dinner came straight from Whole Foods…but the heart is aching anyways. And you feel lost. Oh so lost.
No matter which room is clean today, it will be dirty again tomorrow. The laundry mountain rolls into valleys and then back up to towering peaks again. The marriage ebbs and flows. And the cycle will repeat and the sun will set and the finish line will keep eluding you. Because guess what:
There is no stinking finish line, Mama.
You’re not running a race. It’s not a competition. There’s no gold medal for raising a perfect kid or signing that college FAFSA or for finally getting your sh** together.
In fact, there’s nothing linear about motherhood. Nothing at all.
Not the potty training, or the last day of school, or the changing seasons of mom friends, or the finality of _____ (fill in the blank).
It’s a circle. An endless, dizzying circle. More likened to a ballroom dance than a decathlon. 
And sometimes you just need to know that you’re not alone.
I know it’s hard to believe when you’re hiding in the bathroom crying. Or when your heart is as cluttered as the toys all over the living room floor. Or when the door is slammed in your face and you’re left sitting in the hallway looking at pictures of smiling moms with their teenage kids, further confirming your suspicion that you are, in fact, the only one…
But I need you to know, because we can never hear it enough, that you are not alone.
I recently made the bold comment to a mom that I admire, “You always seems to have your life so together!” (Instagram and Facebook never lie, do they?) To which she looked at me in shock and laughed and said, “Nuh-uh! YOU are the one who has it all together!” (Because Instagram and Facebook always lie, actually…) And as our eyes met in relieved disbelief, our souls breathed, “You are not alone.”
The Mom in the grocery store with the whining, sobbing seven-year-old who wasn’t getting her way needed a reassuring nod from the stranger behind her. A nudge. Some solidarity. Yup…I needed to know deep in my anguished, angry soul, “You are not alone.”
This past year I began teaching English online to Chinese students. It’s an awesome job that I love so very much. I’ve been so blessed by these children and their families, but I soon discovered that as their online “friend” I’ve suddenly been invited, not merely to teach their kids, but to literally come into their homes…at bedtime…on a weekday! And do you know what I’ve found? Sippy cups on the counter. Toys strewn across the living room floor. Crumbs on the couch. Dead houseplants. Tantrums, busyness, messy buns, sweatpants…
And from halfway around the world these tired Mommies whisper, “You are not alone.”
So when your troubles overwhelm and your loneliness literally aches, remember that you are not alone.
Every. Single. Mom. in the whole wide world has moments of desperation just like you.
Every Mom in the world is doing the crazy Mommy dance to nowhere.
And every Mom in the whole wide world sometimes just needs to know that she’s not alone.
She might not hear it. She definitely won’t believe it. But one day when her kids are gone and the dance has slowed, she will look back with clarity and a renewed thankfulness, knowing that she was never, ever really alone.
