Motherhood requires patience. It requires compassion, organization, and creativity.

Motherhood requires persistence. It requires firmness, authority, and tenacity.

Truthfully, motherhood requires grit.

Because mothers are tasked with processing and regulating their emotions, then assisting their children with theirs.

Because mothers are tasked with organizing their schedule and completing necessary tasks to manage their home and family, then helping their children with their schedules.

Because mothers are tasked with mediating sibling arguments, having hard conversations, and educating their children on the reality of the world.

There are dinners to be made, laundry to be done and lunches to be packed.

There are bathrooms that need scrubbing, rules that need enforcing, and dishes that need cleaning.

Mothers are tasked with doing hard things.

Hard thing after hard thing.

And they can do hard things, often with great success.

But when these hard things pile up, day after day, and come from sources outside of their own home or outside of their control, a mother can break.

And mothers are allowed to break.

But it doesn’t make them any less.  

Because when the weight of their own mental and emotional world is heavy; when the weight of their children’s struggles is heavy; when the weight of the world—with a pandemic, capitol building rioting, government unrest, financial insecurity, virtual school, quarantining—is heavy, a mother is tasked with persisting.

A mother is expected to do hard things. And mothers will.

Because mothers always want what is best for their children and will do whatever they need to in order to make sure their children are ready and capable to tackle hard things when they arise.

Because mothers model faith, hope, and strength. They model patience, compassion, and persistence. They tackle one hard thing after the next.

And that tenacity, that grit, allows mothers to raise the next generation of children who are empowered to change the world.