There is something happening in the way we are talking about motherhood right now, and I don't think we should look away from it.

Mothers are posting through tears, saying they understand how another mother could reach the point of harming her children. Some say they could have been her.

I don't want to mock those women. But compassion does not require us to say something that isn't true.

There is a version of Christian motherhood that looks a lot like regular motherhood with better language. The to-do list is still there. The overwhelm is still there. The feeling of never quite measuring up is still there. It is just dressed in scripture references and morning devotional checkboxes.

I spent a lot of years inside that version without realizing it. I thought the problem was that I needed to be more consistent, more disciplined, more structured. I thought if I could just get the rhythms right, everything would settle. So I kept building systems. And they would work for a while, and then collapse, and I would start over, and they would work for a while, and then collapse again.

I used to think I just needed a better plan.

Every few months I would sit down at the kitchen table with a fresh notebook and map out our days. I would write out the morning. I would write out the afternoon. I would even write out the evening in thirty-minute blocks, convinced that this time, if I was specific enough, disciplined enough, thorough enough, it would actually work.