When Lonely Moms Long for Relationship

When you're a mom, it can be so insulated like, nobody else has it as hard as I do. This is the impossible task that I have been given today to do all of this laundry, you know, and it is really hard. But there are other really hard things too. And there are other women who will come alongside of you who might be in a simpler stage of life and say, hey, how can I help you do that?

Like, let's do that together. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

And I'm Dave Wilson and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. So you're a mother of three boys. You're a boy mom. Yes, I am. And we're a special breed.

Yeah. And we've got a boy mom. We got two boy moms in here. You both have three sons.

And, you know, we actually have daughter-in-laws now and grandkids. But as you think about that, what was the best thing about being a mother of sons? What was the worst?

What comes to your mind first? The hardest, I wouldn't say the worst, the hardest thing was when they're little. They are so active, like they're constantly on the go and it felt physically exhausting.

I feel like I have a lot of energy, but I felt like, I don't know if I can do this. And the best was just kind of discovering how God made them, like their physical-ness, their fun, their adventure hearts. We're excited because we have Maggie Combs back with us today. And Maggie's written a book called Motherhood Without All the Rules, trading stressful standards for gospel truths.

So you're a mom of three boys as well. I'll throw the same question to you. Best? Greatest thing about it? What's the hardest thing? The hardest thing for me has just been the physical-ness of it.

Like you said, they're so busy. I remember my husband when he would stay late at work and had these three toddler boys. And it was like, they can't go to bed unless someone has wrestled with them. And so I would get down on the floor and I would go in the fetal position and I'd be like, okay, you can wrestle me now. And they would just jump all over me.

And thankfully they're a little older now. So now I just say like, just go wrestle with each other. Okay. Try not to break a bone. Yeah. I can remember times they were so rambunctious.

They're never going to settle down. We'd be like, okay, outside. Sprint up and down. This is the middle of winter in Michigan. Put all your snow clothes on.

You guys run as fast as you can down the street. Yeah. For like two hours. No, I'm kidding.

But you know, just to get some exhaustion because they're never going to settle down. And isn't it interesting the things that you do that you said, I will never do this. Did you have any of those?

I'm not sure if I had any specific ones of those. My boys were born in just a clump of baby girls, just so many baby girls. All my friends are having baby girls and we would have play dates and it was like, Oh, this is a totally different world. And I remember my best friend coming up to me and I don't remember what the item was, but she picked it up off my floor and she said, I found this on your floor.

You know, it's not safe or whatever. And I was like, Oh yeah, of course. I'm so glad you found that. And then I was thinking to myself, but I was letting my kid play with that like five minutes before you came here. So I feel like boys kind of get a bad rap sometime though. So I'd say my favorite thing about raising boys is just seeing how tender they can be when we're always saying like, Oh, they're, you know, rough and tumble, which they are.

But then that flip side where they're just really sweet and tender with me, with each other, and just being really good at loving while still being a crazy boy. I remember one time one of my friends asked me to come over to help her wallpaper, her bathroom, and she had just had her fifth baby. I guess that little boy was maybe seven months old or eight months old. And so she's corralling all of her kids in the other room. And I'm up on the ladder putting this wallpaper up. And I said, Hey, you might want to come in here because her baby could sit up. But her baby was in the bathroom with me because she was thinking, well, you can watch him buy the wallpaper.

He'll be fine. And I said, your little boy has the plunger and it's in his mouth. I'm waiting for her to rush in and grab that plunger.

She goes, it's fine. Even for me, like, uh, I don't think that's quite fine, but it's amazing. The survival mode that we get into his moms. Now, do you think it's a lot different for moms and daughters?

I think it's just dependent on personality. What do you think, Maggie? Yeah. And I think every mom has to like learn to chill out a little bit to some extent or else you just go crazy.

Maybe not plunger level chilling out, but you learn to go like, okay, I can say yes to that when everything inside me is screaming, no, protect them. Be careful. Well, Maggie, you've written more than this book. Tell us about the other things that you've done and that what you're doing now. Unsupermommy.

Yeah. So my first book is Unsupermommy and it was written in the throes of early motherhood. When I started it, I had a six month old and 18 month old and a three and a half year old.

Are you crazy being a super mom? Well, no, because it was like, what did I do really bad at today? So it is just written from just the overflow of what God was teaching me and the hardest season of my life. And it is really raw, but it's just sharing with women how to release all of those plans that they did have for motherhood that suddenly they're like, alert, alert, emergency.

None of my plans are coming to fruition and to release those and to embrace the life that God has put before them that day and to know that they can only do that life by the power of God. One of the theme verses for that was second Peter one three, his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him. And I really talked about all the things that pertain to life and moms, we grab onto that, like it's just really hard to do life, but then to do it with godliness, all things we need for godliness are given to us, but we often forget the next part through the knowledge of God. And so that's the part where we have to be drawing near. We have to be living in relationship with God. We have to be abiding in him. And so the other thing that I get to do now as a writer is I am the content director at a ministry called Well-Watered Women and I get to write Bible studies and I get to oversee social media and share the gospel with women across the board who are moms, who are single, who are married, who are divorced, who are widowed, all women, not just moms.

And it's been a real gift to get to be a part of that ministry. Well, it's interesting. One of the sections of this book, you know, Motherhood Without All the Rules, the chapter title was Relationship Over Rules. And I initially thought, oh, I know where this is going because we wrote a chapter in our No Perfect Parents book about rules without relationship equals rebellion. So it was about your relationship with your kids, you know, especially as teenagers. That's one of my parents' favorite sayings. Yeah, it is. Is it?

It's been around for a long time and it's, you know, it's highlighting a very important thing, especially with teenagers. If all they're getting from you is rules, you're not cultivating a relationship, it could lead to rebellion, but that isn't what you were talking about. I found it very insightful that you're talking about relationship with God over just being a rule-based parent. Talk about that.

Yeah. I think one of the things that I aim to do in my book is talk to the mom's heart because we can give them all the parenting advice in the world, but if their heart isn't following God, it's not going to do them any good. It's just slapping on fruit on a tree that is dying. And so actually I think that I tried to work that phrase into my book somewhere, the rules without relationship equals rebellion, because it works the same way in our relationship with God. If we just take all of the good rules, all of the good exhortations that the Bible gives us, and we try to do them without being in relationship with God, we're going to end up pretty angry at God. Or throwing the whole thing out altogether, we see all this deconversion stuff right now, throwing it all out altogether and saying, hey, I don't want anything to do with this anymore.

And so that's what this book is trying to do. It's aim at that heart and say, instead of trying to fix your actions, let's work on what's going on in our hearts as mom, dig into that with God, learn to be in prayer with him. I think so often we're afraid to tell him how upset we are about what is happening in our lives. And so being able to actually go to him and be honest, like this was really hard today.

This is what I'm struggling with. Not just like, here's my laundry list of things I want you to do for me, but talk to him like we would talk to our best friends. I call my mom up like 15 times a day and I just tell all the weird stuff that happens in motherhood. And sometimes moms would feel like, man, I just want someone to tell everything to, right? And we do have someone to tell everything to. Moms often really struggle with loneliness because we're just so deep in our kids' lives, we don't have time to make friendships. And first of all, God does call us to build friendships and to make space for that.

But in seasons like when my kids were really little, it was just basically impossible. And it was like, God can be that for me. He is my friend, not just my Savior. I think that's so good. I know that when our kids were little, I would call my sister and she had four boys and I had three boys. And soon as something would happen, I would call her. And I had this and then we would just vent to one another, you know, we just go to dark, deep places. And I realized one day as I was praying, I was thinking I had this thought like of God saying, come to me first. And Jesus said, come to me, all you who are weary and like, oh, that's me.

I have my hand up. And so I thought before I call my friend or my sister, I'm going to go to God first and tell him everything that's on my heart. And doesn't he want that? Like he wants us to go there with him. And it's so funny because the more I did that, the more I felt like, oh, I want to go to him first because other people aren't solving my problems.

I would get this peace, as Philippians says, that surpasses all understanding and it would guard my heart and my mind in Jesus. And I remember driving not too long ago and I was praying, just talking to God about when I lost my mom. And I remember saying to Jesus, like, you're my best friend.

And that takes a while to go to him first to learn that. And that's what we want for our kids. And we can model that of letting them see us go before God and kind of telling him what's on our hearts and minds. I love that you're talking about that.

Yeah, we all long for that. We are relational people because we are made in the image of a relational God. He is Trinitarian Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And in him, there's perfect relationship. And back in the garden, Adam and Eve got to be in perfect relationship. They walked with God and then that was broken by sin. But Jesus came to make a way for us to have perfect relationship with God again. And we will fail sometimes in this world, but we are growing towards living more in relationship with him. And prayer is such an essential part of that. I was thinking of this, you know, in terms of the relationship with God. And you mentioned earlier that moms often feel lonely.

So, they need another mom or another friend as well. I remember, I don't know where I read it years ago. I think it was Max Lucado book. 25, 30 years ago, he tells this cute little story of a little boy running in mom and dad's room during a thunderstorm. And he grabs his dad's leg.

I think he's like six. And, you know, he says, I'm scared. And dad says, Hey, you don't need to be scared. Jesus is here. Jesus got, he goes, yeah, I know that.

But right now I need someone with skin on. I've never forgotten that. And I thought that's so true for us as well. We don't need anybody else, but Jesus. He's all we need.

He's our sufficiency. Yet he's made us in such a way we need humans. We need, and so I'm thinking as moms, how do moms dig out of that loneliness to have other moms in your life to help support you when you're going, I mean, those are the shadow of the Valley, you know, when you're raising little toddlers, especially boys or girls, it's just like, it's exhausting, but you need another mom.

How do you do that? Yeah, I was thinking about just that in the book I talk about my boys like to come and start their day in my presence and on the best days I'm there open with my Bible already reading and they come down now that doesn't happen every day, but they'll, when that happens they'll squish in beside me and pull out their little Bible or pull out a book and just sit next to me and just be in my presence. And what I found is those days are always the better days where we start together in God's presence.

And that's why remaining is so important that abiding really means remaining, starting with God, remaining with him throughout the day. But then God made us relational people and we we've been given friends, we've been given the local church. And so often we want to go to Instagram for relationship.

We want to go to social media for relationship. And those relationships are not enough. They cannot know our whole selves, but women who are in our lives do in real life with us can, when we're willing to pull back the veneer and say, hey, I don't feel like a good mom today because I did this. And moms tend to hide in our shame. When we feel shame, we pull away from others.

And I remember making myself make calls when I felt like every other mom's better than I am. And if I tell them the way I'm acting or even what's in my heart, like I'm so angry or lonely, sometimes I'm afraid I'll be judged. And so sometimes to be the first one to say it will open this door of other women saying, me too.

And there's something really special and healing about having people open up about what they're facing and then praying. I think the right kind of friend, Dave, is really important. When I would call a friend and she would say, I know your husband is an idiot. That may not be the best friend. You had friends say that about me? It could have been a family member.

No, I was going to say there's kind of two steps. There's one being the willing to be the first person to be vulnerable, but then making sure that you are being vulnerable with the kind of friend who's going to give you the gospel. And so the world is full of all kinds of things to put our hope in. Like we can put our hope in the next girl's night out or the next vacation. One of the main ones moms here is like, don't worry, it's just a season. And that is a little hope.

That is not enough to support all the hope that we need for motherhood. And so getting a friend who you know is going to say, I see that. I see how that was really hard, but you know, I also see that Jesus is here with you and he knows what it's like when your kids are just, they not listen to anything you say, who knows better than Jesus about that, right?

I mean, it's like prone to wander. I mean, and so when your kids are refusing to listen to you, a friend who says, you know what? I think God has experienced that too. Let's pray together.

Let's pray together and remember, let's remember together what God has said about this. Well, it's easy as a guy to think women never struggle with the loneliness because you're so good at relationships, but you know, you've watched women relate to one another and it's like, wow, they have real friendships. We men have to initiate and struggle with that, but you really do need other women. And if it's true, how do you do it as a mom who's overwhelmed with their schedule? How do you find time to spend some time with women? So I think there are a few ways, like one of the best ways to spend time with other women is to join your church Bible study. Praise the Lord for church child care.

Am I right? So I struggled with doing that as a young mom because I'd be like, well, I know the kid's going to have a hard day and I know that the nap time will get messed up and all this stuff. But you have to say like, but actually I know that even more than I need an easy afternoon that day, I need to be opening God's word with other women.

And I think the great thing about Bible study, especially if you can be involved in an intergenerational Bible study, is it opens your eyes to circumstances. Other women who are in different ages and stages of life and their circumstances, because when you become, when you're a mom, it can be so insulated like nobody else has it as hard as I do. This is the impossible task that I have been given today to do all of this laundry, you know, and it is really hard, but there are other really hard things too. And there are other women who will come alongside of you who might be in a simpler stage of life and say, Hey, how can I help you do that?

Like, let's do that together. I've always say have a woman in front of you that's ahead of you in their life stage. Have a woman beside you that's right alongside that you can say, Oh, I know that happened to me today. And then I think it's really good to have someone behind you that's in like just maybe she just had the baby or she just got married because maybe you weren't perfect in that stage, but you've learned so much. And I talked to so many older women whose kids are gone that feel like I have nothing to offer.

My kids are gone. I feel like my life is kind of the meaning of it doesn't have as much significance. And I'm saying, Oh, you are in the peak and prime of pouring into younger women. And when they say, but I've been divorced or I have kids that have rebelled, I'm like, and haven't you learned a lot from that? Because Satan says to us, you're disqualified. And God says, No, I will use all of your pain for someone else's gain if you'll let me and let me heal some of those things.

Yeah. We need the whole body of Christ and we are all unfinished. And I just, I hear so much in the ministry that I work with women going like, I want a mentor. How do I get a mentor? And so if you are an older woman who is thinking, I don't know, I don't have anything to offer. There is a whole generation of women who are just recognizing the shallowness of getting mentoring on the internet. And they're starting to say, I want someone to talk to about my real life. And if you would just say, Hey, like, would you want to meet every once while that woman's going to be like, yes, I would love that.

How can we do that? Yes. Well, I mean, in some ways, you know, reading through your book, it's like these stressful standards. Most of them are lies.

You know, there are things that we hear or you heard as a mom from the culture, from the world. And when you look at it and you're like, that's not true. But when you connect with other women, that's what they can do.

They can speak what you're doing in your book. You're saying this is a lie. Here's a myth. Here's the truth.

Boy, if you surround yourself, same thing for guys, there's no difference. And for couples to say, I need people in my life that remind me what's true. I'm buying into a lie again. I don't even realize it. I say it out loud and they look at me and I go, that's not even true. That's all discipleship is. Yeah. Or if there's a hard question, like let's find it in the Bible together.

Like, you don't have to be able to come up with the chapter and verse off the top of your head. Let's look together. And I think what we can do as women is I've heard so many women say to me, I'm sure you don't have time, you know? And so I think they assume in their head like nobody would want to meet with me.

If somebody heard how I was struggling, they would think I'm disqualified. And I would say, do not listen to those lies, because if Satan has a plan for your life, it's that you remain isolated. You live in shame. And God is saying, no, step out. This year I've been going through my one year Bible and every time it says, and they cried out to the Lord, you know what the next sentence is?

And he heard their cry. And I would just say to you women, to you moms, like every single time you cry out, God hears you. So pray for a mentor, pray for a friend, pray for your kids, because God hears you. And then if you have that urge, like if somebody comes to your mind, like I'd love to meet with her, why not call? And if she doesn't work, then call someone else, but keep moving and keep finding those people that can pour into you.

And here's a simple way to do that. Pick up Maggie's book, call another mom or two and say, hey, let's go through this together. Who knows where that would lead to? You're going to talk about mom stuff and you may end up with a really good friend that helps you do this journey as a mom.

I love that idea. I went through a season where, you know, that early season of motherhood I came out and that's exactly what I did. I just said, I'm lonely. And I just prayed for a friend and you know what?

God gave me three, three very clear answers to prayer. One was a woman I had never met who had recently moved to Minnesota, has become one of my best friends. I saw her at Bible study and I was like, I'm like your Bible, which is like kind of a Christian pickup line. And we started talking and just instantly became friends. And then one was a dear sister-in-law that I've always been friends with that we just grew closer again. And then one was a friend across the internet. We started talking about writing and we've just been talking about writing ever since and everything in life. So God does answer that prayer.

He wants us to be in fellowship with each other. If you find yourself struggling in all that is involved in motherhood, maybe one of the issues is you're isolated. You don't have the help and the support you need from other moms. You don't have other women you can lean on who will tell you, I'm struggling with that too.

Or here's something I've found that works there. Being a mom was never designed to be done in isolation. We need one another in this journey. This is something that Maggie Combs addresses in her book, Motherhood Without All the Rules. It's a great book to help free you up from some of the preconceptions you might have about what it means to be a good mom. The subtitle of the book is Trading Stressful Standards for Gospel Truths.

And we want to make this book available to you this week. If you can help support the ministry of family life today with a donation, this would be a great book to give as a gift to a young mom, you know, or to read through with a group of other moms and maybe begin to cultivate some of those friendships that Maggie was talking about. Get your copy of Motherhood Without All the Rules when you make a donation today to help support the outreach that is family life today. Each day, there are hundreds of thousands of husbands and wives, moms and dads who are connecting with us looking for practical biblical help and hope for their marriage. You make this daily encouragement and equipping possible for them when you support this ministry. You can do that easily online at familylifetoday.com or you can call to donate at 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, when you do ask for your copy of the book Motherhood Without All the Rules by Maggie Combs, donate online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Now, tomorrow, all of us have heard on an airplane when they say, if the oxygen mask drops down, put your mask on first and then put your child's mask on. Is that how it works with being a mom? Do you take care of yourself first before you take care of the kids? Dave and Ann Wilson will talk with Maggie Combs about the priority of self-care and how that fits into being a mom on tomorrow's program. Hope you can be with us for that. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.