What I Thought I Knew About The Family Proclamation
By Kristen Gardiner
drivingmomcrazy.com
“Why is Heavenly Father allowing this to happen to me?” This was the question I asked my husband in between heavy sobs as I cried into his arms more than ten years ago. I was a new mother struggling with postpartum depression and the feeling of being completely and utterly overwhelmed with my new role. I thought that because I was doing all the “right” things, that motherhood would come naturally to me. Instead I felt like I wanted to run away. This was not at all like I expected.
I didn’t anticipate feelings of failure, the difficulties of breastfeeding and pain recovering from childbirth, and how badly the lack of sleep would make me feel mentally. And I felt overcome with the stress of not knowing what was coming or if I was doing anything right. Why did I feel like this? Wasn’t this supposed to be the best time of my life?
I always knew I wanted to have children. That desire was strengthened when I became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints at age twenty and met my husband. I had a very clear picture of what I thought life should look like. I figured motherhood would come easily, especially after the first time I read the beautiful declaration that families are “ordained of God” in The Family Proclamation.
It only took a few hours with a newborn for me to realize that I was in way over my head. I had no idea what I was doing. Reality had set in.
I felt like something was wrong with me. Was I fit to be a mother? Was I broken?
The hardest part for me to reconcile was why God didn’t seem to be helping me. I was praying, reading my scriptures, and asking Him for help. I expected answers. I expected more strength. I expected more clarity. But I didn’t see those requests fulfilled in the way that I wanted.
I finally realized I needed to humble myself and reach out to a professional to find the help I was asking God for, rather than just waiting for it to come to me. I talked to my doctor, who was also a member of the Church, about my depression symptoms and she reminded me that that this was a medical problem with my physical body, and not a spiritual problem. I was prescribed medication and I began to adjust to our new normal. I still didn’t understand why things seemed to be so hard for me, but I kept trying, and over time I started to find my groove.
I continued to experience depression during and after my next two pregnancies. I was able to rely on my husband and my medical support system to help me try live the best life possible. Eventually I accepted the fact that my motherhood experience wasn’t what I had imagined or expected.
I thought motherhood should come easily to me because I had faith in God’s plan. But I realized it wasn’t easy, and it was never meant to be easy.
We begin this life knowing nothing. We are not meant to know everything in the beginning. This is by divine design. We are taught about life, our responsibilities, and the gospel “line upon line, precept upon precept.” (2 Nephi 28:30) The family unit is an important vehicle through which we can eventually come to know all that God knows. And everything that God knows He learned through experience. And we cannot understand these things except through experience.
From childhood to parenthood and beyond, God’s knowledge is revealed to us in the struggle. It is the only way, and the entire reason why we are here on earth: to learn through living in this body. Difficulties are a part of that. The Lord lets us struggle through them so we can gain the knowledge that we are destined to achieve.
We are always encountering struggles because we are always experiencing new things. Each stage of life is, well, new. Every year we are alive we are experiencing a year we never have before. And our children are experiencing a year they never have before. And so every interaction we share together is also new. The new stages will never end.
If God changed us from an incompetent new mother to a wise and nearly all-knowing great-grandmother in the blink of an eye, we would miss the middle. We wouldn’t know what refinement felt like. We wouldn’t understand the depths of suffering and heights of joy that have shaped that “ideal mother” we are picturing in our minds. She didn’t magically become that way. She was molded over time by an all-loving God.
The hardest experiences of my life have yielded the greatest knowledge and the most meaningful moments. Those hard experiences weren’t interrupting the Plan of Salvation, they are the Plan of Salvation.
I used to think that the reason that “the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children” was so that parents could teach children the gospel and we could all live together forever in perfect harmony. And it’s true that teaching the gospel to our children is important. But I was missing another extremely important reason why the family is central to His plan: to transform us through the struggles of parenthood.
The messiness of life, both the hard times and the joyful ones, is His Plan.
No matter how much we feel like we are not progressing or learning, we are. We are never standing still. Every day we get up and strive to do what the Lord wants us to do, we are moving forward on the covenant path. What is happening in your life right now, at this moment, is the very essence of transformation.
So why did Heavenly Father allow depression to happen to me? Because He knew how much the experience of an imperfect human body would teach me. And what I have learned has changed me profoundly.
One day we will all be able to look back and marvel at how we have changed. We will see that the Lord was in fact there all along, and our suffering has not been in vain. Jesus Christ intimately knows our pain. He empathizes with us. He sends us comfort even if we don’t see it. He is there.
We don’t need to be ashamed of our struggles. The world was made so we could experience struggle. Families were created so we could learn, grow, fail, and forgive together. Our bodies were made to struggle. Your spirit was made for struggle too, but it was also made to triumph over struggle as we rely on Christ. Christ descended below all things so He could meet you at rock bottom and take your hand, help you stand up, and lead you toward your “divine destiny as heirs of eternal life.” And that incredibly beautiful ending gives us so much hope to know that one day, these earthly struggles will be over. And we can rest in knowing that we did our best, whatever that may be.
With Christ, that is enough.