Authenticity - by gabriella

Several years ago, I was in a season of life as a new parent and was a stay-at-home mom with 4 small children ages 6, 4,2 and 1. It was a crazy time and one full of adventure. I am an extrovert, someone who loves to engage in conversation and life with other people. I come from a big family; 5 children and 2 parents who were always together. That home environment is what I’m used to - the air I breathe - noisy, boisterous, and fun-loving. During my years as a stay-at-home mom, I really missed adult interaction. I needed the company of women to live life with, to grow and develop with and I just wasn’t getting enough of that. There were some things that held me back though, life with 4 kids is fun - and chaotic, messy and sticky. Every day, my house looked like a bomb had went off. How could I invite someone into that mess, a mess that revealed the limits of my parenting and revealed how little control I had over my house and kids? One day it kind of struck me; for many years I lived under the idea, the illusion, and I think many of us do, that my life needed to appear perfect for me to be accepted in the world – perhaps that wasn’t true at all.

I grew up with a traditional conservative upbringing. My family immigrated to Canada in 1978 from the Netherlands and peripherally became a part of a rather traditional Christian Reformed Community. Our faith and cultural community had clear and rigid gender roles for men and women (and boys and girls) and cultural norms about relationships and how people are to have relationships with each other.  My mom, thankfully, didn’t adhere as tightly to these cultural norms as others did. When the Dutch standard of cleanliness is spoken or joked about – how tidy they are, the rigid cleaning schedule, or how fastidiously clean the whole house is, that’s not my story, that’s not my mother and so that’s not what she passed on to me. And I’m grateful for that.  

However, there is a sense in the Dutch immigrant culture, and society in general, that women are to keep an impossibly clean house and present as though everything in life is perfect. Although my mother didn’t pass on these values to me, I learned quickly the expectation of what it was to be a good woman. And so went into womanhood with this sense that I needed have a clean, tidy house, with beautiful things, be the perfect wife, mother, dinner on the table at 5:30pm, etc. -  you know the exhausting list. And to be honest, having 4 children under your feet is not a time to work towards perfection. I’m a high achiever though and quite motivated, so while perfection was unattainable, I could certainly try.

During those stay at home years, I came to a realization, a different sense of prioritizing my life. I knew that I wanted relationship in my life and knew that seeking relationship started with me. And so, I jumped in. I started to take those first few unsure steps and invited people into my mess and chaos and real life. What I found when I started were words of encouragement; statements about bravery and courage and, curiously, women admitting to me that they struggled with the same thing! At the beginning, friends and their kids would come to the door, and within the first minute, I would apologize for the state of my house and make excuses for why it wasn’t perfect. Over time, I started to realize that my apologies weren’t authentic and actually made my friends feel unwelcome rather than welcome. So I stopped apologizing. I stopped living in that place of fear of judgment, what people would think about my house, my life, my parenting, my womanhood, my ability to clean, whatever it was. I let that go and make a decision that if people wanted to judge, they could. Judgement was really a matter of their heart, not mine. And, you know, it sounds like something so small, but that life lesson was one of the pieces of my journey to authenticity.  

The metaphor of the perfection of my house also applies to the rest of my life - how freeing. One of other catalysts of my change of perspective is that at the same time, I was also digging deeper into my relationship with God and finding a real sense of identity in Him. I worked through Rick Warren’s, “A Purpose-Driven Life” and found deep resonance in Warren’s writing. I took my study through it very seriously, spending dedicated and devoted time with it every day.  Naturally over time, that transferred into dedicated and devoted time with God. In the Bible, I heard again the story of God’s unconditional love and grace - the story of belonging and being enough to God.

Fast-forward to my life now, with children 14, 13, 11, and 9, a career, husband and a life that moves at a quicker pace. What that life lesson, learned so long ago, has brought me to is a really clear sense of who I am in God and therefore who I am to other people. There are moments when this sense is a big foggy, but for the most part, I live with a deep assurance of God’s love for me that overflows in how I live. I’m no longer interested in other’s judgment of how I’m doing things or how I live. Instead, what I value in my life are those relationships that are authentic and meaningful with folks who are interested in getting past the superficial pressures of this life and sharing the journey together.