I read a lot of old books. They are full of quaint words like duty, happy and good. People used to be far more comfortable connecting happiness and goodness than we are. It made me very uncomfortable at first.

The Psalms make it plain that goodness and happiness grow in proximity to God. We won’t find the satisfaction of our longings anywhere else. We won’t find goodness and joy anywhere else. The problem is, the Psalms also ask questions like:

Lord, who may dwell in your sacred tent?

Who may live on your holy mountain?

And the question is answered, to our despair…

Our world tells us that happy mums will be good mums and that happy mums lead to happy children. So we prioritise happiness. We think the duty of motherhood is the parasite eating our happiness and that the solution is to get rid of it. It hasn’t worked. Women, men, children and teenagers are alarmingly miserable. Happiness pursued at the cost of goodness will be a shrinking, shrivelling, fragile happiness. It devours mothers and their families. While disordered duty devours, rejecting God-centred duty makes us deathly miserable.

Being happy is a bit like staring at a star. Focus on it and it disappears. When we scramble to pin it down, trapping it to keep, happiness gets away. It’s not tame and docile. Happiness cannot be crafted, curated and edited into life. By force, we’ll never get hold of it. We’ll have hints and wafts, barely enough to enjoy, gone before we know it.

Walking through the shopping centre with six children starts conversations. Anyone with more than two kids knows how that goes. While waiting for a takeaway coffee, I chat with an older man and his adult daughter. After the traditional “are they all yours?” comments, this greyed man tells how he loved growing up in a family with a dozen siblings. He remembers a childhood spent mostly outside, playing hard. “You couldn’t do that now, though,” he laments. “Technology is so pervasive and you can’t not give it to the kids. It isn’t good for them, but that’s what society is like now. What can you do? Imagine how terrible it’s going to be for the next generation with the way technology is going! But you have to have it…” His daughter, herself a mother of young children, joins in, lamenting how things are unavoidably terrible.

Christians get to see things differently, but we often don’t.

I still feel sick when I open a parenting book. There is always something I’ve got wrong. The further down the parenting road we get, the harder it is to change things. Instead of trying to sift out what is wise and good and how to get there, we usually settle for something that makes us feel better about whatever it is we have or haven’t done.

Mummy social media is full of women trying to justify themselves and solicit the affirmation of others—not always because we care about being good mothers, but because we want to feel like we are good mothers. Or to feel vindicated when we’re not doing well. This social media absolution interrupts the cycle of repentance a Christian woman is meant to be on. It submerges us in the shame we are trying to dislodge.

No one is ever ready to be a parent. We grow into things as we have to. And we rarely feel like we’re doing it very well. This is true on every level; big and little, seen and unseen. We avoid thinking carefully about the duty of motherhood because we are already small fish in an ocean of inadequacy. Floating, not swimming. Why would we want to feel worse?

Duty stops love from being an impotent, sentimental abstraction. Without some definite and defined responsibilities, we settle with merely good intentions and admiration. It is entirely natural to feel incredible warmth for our adorable children, to want to bottle up their cuteness forever, even while we set aside the good we owe them. That chemistry is not the same as biblical love.

Holding a baby, whose needs are hard to understand, we get in the habit of asking, “what does she want?”. The baby grows into a toddler and then a preschooler and before you know it, she is taller than you. If the dependent years of mothering are built on trying to solve the question, “what do they want?”, then we will miss out on the work we’ve been entrusted with and we’ll probably not enjoy doing it. The questions we ask form the character of our children.

Duty is not a loveable word. Most of us hate it. I did.

If the Lord Jesus has placed children in our family, then he has entrusted us to raise them; for his glory, and their eternal good. It’s a work which will not do itself. Ignore this role, and we end up teaching our children the opposite of what we ought, even if by accident.

All of us are ill-equipped for this task. We’ve been given a job too great for us, but a job which we must do. This dilemma echoes across the Bible. God habitually placed his people in the middle of situations they were unfit for, which they were called to trust and obey in. He glorifies himself in bringing about his purposes for his people, being triumphant for them, even despite them.

When my eldest child was losing the last of his baby teeth, my sixth baby had none. It would have been grotesque and ineffective to take one child’s old teeth and stick them into my baby’s bare gums. Babies need to grow their own teeth.

When I was starting out as a mum, I wanted to glean from other people’s experiences, to get insight into the things that matter and the things which wouldn’t. I wanted to know the battles worth fighting. This was valuable, but it didn’t change the fact that I had to work out how to love my own particular children.

As we start, let me get some things out of the way. I have no desire to write about myself. There are far more interesting and useful things to be said. But, as soon as I turn the tap on and the words start pouring, assumptions are likely to be made. Someone will ask, “where do you find the time?”. Given my readers are probably in the thick of the very early years of mothering, I am sketching an answer, lest you be discouraged.