Taming ambition
85%ish more terrifying than taming a lion
My children are constantly getting in my way.
We live in a hundred year old house with narrow passageways and a small kitchen. Countless times a day I slam on my brakes to avoid knocking a kid over as I speed from room to room. My children, ages 4 and 18 months, especially love to position themselves in threshold spaces – lingering right inside the frame of the front door, testing their balance on the beam separating the porch from the living room or standing – just standing – in the narrow bend connecting the kitchen and dining area. I too stand at these thresholds, buzzing behind them, my arms often full of bags, coats, snacks, still-hot meals, begging them to notice me and move, move, MOVE!
It’s as though their small squishy bodies are a brick wall I crash into a dozen times a day. Or, more accurately, a glass door that tricks you into thinking there’s no barrier until you smack right into it (and the tears start flowing).
Nothing else in parenting launches me from calm to irate faster than this does.
I let out my angry monster yell I try to “make fun” by roaring in a silly tone but really it’s my own kind of pressure valve releasing because everything in me wants to just plow forward and yell GAAAHHHHHH WILL YOU PLEASE MOVE?!?!?!
They (the Instagram parenting influencers that be) say to pay extra attention to the things that trigger us in parenting as our outsized responses often point to our own unresolved stuff. In short, that triggering event points to our work.
When I zoom out and consider what these moments poke at deep within, it is this:
I cannot go where I want to go.
I cannot do what I want to do.
Again and again, and often during some of the most stressful moments of the day, I am stopped, forced to slow down by Love plopping itself right in my path.
I wrote last month about how motherhood thrusts us into the daily (hourly?) work of taking up our cross. Motherhood demands a constant surrendering of my desire, my body, my energy, my creativity, and my time.
But this morning, as my son stooped down to pick up a crusty Cheerio from the floor while I hovered behind him with plates of toast and bowls of oatmeal, the breakfast table just one single step away, I was reminded too that motherhood is an unequivocal taming of my ambition.
More than any other, this restraint digs deepest into my skin. I pull at it constantly, trying to wriggle free but there’s no freeing myself; instead, my bucking and rearing just causes more anguish and exhaustion.
To not go where I want to go, when I want to go, at the pace I want to go enrages me.
Please God, does this part of me really need to be tamed too?
My mentor Alicia Britt Chole, talks about how a strength is not truly a strength unless we know how to restrain it.1 My ambition, speed, and vision have gotten me far in life but they’ve also driven me to supreme burn-out and soul-deep exhaustion. I love making plans and, for the most part, am good at setting a successful path to get there. But my failure is becoming so fixated on the goal, I run over everyone else, myself included. I, of my own free (and stubborn) will, sacrifice my desire, my body, my energy, my creativity, and my time at the altar of this one goal.
Motherhood humbles us by asking us to revisit our goal of Write a Book This Year and set something just as ambitious but far more realistic: Finish Your Bowl of Oatmeal While It’s Still Hot.
God, where are you in all this?
A couple verses have met me in a tender place for many years. At different times of my life I’ve returned to them and they’ve been a source of confession and comfort.
This declaration of God from Isaiah 55 is one such passage:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”Isaiah 55:8-9
God speaks these words to Israel as they return from exile in Babylon.
This idea of exile is one I keep coming back to when I consider my experience of becoming a mother. To be taken into exile is to leave everything that is familiar and take up residence in a foreign land. Will you return home again? Is home even there? What does home even mean?
This feels very much like the experience of matrescence to me…
Google’s AI overview (*cringe*) helps back this up:
Do I feel like anything is possible?
Yes.
Do I feel discouraged and like my future is uncertain?
Yes.
Am I struggling to meet my basic needs?
Definitely sometimes.
Am I struggling to rebuild my life after the life I knew is no more?
Yup.
Here you meet me God, just as you’ve met your people for millennia.
Your thoughts are not my thoughts.
Your ways are not my ways.
My pace is not your pace
My ambition is not your ambition
I grew up drinking the Kool-Aid of Doing Great Things for God. But what if the greatest thing God is asking me to do right now is to slow myself waaaaaaaay down and not lose my mind every time my child plants themself right in my path?
To lay on the altar our pace and our place (or whatever else we cling to as a cloak of identity) and be baptized in the waters of self-forgetfulness, this is the grisly stuff motherhood asks of us.
And this is the stuff that forms us into the image and likeness of Jesus who modeled this unhurried, present, and connected life for us. How does God choose to come to earth after all, but as a vulnerable baby who grows into a wobbly toddler who likely stopped and stood right in front of Mary all the ever-loving time.
A Mantra
This lesson is on its return visit to me. I remember wrestling with it when my daughter was a similar age as my son is now and the words that came to me then were, move at the pace of Love.
Move at the pace of Love.
Love is not in a hurry.
Love just wants to be near to us, no matter what we’re doing.
Love delights in our delight.
Love trusts in God’s perfect ways, thoughts, and time.
Love knows that there will always be more than enough.
Love rests, deeply.
Whatever plants itself in your path today, whether cute or maddening (or, likely, both), may you experience them as God’s grace toward you, and may you move at the pace of Love.
Tell me I’m not the only one taking many slow deep breaths…
What’s taming your ambition right now?
What’s stopping you in your tracks?
Seriously, I love hearing how this resonates with you ♥️
This is so thought provoking and unexpectedly brought tears to my eyes.
What’s stopping me in my tracks right now? Really wanting to do what truly matters, and suspecting that much of what I spend my time doing doesn’t fit that growing desire.
What's taming my ambition right now is my "why". Why do I want that? Why do I think I need to produce, create, do that? I'm very suspicious of myself as I age. Wanting to be relevant is as intoxicating as ambition. Maybe relevance is ambition grown up. With more awareness of the brevity of life, I want it to matter more than I want it to be relevant, so lots of time reflecting on it keeps it tamed.