I collapsed on the floor one night holding my infant daughter while she screamed. Not fussed. Screamed. The full-bodied, hours-long, fray-every-nerve kind that ends with you sobbing right along with her because what else is there to do. My body was still cracked open from birth. My brain was running on approximately zero sleep and a lot of spite. And I remember thinking, with total clarity: there is no way that motherhood is divine.
Good mothers know how to soothe their children, I thought. Good mothers don't get frayed after hours of screaming, apparently, according to nobody in particular but somehow everybody at once. I could lead a group of hundreds through a production. I could lead a sales team. I could get children to listen and learn and laugh while doing it. Leading came naturally to me, I had actual confidence in that. Motherhood was supposed to be the same instinct, just softer. Instead it required something I did not have, and I decided, in my extremely tired wisdom, that meant I was failing at the one thing I was supposedly built for.
What I didn't know yet, what took years to learn, was that my daughter was autistic, and the screaming, the sleeplessness, all of it, was her nervous system doing the best it could with more input than it knew how to hold. None of it had anything to do with my ability to mother her. But that night, on that floor, all I had was the evidence in front of me and the quiet, awful certainty that I was the problem.
Here's the thing about building your identity on a role. When the role cracks, you crack with it. And roles always crack eventually. Motherhood. Marriage. Career. Ministry. One hard season, one failure, real or only perceived, and the whole thing can come apart. Not always at once. Sometimes it's smaller cracks building on each other until the ground gives way and you're already falling before you even understand why you're falling.
You will lead exactly as far as you believe you are allowed to go.
I've thought a lot since then about Esther. A woman who didn't volunteer for influence, who was taken into a system that valued her face more than her voice, and who still had to decide, in the moment it actually mattered, who she was underneath a crown she never asked for. Who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this? That was never just a call to action, if you ask me. It was a call to identity. Are you your role, or are you something the role can't touch?
I wasn't anywhere near that kind of clarity on the floor that night, not even close. I was just a woman convinced she'd been given the wrong assignment. But somewhere in the exhaustion, underneath the certainty that I was failing, there was a truth I hadn't found the language for yet. I wasn't failing at being a good mother. I was trying to stand on a foundation that was never built to hold an entire identity. Good mother, bad mother, or otherwise, it was never going to hold any of it.
Being a daughter of God doesn't crack like that. Not in that season, not in any season. That's not a phrase I could have said with any conviction that night. But it's the one I needed, and it's the one I hope finds you if you're anywhere near your own version of that floor tonight.
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