Goodness: Becoming a Good Mother
“Good job! You did such a good job!” Before I became a mother, I had no idea how many times I’d say these words.
“Good job!” I exclaimed when my daughter rolled from back to tummy.
“Good job!” I cheered when my son took his first steps.
“Good job!” I sighed with relief when my youngest finally learned to run to the potty.
“Good job!” I quietly affirmed as they struggled to put sounds to letters and letters together to words.
Before I became a mother, I had no idea how many times I would say the words “Good job.” I also had no idea how much I would long to hear them for myself.
Seeking Goodness
I remember how I felt—now sixteen years ago—when a nurse wheeled me out of the hospital doors holding my first child in my arms. After she’d checked the infant safety seat, she offered a smile and wave and turned to go back inside, leaving me on the curb. Literally. And all I could think was, Are you just going to let me leave here with this new human being? Shouldn’t there be some kind of test?
We live in a time when many women enter motherhood unprepared and uncertain. We may be highly educated, having spent years learning other vital skills, and we may have even attained some level of professional success. But somehow, when it comes to mothering, our culture better prepares us to manage our finances than to care for new image bearers.
Complicating this, every mother I know desperately wants to be a “good” mother, the desire for goodness hardwired into us. We want to be “good moms” because we are image bearers of a good God. We long to return to the state of the original creation when he declared the world and everything in it—including us—“good.” We long to know that we are doing and being what we were made to be and do. We also long to know that we’re adding goodness to the world just as he does.
The Desire for Goodness
But while the desire for goodness might be instinctive, we really don’t know how to go about finding goodness. In the shadow lands after the fall, where good is called evil and evil is called good, it can be hard to recognize true goodness.[1] Not only that, Jeremiah 17:9 tells us that our own hearts deceive us. Even if we want goodness, would we know it if we saw it? What exactly does a good mother do?
Many of us turn to online parenting gurus, Instagram feeds, and cultural expectations to answer this question. But as soon as you do, you realize that there are as many competing visions of motherhood as there are of goodness. Who is the “good” mother? Is she the mother who embraces attachment-style parenting? Or the mother who follows a routine? Is she the mother who has two children or six? Is she the mother who cuts her grocery budget in half? Or the one who values organic, locally-sourced food enough to pay for it? Is she the mother who homeschools? Or the mother who volunteers in the PTA?
How you dress, feed, and educate your children are important questions, but they cannot answer this deeper, more pressing question: How can I be a good mother?
Becoming a “Good” Mom
Let’s say for a minute that you do figure out what a good mother looks like. After prayer and reading the Scripture, you begin to craft a definition of goodness that is based on God’s good character as revealed in the Bible. You recognize that the world’s vision for goodness is not God’s vision for goodness, and you commit yourself to pursuing whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, and commendable.[2] Can these choices make you a “good” mom?
Obviously, none of us can make all the right choices all the time, but assume you could. You research and set up a plan; you discipline yourself to follow it; you find that it’s successful. At least on the surface. Your children are well-behaved. Your home is well-managed. Even your pets are beautiful.
But at what cost? If you build your sense of being a “good” mom on your performance, you’ll have to never stop performing. The minute the table is covered in crumbs, you’ll feel compelled to sweep them up. When your children misbehave, you’ll need to come down swiftly and harshly to get them back in line. And when life gets tough, you’ll just have to get tougher.
Believing that your goodness rests on your choices, you’ll also begin to believe that you achieved goodness in your own strength. You’ll begin to judge other moms whose lives don’t measure up to yours. And slowly but surely, the weight of producing your own goodness will become a burden around your neck.[3] If you find you can carry it, it will become all that you do. And when you finally discover that you can’t, you’ll be tempted to give up on goodness altogether. Exhausted from trying to be good, you’ll accept the lie that you’re already good enough.
And you’ll be no further along to becoming a truly good mom.
Gospel Goodness
It’s into this exhausting reality that the gospel speaks. “For by grace you have been saved through faith,” Paul writes in Ephesians 2:8–9. “And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
A good mother is not a mother who makes good choices or one who has given up on goodness. A good mother is a mother who has been made good by Jesus and lives in his goodness. A good mother is a mother who knows that just as God declared her good at the creation of the world, he again declares her good through the sacrifice of his Son.
And this is why the gospel is countercultural—especially for mothers. It’s not because Christians make better choices than the world around us. It’s because we know that our choices don’t make us good. Only Jesus can.
This is also why Paul names goodness among the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22. Goodness is not something that we can produce apart from God. It is not something we can become apart from him. “Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?” Paul asks in Galatians 3:2–3. “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?”
What begins as an act of dependence on God for our eternal goodness becomes the way we pursue goodness in our everyday lives. Because even as we disciple our children, we do it as the overflow of our own deeper dependence on Jesus Christ. So that when we doubt, we run to Jesus. When we worry, we run to Jesus. When we fear that we’re not “good enough,” we run to Jesus. And in running to him, we find ourselves made good, equipped for every good work.
Suddenly we come full circle. Our choices don’t make us good. Only grace working through faith in Christ can do that. But this grace and faith does result in goodness. Because following Ephesians 2:8–9, verse 10 says this: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God has prepared ahead of time for us to do.” Freeing us from a posture of performance, the gospel invites us into good work. Including the good work of motherhood.
So that being united with Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we learn the power of resting in him, both for our own goodness and the good work we’re called to do. Until one day, after years of learning and growing in his goodness, we might hear our heavenly Father say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
Or as I like to hear it, “Good job, mama!”
[1] Isaiah 5:20
[2] Philippians 4:8–9
[3] Luke 11:46
R|M Apply Questions
Remember your first days as a mother. In what ways did you feel unprepared? What do you wish you had known? What advice would you give a first-time mother?
In what areas do you feel pressure or shame from broader mothering culture? How does this affect your sense of being a “good” mom? How do you find yourself attempting to compensate for this gap?
In what area of motherhood do you find yourself most dependent on God? In what area do you find yourself tempted to be independent of him and to act in your own strength?
1 Thessalonians 5:21 calls Christians to “Test everything; hold fast what is good.” What would it look like to build a family culture that pursues goodness but does not view good choices as the basis of our goodness? What would characterize the atmosphere and relationships of this kind of home?
