Reading · Neurodivergent Motherhood

Two things: I know there are a variety of folks here from different faith backgrounds, and a number of new followers. My posts cover topics related to neurodivergence, parenting, church, culture, work, creativity, and how all of these things intersect. This is heavier on the faith piece, but these will vary each month. I hope you’ll stick around.

Also, if you’re a paid subscriber, scroll to the end for a link to our first call. Onto the piece…

Several months ago, before the sun was fully up, my son padded into my room and climbed into bed beside me.

That alone was unusual. We don’t do morning snuggles very often anymore. But what came next surprised both of us.

I’ve shared briefly before that after sort of a meandering journey with a few medical professionals, I was diagnosed with POTS last year, and we’re still exploring naming other related diagnoses. Some mornings my body requires a slow start whether I want it to or not, and this was one of those mornings.

For reasons known only to God, my son had woken up at this unusually early time and he was ready for the day to begin. He wanted breakfast. He wanted our normal routine. He wanted me to get up with him. And I genuinely wanted those things too. My body simply said no.

As we talked, I tried to explain what was happening. I told him it was frustrating for me too. I explained how great my doctors were, and what a gift it was to be alive at this time and have the medications and care that I did. But that even so, it was frustrating. I told him I wanted to be the first one awake. I wanted to make breakfast. I wanted to do all the things we normally do.

Then I said something that made his eyes widen a little: “Sometimes I get mad at God because I don’t understand why my body doesn’t do what I want it to.”

He looked at me with a little shock and surprise. I haven’t really talked about that part of my faith experience with my kids. We talk a lot about praising God. Asking God for things. Going to God with our hurts. But not our direct frustration with the Creator of all things—it was as though I had broken an unspoken rule.

Anne Lamott writes often about how anger and rage is prayer, too. About how she yells at God, but I never know how to translate it to my children.And yet here I was, just lying in bed trying to explain it without getting dizzy from standing up too fast while I waited for my blood pressure to catch up with the demands of the day.

Children absorb theology long before they can articulate it. Somewhere along the way many of them learn that gratitude is acceptable, joy is acceptable, trust is acceptable. Anger, however, is treated as suspect, at the very least.

Because we grownups like to hand them polished stories and tidy endings. We teach them that God is good—and I believe very much that this is true!—but we often skip over the parts where God’s people are bewildered, grieving, furious, and asking questions that sound dangerously close to accusation.

But scripture is full of stories just like this! (This is one of the things I like about the lectionary, but that’s probably its own post.)

David lamented openly (honestly too many Psalms to cite here, but Psalm 13 is a good one to start with). Jeremiah accused God of deceiving him (Jeremiah 20:7). Job demanded answers again and again, and his friends frequently made him feel like crap when he tried to work it out with a God he believed was good and trustworthy. Elijah wished for death (1 Kings 19:4). Even Jesus echoed Psalm 22 as He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). The Bible contains entire books devoted to grief, confusion, protest, and longing. And yet somehow many of us insist that faith means pretending not to feel those things.

Perhaps this is one reason my brain has struggled with certain expressions of Christianity. I am not particularly good at pretending. My questions have often felt more honest than the expected answers. Even now, years into a faith that I cherish deeply, I often find myself leaning into the questions instead of relying on prescriptive answers. And even though I’m one of the adults, I find that I might be one of the ones being passed off to leaders and pastors when my questions become too great in number.

Lately I’m thankful to be wrestling with these questions at a church that welcomes those questions and sits with me in them. A church that listens to my grief and anger and lament without encouraging me to suppress it.

The older I get, the more I wonder if part of my struggle has never actually been with God.

That feels strange to write. My struggles include so many emotions and frustrations and experiences with God.

I have certainly been angry. I have been confused. I have had seasons where my prayers sounded more like arguments than devotionals or songs of worship and praise.

But when I look back over the last few years—autism and ADHD diagnoses, physical health and chronic illness, parenting, grief, divorce, rebuilding, writing, and all the ways life has unfolded differently than I imagined—I do not see a God who was absent. I see a God who kept meeting me in places I didn’t expect.

What has been harder, if I’m honest, is figuring out what to do with the gap between Jesus and the ways people sometimes represent Him.

The last few years have stretched my faith in ways I never anticipated. Not because I have stopped believing in Jesus. If anything, I find myself more convinced than ever that He is exactly who He claims to be. But I have wrestled with the ways we interpret Him and His ministry.

I have wrestled with expectations placed on women, especially mothers, to be endlessly nurturing, endlessly available, endlessly grateful. I have watched women carry postpartum struggles, chronic illness, caregiving burdens, and profound loneliness while feeling pressure to present it all with a smile.

I have wrestled with communities that celebrate sacrifice while overlooking suffering.

I have wrestled with the ways churches sometimes respond to disability—not always, not everywhere, but enough to notice.

I have watched denomination after denomination navigate scandal, abuse, failures of accountability, and broken trust. I have watched people leave communities they loved because they no longer felt safe inside them. I have watched leaders protect institutions when people needed protection.

And I have wondered what we are so afraid of.

Why are we so uncomfortable with grief when Scripture gives us an entire book of Lamentations? Why are we so uncomfortable with questions when Jacob wrestled with God and received a blessing even as it permanently changed him (Genesis 32:24–30)? Why are we so uncomfortable with anger when so many of the Psalms sound like accusations before they sound like praise?

The Bible seems far less threatened by human emotion than we are.

What happens when you tell your child you're mad at God?

Comments