My struggles are real, and my history doesn’t invalidate them

T

he rain is hammering down, drenching every last fiber of my clothes. I’m not wearing a raincoat, nor do I have an umbrella. I just had to get out. I had to run, to save some of the sanity I still had left.

I run until I can no longer hear the nagging or screaming. I run until I can no longer feel the vibrations of door slamming or wall climbing. I run until I can no longer see the phone lighting up with another call from school, another call that reinforces my failures as a mother.

The weather is apropos. My thoughts, mirroring the rain, come pouring out. They thunder, they flash. They leave my brain a puddle of mud. How did I end up here?

A streak of lightning transports me to another time not so long ago. I’d been walking in the rain then, too. Running. Running from the diagnosis that I just couldn’t face, from a world that was so foreign to me. I just couldn’t.

“Hashem, why me?” I’d sobbed. “You know I have it in me. You know I’d make a great mother… devoted to my children, pleasant, patient. Why did you have to take this dream away from me? Why?”

The downpour continues. Those “why’s?” echo louder. Now, though, they take on a different ring. “Why is mothering so incredibly difficult? Why haven’t things turned out the way I dreamed they would? Where are all the strengths I thought I had, back when I wished for this seemingly unattainable dream? Why can’t I be more patient, more loving? Why?”

I feel so helpless. So, so dejected. Where is my gratitude? I had wanted them so badly, and now…. What a lowly, ungrateful person I must be, to yearn for something so badly, and then to finally attain my dreams and fail so miserably. Maybe I never was cut out to be a mother after all….

Is this what I davened for?