Loving them and surviving them are both holy.
I love them, but I don't enjoy this. There must be something wrong with me.
Christ's friends fell asleep on Him — and He still washed their feet. You can be exhausted by the work and still tender with the children.
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland
The single most emotionally honest General Conference address ever given on what motherhood actually costs. Holland never pretends it is easy — he calls the work "hard, too often unheralded" and consecrates that exact hardness. The same talk applies, with a turn, to fathers in long unseen seasons of provision.
President Russell M. Nelson
Nelson's tenderness about parents praying through seasons that feel like failure. "Pray for the children. Pray with the children. Pray for the children." The talk is not about success — it is about the long, faithful posture of bringing children before God when nothing in the day looked sacred.
Both of these are true. Both came from God.
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God."
— Mark 10:14
"The work of a mother is hard, too often unheralded work… mothers go longer on less sleep and give more to others with less personal renewal for themselves than any other group I know."
— Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, "Because She Is a Mother" (April 1997)
"The work of a mother is hard, too often unheralded work. The world will almost never see it, and seldom acknowledge it. Through these years, mothers go longer on less sleep and give more to others with less personal renewal for themselves than any other group I know at any other time in life."
Alma the Elder prayed with anguish, not praise.
Alma the Elder prayed with such anguish over his rebellious son that an angel came and told Alma the Younger, "He has prayed with much faith concerning thee" (Mosiah 27:14). Parenthood brought Alma to his knees — not in worship, in desperation. And God honored that desperation as faith.
Mosiah 27:14
Loving the child.
Mark 10:14
Naming the cost.
Holland — "Because She Is a Mother"
A mother of three, four years into a season where she has not slept through the night more than a handful of times, sits in Relief Society and listens to a lesson about the "divine role of motherhood." She smiles. She nods. She goes home and unloads the dishwasher for the second time that day and thinks: if this is divine, why does it feel like drowning? She does not say it out loud. Not to her husband. Not to her mother. Definitely not at church. Because what kind of woman does not enjoy the thing heaven says she was made for? Here is what she needs to hear: you are not broken. The work is brutal. The beauty is real. Both things are true. You can love your children desperately and still find the daily machinery of raising them grinding, monotonous, and lonely. That is not a spiritual failure. That is an honest description of a job that requires more of you than any other job on earth while offering less immediate feedback than almost anything else you could do with your time.
"The work of a mother is hard, too often unheralded work… mothers go longer on less sleep and give more to others with less personal renewal for themselves than any other group I know."
— Elder Jeffrey R. Holland (April 1997)
The father of the prodigal — love is shown in pursuit, not in pretending the pain did not exist.
The father in Christ's parable did not pretend the years of waiting were easy. He scanned the road. He waited. And "when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him" (Luke 15:20). The longing was real. The pain was real. The love that ran down the road to meet the returning son was the same love that had been hurting the whole time he was gone. Loving a child without pretending the cost is small — that is the parable.
Luke 15:20
Bridle it: right time, right place, right person, right reason.
This is not an excuse. God wants both — devotion that does not quit and honesty that asks for help. Bridle this.
When dislike of the role becomes contempt for the child — when the child begins to feel that they are the burden — the damage goes to the bone. Resentment that lives unexamined for years leaks out as coldness, sarcasm, or absence. That requires attention. Not guilt — attention. Therapy. Community. A spouse who shares the load. A friend who says me too.
"But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
— Matthew 18:6
Pretend you love every minute? You will burn out, your children will hear the lie, and your spouse will try to hold up a mountain alone. Honesty about the cost is not the opposite of love. It is how love survives the long haul.
"Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ."
— Galatians 6:2
Take the bread. Take the water. Adjust. Come back.
Hand this to someone.
Two Are True is a small, gift-able book — designed to be opened to any page and read in under a minute. Send a copy. Leave one in a bathroom. Give one to a teenager.