Cultivating spiritual practices in the middle of ‘mom life’

LOUISVILLE — What does it look like to cultivate spiritual practices in the middle of busy “mom life”? How can spouses and partners support moms so that moms have time for their own spirituality?

Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe, the hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” turned to Sarah K. Butterfield, an author, podcaster and ministry director — and the mother of two — to get answers for those and other questions during a June installment of their podcast. Listen to their 49-minute conversation with Butterfield here. She’s introduced at the 5:58 mark.

“I think a lot of moms and parents in general experience a kind of shift in their spiritual lives pre-kids to post-kids in the way we were taught to relate to God, as having this discrete time of the day when we are having a quiet time with God,” Butterfield said. “That flies out the window when you’re having babies and when you’re experiencing that life-stage transition when the things you used to do in your relationship with God feel like they’re not accessible anymore.”

The “deeper problem,” she said, is that “we need a mindset shift: God is not supposed to be a slice of your life. God is your life.” God is “not just interested in your spiritual life,” but “is interested in your life.”

Rather than thinking about God as a slice of pie when it comes to our lives, consider God “as the pie tin who’s holding it all together,” Butterfield said. “We need to be more understanding that God’s presence is with us throughout the day. Any spiritual practice that can bring you into that kind of awareness is going to be key.”

There are “all kinds of organic ways to walk your life of faith with your kids to take advantage of those moments when they come up,” she said. “When you’re dropping off a meal for a neighbor, you can tell your children, ‘We’re doing this because we love Jesus. Jesus has asked us to love other people, and our neighbor needs help right now.’”

“You can capitalize on those moments and not think you’re a failure because you don’t sit around the table and have a family devotion time,” Butterfield said. “We need to be capitalizing on those everyday moments.”

Catoe asked her about parents sharing roles around raising their children.

“I think the truth is that women do tend to carry the mental load of the household,” including “what are we running low of in the pantry?” and “what sizes are the kids’ shoes right now?” and “who’s due for a dentist appointment?” she said. Those roles are becoming “a little more fluid.”

“In my household, my husband and I trade off our busy seasons,” Butterfield said. “There were years in our lives when he was doing all the household stuff because my work was keeping me so busy.”

“I think it’s important for kids to see that in a household, everyone pitches in together for the good of the household,” she said. “It’s not one person who self-sacrifices in love for everybody else. It’s ‘we are serving one another in love.’”

When a baby is born, “there is this prolonged season when a lot of it is on mom. It’s almost inescapable,” Butterfield said. “During those intense moments, it’s important to remember this is a form of spiritual formation. The Christian life is about imitating Jesus and his sacrificial love for us.” A mother caring for a newborn around the clock “has to experience self-sacrifice over and over to the point of exhaustion.” That guilt we might experience “when we haven’t opened our Bible all week — we need to remember that we are being formed to be more like Jesus during this very intense season by these self-sacrificial acts.”

Parents feel “so many expectations about how we’re raising our kids,” she noted. “There’s this weird expectation that they’ve got to be doing all the things and excelling at all the things. We can get caught up in that.”

But “as Christians, we need to be living a little more counter-culturally,” she said. “During the pandemic, we kind of reclaimed that time. We were forced to be home all the time. There were terrible hardships and challenges, but there was a gift in that because everybody could step back and ask, ‘why were we so busy?’”

“It’s been interesting seeing that busyness creep back,” she said, “instead of taking a moment to say, ‘what gifts can we carry forward from being at home together and carving out white space on the calendar to just be?’”

Citing Elizabeth Berget’s “Love Like a Mother: How the Sacred Work of Motherhood Reveals the Maternal Heart of God,” Butterfield said, “the truth is that Mary’s body was broken for Jesus before Jesus’ body was ever broken for her.”

“There is the real sense for mothers in the act of giving birth and sustaining life that there’s something of God we are mirroring,” Butterfield said. “We are made in God’s image, and in parts of the Old Testament, God is described as a laboring woman. If we’re only given examples of God with these typically male attributes, it can affect our relationship with God to not see ourselves and our experiences reflected in the Divine.”

For parents who are having a baby or waiting for an adoption to be finalized, “there are real limitations — on our time and the physical limitations that are hard and that reflect the Divine,” she said. “They’re how we were formed — to be more and more like Jesus.”

With a nod to the writer Carolyn Custis James, Butterfield noted that “we need to get to know and experience God for ourselves to have a more robust picture of what God is like. When hard seasons come — when life happens — you can’t be relying on what your pastor told you about God or what your husband thinks about God. You have to have your own strong relationship and experience with God to get through those seasons.”

“Seeing the maternal heart of God and understanding your own experience as a mom as something that’s reflected in the Divine is helpful in building that picture and those better ideas of God that can sustain us.”

For Butterfield, “the most unexpected part of having kids is they end up being little mirrors of you. They shockingly reflect back to you what you sound like and what you act like. … The second your kids give you some sass and you wonder where that came from, you remember, ‘oh, I say that all the time.’ It’s very humbling.”

Doong pointed out that a church “can be a great place to have that community and have that support system.”

“It’s unfortunate that God designed us to need community,” Butterfield said. “You can do a lot of spiritual things on your own — just you and Jesus — but unfortunately, God designed us to need other people. It’s time-consuming to belong to one another, but it’s necessary.”

“In church, you’re thrown into the mix with people you may not choose to hang out with,” she said. “We grow and we learn from each other. It’s a beautiful piece of church, but it does take intentionality.”

Parents of young children do well to invite people into their lives when and where they can. It can be by way of a quick phone call, such as this example: “Hey, I’m stuck at the playground for the next two hours and I’d love to see you,” Butterfield said. “There are ways to make it work if you want to make it happen.”

“Theology on Purpose” is Butterfield’s podcast. She suggested people interested in incorporating more spiritual practices into their life take the “Connect with God Quiz” found here. 

Go here to listen to previous editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.”