Woman on the Front Line

At the beginning of 2020, I had everything I wanted–a job I love, two happy kids, and a husband making an exciting career move. Beyond my home, local families from the kids’ school community enhanced our lives. My colleagues inspired me daily. I was growing, learning, and enjoying life. While raising my kids far from my parents was always a source of pain, I finally had enough income to get the four of us tickets to my home state without excessive financial strain. 

Then, life changed in March 2020, and I have not been able to regain equilibrium since. With numerous subsequent losses, disorientation has lingered and grown. For a while, I believed that this was just me. Other women seemed to recover from the pandemic and resume a sense of normality while our family remained in flux. In the last year, however, I have come to a realization. I am not alone. The majority of women I know are not okay. What exactly is going on? 

Early in my pandemic disequilibrium, I attended a Zoom prayer meeting with three women. Kim, with six grown kids of her own, told me, “One thing I do not regret is the time I spent praying for my kids in those mom’s prayer groups at the schools.” Without any other levers to pull for greater sanity, I took her comment as sage advice. I recommitted my time to the weekly mom’s prayer meeting, now located on Zoom, that began years ago with a group of elementary school moms. Before too long, I had started three new prayer groups, one at church and two for my kids’ new schools. I am not sorry that I took Kim’s advice. And with my recommitment to gathering moms for prayer, I now have a broader data set to draw from. Moms are not okay. In my observations, some themes are contributing to our aches and pains.

Faith Community – Difficulties in our faith communities cause stress on the family and make youth group offerings strained or slim. Commitment to our kids growing up in a faith environment does not necessarily translate to receiving the support we need. Youth groups stopped meeting during the pandemic, and our kids may not have rejoined or connected. Churches are struggling with relational strains, transitions, budgets, and, in some cases, a full-on crisis, making church a stressful category in life instead of the community support system it was for previous generations. On top of this, the pandemic accelerated the breaking point for passing faith from one generation to the next. As kids hit their tweens and teens, they often see church as something they do with their family, but that has no relevance or future for them and their peers. 

Generational challenges – Our kids lived through a pandemic that migrated more of their social life and academics online while trapped at home, giving older kids almost 24/7 access to the internet and social media. Teens report mounting pressures to succeed in a system with no guaranteed reward or outcome for effort. With extreme costs and oversaturated admissions pools, even straight-A students are not guaranteed that hard work will equal acceptance at a “good” college. These factors all lead GenZ tweens and teens to increased mental health struggles, and stress out their parents. 

Whereas previous generations may have felt boxed in by strict societal expectations, this generation has fewer boxes, which can cause its own kind of stress and anxiety. Parents are navigating new territory. Whereas 5-10 years ago, young people sought freedom by shedding the constraints of societal spaces, GenZ and Gen Alpha kids will not be oriented by deconstruction. Instead, they are increasingly floating around in the ether with nothing to hold onto. They live in rubble. Of course, they can’t identify it as such because it’s all they’ve known. Disoriented parents watch this rapid generational shift unfold without the resources and structures that were there for us. A sense of shame ensues in the absence of clear measures to point to the success for our parenting efforts.     

Unsustainable systems – When I received a promotion into my last job in 2017 with a seven and eleven-year-old, I knew I was joining a small cadre of women in breaking our organization’s barriers. A female predecessor told me the job was nearly impossible if your kids were too young. Maintaining and functioning in that role, which I loved, required optimal conditions. I was fortunate to have a six-month sabbatical before beginning the job to gain energy and establish family rhythms that worked for me. A few years later, when the pandemic hit and the announcement for remote K-12 education came out, I knew I instantaneously lost my thriving. The suboptimal conditions would last almost an entire school year, directly impacting all families. When I talk to women my age, we universally understand that our jobs exist in systems not built for us. We are intelligent and savvy, and by mid-career, we figured out how to make accommodations on our end to succeed. Still, since 2020, the obstacle course has become more strenuous, and without the system changing entirely, it seems impossible to continue. I used to say that I felt like I was just trying to get through the obstacle course of my day, which was strenuous enough. Then, after 2020, it felt like people were throwing balls aimed at my head that I had to dodge while running and jumping through the course. It was exhausting to make it through every day on that type of alert. Many women I know have taken career breaks, and others want to but cannot afford it financially, leaving them stuck in this cycle. 

Caretaker burnout – Women are not the exclusive caretakers of our families, but there is no denying that we take on more of the burden in most cases. There is a saying that “a mother is only as happy as her least happy child.” Truer words were never spoken. With a lack of solid faith community support, increased generational trauma for our kids, and strain over career sustainability, women are burning out. Imbalanced hormones, dysregulated nervous systems, and off-kilter relationships abound, but healing is expensive and time-consuming. When everything is breaking at once, which aspect do you tend to? Whose needs come first? Are some things shattered to the point of being irreparable? These questions call for new skills, paradigms, and resources for many of us. 

There is no space within our faith communities, family systems, and work lives to accommodate the work of healing. In an environment where you face daily threats, you cannot carve out a space for restorative pathways on your own. At some point, the threat has to relent so you can move toward repair and thriving, but these days, dangers seem more pervasive and impactful. 

Some may wonder, as I have, how this can be so bad when, for generations across time and place, women continue to face many, if not more, instances of trauma. I speculate that we may be in a perfect generational storm. While I am not describing any challenges that women in strained socioeconomic, war torn, and other marginalized realities have not faced and overcome, I believe it helps to put words to what exactly the middle-class is experiencing post-pandemic. It is not the worst suffering in the world, but the mind and body only know suffering as suffering and trauma as trauma. The security system of the middle class is dwindling, making more of us susceptible and vulnerable to loss of agency and systemic failures. Instead of reaching for insights from the successful and well-off, we need to turn to the resilient faith of those acquainted with systemic disenfranchisement and the related cycles of trauma. I anticipate this need will require both tapping into a theology of faith and suffering that is underrepresented or nonexistent in many of our churches and learning moment-by-moment dependence on God. 

Successful Baby Boomers who achieved a comfortable American life raised my generation of mothers in the workforce. As their offspring, we may have been ill-prepared to imagine a regression of thriving and lifestyle choices for ourselves and our kids. A lack of hope for a better future brings about depression and fear. Inflation, living further from family support systems, and having less hope in our faith communities may contribute to a sense of crisis. Additionally, more of us work outside the home, simultaneously taking on the burdens of providing and nurturing, unprecedented in previous generations. Pre-2020, we may already have been on a path of burnout. Still, the pandemic accelerated burnout by isolating us and demolishing support systems, such as interactions with grandparents, public school education, and Sunday school or youth groups. We never imagined we would be here, raising our kids without a sense of a hopeful, bright future for ourselves and them. We thought they would have access to the same things that gave structure and provided guardrails to our lives.  

While devastating and disorientating, this may be the best thing to happen to middle-class American parents spiritually as well as to our kids. After over two decades of working with young adults, I have noticed that those who attend church are more serious and committed to Christ than in previous generations, where previously there was a social benefit to joining a Christian group. Faith expressions and prayers will likely be more authentic as trials test us. Like Hannah, the mother in the Bible who cried out desperately for a child, we must come to terms with releasing our kids back to God. We did not fully anticipate this because we trusted the “program” to guide our kids in the right direction before the pandemic. Three and a half years after it began, our kids’ childhood, parenting, churches, and society are forever changed. Fortunately, God was never counting on these programs, and our desperation as mothers can become the beginning of a prayer movement where we otherwise, unknowingly, might have sat back and trusted in humans more than God.