Messy Mom Moments: Imperfect, Without Regret

Looking back at the mother I was and the man my son chose to become.

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Today, as I think about my son’s engagement, memories tumble in without chronology: laughter from the time-out carpet, his cries when our family split apart, the years I feared I was getting everything wrong, and choices I would make with more wisdom now.

Together, those memories reveal the unvarnished truth of our life. I was not a perfect mother, yet love ran through even our most chaotic years. Looking back, I refuse to let regret have the final word.

The Early Years

I mistakenly believed the oldest brother had taught me everything I needed to know about the baby and toddler years. Then my second mischievous little boy entered the world two weeks early, weighing nearly ten pounds, and gleefully rewrote the parenting manual I thought I had mastered.

At two, he became the only child whose mouth I tried washing out with soap after he kept spitting at me. The Nanny promised it would work but did not share that children impulsively spit out what does not taste good. My sound judgment had vanished beneath the fatigue of keeping two fearless, busy boys alive.

Our clashing wills carried us into daily standoffs neither of us knew how to resolve. One afternoon, I returned him to the “time-out carpet” for what felt like the hundredth time. His favorite act of defiance would be to sprawl his little body across the floor, with a single finger touching the carpet. My internal dialogue rumbled, “Well, the Nanny didn’t tell me how to manage this behavior.” I imagine his answered, “Well, she didn’t tell me how much of my body had to stay on the carpet.”

Thus began the battle between the authority of a forty-year-old and the loophole-seeking logic of a three-year-old.

He was also our resident jokester, instinctively recoiling from emotional heaviness and breaking tension with laughter. His humor crossed the line of age-appropriate comedy more than once—fart jokes go a long way with boys. During some of our most chaotic moments, I dissolved into uncontrollable laughter, which only encouraged him. It was not textbook parenting, but it was us: imperfect, exhausted, and still finding reasons to laugh.

Those early years now live in family stories we can tell with affection. At the time, however, I questioned myself constantly. Was I too lenient? Too harsh? Was I teaching him anything, or merely surviving until bedtime? I did not know that one day I would miss stepping on Matchbox cars in the middle of the night, watching McQueen in Cars declare "I am speed.", negotiating endlessly over piano practice, and receiving unanticipated hugs from that small, chunky body.

Motherhood gives us very little perspective while we are living it. We make critical decisions during suffocating, bone-deep fatigue, financial pressure, strained marriages, overloaded schedules, and experiences we do not yet understand. Years later, we revisit those decisions with knowledge we did not possess when we made them and then have the audacity to judge the women we were for not knowing what only time could teach us.

When the Really Hard Years Arrived

As he grew, laughter no longer provided a consistent solution to evading pain. When he was seven, he went to his older brother's room one night and asked whether they needed to call 911 because the violent yelling from their father and me terrified him. Two years later, his wails filled our kitchen as we, his parents, told him his father would be moving out.

The haunting recollection of those wails still brings tears to my eyes and tightens like a vice around my heart. I'm so sorry, my sweet son. I'm so, so sorry.

Our separation was jagged, loud, and far from graceful. There were no carefully executed conversations followed by seamless co-parenting and emotionally secure children. We were a wounded family trying to function while the structure beneath us broke apart.

I know he carries wounds from those years. I cannot erase them or pretend my choices left him untouched. Loving him now requires me to name that truth without excuses.

Divorce also planted questions in me that lasted far beyond the legal process. Had I ruined his understanding of marriage? Would he be afraid to trust someone completely? Would conflict always feel dangerous to him? Would he repeat what he witnessed, or avoid commitment altogether because he had seen how painfully a family could divide?

Those fears colored so many ordinary milestones. On birthdays, I wondered, “Did I give him enough? Too much? Will this become a good memory?” At graduations, I replayed every misstep, including the flub at his high school ceremony. At sporting events, I wondered whether it felt strange that his dad and I were not sitting together—or whether he was relieved. Even family dinners carried guilt because sitting together at the dining-room table was often too painful for me.

The fears surfaced whenever one of my children struggled. Divorce made it easy to trace every disappointment back to the fracture in our family and assign myself the blame.

There were consequences to divorce. There was grief. There were moments I wish I could gather back into my hands and remake.

But our hardest years were not the whole of his childhood, and they were not the whole of my motherhood.

Life Continued

Life kept moving after our divorce, as did my spontaneously funny kid.

For six years, he terrorized me as a soccer goalie. Goalie moms deserve awards at the end of every season. At times, I had to move away from the other parents, lock eyes on my kid in the goalie box, and silently hex every child who charged toward him. Beneath my clenched jaw and racing pulse was the fierce prayer I had carried since his birth: Let him be safe; Let him be spared. Realistically, the prayer sounded more like, "Don't you dare touch my son. I have no qualms about marching onto the soccer field." Much to his relief, I never did- except when he was two. That is a story for a different blog though.

Of course, he could not be spared from everything. No child can.

What I could do was keep showing up. I could watch from behind the goal when my nerves could not tolerate the sidelines. I could drive him home after a difficult game. I could listen when he wanted to talk and remain nearby when he did not. I could apologize when my own pain spilled into his world. I could keep loving him while both of us learned how to live inside a family that no longer looked the way we once believed it would.

He was not frozen in the moment his parents’ marriage ended. He continued forming ideas, testing beliefs, meeting people, and deciding what kind of man he wanted to become. His life remained his, not an inevitable reenactment of ours.

That truth took me years to understand.

The Man He Became

After dating his high school sweetheart for five years, he made the decision to solidify the future of the relationship by asking her to marry him. When he lowered himself onto one knee, I know he looked at her with tenderness and told her she meant the world to him. He slipped a ring onto her finger as a visible promise of loyalty, and her yes sealed that promise between them.

I knew the day was coming. He had called and walked me through details of the planned surprise. I listened, reassured him, prayed with him, and waited for the confirmation call.

Interestingly, the proposal itself did not surprise me. The wave that followed- pride, joy, relief, and an unexpected ache- did.

He had witnessed the collapse of his parents’ marriage, yet he had not surrendered his belief in love. He knew commitment carried risk and still believed it was worth taking. He was not approaching marriage with the innocence of someone who believed love prevents suffering. He was choosing it with an awareness that relationships require character, loyalty, repair, and courage.

His engagement answered a question I pondered for years: our divorce had not taken away his ability to believe in marriage.

What I Felt in That Moment

First came pride. Although his parents’ marriage ended, he believes two people can choose one another for a lifetime. Watching him make that promise showed me the honorable man he has become.

Then came excitement. I picture another place set at holiday tables, new traditions taking shape, and his fiancée becoming even more deeply woven into our family. My joy comes from knowing he has found someone beside whom he wants to wake, struggle, celebrate, and grow old.

And beneath that joy was sadness. I know marriage will bring disappointments, losses, and seasons when love demands more than either of them expected. I cannot know which trials will find them. I want to stand between them and every heartbreak, even as I understand that I can no longer protect him from pain.

Actually, I never could.

That ache also comes from recognizing what this engagement means. Scripture speaks of a man turning toward his wife, and now their partnership will take first place. I am still Mom, but my place has shifted to a cherished seat nearby.

He is still my child, but no longer the little boy whose warm body curled beside mine during story time, who counted “lights out” with me at bedtime, or who called from the kitchen to ask what was for dinner.

The goal of raising children is to help them build lives that no longer revolve around us. Knowing that does not make the transition painless. Pride and grief can inhabit the same moment without diminishing one another.

No Regrets

This milestone has made me look back at motherhood again. My oldest moved out a few weeks ago, (Messy Mom Moments: A Journey Through Grief and Growth), and now I'm watching a different son prepare for marriage.

I was not perfect. I snapped when patience ran dry. I followed advice that now makes me wince. I laughed when I should have drawn a firm boundary, and I could not shield him from slammed doors, raised voices, and the grief inside our home. I own those truths.

Yet, regret is not how I want to remember his childhood.

I returned after the arguments. I sat beside him through disappointment. I shouted from the sidelines. I admitted when I was wrong. I kept learning, even when learning required me to confront parts of myself I would have preferred not to see. I loved him through every age with the wisdom, strength, and capacity I had at the time.

My failures belong to our story, but they do not eclipse the devotion that carried us through it.

There is a difference between taking responsibility and sentencing ourselves to lifelong shame. Responsibility allows us to acknowledge harm, apologize, make repairs where we can, and live differently. Shame declares that every good thing we gave our children has been nullified by the places we failed them. I will not accept that verdict.

For the Mothers Still Inside the Mess

To the mother navigating divorce while trying to hold your children’s world together: you may not be able to see beyond the season you are living.

You may lie awake replaying what they heard, what they saw, and what you wish you had handled differently. You may study every change in their behavior and wonder whether the divorce has damaged them beyond repair. You may fear that the end of your marriage has already determined what they will believe about love, safety, commitment, or family.

It has not.

Divorce will become part of their story, but it does not receive sole authorship of who they become.

Your children are also being shaped by the mother who keeps returning. The mother who tells the truth in age-appropriate ways. The mother who seeks help, apologizes, creates new traditions, and makes room for both grief and laughter. The mother who gets dinner on the table, or orders pizza in front of the TV because the day defeated her. The mother who loses her patience, repairs the rupture, and tries again tomorrow.

These are the messy mom moments no family photograph preserves.

Hope after divorce does not require pretending the children are fine or insisting everything happened for a reason. It means believing that pain and growth can occupy the same history. It means recognizing that children can carry wounds without being defined by them. It means trusting that what happens after the fracture matters too.

We cannot promise our children a life untouched by loss. We can show them that loss does not have to destroy their capacity to love.

Years ago, I heard my son wail as his family changed. Today, I see that same child preparing to stand before the woman he loves and promise her a future.

The distance between those two moments contains grief, mistakes, resilience, healing, laughter, and more grace than I could recognize while I was living it.

I cannot change the mother I was, and I would not trade the son who grew through it all. I choose gratitude over regret- for the boy he was, the man he is, and the privilege of loving him imperfectly every step of the way.

My motherhood was messy. It was also faithful, enduring, and filled with love.

That is the story I choose to carry forward.