You Don’t Have to Be Enough

From the moment I realized my baby wouldn’t live, I felt my utter inadequacy as a mom. Cries I would never be able to comfort. A face I would never fully memorize. Milestones I would never get to celebrate. Questions I couldn’t answer, for myself or for anyone else. And underneath all of it, the weight of watching the world move on without her in it. I lived with the nagging fear that I was broken. That somehow, in the most important thing I had ever been asked to do, I wasn’t enough.

Maybe you’ve felt that too. Maybe loss has left you wondering if you failed your baby, your body, or your family. Maybe you’ve replayed moments, searching for something you could have done differently. Maybe the grief itself feels like evidence of your inadequacy, as though a stronger woman would be further along by now.

But here’s the truth. God never entrusted you with your baby because you were enough. He doesn’t give us the gift of motherhood in confidence that we can hold it together on our own. He is a Father who looks down on us with limitless understanding and love. Scripture tells us that “he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14).

He has always known exactly what we are made of, and He chose us anyway. That means we can exhale. We don’t have to pretend to be anything other than what we are. And what we are is needy children, held by a forever faithful Father.

This is actually at the heart of what it means to live as God’s children. We are called to steward many things in this life, motherhood among them, that we could never fulfill on our own strength. Scripture tells us that we serve “by the strength that God supplies” (1 Peter 4:11). That we carry the treasures of the gospel in “jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:7).

Jars of clay. Cracked, ordinary, fragile. That is what we are, and that is exactly what God chose to work through. Your insufficiency was never a surprise to Him. It was always the point. Because insufficiency keeps us running to Christ again and again for wisdom, comfort, and strength. It keeps our hands open and our hearts dependent. And a heart that knows it cannot hold itself together is a heart that learns, slowly and painfully and beautifully, to be held.

Mama, your baby’s life was not a mistake, your love for them was not wasted, and your grief is not evidence that you failed. Your grief is evidence that you loved, deeply and completely, a child who was always fully known and fully held by God.

Jennie is the Executive Director for Hope Mommies. She and her husband Brian live in Oregon and have four children together— Trenton, Paige who has been in Heaven with Jesus since 2010, Mason, and Cora. If you were to knock on her front door today, you’d find her in something comfortable drinking a hot cup of tea, while trying to figure out how to balance all the things that make up a life. She enjoys spending time in God’s word, fresh flowers, board games with her kids, cooking, and evening walks in her neighborhood. She adores being a new creation in Christ and prays she reflects Him well on this earth.