I’m Not the Church Lady | Mother’s Day is the worst day of the year

||| I’M NOT THE CHURCH LADY by ROSIE KUHN ||| 

An idol is not something evil or dramatic. It is often something we unconsciously ask to give us what only God, Presence, or the Divine can provide: peace, completion, security, identity, worth, certainty, and unconditional love.

Children can become idols. Parenthood can become an idol. Relationships, success, approval, usefulness, spirituality itself—even suffering—can become idols if we are asking them to complete us or fill the ache of separation.

As a mom, loving my children is not the problem. Wanting relationship with them is also not a problem. The problem is when the suffering begins. When I make the relationship with my children the source of my peace rather than an expression of it. In essence—an Idol.

When I look to my children to comfort me, reassure me, validate me, and give me something they cannot truly provide, irritability arises. Sadness arises. Resentment arises. This is not an accusation of them or of me. It is more like a revelation. Almost like seeing the invisible emotional contract underneath the relationship that I didn’t even know was there: If you love me enough, respond enough, need me enough, reassure me enough… then I’ll finally be okay.

Most humans do this. Parents do it with children. Children do it with parents. Partners do it with each other. We place unbearable spiritual responsibility on other human beings and then wonder why peace feels so fragile. The moment peace depends on another person behaving a certain way, peace becomes a hostage.

For me, this realization is not meant to produce guilt. It is meant to exonerate my children—freeing them from being responsible for saving me from myself. Somewhere beneath my love was the unconscious hope that their love, their closeness, their appreciation, or their need for me would finally make me feel whole.

As many of us eventually discover, placing our hope in idols—in this case, our children, we inevitably creates suffering. I have no doubt that my love and bond with my children go well beyond physical form. But extricating myself from this unconscious idol-worshiping takes more honesty than I ever realized I possessed.

It is hard work letting my children off the hook from carrying the burden of creating peace for me. And I no longer want to carry the burden of being theirs. I am learning an entirely new way of being in right relationship with myself in relation to them. Strangely, this changes the quality of love entirely.

Love becomes less grasping, less frightening, and less sacrifice-based. It becomes less, “Do you have any idea what I’ve given up for you?” and more, “I love you deeply enough that I no longer ask you to complete me.”

This is where spirituality stops being philosophy, inspiration, or beautiful language and becomes frighteningly intimate. As long as “God” remains conceptual, symbolic, theological, or poetic, we can keep a certain distance. We can admire spirituality. Talk about spirituality. Teach spirituality. Even seek spirituality. But relationship with spirituality changes everything.

Relationship asks something of us. It asks for vulnerability, honesty, availability, trust without guarantees, and love without bargaining. Perhaps most terrifying of all, it asks us to stop making other humans responsible for what only communion with the Divine can allow.

For many people, the first experience of “God” was tangled up with fear, authority, punishment, abandonment, emotional deprivation, and performance. So, when life invites us into direct relationship with the Divine, many of us recoil without even realizing it. Not because we do not want peace, but because intimacy with God feels too vulnerable, too exposing, too real.

Which is why many people remain devoted to substitutes: substances, relationships, achievement, service, being needed, being spiritual, being self-sacrificing, being indispensable, being good, and, my all time favorite—being right. These often feel safer than real intimacy.

And yet, this is the choice point. The movement from: Please complete me, reassure me, stabilize me… into: I must decide that there is truly something beyond this question: do I matter enough to belong—not to my children but to God?

That is the real threshold. Not believing in God. Not discussing God. Not performing spirituality.
But risking our familiar perceptions of a relationship with God. Yikes!

Love or a Bargaining Chip

When parenthood becomes identity-attachment, there can be an unconscious bargain beneath the love: I gave my life to you… therefore you must prove my life matters to you.

This is where the heart begins to ache. Because attachment to identity quietly interferes with love. When I begin to see how attached I am to being “Mom,” I also begin to see how that attachment has prevented me from loving my children as they actually are, rather than as I unconsciously needed them to be.

Then deeper questions begin to emerge: Who am I if I am not needed? What remains if I surrender my attachment to my identity as mom and Granny? What remains when I stop arranging my life around being someone’s source—or needing them to be mine?

And maybe this is where the peace of God begins to enter—not as philosophy, but as experience.

Not: They finally love me enough. Not: My children finally see me. Not: I finally getting the validation I deserved.

But, something more like: I am held, even here. I exist beyond the role. I do not disappear when I am not in mom-mode. There is a Love underneath all of this that does not fluctuate with human behavior.

This is the place where spirituality becomes real instead of performative. Not abstract. Not churchy. Not spiritual theater. But: How do I actually live this when my heart is aching, my identity is shifting, and I no longer require the people I love to carry the weight of my woundedness?

This is the unrectifiable moment. The moment we realize that the ache for human adoration, reassurance, or completion will never truly be enough. Not because our children have failed us. Not because love doesn’t exist. Not because relationship is meaningless. But because no human relationship can successfully carry the burden of Divine longing. That burden will eventually crush every relationship asked to hold it.

In recovery language, this is often what “hitting bottom” truly means. It’s the collapse of the final illusion that this substance, this person, this achievement, this role, this sacrifice, this devotion will finally make the ache disappear.

When there is nowhere left to go externally, the bottom rises up to meet us.

This is horrifying to the ego and liberating to the soul.

As long as I still believe, “If they would just love me correctly… If they would appreciate me enough… If they would finally understand all I sacrificed…” I remain tethered to a salvation strategy that can never succeed, because I am asking finite humans to resolve an infinite longing.

The Arrival at Bottom

What initially appears with the arrival at bottom, may feel empty, lonely, humiliating, terrifying, and bottomless. But eventually something begins to quiet. Something becomes less dramatic, less desperate, and less performative. More honest. More spacious. More real.

When I sit in the dismal truth that nothing can be solved through the line of reasoning I’ve relied on, which is to say, is highly un-reasonable, shift happens. Again, an opening appears where there seemed to be only the bottomless bottom.

Better questions arise: What shows up when my children no longer have to perform reassurance, when they no longer have to prove I’m worthy of their love and attention, when they no longer have to become the evidence that my life matters?

What shows up when I no longer have to contort myself into martyrdom, indispensability, or emotional bargaining in order to feel connected?

What shows up may initially feel empty, lonely, bottomless self-loathing, and isolation. However, willingly exploring what truly is at the center of parenting will bring us to what it is and what it isn’t. This is a very good place to be.

The Isn’t of This is Where We Meet the Isness of Everything

Because the “isn’t” here is devastating: My children cannot complete me. Parenthood cannot save me. Being adored cannot heal existential separation. Nothing I make into an idol can give that to me.

But when that illusion collapses, something else becomes possible: a love no longer organized around starvation for belonging and deservedness.

What reveals itself slowly but surely, is a love rooted in presence rather than in shoulds and shouldn’ts. We meet the Isness of everything! Yahoo!

This is not fun! This is at times excruciating and unbearable. Maybe this is why so many spiritual traditions speak of surrender, emptiness, or dying before dying. Not as punishment, but as the dissolution of what could never truly hold us in the first place.

The spiritual path of parenting is not about becoming a perfect parent. It is about becoming conscious of everything that gets mixed into love and mistaken for love as a parent. Truth is, parenting awakens immense love. And at the same time it awakens attachment, fear, sacrifice, control, grief, identity, projection, longing, guilt, and unmet needs. We are given these
moments to know the difference.

Many mothers quietly carry the ache of not feeling appreciated, the grief of changing roles, the exhaustion of sacrificial identity, and the heartbreak of loving children who cannot emotionally carry them—and were never meant to. Beneath all of it lives the deeply human longing to matter and to belong.

Mother’s Day often unconsciously intensifies this ache. For many mothers—and many children—it can be the worst day of the year. It is the day the wounds often becomes real. The longing to feel appreciated enough, loved enough, seen enough, needed enough aches loudly, for mother and for child. For many people, the grief surrounding this day can feel enormous. Mother’s Day can place enormous pressure on families to perform emotional experiences that may not actually feel true. Yet beneath all of that awkwardness, grief, resentment, pressure, longing, guilt, and disappointment, something sacred is trying to reveal itself. There is LOVE.

The sacred path of parenting is strewn with obstacles to what has always lived underneath all of it: Love. It’s the kind of love that remains after illusion collapses. The kind that says: I release you from having to complete me. I release myself from needing to be completed by you. This is a good kind of love to reveal.
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What I’m left with, after writing this piece, is a deep honoring of all it takes to be both mother and child. Regardless of the day of the year and regardless of what is supposed to be, I am truly in gratitude for my children and for all that I continue to learn because of who they are and because of what we have been creating together over the course of our lives.

You can catch Rosie on Sunday mornings as she broadcasts on