“You’re so strong” - Words That Hurt More Than They Help

Can I tell you something? I know for a fact that telling a mom “you’re so strong I could never do that” more often than not comes with the best intention… but it can hurt. A lot. I used to say it often to mothers navigating things harder than I could imagine.

I’ll be honest - even with good intentions, many of us doing the “hard”, feel invalidated when we are told this… I know. I know it’s hard to relate to. Or to get but more often than not, we didn’t see ourselves doing this “hard thing”. We question “why us”, a lot.

Once I became that mother. Once I talked to other mothers in similar seasons… one common denominator I noticed was… none of us wanted to be strong. None of us wanted to have to see our kids be strong either. None of us wanted to be the story that other told or used as an example of strength. More often than not the world told us we were strong and we wept behind closed doors. We wept a lot. We broke. We shattered. But we kept showing up for our kids. Afraid to admit to the world we weren’t as strong as they said. We broke. A lot.

But we were relentless. We didn’t give up.

And honestly, our strength is not ours. It’s HIS.

But do you know what I learned? You never know how strong you are until strong it is the only option. We can do hard things. Maybe we never imagine ourselves in those types of situations…but I promise that If you were given the same cards, you’d do the hard thing. And you’d be strong when you didn’t think you could.