Growing up in the South, I heard the words, “Bless your heart” a hundred times a day, always spoken with gentle, sympathetic tones by women with cheeks softer than a powder puff and smoother than the skin of a newborn. Just say, “Bless your heart,” and memories swirl of sweet tea and throaty laughter and bright summer sun.

I love this phrase, but when overused it becomes meaningless and trite. “Bless your heart” disintegrates into a catchphrase, a soft murmuring sound uttered when other words make no sense or don’t appear. Just three meaningless filler words. Even worse, spoken with just the right inflection, “Bless her heart” becomes a putdown, a tsk-tsk equivalent to “What a shame.” With just the teeniest dose of low self-worth, we could hear those familiar words as “You are to be pitied” or “You are in trouble” or “You are a failure.”

Isn’t this easy for mothers to believe? Don’t we internalize our children’s mishaps, failures, and shortcomings, figuring that if our young ones don’t grow up to be decent people with good jobs it is likely our fault? We’ve all heard that behind every great person stands a self-sacrificing, saintly mother. So the opposite must be true as well. If good children have good mothers, then children who stray or are less than perfect or don’t fit into the triumphant Christmas letter must have bad mothers. We believe this, even if we don’t verbalize it or put it into writing. When our children misbehave, we tut-tut ourselves and spike the blame meter in our own hearts.

Then we play the “if only” game. If only I had been more available, and more present. If only I had smiled more and yelled less. If only I hadn’t worked outside the home or had homeschooled the children; or if only I had worked outside the home or put the children in private schools.

We need to stop that ranting of our sore heart. What if we reclaim this blessing? As a woman, I want my heart to be blessed. As a mother, more than almost anything, I want my children’s hearts to be blessed.

The only catch to that wonderful longing? Failure to Thrive.

Failure to Thrive

Failure to Thrive (FTT) is a diagnosable condition, usually seen in children, who, though they receive adequate care for their physical needs, don’t gain weight. They don’t thrive. They just survive. FTT was first identified in children who were evacuated from London during the height of the Blitz in World War II.

Might there be a sort of emotional FTT in some mothers who are busy raising children, tapped out emotionally and spiritually because of lack of rest, surviving on leftover nutrition by eating mostly what the kids leave behind, and having a general drive to care for the needs of others?     

Because of our busyness while in the thick of parenting, living waist-high in children and their friends and their schedules of activities, we might not notice this state within our own souls.

For me, spiritual (and relational) failure to thrive showed up after my second child’s birth. My family moved from a full and insanely over-involved life in suburbia to a country parish.

Here’s a snapshot of my family at that time: two children aged two and under, a husband working double shifts, and one mother hanging on by her hair and faring poorly in all roles. Compounding the issue was the fact that I understood neither my gifts nor my natural talents and had overcommitted myself so people would like me. Maybe I figured that if they liked me, they would like Jesus. Or like my husband. Or all three.

This recipe for disaster worked out just as you’d expect. A Chernobyl-sized meltdown over an inconsequential issue forced me to seek healing. My past reached into my present with radioactive tentacles and dragged me to a reality check: get help or go down— and take my family with me.

Any time your reaction outweighs its trigger, look deeper and further back for the real issue.

When I finally realized I couldn’t blame anyone else for my own disaster—although I preferred blame over taking personal responsibility if at all possible—I got help. And in that achingly slow recovery process, I began to learn for the first time the necessity of self-care. Whether through a support group, a 12-step program, seeing a physician or counselor, learning your spiritual gifts, reading helpful books, delving into new spiritual disciplines, or other forms of soul care, women must do what it takes to thrive. We can’t afford not to. Failure to thrive is not an option, regardless of our age.

If we wait until the kids are grown, we could lose our minds. And we will definitely lose ground in terms of our own soul growth and cause repercussions on the hearts and lives of those around us. I knew I could not afford to live bleakly for one more second. Neither could my family.

But self-care is a battle. Others’ needs are so much more obvious, and we are created to nurture others and to tend to their needs, which are constant. However unhealthy it might be both for them and for us, we too often continue to meet those needs beyond the point of reason.

I once met a woman who cut up her child’s food at every meal— and the child was a teenager. She also cut up her husband’s food. You probably don’t do that. I sure don’t. But there are plenty of needs I’ve tasked myself with meeting long after the person in question needed to take ownership of those needs.

If you tend to resist self-care, as I did, where is that coming from? When did you begin to believe that it wasn’t OK to have needs, which means, in other words, when did you decide you couldn’t be a human being? If Jesus had needs (and He did: food, water, rest, time with God, and companionship), why wouldn’t we have them? Jesus took the time to meet His needs, and no one can say that was a selfish move on His part.

Is refusing to take care of ourselves a form of  “de-selfing,” of distancing ourselves from ourselves? Not having a self?

That question bears repeating—and answering—on those days when it’s too easy to care for other people and ignore our hollowness and too hard to say, “I really must invest in my own soul and growth.” If we want our families to thrive, let’s learn to thrive too.

For every single day you have been a woman, a mother, a wife, I pray, “God, bless your heart.” Bless your heart, my friend. Every step you took, nose you wiped, bed you made, lunch you prepared, meal you balanced, green veggie you force-fed. Bless your heart for every tantrum you deflected, bruise you kissed, back you rubbed. For every time you felt like a failure, a mistake, a mismatch in the parent-child dance, bless your heart. For every time you’ve tut-tutted yourself, felt shame for your actions, cried for your children, bless your heart.

Just listen one more time: Bless your heart.

Excerpt from Heartbeat of a Mother: Encouragement for the Lifelong Journey. Used with permission.