I have lately been dreaming of a time to come. You see, I have had a toddler for basically the last eleven years of my life. As soon as one graduated from toddler-hood, there was always another to take its place. Yet, now, here I am, nearly at the end of my toddler line, and while, the end of every season comes with its sorrows, I am mostly welcoming it with excitement. Soon, everyone will be potty-trained. Soon, everyone will be able to wipe their own rear ends and get their own shoes on and buckle their own seat belts. Soon…

That’s what I was dreaming about recently when we took our family to a baseball game. That sounds simple enough, right? “Here are some seats, children, and look, there is a baseball game. You sit in the seat and watch the baseball game.” Yes, that sounds straightforward, you’re thinking, but there is nothing straightforward about a seat when you have a two-year-old. To a two-year-old, a chair is a loose suggestion, a nice idea, an abstract thought. And sit and watch something? Why would one do that when one can run around and endanger one’s life?

And so, I found myself chasing a two-year-old around a ball park, looking under chairs for the ball he’d possessed for two whole minutes, but had become completely essential to his happiness, attempting to quell cries and arguments while oft glancing apologetically at the people behind us who, no doubt, were ruing the day they had purchased these particular seats.

It may come as no surprise then that we left the game early. As I was trudging up the stairs, rambunctious toddler in tow, more than a little discouraged that it is so hard for us to do literally anything in public without being a spectacle, an older man we passed said to me, “You’re a good mom.” I smiled and began to thank him and he said again, “I was watching you. You’re good.” His words struck me and in the weeks since, have repeated in my mind a few times. “I was watching you. You’re good.”

Most of motherhood is unseen. No one sees you nurse your baby in the middle of the night. No one sees you make lunch for 183478th time. No one sees you clean the pee off the floor or labor through your son’s Pre-Algebra homework at 9 pm when you’re supposed to be cosseted in bed watching Gilmore Girls.

How much do we long to feel seen and yet, also fear it? Because it’s also true that no one sees the bad stuff. Mostly, no one sees you lose your cool, raise your voice, say the thing you regret and maybe we wonder, what if they did? And maybe we feel that God is watching us, more like the people in the seats behind us than the kind man who spoke these words, watching us with an eye for faults, impatient with failures, and ready to criticize. But…what if he’s not? What if he watches us and calls us “good?”

Show me a mom who doesn’t desperately want that title. Show me a mom who doesn’t put her head on her pillow some nights and wonder, “Am I a good mom?” Why does that word, “good,” mean so much to us? And why, as I did when this man spoke these words, do we long for it and yet, also find it hard to receive?

Perhaps, the answer is simply that we’ve forgotten something very important, that we’re telling ourselves an incomplete story. We often start with the truth that we are all fallen and bad, depraved sinners and that is all true, but that is not actually where the story of the Bible starts. The story starts with goodness. God created Adam and Eve and before they had done a single thing, he pronounced them “very good,” (Genesis 1:31). They possessed a goodness that had nothing to do with what they did or did not do. They were inherently good because they were created by God, made in his image. They were good because they were his.

It is important for our theology and our anthropology that we understand that that goodness did not completely disappear after Genesis 3. Creation is fallen, but still good. The image of God in mankind is marred, but not erased and you, Mama, are broken and imperfect, but still good. Just like Adam and Eve, you possess a goodness that has nothing to do with what you’ve done, but everything to do with who you are and whose you are.

“But what of my list of failures and shortcomings?” you say. Yes, what of them? For, the story of the Bible tells us more. It starts with our inherent goodness and ends with Christ’s complete and perfect goodness which covers all who come to him in faith. Goodness is a thing we receive and not achieve, an identity we live out of and not work toward.

So, next time you’re ruminating as you fall asleep, the next time you wonder if you’ve finally been bad enough to lose the title “good mom,” remember where the story started. You are created in his image. Every day, you reflect who God is as you care for your children and your home. Every day, you display the goodness of God to your kids. God knows your frame. He remembers that you are dust. He sees your failures through the lens of love and compassion. He watches you and calls you “good.”