Unsupermommy: Release Expectations, Embrace Imperfection, and Connect to God's Superpower

By Maggie Combs

Imperfections are opportunities to receive God's unending strength.


No mother can live up to supermommy expectations. Thankfully, God isn't looking for perfection. He's calling on imperfect moms to be faithfully plugged into his superpowers.


In Unsupermommy, Maggie delves into expectations every new mom faces—for her baby, personal appearance, housekeeping, marriage, parenting, and more. She shares that by having three babies in three years God used the trenches of motherhood to transform her life, releasing her from the pressure of perfection. Her desire is to see discouraged moms freed from expectations prevalent in society, social media, blogs, and even our own hearts.


Maggie's candid motherhood story will inspire you to embrace your own imperfection as a means to receiving God's grace. You don't need to be a supermommy when you rely on a superpowered God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC
• Release date: Apr 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781424554126

Maggie Combs

Maggie Combs is passionate about helping moms experience God’s unending strength through their own imperfections. She is a mom of three busy boys and blames their unending energy and solid build on her tall, active husband. Her stolen moments throughout the day are used to write about the realities of motherhood. You can join the conversation on Instagram (@unsupermommy) or her blog unsupermommy.com. Maggie and her family make their home in Lakeville, Minnesota.

Book preview

Embracing Imperfection: Step 1 — Give Up on Measuring Up

Have you ever met a supermommy? Her baby sleeps soundly, nurses happily, and meets every milestone ahead of schedule. She tosses her perfectly wavy hair over her shoulder as she tidies her already sparkling house with nontoxic, organic soaps while her sweet cherub plays quietly with a wooden teether on a knit blanket on the floor. Naptime is just long enough for her favorite hobby and a spunky exercise routine. Her doting husband arrives home in time to kiss her cheek and pinch her baby-weight-free behind before playing with the baby while she creates a healthy and delicious dinner.

If we’re honest, we all want some of that supermommy life. Unfortunately, it’s a fantasy. It’s time to be transparent about our real lives and give up on measuring up to supermommy standards. Trust me, embracing an imperfect life as an unsupermommy serving a super-powerful God is joyful freedom.

This book won’t instruct you how to do motherhood perfectly. I won’t tell you how to raise your child, but I will push you to let God change your heart. You’ll discover how the gospel offers redeemed imperfection and more of God even if you’re failing by the world’s standards. If you’re pregnant, your heart is full of lovely desires for how your motherhood will look and the kind of home your child will experience, but if you’re already a mom, you probably know the brutal truth: motherhood often feels like failure upon failure.

The world around us is filled with bloated expectations for moms. Even though logically you probably know that no one can live up to those standards, it’s nearly impossible not to internalize them. These standards aren’t all bad on their own. It’s the assumption beneath the standards—that we can control our circumstances—that’s fatal to our joy.

But there is hope! You may not have the ability to succeed at the expectations piling up at your feet, but God’s strength is mighty in your weakness. He has more than enough power to connect to when you discover that you just aren’t strong enough. Ultimately God’s goal is not to enable supermommies, but to develop us into women whose humble hearts earnestly love and desire more of him.

I’m a fairly new mom myself. I had my first baby five years ago. Then I had two more, for a total of three boys in just shy of three years. Only God could orchestrate such chaos. With the first two boys, I experienced not infertility but delay in getting pregnant. We knew we didn’t get pregnant easily. We were wrong. My second son was only five months old when I took a pregnancy test on a whim after some morning queasiness. I needed to put my mind at ease. So much for that!

I’ve had three newborn baby experiences in quick succession. I’m not reminiscing fondly from ten years down the road; instead, I’m soldiering through the endless loads of laundry, a constantly messy kitchen, showerless days, and sleepless nights right along with you. I don’t have this all figured out. God is teaching me his truth as I write. I’m not a perfect mom, and I’m not an expert, but I have to speak this word: Dear Mommy, don’t live in shame for being pushed beyond your limits. You can break free from unnecessary expectations and embrace imperfections covered by God’s superpower.

Here’s What You Don’t Know

My dad loves to remind me, You don’t know what you don’t know. Let me tell you, I had no idea what I didn’t know about the spiritual impact of being a mommy. When I was pregnant, everyone told me the first year would be rough, but no one explained why. Now that I have done it three times, I’m starting to figure it out. The problem with motherhood is that you’re starting from scratch with everything. I didn’t know the first thing about taking care of a baby. I had a major learning curve there. Even if I had been a baby person (I’m not) or a full-time nanny for ten years (I wasn’t), I would have been completely unprepared for the real trial: identifying the good desires of motherhood that are usurping the best desire—knowing, loving, and glorifying God.

With the birth of her baby, a mother also births an entirely new set of desires for her life. Some of these new desires come from the lengthy set of expectations our society has for mothers. A pregnant woman is inundated with expectations from her doctor, fellow moms, friends, parents, blogs, baby websites, social media groups, and pregnancy books. She develops a master plan for motherhood, full of the grandiose expectations she has willingly (or sometimes at the insistence of others) adopted to fashion the best life for her baby. It’s more than a birth plan; it’s a life plan, and it feels awesome and untouchable.

Then baby comes and one or all of her plans don’t work out. Now mommy feels like a failure. Of course, she’s not really a failure! She’s just a real-life imperfect woman, with a unique child, whose perfect plan needs to be adapted to meet their combined needs. The real trial stems from her reaction to her circumstances; when a mom lets her expectations become more important than God’s plan, her good desires can develop into something ugly.

God explains it best in James 1:13–15: Let no one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

James explains that we can’t blame God or Satan for our temptations; they stem from our desires. God doesn’t say evil desires, which means even our good desires can trip us up. Desire gives birth to sin—oh, how appropriate for mothers. We have so many desires—for ourselves, our children, our husbands—and they’re good desires!

The problem is allowing our good desires to reign unchecked by our desire for God. A good desire starts so small that you can’t even feel it growing inside of you. As that desire grows, it starts kicking against everything around it. Eventually you can’t think about anything else anymore. Everything you do is impaired by it. Sound familiar, pregnant mommies? Unchecked desires become expectations, and expectations become wants, and wants become needs. When something we feel we need goes unmet, we sin to get it.

Sin doesn’t feel justifiable for a simple desire, but a need deserves drastic measures. This is the conundrum of the Christian life: we can never completely escape the growth of our desires into needs. Paul David Tripp calls the word need the sloppiest, most all-inclusive word in the human language.¹ There’s an endless list of needs for our babies, our husbands, and ourselves when we allow our desires to become more important than God’s plan for us.

The hardship of motherhood isn’t our strenuous circumstances; it’s our stubborn hearts. Before motherhood, I knew what my normal sin patterns were: worry, need for the attention and approval of others, and pride, just to name a few. Despite these sin patterns, I had always been capable to perform any job given me in my own power. Then I underwent the colossal lifestyle modification of wife to mother, shifting my desires and revealing new sin patterns. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t able to meet simple expectations, and I fought endless emotional battles to win back the feeling of being capable and productive. No matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t manage to measure up to either the world’s standards for moms or my own standards for how I thought motherhood should go.

Unfortunately, this didn’t lead to victory but to discarding the one thing I truly needed: more of God. The hardest part of becoming a mom isn’t the loss of sleep or crazy hormones; it’s the raging unchecked desires for our new lives overtaking our desire for God. It’s the grasping, endless pursuit of the unreachable goals for our babies, ourselves, and our husbands.

We know the problem. Now we must search out solutions.

This book outlines specific, good desires for your baby, yourself, and your husband. We’ll walk together through unplugging from some common expectations in motherhood that are commandeering the throne of our heart. We are weak and fallen. We will never be perfect moms. We will fail every day. But he gives more grace (James 4:6).

God is grace and mercy, perfect love, and complete rightness. When we get mothering wrong, God gets everything right. His power is stronger than all our weakness. God’s grace is sufficient for our tasks, redeeming of our failings, transforming of our attitudes, and abundant enough to always surpass our expectations. God’s grace is always greater than our imperfections. It’s time for us to give up on measuring up and fall into the faithfulness of our super-powered God.

This book will also walk you through four steps of fully embracing your imperfection as a means to God’s superpower. We’re already working on Step 1 right now: Give Up on Measuring Up. God doesn’t want our self-made supermommy. He wants to use our failures to give us more of him: For when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Corinthians 12:10). Let’s embrace our weakness as the ticket to God displaying his strength in our lives. Let’s release the control of raising our children into the hands of the One who loves them infinitely more than we do. Then we can move forward in our imperfection, expecting God’s super-powered grace to redeem it for his glory.

Let’s begin with believing the gospel: Jesus came to sacrifice himself for all our sins and imperfections. The grace offered to us on the cross is all we truly need for this life. When our