In this talk I share my personal journey – with motherhood, imperfection, and God. As a daughter, I spent half a lifetime scrutinizing my mom’s imperfections. As an adoptee, I spent 40 years consciously or unconsciously searching for my birth mother, who I believed would fill me with the perfect love I so desperately needed. Becoming a mother myself threw me into a quest for perfection, determined to satiate my children so they’d never experience the holes I felt as a child. It wasn’t until I found my birth mother, and soon after watched my mom die, that I realized it takes a lifetime of being a mother to mature and reach perfection – and came to see that when it comes down to it, mothers just aren’t enough. Nobody can give us the perfect love we yearn for. That is, nobody except God. In the meantime, though, Mothers are the next-best thing. Not to mention, a crucial precursor to fully experiencing God, showing us what loving with our whole hearts is really all about.