Even if you haven’t heard of Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs,” you can feel it in your bones. In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow came up with this handy pyramid to explain when, why, and how we are motivated.

Here’s how it goes:

Way down at the bottom, at our most basic level, we have to have our physiological needs met. If you were a baby, innocent and helpless, these are the things you’d need first. Things like eating, breathing, sleeping, and steady temperature. Until you have these things mastered, you cannot thing about anything else.

But as you travel up the pyramid, you get to be more nuanced in what you seek. You scale the mountain past safety and into love and belonging where hopefully you have family and friends and later a significant other to add to the definition of you. And up at the very top, where the air is thinnest but the view the most breathtaking, you have self-actualization. It’s what everybody wants really—to understand themselves with that complete 360-degree view of their own psyche and life history. What a peaceful place that would be. I picture a jasmine-scented breeze and softly chiming bells.

But here’s the thing…if you’ve got a new infant at home and your sleeping in teeny tiny torturous increments, you’re not thinking about the “definition of the real you”. You’re thinking about your bed and the last time you saw it. You’re way down at base camp level.

Or let’s say you’ve just moved to a new city, started a new job, and are learning how to live on your own for the first time. You’ve probably got a copy of The Tipping Point and How to Make Friends and Influence People on your nightstand. And you might be tottering on the “can pay my heating bill only if I cancel my cable this month” which leaves you hovering somewhere on the middle of the mountain—too far up to go back, but still so very far down to feel like you’ve got a grip on the “real you.”

The thing about Maslow’s Hierarchy that slashes through my straight-line, plan-loving, actionable-step following soul, is that it is terribly misleading.

There is no straight path up that mountain.

Maybe you’re up, up and away after high school and into college. Maybe you get married and have kids and buy a bigger house and start to really examine what makes you tick. But then perhaps you lose a job or a spouse or get sick and suddenly, you’re halfway down the mountain again, deep in the woods, waking each day more confused than before.

That’s what happened to me.

It happened halfway up the mountain, just past the joining of the two roads that was marriage, when I decided I wanted a child.

And then months passed. And then years.

I was stuck and then slipping farther down, back to the basic physiological need to fix hormones and get the body running.

Here’s the thing: I think you CAN have moments of self-actualization in the middle. I think God can show you glimpses of the person He intended you to be even as you hang off the mountainside. There is no magical moment where you reach the top and think, “Aha, I’ve finally made it” now let’s set up camp.

This is why I wrote Unbound, to counteract the false impression that getting to the top is a steady line you follow or that self-actualization and satisfaction can only happen at the top.

Life is up and down and all around.

And for me, even after fertility treatments and getting to that sacred place of motherhood, it’s not peak perfection. And what I learned in the muck of those years of wanting a child more than anything was that God gives us “mountaintop moments” when we need them, not simply when we reach the top.