For The Love of Mothers

“Nobody told me there would be days like this.” John Lennon sang those words and my mother’s heart agrees.

Sometimes I wonder what the reality is. I was told, in bits and pieces, things about being a mother. Didn’t I hear about the great love mothers have for their children? From my own mother hadn’t I heard some tidbits of motherhood?

Perhaps you were told, but like me, you didn’t have the capacity or interest to listen and understand at the time. You weren’t a mother; you had no child. How could you have possibly known what to expect or prepare for?

And now, you are a mother of a precious child. You change diapers, wake at all hours, share you body with a nursing infant, feel your mind becoming frazzled, and just when you’ve learned to sleep through crying, you are pregnant again. Along comes child number two and then three, and one day you look at yourself in the mirror and say, “Wow! Nothing could have prepared me for all of this! Nobody told me there would be days like this!”

Here are a few things that you have learned:

• You can stir the spaghetti sauce with one hand and hold a fussy baby in the other.
• Snuggling and reading books together is time well spent.
• Your heart is built stronger than a Samsonite suitcase, larger than the Montana sky, and like the Energizer battery, it will keep going and going because nothing beats like a mother’s heart.
• Your children will not always look like cherubs. One day they will have long hair, wear the same shirt for days and smell like teens only a mother could love.
• They will blame you when things go wrong and when they go beautifully, they will forget to thank you.
• Your thoughts will be filled with “I told you so” but you will learn to refrain from saying that line as your mother learned early on.
• You will see that a child’s laughter warms more effectively than a blanket.
• You will start to hear yourself saying those cliches your mother swore she’d never say. Things like, “Do you think money grows on trees?” and “If everyone jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff?”
• You will learn how the expression to bend over backwards for someone came into our language.
• You will bend and break and mend and bend some more.
• And if a child dies, you will want to, too. You knew you loved, but the absent child will cause you to realize the vastness and incredible depth of a mother’s love. You will look for the simple, but magnificent of life — rainbows and sunsets– but nothing will fill that hole your child’s death leaves in your heart.
• Your children will beg for independence, and when you give it to them, they will ask you to be there, right next to them.
• You will grow old and hopefully watch your children grow older. They will make mistakes, cry, make mistakes again, and you will see your hands can heal and soothe and comfort.
• You will learn that sometimes all they need are pancakes for breakfast.
• And if you get to travel and see the Eiffel Tower you will feel kin to it — for you, too, are like steel. And as the sun sets behind the Eiffel Tower, and you marvel at the beauty, marvel at your own beauty. You are a priceless work of fine art.

You are mother.

Related reading: Read one mother’s story of her miracle baby

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