On Motherhood

[Sendmorecoffee]

To be a mother. This is something that only women can do  and it changes us for ever. I was on the road trip and I ran across a page where a young woman who had had a few miscarriages and no living child was asking the question 'am I still a mother?' I've been pondering this. What is a mother? I don't believe that giving birth makes us mothers in anything but the animal biological sense. We are spiritual as well as material beings and motherhood for humans has to take into consideration more than biology. There are women who give birth and throw their babies in trash cans to die. Are they mothers?

 Mothers love their children. Love is not an emotion but an action. When you love someone their happiness is as important to you as your own and you act accordingly. I don't mean you give that person everything they want, getting everything you want does not often create happiness.A mother can give a child up for adoption or adopt a child or be a mother to a stepchild or relatives child or foster child or a child of their own body. It is her actions of love that make her a mother. Love as a verb.

This young mother asking that heartfelt question must be answered with a yes. Yes you are still a mother. it doesn't matter how long you got to love that child born or unborn, but the mere fact that you loved that child with every desire to provide for her happiness is what made you a mother. Once we are mothers, we can never look at children after that with the same detachment we had before. We are always involved. Once you love a child all children live in your heart in a way. I think this is at the bottom of why so many of us criticise the way other moms raise their children. We can no more stop being mothers than a butterfly can turn back into a caterpiller.

I hope we can remenber that this love of our children is also a love of all children and treat it as a common bond. Perhaps then our differences will not seem so great and our disagreements on styles of parenting will be tempered more with gentle consideration.

                                                                           Nancy