Mother love

Christian Century, Oct 8, 1997 by Nancy Mairs

Dear Mom: On this Mother's Day when I am an almost mother, I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate you for being my mother. I realize now that no one can really understand the bond a mother feels with her child except another mother. Not even the child, as much as she may love her mother, can understand.

As I feel the baby inside me now, I imagine how you must have felt feeling me move and grow stronger, imagining what I might look like or what I might become. Also, as I worry about our baby (everything from whether he'll be healthy to how to raise him as a good person), I realize all the worries I must have given you. I want to thank you for raising me well and for continuing to love and support me through the years.

Have a Happy Mother's Day! I love you!--Anne.

Reading this note in the hubbub of a restaurant, I could not be gladder that, 31 years ago and without much heed for the consequences, I committed myself to motherhood.

When Anne was born I was nearly ten years younger than she is now, and although I surely worried about her health, I doubt that I knew enough to have qualms about her goodness. One quality conferred by a Calvinist upbringing in a village on the north shore of Massachusetts in the 1950s was a confidence, perhaps even a conviction, that rectitude was something of a birthright. As long as a man worked steadily at the managerial or professional level and returned home every evening to a spotless house and a hot meal and two scrubbed children ready for a night-night kiss; as long as a woman confined her out-of-the-house activities to service and social clubs with other like-minded women; as long as the children attended school regularly, joined the Scouts, didn't go "parking" and get each other "in trouble" (or, if they did, married quickly and quietly); as long as the family, unbroken by divorce, showed up at the large white Congregational church on the village green every Sunday--they were all, as a matter of course, the right kind of people.

Such a setting, snug but also smug, where good was something you were (or weren't), not something you did, fostered an almost ludicrous naivete. My idea of living on the edge entailed a visit to my aunt's house in Boston, where some of the guests might wear long black stockings and write poetry. I had never heard of heroin, abortion, domestic violence, homelessness; we gave our castoffs to Goodwill, but I had never met anyone whose nakedness they might clothe.

Moral distinctions seemed pretty plain. Those who lived as we did were good. Those who lived otherwise (in other words, most of the world) were not good--not necessarily evil but certainly benighted, their hope of redemption lying in their becoming more like us. Small wonder that I didn't fret over my baby's moral health: simply by virtue of being my daughter, she was destined to become a good person.

In the wake of the Vietnam War, which drove home for many of us the discontinuity between righteousness and right, I began to relinquish the Mosaic certitude that I was among God's chosen as long as I obeyed the stone-carved rules. I felt drawn more and more strongly toward the essential message of the gospel: that God loves all creation, not in a mawkish fashion but fiercely, fixedly, without restraint, expecting much yet forgiving each failure, suffering with us in defeat, promising that we can do better next time, refusing to abandon or destroy what She has made no matter how blemished it may seem to our limited vision.

In other words, Jesus spoke literally: God's love epitomizes parental love, and goodness is indeed the birthright of my children--my daughter and later her brother--in ways I once could not have conceived.

Because Anne is not a Christian, she will have to find a different (and, as I imagine it, a more difficult) route to the recognition that goodness is not a state into which she can draw her child by either instruction or inspiration. Nor is it a quantity that she can pour into him until he is filled and finished. Rather, it is a journey with many way stations.

Since staying out of trouble is a wholly inadequate indicator of goodness, her heart may be broken, perhaps many times over, as he stumbles--and she, too--along the way. What will get them through has little to do with propriety. What will get them through to the point that they can celebrate each other as good-people-in-the-works is the passion and intensity now stirring in her--all we can know firsthand of God's love.