Some
Mothers Don’t Get A Perfect Ending
IF you are looking for an answer this
Mother's Day on why God reclaimed your child,
I don't know.
I only know that thousands of mothers out there today
desperately need an answer as to why they were permitted
to go through the elation of carrying a child and then to lose it
to miscarriage, accident, violence, disease, or drugs.
Motherhood isn't just a series of contractions,
it is a state of mind.
From the moment we know life is inside us,we feel
a responsibility to protect and defend that human being.
It's a promise we can't keep.
We beat ourselves to death over that pledge.
"If I hadn't worked through the eighth month"
"If I had just taken him to the doctor when he had a fever"
"If I hadn't let him use the car that night"
"If I hadn't been so naive, I'd noticed he was on drugs".
The longer I live, the more convinced I become that
surviving changes us.
After the bitterness, the anger, the guilt and despair are
tempered by time, we look at life differently.
When I was writing my book
"I Want to Grow Hair,I Want to Grow Up.
I Want to Go to Boise,"
I talked with mothers who has lost lost a child to cancer.
every single one of said that death gave their lives
new meaning and purpose.
And who do you think prepared them for the rough, lonely
road they had to travel?
Their dying child.
They pointed their mothers to the future and told them to
keep going.
The children had already accepted what their mothers
were fighting to reject.
The children in the bomb out nursery in Oklahoma City
have now touched more lives then they will ever know.
Workers who had probably given their kids a
mechanical pat on the head without thinking that
morning were making calls home during the day to their
children to say,"I love you."
This may seem like a strange Mothers day column on a
day when joy and life abound for millions of mothers through
out the country.
But it's also a day of appreciation and respect.
I can think of no other mothers who deserve it more
then those who had to give a child back.
In the face of adversity we are not permitted to ask
"Why me?"
You can ask, but you won't get an answer.
Maybe you are the instrument who is left behind to perpetuate
the life that was lost and appreciate the time you had
with them to do it
The late Gilda Radner summed it up pretty well.
"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned
the hard way that some poems don't rhyme
and some stories don't have a clear beginning,
middle, and end. Life is about not knowing,
having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it,
without knowing what is going to happen next.
Delicious ambiguity."