Who Mothers Mothers?

How does a mother love?  What I mean is, how does a mother bear it, the incessant care, the tenacious caring?  I looked back this morning at poems I’ve written to Kathy on past Mother’s Days.  I think that poems are things we write when there are no words.  And each Mother’s Day morning, I find myself struggling for them; I do again now.  And so I looked at poems I’ve written, and they are not poems of sappy sweet how-do-I-love-thee inclination, but poems of struggle, my own struggle with the weight of maternity.  One poem likened maternity to the sea, now calm, now powerful, always full of life, and always a force to be reckoned with.  Another pleaded with Christ’s mother to be a mother to Kathy, who lost hers at age 11.  I think of the sweetness of maternity, but more often I think of its weight.  Mothers carry children not for nine months, but nine lifetimes. 

Birth is not delivery, but a shift of weight from the womb to the heart.

Yesterday I heard from a friend who is, despite being a male, caught in the jam of loving like a mother.  Unable to see a friend hurt by that friend’s own decisions, he suffers terribly with finding his place in the relationship.  It was not until this morning, when I read the poems I’d written to Kathy, that I realized that he is in the dilemma of all caring mothers.  There is something inordinate about a mother’s love.   Some weeks ago I wrote that God’s love is mad.  So is a mother’s.  It does not follow order or logic.  Just as the need for love is incessant, so is the tug on the lover’s heart.   In my conversation with him, I felt as I had on those Mother’s Day mornings writing to Kathy.  I felt inadequate.  I could not take away the pain of his loving, just as I cannot take away hers. 

Perhaps in my grinding sense of my inadequacy, I was being given a sense of what a mother feels.  In each of those poems, my stumbling led me to fall into the only arms that would catch me – God’s.  And in a note to me, my maternal guy friend fell into those same arms, his stumbling words eventually decomposing into the most essential language: “O God!”  I discovered two weeks ago that the Chinese character for “Mother” is the combination of “Woman” and a squalling infant.  These characters began as drawings much like Egyptian hieroglyphics, but became simplified over time.  “Woman” shows the vestiges of arms and legs in movement, always working.  The baby is all head, with a huge open mouth and a tongue, the tongue most prominent, the tongue uttering the word that is the same in Chinese as in English, as it is in hundreds of other languages.  The bible says that Adam named all creatures as God created them, but I propose that Mother is given her name by the infant, the infant who is hungry, who is aware of her nearness, and her nourishment: MA!

Who nourishes us? MA!  Who nourishes Ma?  GOD!  Who else could keep satisfy the inordinate maternal need to care but a God who knows the madness of love?  I pray that all mothers feel as free as that squalling infant to call out, and to feel the comfort and nourishment of God, who alone is adequate.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.