Universal Mother Truth

When I think about my life, and I compare the things I’d hoped to accomplish with the things I have actually done, I realize that by most standards I am quite ordinary. I did not coach a world champion gymnast. I never got around to writing that next great American novel. I never made it to law school.  In fact, my life plans were interrupted when I became a mother.        

I had been married for six years when, tipping the scales at roughly 70 pounds over my normal fighting weight, I gave birth to our first child. I took a moment today to glance at a photo of my oldest son. He was an infant, just hours old. Incredibly that image evokes the same rush of emotions, intensified by a savage maternal instinct that overwhelmed me on the day he was born. So vivid is the accompanying morsel of self-discovery, that it fools me into thinking it all happened only yesterday…not more than two decades ago. 

With one push (ok maybe it was more like three or four pushes plus 20 hours of heavy labor preceded by nine months of morning sickness and hemorrhoids, but you get the picture), I realized something. Somewhere deep inside my sanctity-of-life-respecting soul, a savage beast lay sleeping. In the very instant the doctor delivered my baby and handed him to me, abruptly and with certainty I knew I was capable of killing another human being. I gazed into my baby’s face and promised, If anyone, anyone, tries to harm you I will kill him.  

Four years later, I nestled another newborn son in my arms and again that protective instinct erupted in me. I made the same silent promise this time around as I had the first time, If anyone, anyone, tries to harm you, I will kill him.

Perhaps hormones are accountable for this murderous instinct in an otherwise normal woman. Perhaps I am a raving lunatic. Perhaps, but I assure you I am not alone. Initially I was convinced this involuntary response to motherhood was unique to me. Surely no other mother loved her children as much as I loved mine. Come to find out, I am not extraordinary. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I am just another ordinary mother.

I have frequented passels of playgrounds, waited in endless, snaking carpool lines, and have volunteered at umpteen school functions. I have attended oodles of sporting events, school plays, and band concerts. I’ve spent a lifetime of arriving 30 minutes early with the not-so-hidden agenda of shamelessly jockeying for a position to insure snapping the perfect photograph of my little cherubs. In doing all of this I have spent incalculable hours with my mother colleagues and their children. The conclusion is unavoidable. I am not alone in my lunacy. It is a universal mother-truth: IF YOU HURT OUR BABIES WE WILL KILL YOU. 

From the benign threats of the schoolyard bully, from the most heinous misdeeds of the pedophile, and from ANYTHING in between, mothers do what it takes to protect their children. We do it with utter disregard for our own health, safety, and while I don’t like to admit it, dignity. 

There is nothing particularly special or heroic about what mothers do. We all do it. In fact it’s the ordinariness of it all that makes it quite extraordinary. Come to find out my accomplishments have exceeded my expectations…I am just another ordinary mother.