Mother: The One Who Makes It All Happen

My own mother, who is a family practitioner, told me lately this gut-wrenching story about a patient of hers: An elderly couple, together for many decades, were living through his late-stage Alzheimer’s. His disease had robbed him of most of his mental capacities, yet still he retained an essential gentleness and courtly consideration of others (he always stood up when a lady was present, for example). Heartbreakingly, he had almost no memory of who his wife was to him, except this: ‘Oh, she’s the one who makes it all happen’.

The more I think about this story (and I can never think about it without crying, for, I think, obvious reasons), the more I am convinced of several similarities between our situations. For Jack, as for this man, one woman is at the fulcrum of daily existence, and as both have no concept of time in the usual way, this minute, this hour, this day is all there is to life. When the central woman in the case leaves the room, for each there must be bewilderment: ‘Where did she go? When is she coming back? Has she left me forever?’ The woman wields all food, toileting, amusement and comfort. Such power! Such all-purposefulness!

And so, at the end of life as at the beginning, man is encompassed by the all-sufficiency of woman. Is it any wonder so many of them, to this day, feel so threatened by our awesomeness? Other women have written – though very few will talk about it – of the power and accomplishment they feel in giving birth and raising children. To paraphrase one author: ‘Now I know what God felt when he created the Earth, for I, too, have said Fiat Lux!’ I joked in the playground the other day (when one mother was asking me if I worked or what – God, I hate that question) that Jack was my current full-time project, my very own Sistine Chapel. He is. He is my masterpiece. I don’t mean (I really don’t mean) that I have created him in my image, or that I have more than very marginal control over how he will ultimately be as a person. (It’s very dull, actually, to think of reproducing as duplicating, in whole or in part - oh, he has his mother’s eyes and his father’s talent at math!) What I do mean is something far more magical: I have brought forth a life completely independently of my own, a being I will one day look at in wonderment and think: ‘Where did he come from?’ He came, indeed, from nothing… silence, darkness swirling. Bang! Collision! Sparks flying… Life emerging….

Sometimes, being a mother is the closest we’ll get to being God in this lifetime….