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MOTHERS MAKE SYNONYMS of love and life. In the darkness of our personal prehistories, before memory recorded its first jot, mothers tenderly tended our most basic needs, filling our gaping mouths, depending on our station in the animal kingdom, with worms or nutritious regurgitation or a nipple. In a few species, it's true, males nurture the young, so these words may have little resonance with readers who happen to be, say, sea horses. But for most of us whose ancestors shipped out on the Ark, with a sense of special devotion we hereby tweet, snort, whinny, honk, moo, and say, "Happy Mothers Day, Mom!"
Of course, the contributions of mothers are not what the Good Book calls "bread alone" (or, to speak precisely, milk alone). In a rather cruel experiment--somewhere in South America, if memory serves--orphaned babes were divided into two groups, and each given identical care--the same food, changing schedule, etc. With a single exception. One group was deprived of a sole, omnicultural element of child-rearing: human affection. Infants in the unsung-to, unplayed-with, unloved group failed to thrive; many died. Clinically, it seems, there is no substitute for love, and no love as pure and sustaining as motherlove.
Indeed, mothers generally teach us how to love. If we think back to the very first time our wee brains became aware of love, with its almost physical warmness, its sense of security, and our feeling of gratitude at being its recipient, we'll probably remember that the First Lover, who showed us this new thing in a way that left an eternal impression, was our mother. Maybe we felt the first rays of this sunshine on our soul as she pushed us through a still summer night to get an ice-cream cone, or when she picked sweet backyard clover to make us a flower necklace, or when, just the moment we thought the little piggies were dead meat, she reassured us, covers to our chins, that all the huffing and puffing in Wolfistan couldn't blow their little house down.
Later, in childhood and beyond childhood, we discover wolves with greater lung capacity than their fairy-tale kin. Often our houses do lose a few bricks; sometimes they're blown clean off their foundations. And in those times, mothers are there, the ultimate masons, helping us through encouragement and prayer to repair, rebuild, and go on. (Even short-winded wolves, we imagine, get uplifting words from their mothers. Mothers are just like that. It's the nature of the beast.)
Yes, there are--some--a few--bad mothers. But surprisingly few, given the cultural storms that have torn the little boats of convention from their moorings and scattered them hither and yon on turbulent seas. The female half of the race has hardly escaped the tempest, and thus many young women behave in ways that sadden their mothers, would shock their mothers' mothers, and would mortify to the point of requisitioning smelling salts their mothers' mothers' mothers. But even unready girls who stumble into motherhood become, about the time the first coo and gurgle emerge from the depths of the blue or pink blanket, committed traditionalists: They put the kid first. They do their best.
And so the cycle continues. The pigtailed Brownie of yesterday becomes the den mother of today. The former Band-Aided roller-skater, with cooling breath to ease the ointment's sting, becomes her own child's expert boo-boo dresser. The crushing blows that once fell on a little girl's world become the experience that informs the words that comfort the newly pained.
The "miracle of birth"--those who've seen it know it's aptly named. But both before and after it comes a twin wonder, which we toast today: the Miracle of Motherhood.
