The Lord was engaged in the task of creating mothers. He was in
his sixth day of overtime when the angel appeared and said, “You’re doing a lot
of fiddling around on this one.” And the Lord said,” Have you read the specs on
this order?” Then the specs were set forth: she has to be completely washable
but not plastic, have 180 moveable parts ... all replaceable, run on black
coffee and leftovers, have a lap that disappears when she stands up, have a
kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair,
and have six pairs of hands. But hands were not the major problem. The problem
was the three pairs of eyes. One pair that sees through closed doors when she
asks, “What are you kids doing in there?” when she already knows. Another set
of three in the back of her head that see what she shouldn’t but what she has
to know, and the ones in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and
reflect, “I understand and I love you” without so much as uttering a word. The
Lord went on working on the model and the angel suggested putting the task off.
But the Lord said, “I can’t. I’m so close to creating something so close to
myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick, can feed a
family of six on one pound of hamburger, and can get a nine year old to stand
under a shower.” The model was finally finished complete with a tear of which
the Lord said, “I didn’t put it there.” The tear, the Lord told the angel, “was
for joy, sadness, disappointment, compassion, pain, loneliness, and pride.”
That fable, taken from Erma Bombeck’s book Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession, touches somewhat heavily
on sentimentality but it has a hard nugget of truth. Many of us would confess
with gratitude that the closest we come to knowing the love of God in human
form is found in a mother’s love. As the fable says, God indeed created
something close to himself.
There is certainly no question but that motherhood, especially in
our day, is a difficult and demanding vocation. It is an art and part of the
trouble is that a mother is compelled to undertake the task with no previous
experience. Especially with a first child, the mother faces the experience
forced to learn as she goes along. And most mothers (and fathers, too) would
confess a need for a model, some indication of what should be done and how to
do it.
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