Some Moms (and Dads) Don't Get a Perfect Ending
Erma Bombeck
If you are looking for answers this Mother's Day on why God reclaimed
your child, I don't know.
I only know that thousands of mothers out there today desperately need
an answer as to why they were permitted to go through the elation of
carrying a child and then lose it to a miscarriage, accident,
violence, disease, or drugs.
Motherhood isn't just a series of contractions; it's a state of mind.
From the moment we know life is inside us, we feel a responsibility to
protect and defend that human being. It is a promise we can't keep.
We beat ourselves to death over that pledge. "If only I hadn't worked
through the eighth month." "If I had taken him to the doctor when he
had a fever."
"If I hadn't let him use the car that night." "If I hadn't been so
naive, I'd have noticed he was on drugs."
The longer I live, the more convinced I become that surviving changes
us. After the bitterness, the anger, the guilt, and the despair are
tempered by time, we look at life differently.
While I was writing my book "I Want to Grow Hair. I Want to Grow Up. I
Want to Go to Boise," I talked with mothers who had lost a child to
cancer. Every single one said that death gave their lives new meaning
and purpose. And who do you think prepared them for the rough,
lonely road they had to travel?
Their dying child. They pointed their mothers toward the future and
told them to keep going. The children had already accepted what their
mothers were fighting to reject.
The children in the bombed-out nursery in Oklahoma City have touched
more lives than they will ever know. Workers who had probably given
their kids a mechanical pat on the head without thinking that morning
were making calls home during the day to their children to say, "I
love you."
This may sound like a strange Mother's Day column on a day when joy
and life abound for millions of mothers throughout the country. But it
is also a day of appreciation and respect. I can think of no mother
who deserves it more than those who had to give a child back.
In the face of adversity we are not permitted to ask, "Why me?" You
can ask, but you won't get an answer. Maybe you are the instrument who
is left behind to perpetuate what was lost and appreciate the time you
had with it.
The late Gilda Radner summed it up pretty well. "I wanted a perfect
ending. Now I've learned the hard way that some poems don't rhyme and
some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is
about not knowing, having to change, and taking the moment and making
the best of it, without knowing what is going to happen next.
Delicious ambiguity."
--Erma Bombeck
blue
sad
