If you're looking for an
answer 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 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's a promise we can't keep.
We beat ourselves to death over that
pledge. "If I hadn't worked through the eight 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."
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."
The may seem like a strange Mother's
Day column for a day when joy and life abound for the millions of mothers
throughout the country. But it's also a day of appreciation and respect.
I can think of no mothers who deserve it more than those who had to give
a child back.
