Mother

I wrote an article once about how we slight parents’ devotion to their children when we emphasize the instinctual part of it, as though their devotion comes from an inexhaustible well of love. If you can’t help but shower your child with affection from that deep well, I wrote, then where’s the glory? Sometimes love for your child has to draw from another well, I wrote, one filled with a jumble of determination, duty, and guilt-on-the-ready. And this may be especially true if your child has a serious illness that goes on over time. 

But another part of the essay dealt with that deep well of love itself. I wrote about how I had always seen that well as belonging mainly to the mother, and about how I learned, in a split second, that I was wrong. 

My son Jesse was about three. I stood near the door from the dining room into the kitchen as he came running from the kitchen. He tripped and fell where the linoleum floor of the kitchen met the dining-room carpet. I turned, swooped, grabbed, picked him up and asked him if he was all right before I knew what I was doing. ‘Aha!’ I thought, ‘so it’s not maternal instinct after all. It’s parental instinct.’  

I think I was right to make this point. But point being made, and acknowledging that things are changing and that there are exceptions, I think there is something special about a mother’s love, and so there may be something special about a mother’s grief, too. And what better way to illustrate this than by the example of a mother once removed from the child? 

Jesse had a special relationship with my parents. He was their first grandchild and the first among the parents on the block I grew up on. When Jesse died at 19 from complications of a liver transplant, my mother was distraught. Last year, after her own death at age 100, I came across a letter she had written after Jesse’s death, to the Methodist Bishop for the Rochester, New York area where she lived. It was about her anger toward God. I never knew my mother to be especially religious, and her letter didn’t persuade me otherwise. She just loved Jesse very much, and someone was going to have to pay for it.  

None of this proves a thing. The me who wrote about parental instinct was partly right, and the me who says a mother’s love is different may be partly wrong. 

After Jesse died, my mother and sister had a tree planted in Jesse’s name in Queen’s Royal Park in the little town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada. (Jesse loved Canada.) The tree is a sugar maple, planted at the crest of a hill in the park overlooking the confluence of Lake Ontario and the Niagara River downstream from the Falls. It was a spindly little thing back then. Years later, I see it my mind’s eye grown to a mighty tree that commands this meeting of those two great bodies of water. 

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention got it right more than fifty years ago: 

What you need is motherly love.  

This love stretches across time, from the waters of the womb to the waters of the River Lethe, where the boatman ferries you across from the land of the living to the land of the dead.  

Listen to your mother, children.