Assuming Motherhood

I am an excellent mother, despite the small fact that I have never birthed a child.  But, as it turns out, I do not need to birth a child to feel the pain of a mother who has.  And as such, I possess a love that ranges so far and wide as to encompass each and every individual that I encounter.

As I sit sequestered in my favorite booth with my favorite meal of chicken strips and fries (with extra crisp of course) I watch the other diners walk by.  An adolescent male—buck teeth gleaming from across the room, starched polo tucked tightly into khaki pants—leaves his seat to go to the bathroom.   He does not pass by me again for quite some time, and I wonder how long exactly his tucking and buckling and reattaching of his shirt adds to his hourly bathroom commute, and if he has any idea how absolutely ridiculous he looks.  It is at this exact moment (and countless other identical moments I’ve had nearly every day of my life) that I feel the motherness kick in and a surge of protective pity crashes over my body.  It is at this time that I have one thought consume all others my dimwitted brain’s mean-streak could possibly come up with—a thought that is really nothing more complicated than an indescribable feeling that I cannot possibly put into words.  It is in this microsecond that I become the buck-tooth adolescent’s mother.

This, of course, is but one example of many that I could cite describing how I become mother to all that I meet.  It took me some time to decide what name I could possibly bestow upon the feelings that consume my being, because—as I said—the feeling of becoming a mother simply cannot be put into words.  And yet there is no word better for the thing that I become.  And so, I sit in the same booth in the same restaurant every Friday, with no direct companions.  And every Friday, I am surrounded by my new children and am given the pleasure of feeling their companionship.  And, as such—as I have previously outlined and discussed with you here today—as long as I am surrounded by other beings, I am never truly alone.  I suppose it is true what they say—a mother is never lost so long as she has her children.

I think this is particularly hilarious because I did not have a mother to learn from.  Only my father and myself, with the company of an aunt (who thought of herself as my mother) from time to time.  This distant aunt, who I somehow had to see every other weekend, would push and pull at my body, at the things that are quintessentially me—like my one buck tooth or the three cowlicks on my head—and tear holes in them.  She would act without fear of how it would make me feel, as if she were aghast that I had not changed any of these things yet—thus inviting me to share in a joke called “how to change who you are”.  The funniest part of this jest, though, was that she always got her way and yet somehow always felt like she was owed more.  Like the sacrifices she had made by being related to the woman who had created me were too large to ever have a hope of being repaid.  And it was like I never even stood a chance.

This is, I really believe, part of the reason I am such a wonderful example of a mother—I know exactly what words will tear a child into pieces, and I refuse to ever say them.

And as I sit and stare at the buck tooth creature skulking across the diner, I find myself hoping desperately that his first mother knows them too.