Orginally posted last Mother's Day. I think it needs repeating:
Some Mothers Don’t Get A Perfect Ending By Erma Bombeck
IF you are
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 to lose it to miscarriage, accident, violence, disease, or
drugs.
Motherhood isn't just a series of contractions, it is a state
of mind
From the moment we know life is inside us,we feel a responsibility to
protect and defend that human bein
It's a promise we can't keep. We beat
ourselves to death over that pledge.
"If I hadn't worked through the
eighth month"
"If I had just 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 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 despair are tempered by time, we look at life
differently.
When 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 has lost lost a child
to cancer. every single one of 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 to the
future and told them to keep going. The children had already accepted what their
mothers were fighting to reject. The children in the bomb out nursery in
Oklahoma City have now touched more lives then 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 seem like a strange Mothers day column on a day when joy
and life abound for millions of mothers through out the country.
But it's
also a day of appreciation and respect. I can think of no other mothers who
deserve it more then 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
the life that was lost and appreciate the time you had with them to do
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, taking the moment and making the best of it, without
knowing what is going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity
