Motherhood: This job is an unpaid position. The hours are 24/7 for your lifetime. The basic duties include, but are not limited to: every single thing that needs to be done for a child, teenager, young adult, and fully grown adult.
Now, here’s the deal. Your compensation for this job, if done well, is something no one can actually fully describe. The way this work transforms you,from the inside out, is only understood by others who have attempted this job. No matter how you come to it, Motherhood makes you someone other than who you were before. You have been served a miraculous cocktail of obsessive love, protective instincts, sentimental mush, Spartan tenacity, and Herculean strength.
For the first time, you are able to withstand projectile vomiting aimed at your face, smells that Andy Dufresne encountered as he escaped Shawshank, and minor emergency medical treatments for wounds, lacerations, nosebleeds, insect stings, and allergic reactions.(Was any of this in the Manual??)
The love that is inspired by this job changes forever how you see the World. You no longer can turn off news stories about suffering children anywhere. You become outraged when there is bad, neglectful parenting reported, and you rejoice in every sick child’s recovery. You feel a connection with every other Mother, no matter where she lives or how she lives. You know the commonality of the devotion and heartache.
Jackie Kennedy was known to have said that whatever you achieve, if you botch the job of raising your children, nothing else really matters. I think she was right.
I read a quote that said “to have a child is to have your heart walking around outside your body forever”. True. Just ask any Mother.
BarbaraBeardsley.com 