Motherhood

What is motherhood? Is it the essential happiness for which woman longs in her married life? Or the social event she cannot do without in the forming of the family?

It seems to me that it is nothing but the dream that turns in the head of every woman, and that it is the immortal mission in which is made manifest what God has bestowed upon the female alone. All women bow in reverence, with the tremor of awe in their souls, before the splendid image of motherhood; all of them wish to taste this deep happiness, giving it the first place in their lives; and they feel no gladness so great as that which they feel when they become mothers, even if, short of it, the blessings of this world are theirs in abundance, and broad standing, vast fortunes, and a happiness-giving husband are gathered to them! Zarathustra said: "Man for woman is only a means; her end is the child." Children are the source of their hopes; they are not happy unless they are granted the children who strengthen their position and raise the worth of their ultimate end in life. A mother's love for her child is the strongest of all loves, the purest, and the furthest removed from all selfishness; she sacrifices everything for his sake, without hoping for anything in return. Were it not for this strong love, stripped of all selfishness, no mother would expose herself to that danger, content to do so for the sake of bringing into this world a new child whose mother she is. The man, in begetting the child, may be driven by the factor of pleasure; and the woman's pain may itself be a pleasure, for the mother endures this passing pain only for the lasting pleasure that follows it: every mother feels a pleasure beyond all pleasures in bringing forth a little child. Dr. Stopes has said: "Radiant motherhood in its intensest meaning is summed up in two things: the pleasure of bringing forth a little child, and the bearing of pain in giving birth to this child—in other words, it is the sacrifice of the self for the sake of the self."

The female is happy, and her soul beams with the colors of bliss, in the exalted moment when this wish is fulfilled—a wish surpassing all the radiances of happiness, and all the moments of bliss she has ever enjoyed.

In the instant in which the mother gives birth to a child, her eye is gladdened by him, her careworn conscience finds rest in him, and her life brightens because of him, despite the exhausting pregnancy and the bitter delivery that so often threatens to end her life.

To the mother the child is the shining light that fills her eyes; she sees the truth of her world in the opening of his eyelids, and so she loves her world, even if torment weighs heavy on her shoulder and the wound of pain bursts open in her breast.

He is the rays that flood her heart with contentment and satisfaction, and the strong cord that binds her to her husband; the hope toward which she has so long looked and of which she has dreamed; he is her sole companion in the darknesses of solitude, and the crown of her kingdom, for whose sake she fights all the armies of despair and hopelessness that league against her.

In his glances she sees the world and all who are in it, and in his smile the dazzling lamp that sweeps from her the darkness of life and helps her to bear responsibilities, awakening strength in her and renewing her resolve.

With one clasp of him to her breast the mother forgets all the fetters of trials and pains with which the days have bound her; the somber clouds part from the sky of her life, uncovering a smiling, flourishing, clear sky.

She strives for his sake and toils, heedless of fatigue, working to care for him with energy and fidelity, to prepare his powers and to set his steps straight.

She listens to him, taken by the magic of his first babblings—he calls: Mama—Papa—and she hastens to him, flooded with rapture, the tears of joy clinging to her eyelids.

She looks at him with glances of tenderness and affection as he smiles and laughs, crawling on the rug, trying his first unsteady movements, now falling, now bumping into things; and she clasps him to her breast, making him feel her love in the glow of her breath, and her tenderness in the warmth of her kisses.

She stays awake the long nights over his rest, drowned the while in her far-off dreams, seeing in her child, asleep with full eyelids, the delights of the world and all the treasured wishes it contains.

How many a startled leap has drawn the mother out of her pleasant dreams—a feeble movement, or a faint sound that might not rouse a heedless consciousness, makes her wake in alarm and stand before her child's bed, watching over him with her tenderness, and seeking out the source of his fright and his stirring.

She cannot bear the sight of her child crying from hunger, or ailing and in pain; she sacrifices everything for his sake, loading herself with severe torment to prepare his food, or to give him her breasts in the sweetest hours of her sleep.

She passes the nights in continual vigil before her sick, aching child, crying out from the depths of her soul—the hot tears flooding her cheeks—in prayer for her child's recovery, even should it lead her to pay her own soul as the price of his cure. She aches for his aches, and every strength in her dissolves before the pain he suffers, and her voice rises in broken moaning, the echo of the broken strings of her heart.

Among woman's merits there is none surpassing the merit of her sensibility. She turns herself into gifts and bestowals from a spring brimming with love, feeling, and tenderness that gushes in her depths; and so she gives with a bounty such as the man cannot give to his son, because he is himself athirst for those bounteous gifts—he wants to share with his son the blessings of giving, and this thirst is what drives him to marriage.

Woman understands by instinct the source of a child's crying, for instance, more than man understands it; she hastens to him, answering his call without delay or questioning, while the man stands inquiring, seeking explanations, thinking.

This is because woman was created to answer wants, to attend to the existence of the living beings that surround her, and to bestow happiness on her children, her husband, her mother, her grandchildren, whom she loves—each of them having a particular personality and differing desires; and this makes her, by instinctive discernment, perceive the recesses of the soul in each one of them, and understand their many demands with their divergent aims.

Such is the mother who grasps the meaning of motherhood, and who appreciates the immense responsibility laid upon her shoulders. But are there not ignorant mothers who draw down upon the child sins that society will not forgive them?

There are women who, on the plea of preserving their beauty, disdain to nurse their children at their own breasts, for fear of the slackening that might disfigure that beauty, their supreme idol; and so they deprive the child of the blessing of nursing, and the little one grows up with the spring of every human feeling dried up in him—the feeling that wells from the breast of the mother, now turned to stone, who was cruel and unjust, and slapped his heart with the storms of deprivation—those storms which so often leave, in the depths of his psyche and the bottom of his soul, wounds and pains.

We see that most children of wasted bodies and emaciated limbs are victims of deprivation of the necessary nourishment carried by the mother's milk. The Prophet said: "Deny not the one suck nor the two, nor the one nursing nor the two" (hadith).

Scientists have proved that the child's gentle suck exercises the muscle of the breast, strengthening and developing it and adding to the mother's beauty and her immunity; they have likewise proved, from the medical standpoint, that the mother's milk is vitally necessary in the child's nutrition, for the abundance of nourishing substance in it that is not found in powdered milk.

As for the psychological standpoint, no two people differ that the child whom his mother has satisfied from her own milk has his psyche wrought upon by all the human influences that stream from the breast of the love and affection which the child feels in that clasp to her bosom; he basks in its warmth, settled there, drinking from its springs the good things by which his powers are perfected.

And what is that clasp but the very hope toward which a girl's soul aspires from her earliest youth, when she clasps her doll to her breast with an embrace to which her instinct and her purity impel her? Is it lawful for her, then, to deprive her living doll, afterward, of the instincts of tenderness, the impulses of compassion, the merits of love and affection, and the qualities of brimming humanity?