EYESIGHT

By Jenn LeBlanc
jkerriga@mscd.edu

Mother's absence brings lost hope

This week marks one month that I am a motherless child.

Regardless of physical age, to our parents we are eternal children. I know this as I look at my daughters. My children exude this youthful fascination, much younger than their years, even though they are nowhere near the physical realms of adulthood.

And I? I am a child with no mother. I have found this fascination recently with the implications of motherhood, or lack thereof-the presence that, technically speaking, we all should know, but many of us don't. This presence that seems to leave a gaping wonder of a hole that cannot be filled by any other presence.

Even though mothers and daughters argue and fight, it is this inimitable bond between the two that began way before our consciousness had any inkling that we would be and formed such an impact on someone else's mental being. It is as if there is a physical and mental change that is fully and wholly irreversible the minute the thought of that physical child comes to be. This change is so powerful that it is impressed on a being that is readily incapable of the duty it brings with it: to be the child of a mother.

There is something so amazing about a mother. Yet, as I type these words, with the realization that I myself am a mother, I do not speak of myself. I speak of my mother, our mothers. I can only hope that, someday, I will be thought of in such a boundless form.

There is a reason that "mother" is such a powerful and all-encompassing word. Mother-earth, mother ship, the mother of all viruses, etc.

But I? I am a motherless child, and even the memory of that power cannot fill the vast emptiness I feel for my future. Not that I don't feel hope, I only feel that something intimately important, like an appendage, has been lost to me forever.

It is only your mother who listens to every ridiculous thing you have to say, and understands completely why you have said it, and lays down no judgment.