Motherlove and the Still Small Voice

Last week CE went on her very first overnight field trip for school. Now we won’t get into the fact that I don’t think I ever had an overnight field trip or that my first foray into the world of sleep away camps was YW girls camp when I was twelve and CE is 9. Times are different now. We have decided that our family doesn’t do sleepovers, except grandparents’ homes, so not only was this a first overnight field trip, it was CE’s first time sleeping away from any relatives. Because I couldn’t be a chaperone (nursing baby), CE had to be on her own. She had been excited for this field trip for months. All we could hear about and talk about was Mt. Charleston and what they would do there. She packed over a week in advance. But when the time came to go through her bags and make sure we had everything the night before the trip, CE lost it. She was more impossible, intractable, recalcitrant (and any other mule-like synonym that you can think of) than she had ever in her life been. I wanted to scream at her; I wanted to cancel the field trip, ground her and send her to bed. It was bad. And then, a tender whispering came into my heart, “she is afraid.” And what’s more, the whispering continued, “don’t tell her she’s afraid, ask her how she’s feeling.” And because I did, we had a great talk and she was calmed and ready to go on this exciting and new experience. Sadly, this isn’t my natural mother style when met with whining irrational pre-tweeners. I know this whisper wasn’t earth shattering, new or un-discernible to the sensible motherheart, if I were sensible. But I was tired, frustrated and truly only able to hear the whines and freak out before me, so I take the fact that the Spirit blessed me with this inspiration loudly enough that I actually heard and listened to it as the most sublime of gifts, given to me not for anything I have done or merited but in response to this stewardship of mine to mother these precious crazy spirits so that they can figure out (along with the rest of us) how to get Home again. I consider motherlove to be part of the mantle that comes with the baby. I know it varies by degrees, intensities and manifestations with every mother and child and each time around. But I know it to be a gift, for though I have been blessed to carry my children and bear their little bodies to full term and feel bits of their spirits before I could truly meet them upon their birth, the love that has come to me for these little ones comes so complete and prepackaged that I know to recognize it as the gift that it is. And so, I count that pre-field trip freak out as one of my treasured “good mom” moments, where I know that I’m in the right place at the right time and blessed with the best job on earth.