Published Articles
By Dr. William R. Morrow

“A Mother's Love Sticks By You”

The most remarkable relationship I know is what happens between mothers and their children. It is happening around us all the time, and is so natural and normal that it often goes unacknowledged. Now that I am a grandfather, I have the chance to see reminders of mothering first hand. My daughter visited recently, and I watched as she performed the eternal rituals of mothering with our grandchildren. The active behavior of the little ones was enough to sharply challenge a guy like me who values his moderately sane routine. I saw a great deal of patience on the part of my daughter, which I, myself, must have run out of along the way. Even as she was chiding, “If you don’t eat your peas, there’ll be no ice cream”, I had to admire her display of mothering. I realized there was a very good chance that the ice cream would probably be served up anyway. Yet her ability to ride herd on the reluctant vegetarians must have been coming from some primordial storehouse of truly unconditional love, however it expressed itself.

A mother’s love persists in the face of all kinds of challenges. I think the best book on this week’s tiny tot list is called, “I Love You Stinky Face" by Lisa Mc Court. It was the bed time book at my house I couldn’t ignore. This little gem heralds the persistence of a mother’s love in the face of all the challenges her young son can think of: What if he were a super smelly skunk or a scary ape etc? The mom of the story comes through every time to reassure her kid that he will be loved in the worst situations imaginable.

I heard of a mother someplace in the Midwest who stuck by her grown son after he was arrested for bank robbery. And, even though it looked as if all the evidence pointed to his guilt, his mother held a press conference to announce his innocence. With her chin held high, she declared, “I just know in my heart that he could not have done this. I know my son, and he is not capable of any such thing. The police have the wrong man. It must have been someone else.”

In fact, the police had him on the bank’s surveillance video, full face, along with eyewitnesses. This did not deter the abiding love of the mother. The case went to trial, but I never heard how it turned out.

To me the important thing was not the man’s guilt or innocence, but the mother’s fixed image of his righteousness. It was as if she could only perceive her son as the potentially good child she had created and nurtured. An extreme case, you might say, but it points to some quality that seems to never go away, and is uniquely motherly. The accused was, no doubt, fortified by his mother’s “unreasonable” distortion of him.

Although we all know mothers are not year-round saints, there has to be some hint of the divine in the mother’s love I am talking about. If we didn’t have any religion on this planet, we would probably draw some good ideas from mothers. We would begin to believe that a God existed who had this illogical quality of love.

The world of relationships cannot get along without unconditional love, or whatever we should call it. Nobody behaves perfectly in a relationship, not even mothers. But without the ability of family members to see each other with a positive distortion, we cannot live intimately, or ever hope to finally grow up.

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