Joy Unspeakable

For my Mother's Day post, I wanted to talk about something I love. Books. Have you ever read Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being? It has been years since I picked it up, but it is full of glory and philosophy, and a lot of sex. Well, the sex is a bit beside the point, but if you take Kundera's concept of weight out of context a bit, I think the philosophy has an applicability to motherhood.

If a life is lived but once, it is utterly insignificant and "light" because "what happened once might as well have never happened at all." But then, there is the issue of being alive, which seems to demand heft and meaning and significance. Value added to this life. To a mother, a child is that heft, that weight. Not in the sense of burdensome, but what keeps you from flying away. A steadying force that really isn't a force at all. Just a reclining anchor, if you will. Keeping you from floating away in all of your lightness, all of the meaninglessness. Giving meaning where, perhaps, there was none before. Viewing this life with new eyes.

I would say "picture this" but the term "feel this" is more applicable: Perfect fulfilled heaviness of a child on your chest. His scent rises up into your olfactory senses as you gently rock him and it feels as if you are breathing in his essence. Cornsilk hair and warm moist breath. Like, if he would consent to lay right there forever, holding your body to life and earth, you could achieve no greater peace and meaning than this. You feel that settled peace beneath that weight of a small child that you love so inexplicably. Nothing else in the world or outside of the world gives you that satiated warm feeling of the sleeping child on your chest, of wrapping your arms around something that is so precious.

May your day be blessed with joy unspeakable.