Erma Bombeck was a columnist and author. Most of her books and columns were uniquely humorous. The following is a column she wrote the year of the Oklahoma City Bombing.
If you don't want to read the entire column, please skip down to my comments at the end.
If you're looking for an answer this Mother's Day on why God
reclaimed your child, I don't now. I only know that thousands of
mothers out there today desperately need an answer as to why they were
permitted to go through the elation of carrying child and then lose it
to miscarriage, accident , violence disease or drugs.
Motherhood isn't just a series of contractions. It's a state of
mind. From the moment we know life is inside us, we feel a
responsibility to protect and defend that human being. It's a promise
we can't keep. We beat ourselves to death over that pledge. "If I
hadn't worked through the eighth month." "If I had taken him to the
doctor when he had a fever." "If I hadn't let him use the car that
night." "If I hadn't been so naive, I'd have noticed he was on drugs."
The longer I live, the more convinced I become that surviving changes
us. After the bitterness, the anger, the guilt, and the despair are
tempered by time, we look at life differently.
While I was writing my book,
I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise,
I talked with mothers who had lost a child to cancer. Every single one
said death gave their lives new meaning and purpose. And who do you
think prepared them for the rough, lonely road they had to travel?
Their dying child. They pointed their mothers toward the future and
told them to keep going. The children had already accepted what their
mothers were fighting to reject.
The children in the bombed-out nursery in
Oklahoma City have touched
more lives than they will ever know. Workers who had probably given
their kids a mechanical pat on the head without thinking that morning
are making phone calls home during the day to their children to say "I
love you."
This may seem like a strange Mother's Day column on a day when joy
and life abound for the millions of mothers throughout the country. But
it's also a day of appreciation and respect. I can think of no mothers
who deserve it more than those who had to give a child back.
In the face of adversity, we are not permitted to ask, "Why me?" You
can ask, but you wont get an answer. Maybe you are the instrument who
is left behind to perpetuate the life that was lost and appreciate the
time you had with it.
The late Gilda Radner summit it up well: "I wanted a perfect
ending. Now I've learned the hard way that some poems don't rhyme and
some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is
about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the
best of it, without knowing what is going to happen next. Delicious
ambiguity.
One of the biggest fears of mothers who have given back a child is that the child will be forgotten by others. If you know one of these mom's, please send them an email, give her a call or better yet a hug. Don't think you will make them sad. They are most definitely thinking of that child today.
Thank you!
