Once upon a time, the world of each one of us was, literally, our mother. Our whole world was our mother’s womb.
In the early stages of our development from the fertilized egg to the baby ready for birth, we were hadn’t quite yet reached the point of consciousness, though we certainly had feelings and reacted to them.
It’s good we weren’t conscious of being born. If we had been, it would have been a terrifying experience!
Our warm, comfortable, protecting world was convulsing, squeezing, pressuring us like never before. We were being pushed through an almost too small opening out of our world, Out! How could a world have an “out”!
The new world was hard and rough: we were manipulated, dangled, slapped, prodded, and literally cut-off from our mother. No wonder that we cried out, though till then we had no voice!
Of course, I don’t remember any of this, but I have a memory of a much earlier, inchoate, physical memory of what must have been nursing at my mother’s breast!
In any case, no matter what our memories, early childhood usually involved intimacy with our mothers—or a mother substitute.
Before birth we were part of her; after birth we were intimately joined to her.
Naturally, there were other people close to us in early childhood, and as our consciousness developed so did our awareness of them.
For some people, alas, early childhood memories are not happy ones, and some have little memory of a mother at all.
Thanks be to God, I was not among their number. For me, my mother was the loving, indomitable, all-knowing and all-protecting center of my early conscious life.
If there was threat, shock, or pain in those days, my cry would be “Mommy!”, and she would be there.
Of course I had a father, too. But he was the provider, so necessarily he was absent most of the time and only occasionally took care of me or took me out. And, for the first seven and half years of my life, till my sister was born, I was an only child.
If I was hurt, if I was frightened, if I was lost, I cried for my mother. If I didn’t understand something, I would ask my mother. If I played in the park, my mother watched out for me. If I was being put to sleep, it was my mother who tucked me in. It was my mother who taught me to pray.
I was a mother’s boy—of course!
I have memories of moments and events with my father, aunts, uncles, cousins—but memories of my mother weren’t just memories of moments and events, since she was the very context and ground of my life.
Probably the most traumatic moment of my childhood was my first day of school. Mom brought me to the kindergarten, gave me every assurance, and then began to walk away—leaving me alone with strangers!
I struggled, cried out, begged not to be left there—to no avail! I had never been so separated from my mother all my life! My poor mother spent a sad day at home, having tearfully left me with strangers.
When she picked me up at the school later that day, guess what! I enthusiastically told her how much fun I had. My first bold step in independence from my mother’s immediate presence and support!
It was the first of many stages of separation. The last was years later when my mother, dying, left me and my sister bereft at her bedside. A strange new experience of birth for her—she was going “out” of this world to another, known only to her in faith!
11 January 2021