“Making the decision to have a child is momentous.  It is to decide forever to have our heart go walking around outside your body.”

Elizabeth Stone

Today is my youngest’s 26th birthday, it is also the week before Mother’s Day.  I’m not one to celebrate mother’s day in an extravagant way.  For me everyday is mother’s day even though my children are well into adulthood.  Of all the things I have done in my life being a mother has been the most important to me.  It defines who I am now.  I just always hope that I have raised kind and compassionate people, both with themselves and others.

Then days come like yesterday when I get to spend an afternoon with my progeny – two that I raised and one I did not and was recently reunited with. It was a quiet time enabling me to reflect on who they’ve become.  A chance to look at them and see my history in their eyes – my mother, my father, my grandparents and marvel at the wonder of it all.  There are so many things they are born with that just need a little nurturing.  The amazing thing is you often don’t see these things until they are adults.

 I wasn’t fully aware how many of our children’s talents are inherited and blossom with a little nurture.  It’s so much like planting a garden.  You put those seeds in the ground knowing what they are and how they will look but you fuss over them and water them and watch over their growth and maturity.  When they mature it is still a marvelous revelation. You think how beautiful even though you knew it all along.

Seeing what they’ve become is only part of it though, there are no words to express the swelling in my soul that encompasses them.  It defies description, yet I know when they have children of their own they will know the feeling.  The idea that your heart is walking outside of your body embodies so many things.  I think I’ll try to remember next time I’m out in the world that every person has a mother who has this same primal desire for her child to feel the sweet kindness of those who come to know them.

Every mom’s heart is out there in the world walking outside her body.