I Love Being a Mom Treasured Stories, Memories, and Milestones

ONE THE MAKING OF A MOTHER A mother's love doesn't begin with the mother, or the child, let alone a set of rules or recommendations or anything having to do with the mind. A mother's love comes on like a thunderstorm. You may or may not hear the low rumble as it approaches, you may or may not have time to close your windows and call in your cat. But when the storm comes the storm is all there is. The sky opens and weeps and howls and devours. --Jeanne Marie Laskas, Washington, D.C. Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born. --Erma Bombeck Making the decision to have a child--it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. --Elizabeth Stone The Lightning Bugs Are Back By Anna Quindlen The lightning bugs are back. They are small right now, babies really, flying low to the ground as the lawn dissolves from green to black in the dusk. There are constellations of them outside the window: on, off, on, off. At first the little boy cannot see them; then, suddenly, he does. "Mommy, it's magic," he says. This is why I had children: because of the lightning bugs. Several years ago I was reading a survey in a women's magazine and I tried to answer the questions: Did you decide to have children: A. because of family pressure; B. because it just seemed like the thing to do; C. because of a general liking for children; D. because of religious mandates; E. none of the above. I looked for the lightning bugs; for the answer that said because sometime in my life I wanted to stand at a window with a child and show him the lightning bugs and have him say, "Mommy, it's magic." And since nothing even resembling that answer was there, I assumed that, as usual, I was a little twisted, that no one else was so reductive, so obsessed with the telling detail, had a reason so seemingly trivial for a decision so enormous. And then the other night, yellow bug stars flickering around us, my husband said, in a rare moment of perfect unanimity: "That's it. That's why I wanted them, too." The lightning bugs are my madeleine, my cue for a wave of selective recollection. My God, the sensation the other night when the first lightning bug turned his tail on too soon, competing with daylight during the magic hour between dusk and dark. I felt like the anthropologist I once met, who could take a little chunk of femur or a knucklebone and from it describe age, sex, perhaps even height and weight. From this tiny piece of bone I can reconstruct a childhood: a hot night under tall trees. Squares of lighted windows up and down the dark street. A wiffle ball game in the middle of the road, with the girls and the littlest boys playing the outfield. The Good-Humor man, in his solid, square truck, the freezer smoky and white when he reaches inside for a Popsicle or a Dixie cup. The dads sitting inside in their Bermuda shorts watching Car 54, Where are You? The moms in the kitchen finishing the dishes. The dull hum of the fans in the bedroom windows. The cheap crack of the wiffle bat. The bells of the ice-cream truck. The lightning bugs trapped in empty peanut-butter jars that have triangular holes in the lids, made with the point of a beer-can opener. The fading smears of phosphorescent yellow-green, where the older, more jaded kids have used their sneaker soles to smear the lights across the gray pavement. "Let them out," our mothers say, "or they will die in there." Finally, perfect sleep. Sweaty sheets. No dreams. We were careless. We always forgot to open the jars. The lightning bugs would be there in the morning, their yellow tails dim in the white light of the summer sun, their feet pathetic as they lay on their backs, dead as anything. We were always surprised and a bit horrBorchard, Therese Johnson is the author of 'I Love Being a Mom Treasured Stories, Memories, and Milestones', published 2004 under ISBN 9780385507899 and ISBN 0385507895.