With uncanny timing, a small insight on motherhood was delivered to me yesterday. After an afternoon out in the yard trying to get our new garden put in, my two filthy boys and I had just settled in for a little mindless cartoon watching when the doorbell rang. Ever since we got chickens, our house has become pretty popular with the neighborhood children. Happy to oblige, I showed them to the back, where our new coop is. With my 1-1/2 year old on my hip, I lingered awhile talking to a neighbor over the fence and watching poultry and small children whiz around the yard like supercharged electrons. It was only when I went to head back in that I heard my 4 year old crying. Engrossed in an episode of Cyberchase, he hadn’t notice us go out and, when the program ended, had searched the house for me, to no avail.

“Mommy, where were you?” he said plaintively between sobs.

I felt awful, of course, but fortunately the scare was soon soothed and forgotten. Later, though, I had this realization about being a mother to small children. It’s kind of like being the starship Enterprise. Surrounded by an impenetrable protective shield, you ferry your charges around the universe, bouncing them from adventure to adventure. Whenever things get a little hairy, you beam them up to the safety of your warm embrace. When circumstances conspire to leave them temporarily marooned on alien soil, they get a little worried. Fortunately, transporter malfunctions are highly unusual and quickly rectified. Though your thrusters may be on the the verge of failure, you give it all you’ve got to escape impending doom and save the day. You take a licking each episode but come back plucky as ever the next show.

So I’ll end my second annual Mother’s Day post (click here to read the first) with these immortal words:

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man woman has gone before.

Tags: mother's day

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 9th, 2010 at 4:21 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.