When my friend Peggy said she would like to tell me one of her love stories, I wasn’t sure what we would be talking about and I was thrilled to find out it was motherhood. For Peggy, she has experienced great loves in her life starting with her parents, and family. Peggy cruised through her childhood with not a care in the world and felt great love for her parents. Along the way, she developed friends who she loved and then Peggy got married and shared her love with her spouse. The natural next step was to have children but nothing prepared her for the love she would feel toward her children.
“There’s no greater love between a mother and her child.” Peggy would agree with the poet and playwright, Robert Browning’s words, “Motherhood–all love begins and ends there.”
Peggy said, “You parent your children as best you can–you discipline and you fumble through and you hope you are doing all the right things and keep loving them and helping them to become happy, fulfilled and productive.”
Every parent has their ups and downs, their sorrows and joys and beneath all of that there is an undeniable, unconditional love. Sometimes you question it and sometimes it’s tested but it’s always there.
Peggy
It’s in times of struggle and trauma that it really hits home for Peggy. Looking back at parenting, Peggy recalls certain times where she really felt that pang of motherhood: handing her first born child off at daycare for the first time after six months of maternity leave; forgetting to pick up her youngest at lunch one day and listening to her quivering voice on the phone calling from the school office; watching her fall of a slide at a playground and thinking has she permanently injured herself; and then leaving her eldest at her dorm in university and thinking how did she grow up so fast.
Each of those instances and many other parenting events elicited a visceral reaction within Peggy–a physical, gut-wrenching, heart racing, panicking feeling. Each time, Peggy remembers feeling she didn’t realize she had emotions like that and it caught her off guard. She would ask herself where are these feelings coming from and then realize that’s love and the love you have for your children. This feeling is one of the many gifts of being a mother–the understanding that the love runs so deep, and it’s so unconditional and its forever. The bond is there and will always be between children and their mothers.
There is no play book to being a parent and you stumble your way through and there is always this amazing love and bond. Peggy knows father’s share similar feelings for their children, but Peggy believes for mothers the bond is on a whole different level.
Thank you for sharing your story with us Peggy. We know that your girls are very lucky to have such a warm and loving parent. Broadcast Love wishes you many more fun adventures with your girls.
Broadcast Love 