The parent often wondering what is best to do? Who is this little creature (or teenager)? How do we navigate the developmental stages together? And what is “good enough” to do as a parent? Motherhood is an assignment, a spiritual undertaking, an Initiation. It’s demanding, arduous, difficult, confusing, filled with suffering and paradox. Mothering does not come with a job description. Prayer helps guide us. Sometimes that’s all a mother has.

A Poem – A Child of Air, by Robert Louis Stevenson. About mothers and children all grown up. The poet imagines a mother who envisions her child at play, and presents him/herself as a child who cannot be summoned now because he has grown up, becoming therefore, “a child of air”.

This poem is about children growing up & leaving the home. And the mother missing her children & wondering about them, trying to recapture her time with them. Thus the title….

A Child of Air
As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.

Quote: “Hard work makes a mother. We like to think something magical happens at birth and for some it does. But the real magic is keeping on when all you want to do is run.” From Call the Midwife