by Lisa Larsen

Created on: September 28, 2009

To more accurately state this phrase, please consider this: How do children affect the woman who spawned them? The term motherhood embraces all the infinite possibilities of nurturing a child. The mother and child are irrevocably intertwined. For without one, there cannot be the other. And within that vast collection of possibilities there are mothers of adopted children, mothers of step-children, mothers of children who are missing or deceased, who are handicapped physically and/or mentally, who are thirty months old or thirty years old, who are in preschool or in jail, who are popular or divorced. The list goes on. And so does motherhood. It never ends.

When my husband and I divorced, the laws of our state demanded we take a class called Children and Divorce. Most everything this class espoused was something a conscientious parent would already know without the instruction. To say I was bored during the four hour class would be a gross understatement. However, I did come away from that classroom with what has proven to be the most influential phrase of my parenting career: Marriages may end. But parents are forever. There has not been a more accurate or more painfully honest statement than that one. It is in the eternalness of motherhood that a woman is changed. She changes incrementally, like a chameleon acclimating to its surroundings. Each new day demands new attitudes, new beliefs, new practices and perspectives, new goals, challenges, compromises, considerations-new vantage points from which to see, new thresholds to cross, and new directions to take. Often she is not even aware of this meticulous evolution. Nor is her husband, friends or neighbors. The most likely observer to recognize these alterations is often the mother's mother! How interconnected motherhood is. How miraculous are its ties and bonds.

I do not judge, yet do not understand the woman who refrains from motherhood. I have birthed six children, miscarried five and aborted two. My path of motherhood has not been easy. It has not been rife with clarity or peace or even understanding. A recent poll of women revealed that mothers are less happy than their child-less counterparts. I find those results difficult to believe. For no matter the sorrow and pain motherhood may inflict, it pales in comparison to the inexplicable joy, the amazing sense of accomplishment, the knowledge of life's purpose and the wish to do it all over again come my next life; yet to do it better somehow, with less pain, less confusion, less tears.

However, these are components of motherhood, and one cannot be a mother outside of them. And so we mothers learn to embrace the whole package. And we learn to accept whatever that package contains. And we love it beyond comprehension. And this is how motherhood changes a woman.

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