family tools
choose a tool resource directory
find a practitioner parenting toolbox product safety media reviews family fun guide send an e-card family astrology

community features choose a feature birth stories find a Mothering friend live chat mothers' writing group teen voices

	growing child discipline

The Servant
by Karen C. Driscoll

The other day, after a seemingly endless morning of dirty diapers, spilled milk, and wailing children, one of my two-year-old twins dropped a fairly sizable hard plastic toy on my bare foot. Stepping backwards, I smacked my other foot on one of the several thousand objects that regularly litter the carpet of my less-than-Martha home. It hurt. A lot.

My pain translated a morning’s worth of frustration into an eruption of anger. I hopped up and down, seething and rubbing my foot. Mostly I was just so tired of feeling like I could never get anything done. Tired of feeling like a servant, catering to the whims of three young children. Tired of the endless pick-up, and never having much other than a messy house and an exhausted body to show for it at the end of the day. At that particular moment, I felt tired, really, of being a mother.One of my two year olds was watching me. She slowly got down on all fours and crawled over to me, an abject subject approaching a wrathful queen. "What are you doing?" I snapped impatiently and not kindly. She wouldn’t answer me. When she reached my feet, she lowered her head and kissed my throbbing toe. She smiled, patted my foot, looked up at me. "You’re all better now, Mommy." She said it with conviction. She said it exactly the same way I say it to them a hundred injuries a day. A kindness returned.

Looking down at her staring earnestly up with such big, innocent blue eyes, something clicked inside of me. This"servant" became instead the served; and this mother became the mothered. My anger deflated. My frustration dissolved. Feeling tired was forgotten. What difference did it really make if my house was a mess? I was, after all, a mother: the perfect recipient of the perfect love of a child.

I picked up my daughter and hugged her small body tightly to mine. "Thank you," I said to her. She was right. I was all better now.

Karen C. Driscoll has a master’s degree in elementary and special education. She has been married to Mark (33), a biochemist, for ten years. Together they have three children, Britanny (3), Holly (3), and Robbie (18 months). She thinks of them as her muse.