Years ago I was neck-deep in primary sources from the U.S. Civil War. Looking through battlefield correspondence and diaries, a sad detail kept jumping out. Again and again, soldiers described the last words of fallen friends who thought of their mothers. There were cries of anguish desperately seeking a mother’s care. There were moments of delirium in which the dying seemed to see their mothers amid the madness. There were sober messages of love expressed one last time before death. It struck me hard how the thoughts of so many sons — in the time of their greatest need — turned to their mothers.
That detail has stuck with me. And it certainly was not unique to the Civil War. I have come across a multitude of similar stories from the First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and our most recent large-scale engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am sure that if the historical record were more complete, I would find endless accounts going all the way back to wars between ancient Greek city-states that described the dying words of warriors thinking about their mothers.
A poet might say this makes sense. Our mothers brought us into this world, and it is only natural that our thoughts would return to them as we depart. Still, these images pain me when I fixate on them for too long. The picture of wounded, lost, and often terrified young men longing for their mothers on strange and bloody fields is deeply haunting. The terrible things that we do to each other during times of war do not fade like smoke on contested terrain. They ripple across generations and break family lines for good.
There’s so much stupid talk these days about mothers and fathers being nothing but socially engineered constructs. You cannot “construct” the bond between a mother and her children. Anybody who has ever been around a new mother has seen the transformation. Whatever else a woman is before motherhood, she is something much greater immediately after giving birth. A woman looks into her child’s eyes, that child gazes intently back, and there is an imprint that lasts a lifetime. Mothers protect their babies forever — no matter how old those babies become. Adults who find themselves in danger reach for their mothers because it is they who gave them life and picked them up after each stumble.
Over the last century, society has radically changed. Women not only entered college and the workforce en masse but also came to dominate both. They have pursued professions that were not available to their grandmothers. They have proven their athletic prowess in sports. They have become politicians and government officials. Many have even joined their brothers in the armed forces. No matter how much they achieve in these new roles, though, they will never eclipse the powers of motherhood.
Among those powers is the opportunity to shape the next generation, one family at a time. Our earliest years are our most formative years, and when we spend them with our mothers, their influence guides us the rest of our lives. We don’t consciously realize that so many of our habits and concerns come from our mothers. We grow into adolescents and young adults, and we strive to become our own person. Watch a mother’s eyes when she sees her children behaving well on their own, though. There’s a look that subtly conveys, “I taught them that long ago.”
After all, mothers are our first and most important teachers. Everything a child learns about the world both before and after birth comes through maternal translation. While we’re growing inside our mothers, we feel what they feel. When something from the outside world worries us, it is her hands that wrap around her belly and her words that keep us calm. Once we’re born and experiencing the world for ourselves, it is she who responds to our needs. When we are cold, she is there. When we are hungry, she is there. When we are scared, she is there. When we fall and hurt ourselves, her look tells us whether we should be concerned. She mediates everything we first do in this world. She shows us how to be happy and how to survive pain. There’s just no greater job — no more important responsibility — in this life.
That’s why this last century of tremendous social change has come with substantial costs. Working mothers have turned to daycares, early childhood education, and government-run services for much-needed assistance. Exhausted mothers set their children in front of television screens or hand their children iPads to keep them distracted. Strangers in strange places become co-parents. Strangers on video become a child’s earliest teachers. Time with Mom is lost.
Some would say that’s “progress.” Hillary Clinton once infamously mocked stay-at-home moms when she quipped, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” as if mothers who manage households fritter their days away playing dress-up. She also published the ’96 book It Takes a Village, in which she argues that the collective society is responsible for each child’s parenting needs.
Taken together, Hillary’s ridicule for motherhood and advocacy for community parenting reflect a belief shared by many leftists that children rightfully belong to the State. From Hillary’s point of view, children are a nuisance and only obstruct women from more important career ambitions. Government organizations filled with childhood “experts,” on the other hand, are ideally equipped to perform as surrogate “parents.”
For leftists, it does not matter if young minds are shaped by ideas coming from televisions and iPads, so long as the programs on those screens reflect the worldviews championed by leftists on NPR and PBS. If Planned Parenthood and World Economic Forum–aligned NGOs sponsor the “educational” content filling children’s heads, all the better. So long as the “village” operates as a multicultural commune that promotes Marxist socialism, climate-change anxiety, racial reparations, white guilt, Western self-hatred, open borders, global government, fear of hydrocarbon energies, censorship, safe spaces, psychoactive drugs, mRNA “vaccines,” and “transgenderism,” leftists will gladly hand their tiring offspring over to the State.
Non-leftists (or what I would call sane and rational people) know that it does not “take a village” to produce healthy, capable, and confident children. It takes loving and reliable parents. When mothers disappear, families collapse. Crime increases. Epidemics of loneliness and drug addiction take hold. Cultural angst grows. Individual purpose evaporates. Societies crumble. One could accurately predict the stability of any generation by honestly assessing the strength of that generation’s mothers.
For all the mothers who might be reading, know that your work and sacrifice mean everything. No matter how broken the world becomes, you are the glue that binds the pieces back together.
I’ve never come across an account of a dying soldier thinking about Hillary’s faceless “village” near the end. However, many left this world much as they arrived — reaching for their mothers’ grasp one more time. That bond is real and unbreakable.
Image via Raw Pixel.
Jesus Christ is King
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