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Pediatrics | Family Matters | Mothering MOTHERINGThe Call to Embracing Armsby Fern Kupfer My mother tells me she still turns around in a supermarket aisle when a child calls "Mommy." My mother is 73 years old and has not taken a young child grocery shopping for a very long time. Still, old habits die hard. She is still "Mommy," and something instinctual, primordial even, makes her respond to this call. My own daughter telephones from Chicago. "Mommy," she says urgently,"I need some help with this essay." I stop grading the papers I am working on to listen. She is filling out an application for something called a Watson fellowship. The fellowship, as I understand it, involves giving a promising college graduate an inordinate amount of money so he or she can shlep halfway around the world and do something political or artistic or educational. I think this is supposed to encourage international understanding. What it also does is keep these kids out of a bad job market for another year. My daughter's proposal for the Watson fellowship has her traveling to the Middle East and working with women and children: specifically with Israeli and Palestinian women and their children to set up day-care centers in Israel. "Think of it, Mom," she says. "If people could work together and could see everyone as someone else's child . . ." Her plan is to promote world peace through the interaction of women and children by recognizing this common bond. I recall in the newspaper the other day two photographs side by side: one, the distraught mother of a slain Israeli; the other, a wailing Palestinian woman at the funeral of her son. How clearly we can see in their faces that no ethnic or political boundaries could ever define the well-deep grief a parent feels from the loss of a child. "The hope for peace could be with these mothers," my daughter continues. She is filled with energy and optimism and the naivete that the world could actually be a better place. I can only think of her, my child, in a dangerous part of the world. The Middle East? I would sooner have her take up bungee jumping over the Grand Canyon. Well, it's come to this, in part, because I raised her to be a person with social conscience; a feminist who values the woman-centered ethos of cooperation, compromise, nurturance; an activist who believes that individual human beings really can make a difference. My daughter and I have often talked about how it would be if women ran the world. Not a woman leader here and there - Thatcher, Meir,Bhutto - who had to play by the men's rules, but women running the whole world show, women who are mothers, who have all the power. As John Lennon once said: Imagine! Watch one of the football games this New Year's Day and notice as the camera pans a close-up of a player's face. "Hi, Mom!" he usually mouths, knowing the camera is on, knowing there is a mother there watching, a mother who is praying that when the game is over her son remains uninjured. Football players, big, beefy game-warriors with shoulders the size of doorways, call "Hi, Mom!" to the women watching at home. Mom. Mama. Also the final word for many in pain, in conflict, in real war. There's that World War I story about the survivors of New York's Fighting 69th, Rainbow Division, hunched in their trenches and hearing the cries of soldiers in no man's land, German boys and American kids, all calling for their mothers. "Mama! Mutti!" How those words must have pierced even the gunfire and the shelling. It's become a holiday cliche to wish for peace in the New Year -peace in the dailiness of our domestic lives and peace for all the children of the world. And simply reading the newspaper in the morning over a cup of coffee, reading about all the violence everywhere - in Bosnia and Somalia and the Gaza Strip, in Chicago and New York - how can it not make us despair? Yet, somehow we do not. Year after year, we wish for peace. Our holiday greetings are filled with prayers for peace, with hope for peace in the new year. Why do we keep within a part of ourselves the belief that peace is really possible on this planet? Because there is an urgency to those calls. "Mommy!" Fern Kupfer is a novelist and writing professor at Iowa State University. She is a frequent contributor to Working Moms' Internet Refuge.
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