Life as a Game

I have often wondered if I would have made different choices had I known what I know now and could live my life over again. The most poignant question would involve the decisions that I have made as a mother. Being a mother is the most important, the most affirming, and yet the most daunting "job" that I have ever had.

I was reading a book this week by Jodi Picoult called Handle With Care. A mother is having to decide whether to launch a lawsuit for wrongful death. Her little girl, perhaps because of the negligence of the pediatrician, has a rare bone disease that renders her bones as brittle as fallen autumn leaves under your feet. Quite conceivably, the pediatrician should have identified the problem in vitro and other choices might have been made. The first problem is not the lawsuit; the problem is that the pediatrician is the mother's best and dearest friend. The worst problem is that the mother has to call her own beloved daughter's death "wrongful".

The following quote from the book shook me hard. The lawyer who is handling the case (who had been adopted and was pining to know more about her birth mother) is pondering on the cost of decisions that a mother has to make.

I figured there was one seminal moment when a woman realized what it meant to be a mother. For my birth mom, maybe it was when she passed me to a nurse and said good-bye. For the mother who’d raised me, it was when she sat me down at the kitchen table and told me that I had been adopted. For your mother, it was making the decision to file this lawsuit in spite of the public and private backlash. Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.

I have done things, even as late as this year, where I ran the risk of losing a "child" (the child is now an adult but is nevertheless my child). I hope the risk has been a loving one because it came from my best judgment and my most fervent hopes. Things have worked out well; the risk was worth the rewards. The rewards are not designed for me, but for those for whom I took the risk.

I bought myself an IPad this year. As part of my downtime, I play Solitaire. This particular version will warn you after a chosen move that the game is "not winnable". I love that. I'm thinking that it would be great if we knew that, just after we made an unwise move, the game of life was not winnable. Solitaire also allows you to undo your latest move -- that is, the one that made the game unwinnable -- and try a different technique. How amazing would that be! The game of life is at this point not winnable, but you can undo something you did and try again to reach the mantle of success. It would be like the "control, alt, delete" combination on your computer. You can reset life so you can try again.

We can't do that. Life is definitely not a game. As Charlie Brown said "In the book of life, the answers are not in the back".

Maybe the lesson learned in all of this is that there is no "undo" magic about being a mother. You make the choices that you feel are best and then you try to live with the consequences. You hold tight, all the while trying to figure out how to let go. Yet, hpw do you let go so that they, the children of your best hopes, land safety?

I hope, for my children, that everytime they fall they do so on a pillow of my love for them. After all, being able to say that you were were loved with a mother's devotion might be one of the only answers at the conclusion of the game of life.