Martyn Jones is a content specialist in St. Mike’s Office of Communications. On a freelance basis, he also writes reported features, essays, and criticism for online and print outlets. He and his wife Melanie are the parents of two boys.
The Hidden Life of Moms
My wife and I welcomed our second child into the world on March 17 of this year. Bauer Timothy Jones has been a quiet baby so far, but it’s unclear to us whether that’s because of a personality difference between him and our older boy Fox, or because we have been better able to meet his physical needs before they foment emotional crises.
Because of the ongoing pandemic, my wife’s maternity leave so far has mostly taken place within view, or within hearing distance, of where I work during the day. Often, I need only to look up from my screen to be able to see her and the baby. It’s a major improvement over my reliance on texted photos and videos during our last-go-round. Being present for these earliest days of Bauer’s life is one of the great unsought gifts of this era in our lives.
Melanie demonstrates an easy, unselfconscious care with the baby that two years ago she and I would have regarded with envy and admiration. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard has a passage in his most famous book, Fear and Trembling, about how a person learns to swim by attempting with each stroke to make the ideal or infinite gesture—to imitate their idea of the “form” of swimming. However, once the swimmer has internalized the form, they can swim freely, making each stroke without reference to anything but how fast they want to go and the conditions of the water.
Fox, our first child, almost overwhelmed us at this stage in his life. To continue Kierkegaard’s metaphor, with every wave we struggled anew to figure out how to stay afloat. Innocent of experience and sleep-shocked, we were left to rely on things we’d read or watched, the half-remembered examples of our own parents, and decades of media representations of parenthood. We hadn’t yet internalized the form.
Things are different now. My wife acts from years of constant and very physical practice, with a level of dedication that goes beyond that of professional athletes or musicians because there isn’t a time of day when she isn’t a mom. To see her expertly remove Bauer from harm’s way when our toddler Fox wobbles on top of his climbing frame, or to observe the balletic grace with which she scoops the baby out of his bassinet while cradling the back of his head, is to catch sight of a kind of pure human excellence it’s easy to miss without the frame of a television camera or an announcer’s hyped commentary.
Mother’s Day is often an occasion for celebrating feelings—love, compassion, and all the other things we associate with moms, especially our own. Mel and I are both fortunate to have been raised in loving and supportive homes, and I in no way mean to discount the emotional dimension of the holiday. But what I see and find remarkable to reflect on now is the myriad of physical activities that give love its meaning, and the domain of learned competencies with a huge variety of tasks that, while unexciting on their own, add up to the work of love itself.
Love is a verb, after all, as the CCM band DC Talk emphasized repeatedly in an energetic hit single by that name that came out during my childhood. While I used to enjoy late-night conversations in the dorm about love’s many possible meanings and aspects, and about the theological and philosophical frameworks that can give it even more meanings and aspects, at this point in my life nothing is so interesting to me as the simple acts and gestures that convey love without announcing it.
Mel is downstairs with Bauer right now coaxing him to sleep, as my own mother did with me, and her mother did with her. Mother’s Day is an occasion for celebrating all these tiny and unsung acts of love that make whole lives possible. As George Eliot writes in the novel Middlemarch, “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.”
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