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A Part of the Job: Sometimes moms don't even know what they need to worry about
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Published: May 11, 2008
After church a couple of Sundays ago, I let my mother out of the car at the steps in front of her house before I parked and followed her inside. As I walked onto the covered front porch and approached the door, I noticed an artificial Christmas wreath hanging beside it, festooned with pine cones and red ribbons.
Well, I didn't know how I'd overlooked that before, but surely I could take care of it. I grabbed the wreath as I went by and carried it into the family room. "Don't you think it's about time we put this away?" I asked, grinning.
My mother, already settling into her recliner, stared at me. "There was a bird's nest in it," she said, matter-of-factly. "Is it gone?"
Oh, my goodness. That's what I got for assuming that my octogenarian mother had simply forgotten to take down the wreath.
Yep, there was a bird's nest tucked into the wreath. I was afraid to peer inside.
Horrified, I hustled back to the porch. Then the sound I'd been hearing finally registered in my brain. It was a small brown bird, perched on the swing at the far end of the porch. She was very, very angry that someone had snatched up her nest, and, presumably, her eggs or even her babies. She was giving me down the country.
I hung the wreath back on its nail, hoping against hope that I was getting the angle right.
Back inside, I went to the window in the living room, which yields a good view of the porch swing. The swing was empty.
I could still hear the scolding bird, however. There she was, on the edge of the porch a few feet in front of the nest-bearing wreath, still shrieking away.
Then in a few minutes, the squawking stopped, and I assumed -- fervently hoped -- she was back on the nest, probably wondering what in the world had just happened.
Motherhood is like that. You may do what you can, taking care of all the details to the best of your ability. And then something over which you have absolutely no control might rear up and cause all sorts of problems.
Often, it's something that was not even on your list of things to worry about. That mother bird might have worried about where to find something to eat, and maybe about the neighborhood cats. But she probably never even dreamed that a giant creature would come along and walk off with her house and family.
My sons think that I worry too much, especially about them. Sometimes they get pretty annoyed with me about my fretting. Sometimes they try to keep information that might be troubling from me so that "Mom won't freak out."
I point out that sometimes my worries turn out to have been justified -- my fears come true. My sons remain convinced that I overdo the worrying, which they consider generally unproductive.
There are at least two kinds of worry. There's the kind that leads you to take reasonable precautions, make plans, do whatever you can to avert a problem. And then there's the kind that drives you crazy because you can't do anything about it anyway. As Reinhold Neibuhr noted in his "Serenity Prayer" -- which we once framed and gave to my mother -- the trick is having the wisdom to know the difference. There's no need to waste time worrying about things you can't have an effect on. Some wise women have told me that when worry keeps them awake, they get up and make a list of actions they can take to address various problems. Then they try to stop thinking about the worries they can't do anything about.
There are a lot of useful quotations about the futility of worrying circulating on the Internet:
David Mamet, the playwright, said that "Worry is interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due."
From Leo Buscaglia, known for his inspirational books, comes this observation: "Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy."
This one is credited to Mark Twain: "I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened."
It is not surprising that the great majority of quotations about the folly of worrying are attributed to men.
I tell my sons that worrying comes with the job of being a mother. Certainly I inherited my worry gene from my mom, who once remarked that she had an ulcer named for each of her four daughters.
Women, especially women who are mothers, just can't help worrying about some things, try as we might.
I bet I know what that poor little bird in the wreath worries about these days.
Linda Brinson is the Journal's editorial-page editor. She can be reached at lbrinson@wsjournal.com.
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