Who Is My Mother?
on Parenthood & the Commercialization of Infants
When my children were little, I read to them the children’s book by P. D. Eastman, “Are You My Mother?” The book tackles a deep existential question of origins in a simple story that a small child can understand. A baby bird hatches out of an egg, falls to the ground, and asks, “Where is my mother?” Not seeing her, he sets off on an adventure to find his mother, asking in turn first a kitten, then a hen, a dog, a cow, a car, a boat, and a truck, “Are you my mother?” All say no, and he ends up back in his nest, where his mother appears with a worm for him and asks, “Do you know who I am?” Now the baby bird knows, and he answers, “You are a bird and you are my mother.” But today might a child have to look in a petri dish to know his mother? Or, in the near future, consider his maternal origin from some amniotic tank that has been his artificial womb? Are we only a product of a chemical mixture? This raises basic questions about nature and relationships.
Young adults from their classrooms to their iPhones are awash in messaging that means to undermine their understanding of their origins in the natural family and the reality of God’s creation. Pope Benedict XVI liked to remind people, “I do not come from myself; rather, I come from another.” At the most basic level of consciousness, he would say, there is a primitive awareness of a transcendent source of our being. Yet there is a great need these days to remind many people who they are. “When God is forgotten,” said the fathers of the Second Vatican Council, “the creature itself grows unintelligible” (Gaudium et Spes, 22).
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