Fighting for Motherland

When I was eight months pregnant, a friend looked at my ballooning body and said that if he had to choose between going to war and giving birth, he’d choose war. I was dumbfounded. Perhaps he was so terrified by my body that he believed he had more control as a soldier in combat than as a woman in labor. No woman I know would ever consider that the destruction of life could be preferable to its creation. But many women might argue that giving birth, that laborious process of breathing in and surrendering to the successive and repeated contractions of life, is like death. I believe that a woman’s final push of human life from her interior to the exterior world is a profound moment of connection with the wonder of life. I suspect that men who go to war discover what women learn from giving birth: appreciation for the value of life comes with a heavy price.

I see many parallels between war and motherhood. Both require bloodshed, a willingness to sacrifice self, and a duty to surrender to circumstances beyond one’s control. There is nothing more heroic than a soldier overcoming an enemy or sacrificing himself to protect his comrades. There is no greater bond than the one between men in trenches. But in the words of another friend, a veteran of two wars, “there is nothing like living through the horrors of war to learn about the sanctity of life.” This is war’s tragic lesson: discovering life’s meaning comes at the price of losing it.

I am a mother of three. I too know about sacrifice and surrender to a cause greater than myself. I salute the heroic women living in the trenches every day to protect and preserve life. Women practice dying all the time for their children’s sake. While giving birth, they come close to death; in child rearing, they lose their identity to give birth to another; in letting go, they die a little more inside; and if their children should die before them, their grief has no end.

The child I carried for nine months in a body that so terrified my friend is now sixteen. I have told him that if he is drafted, I will volunteer to go in his stead. No one would send a fifty-year-old mother to war, but maybe we should reconsider. If the proximity to one’s mortality teaches us about the sacredness of life, then who better understands this than mothers? Imagine a battlefield of mothers. We are trained to defend ferociously, to sacrifice, and to surrender.

We are also the ultimate life givers and recoil at the thought of life-taking. Maybe women don’t have the stomach for war, not because we are weak, but because we have borne life—too precious to squander to the capriciousness of war. For what reason did we endure the pain and terror of giving birth if not to revere the creation that began with a first gulp of air and the unforgettable cry of life?

Susan Monas was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, and now lives and works as a clinical social worker in private practice in Seattle. She has three grown adult children scattered throughout three different countries. Ms. Monas has published two excerpts from her memoir Life on the Border in Drash, a Northwest literary journal. She writes poems and stories about her travels and travails.