Tag Archives: mothers

Under a woman’s authority.

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For I remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact; that the very time when I was most under a woman’s authority, I was most full of flame and adventure. Exactly because when my mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did come in winter (as she said); therefore the whole world was to me a fairyland of wonderful fulfillments, and it was like living in some Hebraic age, when prophecy after prophecy came true.

I went out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me, precisely because I had a clue to it: if I had held no clue it would not have been terrible, but tame. A mere unmeaning wilderness is not even impressive. But the garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found out in its turn. Inch by inch I might discover what was the object of the ugly shape called a rake; or form some shadowy conjecture as to why my parents kept a cat.

-G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy

(From Emily at Children of God blog)

Mother was the earth.

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S.M. Hutchens writing about his mother for Touchstone Magazine:

While our father formed us essentially by disturbing us and inviting us to disturb him, Mother did the same by being a reliably sympathetic presence, an unfailingly generous medium of life. Mother was the earth in which we were anchored and fed, and our father was the husbandman who trained and pruned the plant and fitted it to deal with pests — both are necessary for its health.