English

When A Child Loves You for a Long, Long Time…

This is an excerpt from one of my favourite children’s books of all time – The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. It says a lot about what we BECOME as mothers, as fathers, as parents. We understand what being REAL is – getting hurt doesn’t matter, becoming ‘ugly’ doesn’t matter.

In the course of becoming a MOTHER, we experience varying kinds of pain. It is not just during pregnancy or childbirth, but all throughout the process of raising a child. We disregard all that and we realize we can bear any pain for the good of our children.

Becoming ‘ugly’ doesn’t matter either. From the time we are pregnant we have experienced foregoing some of our ‘beauty’ concerns and we deal with those zits, darker armpits, swollen ankles, post-birth weight gain, not-perfect-anymore set of boobs, etc. All these seem trivial concerns compared to the responsibilities we face as mothers and parents. Motherhood is a significant point in our lives when we are able to separate the trivial from the more important.

I hope you like this book’s excerpt as much as I have.

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”