Mama Robin and the Open Mouths

Today, the robin babies’ mouths were open even wider than yesterday when this photo was taken.

They’re so big, you’d think they could fly to the beach and pick up French fries for lunch. But no, they’re waiting for Mama who is, as we speak, sitting on a power line looking fierce and purposeful like an eagle eyeing a fish.

I backed off but kept looking at the babies. The open mouths, not one of them closing for even a second lest another mouth get filled first, well, the open mouths were the perfect metaphor for being a mother. A human mother, that is.

I was never one to glorify motherhood. Raising my kids, there were times of great happiness and pride, but always with the backdrop of need. Always a child needing something, sometimes all of them at once, needing easy things like dinner, and hard things like help with often complicated, unsortable problems. I was often the bird on the wire looking at the open mouths wondering how I was going to manage.

But time passes. And most of us moms, the robin mom and us, we make it through. The babies are fed enough – maybe not as much as they’d like or as equally as they should have been – but they are fed, and they grow, and they find their courage and they fly away.

Do they remember their mom, their bird on the wire? We don’t know.

She remembers them, though. I’d bet on it.