The Mothering Instinct (Day 7)

I announced today that I realized exactly what sort of TV show they can make about our trip:

The Real World, Haiti

Stripping beds and preparing rooms for a huge group of 16 tomorrow (we will almost be overflowing our capacity), I thought to myself, “Man, this is so bizarre. It’s like we’re running this hotel….Well, wait, actually we are, like, running this hotel, which is a job none of us has ever done, but it is sorta fun. Plus living in a strange city. In a strange house. With virtual strangers coming in and out. Yep, just like ‘The Real World.’”
Ted and I even set up a Express database to keep track of our earnings and expenditures for the month. So far so good.

The presence of the guests from Indiana who stayed with us was last night was an excellent time for me to realize one simple truth: I love entertaining. This may seem like an obvious statement with my constant piano playing, but what I mean is, I really like throwing dinner parties. Perhaps it satiates some OCD or project need, or some control issue, but I’d like to think this love of preparing for and taking care of guests has its foot in some altruistic need to serve. I hope this is so. Maybe it is some sort of mothering instinct left hidden.

We drove to the Child Care Center for Orphans run by the Sisters of Charity, the group founded by Mother Theresa. It was not as shocking as on my first trip three and a half years ago, but only because I knew what to expect. It is not because it is some dank, dark, somber place full of sick children. It is more because the nuns and their helpers have such a difficult time taking care of so many babies, toddlers, children, and teenagers that your presence provides a very simple and basic human need: touch. The children are craving to be held. My Hospice training always told me that it is better to simply be with the person than to try and serve them in some way. This universal fact has been unfolding for me time and time again recently, so it is best that I take notice.

“You didn’t tell me it would be so hard,” Ted expressed to me after his first run-in with a crying baby. Anytime you pick up a small child and hold them—that’s easy; it’s when you put them down and they start crying because they need comfort and affection so much that it seems actually painful, like you have torn off their wounded outer covering, the emotional scab of want and need, reminded them what it is like to be loved, then put them back down into their bed exposed and re-injured—that is “so hard.” This is the true real world situation for so many children. I have hope, though, that God has some sort of healing hand in every person that comes and simply sits with a child in their arms.

Perhaps we all need to practice our mothering instincts a little more.