Happy Mother’s Day

Hail to the mothers! For without them, the Volk cannot live!

An illustration may serve to make this clearer. Perhaps as you have been reading my words, there has flashed through your mind the picture of a mother who, after shipwreck, has strapped her child fast to a life belt, which will not support them both, and pushed off to go down in the dark, so that her child may live. And triumphantly you may exclaim, “Does not she prove that one can be unselfish?”

I do not think so, except in the sense that I have defined above. And I have given my reasons for why, to my mind, to call such an act “unselfish” is open to objection. Do you suppose that the mother gains nothing for herself in laying down her life for her child? Do we not know that her heart must have sung within her as she went down? Was she not satisfying her love, and her maternal instinct, the deepest instinct in her? Had not her love triumphed even over her fear of death? With her final breath may she not have brought her life to the very apex of a perfect fulfillment of her lifelong ideal of motherhood? Is it not obvious that, under the circumstances in which she was caught, there was no satisfaction left her that could be so exquisite, so infinitely sweet and pure? In the light of eternity, in which time is not, may she not have more really lived in that one moment than in all the preceding years of her existence?

-William Gayley Simpson, excerpted from Which Way Western Man