"Mother Knows Best" has been a saying for as long as I can remember. And there is a great deal of truth to this. For one thing women do have some strange intuition when it comes to dealing with people and situations. Perhaps it goes back to our primal ancestors minding the cave. Moms were not big brutes out chasing tigers for dinner. We were built to have children and nurture children and keep them safe. It seems understandable that an instinct would evolve to read an environment and gauge the security or instability hovering in the air.
There is also that knowledge that comes with becoming a mother. It is nine months of cooking a human being within. It means getting enough sleep, eating the best foods, avoiding anything toxic to the body. It requires getting plenty of exercise, fresh air, and nest building. Then delivering this human into the world to keep the mom from sleep for the next six months to ten years. Boiling bottles, making formula, introducing new foods, teaching the little ones to walk and talk, to go to the potty and tie their own shoes. In retrospect getting a child to age five is equivalent to acquiring a college education. It is almost impossible for mothers not to know best.
And on top of that we carried these tiny humans in our womb, delivered them into the world and had a front row seat to every good and bad decision they made, every consequence or reward handed their way. Mom literally felt all and understood all that her children experienced because even though we "cut the cord" with our children, Mother, will always be tattooed on the heart and mind in everyday living whether their children live next door or five states away.
Having said that, my oldest son with four children of his own called me horribly sick. He was explaining his symptoms to me, and I quickly diagnosed him because that is also a part of the "mother instinct." I told him he needed to go get an antibiotic and not skip a dose. Problem was his wife could not get him in to see their doctor, so I told him to go to that walk-in clinic in Folsom. Well, he got to Folsom and called me to say there was no walk-in clinic in Folsom.
I told him he was wrong, that I had just been to it the other day and the doctor was great. He told me that it was a physical therapy business. I told him it was on the other side. I told him to just go to the door and tell them he needed to see the doctor. He then turned his truck around and walked into the building to be told there was no walk-in clinic in Folsom. So, with fever and chills, aches and pains, feeling like an idiot, he called me back to tell me what they said, and then this very astute mother remembered it had moved about ten miles down into Covington. That was where I had gone the other day.
And because I am his mother, all he could say to me once it was all said and done was, "If I had done that to my wife she would not have spoken to me for days." And I said, "Well, then thank goodness I am your mother."
I still hold firmly to the reality that mothers do know best. However, as we get older our caves and minds get a bit dusty, but instincts remain. My diagnosis was correct even though my map was off by a zip code.
