Mother’s hands

Hands that knead, weave or paint; hands that type, operate machines, or prepare classes: these are working hands. Hands that heal and caress, that feed. They transmit strength, security, comfort. They push out of the nest and open up, loving, waiting for the return. Some are soft and well cared for, others are rough to the touch from so much work. They are the hands of one mother or all of them.

We believe that in work not everything is reduced to remuneration and, although it is true that it is done to satisfy the day to day needs, it also calls in most cases to the vital desire of the human being to feel useful and to express his creativity; a means to improve his expectations as a thinking being who seeks to develop in time and who follows a life plan.

For all these reasons, let us remember the artisan mothers, many of them heads of families, who, thanks to associations and community workshops, have the possibility today of working in better conditions than in the past.  They must share the care of the children and the housework with a full-time job as required by the craft.  They are low-income women – from the countryside or the city – who take advantage of the materials they have at hand to do their work: palm fiber, clay, wood, wool until they get to the finished piece, and market it. They use their creativity and transmit tradition, sometimes ancestral when teaching others.  They have the same dilemma as all women in the world when it comes to dealing with having to leave their children at home and go out to work. The little pinch in the heart because “there is no better place than mummy’s arms”.  In some circumstances, they have to take them to the workplace and juggle to be able to reconcile the work of craftsmen and the care of the little ones.

Let us also remember today so many other women: teachers, carers, aunts and godmothers, who carry out maternal functions without being mothers, because as a sensible person whose name does not need to be reminded said, “motherhood is an attitude, not a biological relationship”.

And while we are on the subject of quotes, let’s take this not without irony from Nobel Prize winner Rudyard Kipling: “God made mothers because he could not be in two places at once”. And he is quite right.