Author’s note: I spent last weekend with the mothers in my life, and therefore had to put off the following piece. Day late, dollar short.

Primal, violent and necessary. This is an experience that for once strips away all the trappings of culture and civilization and thrusts people to the same visceral place of our ancient ancestors and countless mammalian cousins. Sweat and blood combine and run fast in rivers toward the bed sheets, and the woman you knew becomes something much more, something wondrous and brave, a miracle made real.

Yet there’s more to being a mother than this steaming process, however difficult and in the end triumphant. A few hours or more of agony suffered, prayers uttered between gasping breaths, and the intuitive, if somehow ridiculous, urge to push this mass of pain down and out of her, is a rite of feral strength, when the animal inside all of us reigns beautifully supreme. Yet motherhood contains this feat, and transcends it.

Motherhood is laying awake long hours at night, gnawing on concern over the rash that covers baby’s belly, or the light fever that won’t go away. Motherhood is agony when the nursing child learns to use her teeth and suddenly clamps down hard on the breast .

It’s learning to wade through an avalanche of fluids — urine, shit, and vomit — while your body screams for the sleep it never gets, and your baby squirms for freedom, your precarious grip on one leg being all that keeps the offal from staining sofa, carpet and shirt.

Motherhood is nursing the baby with one hand while wrangling an older sister down for a quick, squalling hair brush in the short 12 minutes before school starts again.

It’s answering innumerable questions, and tolerating tantrums in public places. It’s becoming intimate with all bodily functions and teaching self-care to wild animals that couldn’t care less.

It’s scrounging up all the change in your purse, the car, and in the sofa, so that your middle son has a cake for his birthday party.

It’s smiling even when your four-year-old asks why the man ahead of you in the grocery line has black skin, or why that lady is so fat.

Or explaining to a gentle child the concept of war, or hatred, or death.

Soldiering on when all your energy is tapped and nothing sounds better than a hot bath and a stiff drink, on science project night.

It’s loving without limits, or qualifications. It’s fear, pride and hope. It’s all these things, every scenario ever confronted by the legions of women over the wide earth who wake up in the morning and go to bed at night with one primary concern that puts all else in the background: Are the children safe? How can I improve their lives?

My own mother, Eleanor, came from a difficult family and married a difficult man. Because of my dad’s infirmities, she had to work full-time throughout my childhood, yet was also responsible for keeping house and nurturing the children. Long hours at the hospital followed by casseroles at night, and dishes before bed.

She kept a listing ship afloat with hard work and a warm heart.

Then there’s the love of my life.

Watching the woman you love give birth to your child is a lesson in humility. Forces deeper and stronger than any you’ve known go to work, transforming the fraught individual that is a normal human female into something larger, a figure of survival in the face of bleak odds, an indifferent world.

It was little more than a year ago when Amy gave birth to our youngest child. Afterward, I was told how well I did, how loving and supportive I was when the time came. In reality, I didn’t do shit.

I held a clenching hand. Murmured words of support. Wiped sweat away with a clean cloth, and rubbed a shoulder here and there.

Meanwhile, Amy was transported away. Physically, she stayed in the bed at St. Joseph Hospital and breathed and pushed and moaned when the pain became great. But she was elsewhere, fighting forces deep down that threatened to overwhelm her, pain that rose in thick tides of agony. With each surge, she sunk deeper and deeper into herself, finding reserves of energy and strength that astounded me, and everyone in the room.

For us on the outside, the process was quiet, even serene, yet Amy told me later that it seemed as if we were all a thousand miles away — tiny voices, helpless hands.

At the perfect moment, she squatted on her haunches and bore down on a birthing bar. Every muscle in her body clenched once, twice, three times until a crown of wet, black hair found the open air. Again, she clenched, and uttered a deep and powerful sound that seemed to resonate throughout the room. In a rush of blood and coagulated matter, another human shot forth into the world.

Then, the breath. The reedy cry of an aching newborn, bruised from its tight passage but otherwise perfect as the sunrise.

Mother’s Day is about respecting these acts, honoring the endless sacrifice and sweet affection that good mothers provide.

Thank you, Mom.

Thank you, Amy.

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James Faulk is a writer living in Eureka.