Maria often says she would have made an awful mother, but I don’t believe this is true. Animals are not children, but Maria is a born nurturer, she even hugs sheep and donkeys. She and Bud love to cuddle up while Maria is reading or blogging or just sitting on the sofa.
I think she would have made a wonderful mother.
But she already is a mother. You don’t have to have given birth or adopted or fostered humans to be a mother. Maria seems to me to have every wonderful attribute of motherhood , instinctively.
I couldn’t say it better than Nancy.
Every woman has the capacity for motherhood. I never was around small children except for my sister, half-brother and 2 adopted brothers and this put me off children, I would have thought for ever–I was the youngest!
Then my own 2 came and whoops! What a difference. Then I enjoyed grandmother-hood , like yourself from afar, mine in Texas and us in Delaware. First with toys and annual visits. Now that they are older, my granddaughter at 21 has started a really personal and revealing correspondence which is a delight to both of us. (Birth control, for example, when her mother embarrassed her too much on this topic–just as my own mother had on the same subject, even one of my nieces came to me on this for the same reason! There was also a period, between her 11th and 13th years, when we discussed what we were reading, by mail very frequently. (Her mother, my daughter, is severely dyslexic and reads only the little as is possible for her.