Life, Day by Day

I looked up the legal definition of a family and this is what I got...and this ...and then this . It only goes to show that today's family is difficult to define because of its diversity primarily due to the many changes it has undergone through the years. In school I was taught that a family consists of a father, a mother and a child.  That teaching continues to this day even when families and family dynamics are no longer as simple as that.  When my son was in Grade 2 in a local Catholic school, his social studies teacher asked them to say something about their families and some of the children gave unusual answers.  She obviously was unprepared (or simply clueless) for what they gave because, not getting the "right" answers, she further explained that a father is the one that made your mother pregnant and a mother is the one who carried you in her tummy! Of course, when he was picked up from school, the first thing my son asked was, "where is my father" and...

Is maternal instinct inherently found in every woman? I ask this because my brother's wife from whom he has been separated from more than a year ago, doesn't seem to have any. I have never known a woman with so little maternal instinct that the very rare moments that it shows goes unrecognized and undetected. The care of her children has been delegated to a caregiver since infancy. So it is no wonder that the children rarely miss her. I act as a surrogate mom because I love them and I feel so sorry for them. I thank God that in spite of their parents' weaknesses and faults, they seem to be happy children. Maybe because they are only 8 and 6.