Thoughts on Kingship and Motherhood
By Anna Von Reitz


When I think of motherhood I think of endless servitude. I think of cold coffee and cold toast and cold scrambled eggs. I think of always being the last one through the buffet line. I think of giving up my hopes and dreams for someone else's. It's a queer feeling, if I am honest, bittersweet, to think about being a Mother and all that it entails.

Wiping noses, wiping butts, becoming expert at putting on other people's socks. Sitting up all night anxiously monitoring fevers, analyzing funny looking spots. Is it poison ivy or chicken pox? Wondering how many sets of clothes a child can use in a single day, wondering when there will ever be time for you again, creeping into the bathroom and shutting the door like a beaten coward, sitting down on the floor of the shower to pray, because it's the only place you have left that's really private.

Oh, yes.

Been there. Done that.

Landing on the floor beside the bed with a thump in the middle of the night because somehow, tiny little feet managed to literally kick you over the edge of the bed like a champion punter.

Untangling the remnants of chewing gum from hair.

Being disbelieved when you try to explain the birds and the bees: "Ugh! That's awful! God could come up with something better than that!"

Trying really hard to capture that Kodak Moment for Grandma and getting nothing but mugging and closed eyes and tilted heads and a dog trying to horn in on the middle of it.

Goo at breakfast, jam goo, honey goo, maple syrup goo, goo, goo, and more goo.

Getting two sips of ice cold soda pop on a blistering hot day, and then wondering, "Where did it go?"

Looking everywhere for your favorite shoes and finding them on someone else's feet.

Asking for the 400th time: "Is all your dirty laundry in the basket?" That is, not under the bed, no shorts hanging on a door knob, or towels festooned over the footboard of your bed?


It's cleaning up the puddles when you bring the puppy home and drying up the tears when you scatter the ashes.

It's explaining about love and how it can hurt.

It's realizing that you hate "new" math.

It's about being so tired you can't see straight, but keeping on keeping on.

It's getting up before dawn on Christmas morning, working your rump off all day to feed and please crowds of relatives and friends, putting in more hours to clean up the mess, and somewhere around four o'clock the next morning getting a two hour snooze before they all start arriving for breakfast.

I had a young man ask me where I got my work ethic.

Seriously.

He's never been a parent. How could he know?

To be fair, I knew what I was getting into. I had always known. After all, I could observe my own Mother. Up before dawn to make bread. Still hunched over the account books at midnight. And all the fun stuff in between: school crossing guard duty, laundry, music lessons, PTA, cooking dinner, cleaning up after dinner, mending....

Yes, I knew what to expect, and did it anyway.

Smiling when I really truly didn't feel like smiling.

Fretting over my decision to never, ever use fluoride toothpaste again.
(Turns out I was right on that one.)

Some people have said it was mean of me to point out the phony nature of the recent coronation -- and the fact that England's land jurisdiction is more vacant than ours has ever been.

The truth of the matter is that being king is even worse than being a Mother, and if possible, more embarrassing.

Charles gets blamed and cheered for everything, and it must have been terrible for him growing up with parents being eaten alive by their own roles and duties.

Nobody allows a Crown Prince to be human, and it gets worse when you are crowned King or Emperor, either one --- not better. So all you've got to look forward to your entire life is duty, duty, and then more duty.

So you grow up lonely and on constant display, constantly being judged and evaluated, criticized, privately having your Royal Bum chewed out for every imaginable small gaff or lapse of decorum, told how wonderful you are by fawning sycophants and how hopelessly lame you are by the other camp.

And you can't find yourself, your true self, in either description.

You are born to be a leader, whether or not you want to be one; your Royal Stars are crossed and you can't even decide who you want to marry. That's a job for the Privy Council and they are only interested in good breeding stock.

And then you get blamed because you are human; you are awkward and hopeless and you can't quite fall in love, because even in bed, everyone's looking for a leader and expecting you to get the job done.

The Living God knows, I'd never want to be a king or queen, either. It's not on my karmic wish list for sure. I used to see Charles in those horrible group family portraits and he always looked sad, as if he didn't quite fit in. And I felt sorry for him.

Yes, imagine that? I had the temerity to feel sorry for the Future King of England, and not once or twice, but through most of our respective lives.
I felt sorry for him the entire time and still do.

He's just a pawn on a larger chess board, a man thrust into an impossible role.

And all this, too, plays into our objection to Monarchy, in an argument that is now several hundred years old. We find monarchy to be cruel and forever unrealistic, because it forces a man to wear God's shoes.

It's cruel to the Monarch and the Monarch-to-be for all the reasons just enumerated and a great many more.

It's cruel to the people in such a system, too, whether they know it or not.
They lapse into a state of permanent babyhood and dependency, waiting for the king or queen to tell them what to do and what to think ---and trying hard not to think of anything at all between the Royal Pronouncements.

Just remember The Royal Family and all the difficulty they endured on Royal Hat Day. Would the Queen wear blue or pink? And spread that out over an entire population, waiting for word from the palace.

We were once kings and queens ourselves, as our lineage attests, and it was no fun for anyone and no sane system to live by. A wise and kind and sober king can easily be followed by a raving lunatic.

Better we thought, both now and then, if the Hebrews had just left Samuel alone, and left kingship to God, and a greater portion of self-responsibility to each and every one of us.

I suppose that motherhood and kingship are not that far apart: grueling schedules and brutal amounts of work figure heavily in both, privation of the self and duty forevermore.

Yet, as a Mother, you have the latitude to choose your battles. You can set your own sails and weather the storms and learn to share it all, right side up and upside down, together. You can build solid relationships with your children, where love is always the greater part -- but a king must always stand alone, taking what small pleasures there may be in such loneliness, and governing his life accordingly.

May we all be blessed in this coming year and may happiness come out of all this unrest.