The Might of Motherhood

The man is lying on his face outside our house roaring with laughter as two policemen bend over him. They haul him to his feet, but his legs buckle like a baby's and he sinks back onto the pavement.
'Don't stare!' I tell the children as I hustle them from the car. So instead we clamber onto the desk in the Vicar's study and peer furtively between the curtains.
'Just do it' says the T shirt stretched over the prone man's beer gut and suddenly he decides he will. He rears up snarling and hurls his vast girth at the officers. Both duck his flailing fists. He's too large and too irate to restrain with ease and the younger man calls for back-up.
Then back-up arrives in the form of a tiny white-haired old woman. She darts up to the attacker and grabs his arms. Her head barely clears his chest and she dangles briefly from his biceps as he tries to pack more punches. 'You f****** b******, what do you think you're doing!' she yells. The policemen step back. They recognize authority when they see it. So does the middle-aged skinhead in her grasp.
With a last lunge, he allows her to lead him away. She berates him like a small boy and he lays an arm fondly round her shoulders. Then he breaks free, tears off his jacket and launches himself back towards the police. His teeth are bared and the officers brace themselves, but his mother wrenches him round and, docile, he walks with her back up the hill to home.
My children watch open-mouthed and I, perched on the parish pew sheets, am bedazzled. I worry that I can't get my children to master fractions or flush the lavatory. And yet here in this tiny old lady is the fearless force of motherhood that, fully unleashed, can quell a giant and turn a punch into a caress.
I am reminded, as I descend from my vantage point, of the dying warriors in the trenches calling for their mothers and for once, as I fail to coax peas into my tweenager, I don't lament my impotence. I am resigned to being defied on small things now I've seen how, deep down, motherhood can make the frailest flesh invincible.