Mother Issues

“I learned a new word group ‘mother nature’ by your email. If let me guess what’s that mean without help of context and dictionary, I would say mother nature is the selfless love from mother to her baby...”

This was Yuwei’s response to my email about canceling our class this week due to freezing weather conditions. My email was worded this way: “I know I emailed you all about going to the museum tonight, but it seems Mother Nature has other plans for us.”

I can completely understand how Yuwei formulated his guess about the meaning of “mother nature.” It makes perfect sense to think this pair of words is referring to the characteristic of a mother loving her child--the ‘nature’ of a new mother. His attempt follows closely last week’s discussion of the quarantiña and post-delivery baby care.  

Most of all, I am delighted that he took a stab at guessing the meaning of a phrase that was new to him. 

Yuwei’s errant guess highlights the difficulty new language learners inevitably have with idioms. 

When the French want to say that they are hung-over from too much drink the night before, they say they are “sick in the hair” or they “have a mouth of wood.” Anyone who has overindulged can attest to the headache that might make the movement of a lock of hair feel painful or the dry tongue that is reluctant to form words, so these colorful euphemisms make a lot of sense. 

I never really thought of Mother Nature as being idiomatic; the phrase must have been presented to me when I was very young, and probably within the context of a book or discussion about the “great outdoors,” so it always seemed, well, natural to me.

I was happy to reply to Yuwei that Mother Nature has nothing to do with an actual mother, but is, in fact, the way we personify nature and the natural world, sometimes the earth, itself. My example was that a person going camping for the weekend might say she is “going to commune with Mother Nature.” 

In this week’s particular case, however, Mother Nature is not the benevolent, fecund mother of lush forests and outdoor activities. Right now, she is a stern, frigid matriarch forcing us all to endure her long winter absence. She is apparently vacationing somewhere in the south, lounging on a sandy shore with her toes in warm, salty water and a fresh, juicy orange on her lips.

Perhaps she will return to us in a few months. For now, all we can do is learn of her as a metaphor.