The Parable of the failing mother

Mara sat in the car, her hands resting on the wheel as the soft hum of the streetlights buzzed in the cool evening air. The house stood before her, still and waiting. Inside, her children were asleep, their small bodies curled beneath blankets she hadn’t tucked in. She had missed bedtime again. The thought wrapped around her throat like a silk scarf—beautiful and suffocating all at once.

She closed her eyes and exhaled. How had it come to this? The endless days of half-written emails, of laundry left damp in the machine, of rushing from meeting to meeting only to return home too late, too spent, too empty. She had given everything and yet, somehow, she was failing.

She needed an answer.

So she drove through the quiet streets to a house with warm yellow light spilling onto the porch. Elda lived here, a woman people spoke of in half-whispers, the way one speaks of a lighthouse when lost at sea. When Mara knocked, Elda opened the door and smiled as though she had been expecting her.

Mara, voice frayed and breath unsteady, said, “I don’t know how to do this anymore.”

Elda considered her for a moment, then said, “Before I tell you what you need to know, I need something from you. There’s a bake sale this weekend. Bring me cookies from a mother who has never felt like she was failing.”

Mara left, confident she could find someone.

The next day, she sat across from a woman at work, polished and poised, the kind of mother who made school lunches from scratch and never forgot permission slips.

“Have you ever felt like you were failing?” Mara asked.

The woman laughed softly, but there was something brittle in the sound. “Last month, I locked myself in my office and cried because I missed my son’s soccer game. He scored his first goal, and I wasn’t there.”

Mara moved on.

She found a mother in the park, one with a baby on her hip and another child pulling at her sleeve. Surely, she would know success.

The mother sighed. “Some days, I feel like I don’t exist. I gave up my career for them, but I don’t know if they even see me.”

Mara asked another and another. A single mother, a mother of five, a mother with a husband who traveled too much, a mother whose children were grown. Each one met her question with a quiet confession, as if revealing some old, secret wound.

Not one of them could give her the cookies she had been sent to find.

At last, she returned to Elda.

“I found no one,” Mara admitted, standing in the soft glow of the old woman’s porch. “Every mother I asked—every single one—has felt like they were failing.”

Elda smiled, slow and knowing. “Then you see, my dear, you are not failing. You are simply a mother. And the weight you carry is the proof of your love.”

Mara sat with this. The air smelled of jasmine and the distant, lingering scent of someone’s dinner cooling on a windowsill. The night stretched before her, heavy with the promise of another day. But for the first time in a long time, she felt lighter.

That weekend, she went to the bake sale. She bought cookies from another mother, one with flour on her hands and exhaustion in her eyes. Mara held the cookie between her fingers, turned it over once, and smiled.

She had found what she was looking for after all.