‘The mother thing makes our world’, is one of many one-liner quotes from an entertaining book, ‘Have Space Suit, Will Travel‘ , written by Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988).
Maybe not so well-written for today, back in 1958, and pooh-poohed by some in academia, this yarn is imagined from the core of humanity about how an extraterrestrial might help a human boy in desperate trouble.
Most of the thousands of reviews seem to echo a feeling that the mother thing is a yearning of our mind for a stable, nurturing linchpin to a healthier, happier future.
by Behar Abbasi, and Micheal John
“Womanhood” by Msabl Format Adaptation/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
A loving, innovative, thoughtful, giving, problem-solving and nurturing creature among millions of her own kind, barely stands out, except when in the center of her own family.
Define family as being the smallest community in which you find her—not just the offspring she carried in her womb, for not all women do that. Not all women care for a brood, some care for all of us.
This creature, we humans love, but do not honour sufficiently, makes up over 72% of health care workers around the world. Today we need her, and we need her everywhere she will be. She too, and her babies, have taken a horrific hit, but she is stronger than any pandemic virus. She is the center of our existence.
Robert A. Heinlein’s extraordinary beauty, the extraterrestrial mother thing, as depicted below by a living artist, stands for all that is good for life. We need to live.
The Mother Thing describes women, or womanhood, in general.
Conceptualization of “The Mother Thing” from Robert Heinlein’s ‘Have Space Suit Will Travel’.
By ‘Ergman’ (Erg’s Art) a.k.a Eric Gignac
(Eric Gignac is the project manager, lead artist and adapter behind Robert A. Heinlein’s first officially sanctioned graphic novel “Citizen of the Galaxy”.) Format Adaptation/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
Dr. Carl Sagan once said, “extraterrestrials would be very different from us” and he once told Johnny Carson (Tonight Show), finding aliens that look like us is not just improbable but impossible. The fact that we are upright walking, two-legged homo sapiens is purely randomness, he added.
Creatures from other worlds will not appear as we currently manifest. Save for a quirk of entropy, we humans would not be what we see in the mirror. We can only rely on Robert Heinlein’s instincts to understand the mother thing creature-concept.
The instinct to be the nurturer resides in the gender with the breasts. They look beautiful, don’t they? They nourish, soothe, they end tears and restore calm; they are the distant subconscious promise of the survival of human life; and they represent the best things in our early lives.
Why bring that up?
The human race is taking a beating from a homicidal pathogen and we all need to center on pacifism, solidarity, caring, nurturing and the mother thing concept that is within us all.
Let women lead for a while.
The Earth and the human race need nurturing and healing.