Motherhood and fatherhood are an experience that each person lives in a unique and personal way. Debates often arise around it about different parenting styles, conciliation, managing the feeling of guilt, how to deal with children's tantrums, understanding children when they reach adolescence, dealing with empty nest syndrome...
Countless books have been written about motherhood and fatherhood, a topic also addressed in films and series and currently covered in various podcasts. And she has also been the subject of poetry. This is the case of a poem by the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, which has gone viral on social networks thanks to a woman who recited it from memory on a television program.
Adela is a 94-year-old woman who went to the program “Mañaneros” on TVE's La 1 to talk about unwanted loneliness. In her intervention, Adela described loneliness as “a kind of physical or mental illness” and talked about how “not having anything to do” is “horrifying.”
She confessed to being an avid reader, but now she has had to abandon this hobby because her eyesight is failing and she has to undergo cataract surgery. “The only solution to not feel alone is to fill your mind with something,” she said, awakening the emotion of the program's collaborators. But when Adela most captivated those present, it was she who began to recite from memory and without hesitation Khalil Gibran's poetry about motherhood and fatherhood.
This is how Khalil Gibran's poem goes:
“Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of life desirous of itself.
They are not born from you, but through you and although they are with you, they do not belong to you.
You can give them your love, but not your thoughts, because they have their own thoughts.
You can shelter their bodies, but not their souls, because they live in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit even in dreams.
You can strive to be like them, but do not try to make them similar to you because life does not go back, nor does it stop in yesterday.
You are the bow from which your children, like living arrows, are launched.
Let the bow in your archer's hand be for happiness.”
In addition to exciting the program's audience, the publication of the moment in which Adela recites the poetry on social networks has gone viral. On TikTok, the video exceeds 450 thousand likes, saved by 88 thousand people and shared by more than 168 thousand users.
