When God Created Mothers

An angel watches the Lord at work on his newest creation, the mother, and cannot stop marveling at how much detail he is putting into her, and how many extra hours. She goes over the design with a critical eye. Every mother, she is told, needs six pairs of hands and three pairs of eyes.

Then the angel spots what she takes to be a flaw. Water is leaking from the model, and she says the Lord has tried to fit too much into it. He answers that it is a tear, and the two go on to talk about what it is for.

This is a short illustrated tribute to motherhood, built around a humorous, tender conversation between the angel and the Lord. It first ran in Erma Bombeck's Mother's Day column in 1974, and readers across America clipped it from newspapers, carried it in their purses and stuck it to refrigerators.

This keepsake edition pairs Bombeck's words with original art. It reads in a few minutes, with a warm, gently comic tone that turns tender at the end, and it suits a gift for a mother on Mother's Day.