She sings "Baby Mine" beautifully. Many of us will remember that song-it was part of the soundtrack from "Dumbo", a Disney movie first released in 1941 and beloved by children and their parents ever since.
In the scene where the song appears, Dumbo, the baby elephant with the big ears, has been separated from his mother, who is confined to a cage because she flew into a rage when boys played with her baby's large ears and made fun of him. Dumbo comes to see his mother and although they are separated by iron bars, she sings him this beautiful lullaby. A few if the lines go like this:
"Don't you mind what they say,
From your head to your toes,
You're not much, heaven knows,
You are so precious to me,
Baby of mine."
I think this song evokes strong feelings for me, and probably for many mothers, because we love our children fiercely and want to protect them, as this elephant mother did, but our efforts don't always pay off and we can't always protect our children.
Children grow from beautiful babies to funny, frustrating toddlers to cute grade schoolers and then they enter the awkward, gangly teen years. Before we know it, they are adults, not always as cute and appealing as we would like them to be. But for most mothers, our babies still remain precious.
I have helped seniors clean houses and purge files and yellowed papers. Among the papers, there is often a preschoolers drawings, a scrawled message on a Mother's Day card that says "Mommy, I love you", a wrinkled report card, school pictures of toothless, grinning kids.
Our adult children question why we save those things: it's because we cherish and love the memories of that little, helpless baby, that funny awkward kid, the days of high school proms and solemn college graduations. .."you are so precious to me, baby of mine."
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